The Counterrevolution Read online

  Long in the making, this historic transformation accelerated after 9/11. Over the past decades, the change has come about in three major waves.

  First, militarily. In Vietnam and then in Iraq and Afghanistan, US military strategy shifted from a conventional model of large-scale battlefield war to unconventional forms of counterinsurgency warfare. As a result, war began to be fought differently. New techniques were developed to control anticolonial rebels and to repress anti-imperialist, often Communist revolutions. They were refined during the 1950s and 1960s in the colonies by Western powers, especially Britain, France, and the United States. And since 9/11, they have been deployed aggressively in the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. First, the NSA surveillance programs and the tortured interrogations provided total intelligence in order to distinguish between an insurgent minority and the passive general population in Iraq and Afghanistan. Second, drone strikes, special operations, targeted assassinations, and indefinite detention—as well as the most brutal forms of torture—served to terrorize and eliminate the active minority. And third, the US military attempted to win the hearts and minds of the masses through minimal humanitarian interventions, including building infrastructure and handing out goods; curating digital media (such as YouTube videos by moderate imams) and targeting them to individuals identified as being more susceptible to radicalization; and deploying armed drones that communicated the unique power of the United States to control territory.14

  Second, in foreign affairs. As the counterinsurgency paradigm took hold militarily, US foreign policy began to shift to accommodate and embrace the core strategies of unconventional warfare—turning to total information awareness, targeted eradication of radical groups, and psychological pacification of the general populations abroad, even outside the confines of particular wartime conflicts. Drone strikes proliferated outside of war zones—in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia—and with them, complicated international negotiations over airspace and the use and location of military bases. NSA total information awareness went global, and digital propaganda campaigns extended across the globe. Counterinsurgency strategies, and especially counterinsurgency needs, gradually began to dominate foreign policy. To be sure, the international implications differed at different times. During the administration of President George W. Bush, foreign relations were deeply affected, for instance, by the rendition of suspects to cooperating countries; under President Barack Obama, by joint special operations and drone strikes within accommodating countries, as well as the sharing of intelligence with allies; and under President Donald Trump, by immigration bans, the construction of a wall on the southern border, and an actual or threatened withdrawal from multilateral agreements and organizations. But in truth, these differences are just variations on a counterinsurgency model of foreign affairs.

  Third, at home. With the militarized policing of African American protesters, the monitoring of American mosques and targeting of American Muslims, and the demonization of Mexican Americans and Hispanics, the counterinsurgency has been domesticated. Big and small cities across America amassed counterinsurgency military equipment and know-how, and increasingly deploy these strategies in routine encounters—not only to fight terrorism, but also as an integral part of their day-to-day policing. At least one state, North Dakota, has already passed legislation authorizing the use of armed drones by law-enforcement agencies; in another state, Texas, a local police department deployed a robot bomb—in effect, an armed drone—to assassinate a criminal suspect. Counterinsurgency strategies are beginning to permeate the routine policing of democratic protest. Muslims and persons with Arab surnames are increasingly suspected and treated like high-value targets—along with antipolice protesters, minority youth, and undocumented residents. Programs like PRISM, Section 215, and others now provide the US government access to Americans’ personal data. Total surveillance has been turned on the American people.

  It is we, Americans, who have become the target of our government’s counterinsurgency strategies. The three core strategies now shape the way that the United States, and increasingly the broader Euro-American West, governs: total NSA surveillance of domestic communications, relentless targeting of suspected minorities, and the continuous effort to win the allegiance of the passive masses. From domestic antiterrorism law enforcement to ordinary street policing, from schools to prisons, from our computers and smart TVs to the phones in our pockets, a new way of seeing, thinking, and governing has taken hold at home—and it is founded on a counterinsurgency war paradigm.

  The result is radical. We are now witnessing the triumph of a counterinsurgency model of government on American soil in the absence of an insurgency, or uprising, or revolution. The perfected logic of counterinsurgency now applies regardless of whether there is a domestic insurrection. We now face a counterinsurgency without insurgency. A counterrevolution without revolution. The pure form of counterrevolution, without a revolution, as a simple modality of governing at home—what could be called “The Counterrevolution.”

  Counterinsurgency practices were already being deployed domestically in the sixties. In the United States, the FBI’s treatment of the Black Panthers under J. Edgar Hoover took precisely the form of counterinsurgency tactics at exactly the same time that those strategies were being developed in Vietnam.15 As James Baldwin correctly diagnosed decades ago, “the Panthers… became the native Vietcong, the ghetto became the village in which the Vietcong were hidden, and in the ensuing search-and-destroy operations, everyone in the village became suspect.”16 Elsewhere as well. In Britain, for instance, the government brought home counterinsurgency strategies it had developed and refined in Palestine and Malaya to combat the Irish Republican Army and police the homeland.

  But since 9/11, the counterinsurgency strategies first developed and tested abroad and occasionally used at home have been deployed across the United States in an unprecedented and pervasive manner. The tactics have been refined, legalized, and systematized. New digital technologies have made possible techniques of surveillance and drone warfare that were simply unimaginable forty years ago. Generations of American soldiers have been steeped in counterinsurgency training and are now back home. The strategies and methods have come to permeate the political imagination.

  Even more importantly, what is truly novel and unique today is that the counterinsurgency paradigm has been untethered from its foundation. It is now a form of governing, domestically, without any insurrection or uprising to suppress. Yes, there are a handful of deeply unstable individuals who gravitate toward radical Islamic discourse (as well as toward white supremacy and radical Christian discourse) and wreak terrible damage—alongside a daily drumbeat of more ordinary multiple-victim shooting attacks in the United States. (In 2015, there was on average more than one shooting per day in the US that left four or more people dead or wounded.)17 But there is simply no veritable insurgency at home.

  This is a difference in kind, not just in degree, and it produces a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy. The Counterrevolution creates, out of whole cloth, the specter of a radical insurgency in this country that can then be embraced by unstable individuals—such as the San Bernadino shooter or the Chelsea bomber—and through which we can then imagine them as an active minority. In effect, The Counterrevolution produces the illusion of an insurgency—an illusion that then radically transforms our public imagination and our perception and treatment of minority communities. It generates a narrative of insurrection that turns whole groups and neighborhoods—of American Muslims or Mexicans, of African Americans, of Hispanics, of peaceful protesters—into suspected insurgents. In the process, entire families, blocks, and neighborhoods that could benefit from public services are transformed into counterinsurgency military targets.

  The United States has turned the techniques of counterinsurgency on its own people. The torture, indefinite detention, and drone strikes are a vital part of how we got to this point, but it would be a mistake to stop there. Those strategies form just the ba
sis of a much larger historical transformation that has fundamentally altered the way that we govern ourselves abroad and at home.

  This book traces the arc of that transformation: from the development and refinement of counterinsurgency practices in the 1950s and 1960s, to its deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, to its domestication and use on American soil, and finally to the ultimate stage of a domesticated counterinsurgency model of governing in the very absence of any domestic insurrection—The Counterrevolution.

  The Counterrevolution was well in place before the election of President Donald Trump, but his election, if anything, sealed the historical transformation. Despite Donald Trump’s campaign endorsements of waterboarding, of the indefinite detention of American suspects at Guantánamo, of a travel ban on Muslims, and of renewed surveillance of American mosques, Trump won the Electoral College with over sixty-two million votes, reflecting that a vast number of Americans are perfectly comfortable or actively embrace the domestication of counterinsurgency.

  In his first months in office, President Trump filled his cabinet with counterinsurgency warriors, appointing tried-and-true practitioners to the highest security positions: retired Army lieutenant general H. R. McMaster as national security adviser, retired four-star Marine general James Mattis as secretary of defense, and retired four-star Marine general John F. Kelly first as secretary of homeland security and then as chief of staff at the White House. All three have extensive counterinsurgency backgrounds, and practiced and refined those strategies in Iraq. Also in his first months, Donald Trump signed executive orders that targeted Muslims (what became known as the “Muslim ban”), Mexicans (through his enhanced enforcement and deportation of undocumented residents and executive order to build “the wall”), police protesters (by lifting federal consent decrees with local police departments and encouraging new antiprotest legislation at the state level), and the LGBTQ community (by singlehandedly undoing progress on workplace antidiscrimination and then banning military service).

  All these executive actions combined to confirm the historical transformation: counterinsurgency strategies at home, despite the lack of an insurgency on American soil. Trump even referred to his administration’s enforcement efforts against undocumented residents in the United States as “a military operation,” reflecting the embrace of a domestic counterinsurgency mentality.18 A few months later, even more pointedly, Trump urged Americans to adopt counterinsurgency strategies used by the United States in its colonies to suppress insurgents in the Philippines in the early twentieth century. Trump directly referenced American modern warfare on its own territory, tweeting on August 17, 2017, that we should “Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!” More than ever, a distinct minority of the American population—Muslims, African Americans, Mexicans, and political protesters—is being turned into a putative active insurgency that needs to be isolated and extracted from the passive masses.

  American history is replete with the false demonization of interior enemies, from the Red Scare, to the Japanese internment camps, to the juvenile “superpredators” of the 1990s. It is crucial that we not repeat that dark history, that we avoid turning Muslims, peaceful protesters, and other minorities into our new internal enemies. It is vital that we come to grips with this new mode of governing and recognize its unique dangers, that we see the increasingly widespread domestication of counterinsurgency strategies and the new technologies of digital surveillance, drones, and hypermilitarized police for what they are: a counterrevolution without a revolution. We are facing something radical, new, and dangerous. It has been long in the making, historically. It is time to identify and expose it.

  In my previous book, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, I explored the ways in which our own desire to take selfies, post snapchats, check Facebook, tweet, and stream videos on Netflix unwittingly feed the total surveillance machinery of the NSA, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on. I argued that we have become an “expository society” where we increasingly exhibit ourselves online, and in the process, freely give away our most personal and private data. No longer an Orwellian or a panoptic society characterized by a powerful central government forcibly surveilling its citizens from on high, ours is fueled by our own pleasures, proclivities, joys, and narcissism. And even when we try to resist these temptations, we have practically no choice but to use the Internet and shed our digital traces.

  I had not fully grasped, though, the relation of our new expository society to the other brutal practices of the counterinsurgency war on terrorism—to drone strikes, indefinite detention, or our new hypermilitarized police force at home. But as the fog lifts from 9/11, the full picture becomes clear. The expository society is merely the first prong of The Counterrevolution. And only by tying together our digital exposure with our new mode of counterinsurgency governance can we begin to grasp the whole architecture of our contemporary political condition. And only by grasping the full implications of this new mode of governing—The Counterrevolution—will we be able to effectively resist it and overcome.

  PART I

  THE RISE OF MODERN WARFARE

  The historical transition from World War II to the anticolonial struggles and the Cold War brought about a fundamental shift in the way that the United States and its Western allies waged war. Two new models of warfare emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s, and began to reshape US military strategy: nuclear warfare and unconventional warfare. Though polar opposites in terms of their respective scopes, both were developed in large part at the nerve center of US military strategy, the RAND Corporation. Formed in 1948 as an outgrowth of the research wing for the US Air Force, RAND worked closely with the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to craft these new warfare paradigms.1

  At one end of the spectrum, the United States developed nuclear-weapon capability and strategy, as did some of its Western allies. There emerged a whole field of military planning that brought together game theory and systems analysis, and produced a warfare logic very much at odds with conventional war strategy. Nuclear-weapon strategists invented theories of “massive retaliation” and “mutually assured destruction”—military paradigms that were dramatically different from earlier forms of engagement and far greater in scale than conventional warfare. American nuclear strategy focused on the superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union and presumed a global conflict of extraordinary proportions.

  At the other end of the spectrum, there emerged a very different model localized especially in the colonies—a far more surgical, special-operations approach targeting small revolutionary insurgencies and what were mostly Communist uprisings. Variously called “unconventional,” “antiguerrilla” or “counterguerrilla,” “irregular,” “sublimited,” “counterrevolutionary,” or simply “modern” warfare, this burgeoning domain of military strategy flourished during France’s wars in Indochina and Algeria, Britain’s wars in Malaya and Palestine, and America’s war in Vietnam. It too was nourished by the RAND Corporation, which was one of the first to see the potential of what the French commander Roger Trinquier called “modern warfare” or the “French view of counterinsurgency.” It offered, in the words of one of its leading students, the historian Peter Paret, a vital counterweight “at the opposite end of the spectrum from rockets and the hydrogen bomb.”2

  Like nuclear-weapon strategy, the counterinsurgency model grew out of a combination of strategic game theory and systems theorizing; but unlike nuclear strategy, which was primarily a response to the Soviet Union, it developed more in response to another formidable game theorist, Mao Zedong. The formative moment for counterinsurgency theory was not the nuclear confrontation that characterized the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the earlier Chinese Civil War that led to Mao’s victory in 1949—essentially, when Mao turned guerrilla tactics into a revolutionary war that overthrew a political regime. The central methods and practices of counterinsurgency war
fare were honed in response to Mao’s strategies and the ensuing anticolonial struggles in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa that imitated Mao’s approach.3 Those struggles for independence were the breeding soil for the development and perfection of unconventional warfare.

  By the turn of the twentieth century, when President George W. Bush would declare a “War on Terror” following 9/11, counterinsurgency warfare was well-developed and mature.4 And with the spectacular rise of US general David Petraeus, counterinsurgency theory gained dominance in US military strategy. Today, given the geopolitics of the twenty-first century, modern warfare has replaced the military paradigm of large-scale battlefield warfare of the earlier century.

  Counterinsurgency warfare has been one of the most consequential innovations of the post–World War II period, in terms of our contemporary politics. In hindsight, it is Mao, rather than the USSR, who was the more momentous and long-lasting foe. Mao is the one who turned warfare into politics—or, more precisely, who showed us how modern warfare could become a form of governing. Perhaps only in retrospect, post-9/11, can we truly understand the full implications of early counterinsurgency theory.