War in Pieces: The Blood Feud

Lee Harris, who wrote the fantasy ideology article I linked to in the post below, has an interesting TCS Article looking at tactics, rather than motivations this time:

Immediately after 9/11, the general consensus was that we were at war. And yet this evocation of the concept of war bothered me because it did not quite fit. Wars were things that Westerners did. They were fought for economic reasons or for territorial expansion; they were instruments of policy; they had a point and an objective. You knew when a war started, and you knew when it was over. On both sides of a war you had diplomacy -- the breakdown in diplomacy normally started wars, and a recommencement of diplomacy inevitably signaled their termination. Finally, wars, when they were fought, tended to resolve into a series of increasingly climactic battles, allowing each side to keep score of its position, as in a game of chess, and ending in some well-established gesture, like waving the white flag or slaughtering your enemies en masse. If you try to make the random and scattered terrorist attacks since 9/11 fit into this pattern, you will soon realize that it takes a good bit of twisting and squeezing to make these events match the profile of Western warfare. Indeed, when I wrote 'Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology,' I argued that war was not the appropriate model to employ in order to gain an understanding of the enemy that we faced -- and yet at the time I was still unclear what model of conflict would make more sense. After the London bombing, I feel more than ever that the war model is deeply flawed, and that a truer picture of the present conflict may be gained by studying another, culturally distinct form of violent conflict, namely the blood feud.

The parallels are interesting, and troubling. If Al-Qaida terrorism is like a blood feud, it is a new version of that old tactic that has gone beyond the traditional family and clan nature of a blood feud to embrace elements throughout the Islamic world. A globalized blood fued if you will. Another thing that makes it different from a more traditional blood feud is the hidden nature of the participants. The Hatfields didn't hide in the general populace of West Virginians, they were a known and identifiable group. Al Qaida operates very differently, taking credit for attacks, but hiding as best they can who their members are. I will have to think if this paradigm is useful in developing specific ways to combat terrorism. First thoughts are that we pretty much have to kill those who have joined this 'clan' and make the clan less attractive to those who haven't joined. Hardly earth shaking, and pretty much what we are attempting to do anyway.