Abstract:
"Are civilian attitudes a useful predictor of patterns
of violence in civil wars? A prominent debate has emerged among
scholars and practitioners about the importance of winning civilian
"hearts and minds" for influencing their wartime behavior. We argue that
such efforts may have a dark side: insurgents can use
pro-counterinsurgent attitudes as cues to select their targets and
tactics. We conduct an original survey experiment in 204 Afghan villages
to establish a positive association between pro-International Security
Assistance Force attitudes and future Taliban attacks. We then extend
analysis to 14,606 non-surveyed villages to demonstrate that our measure
of civilian attitudes improves out-of-sample predictive performance by
20-30% over a standard forecasting model. The results are especially
strong for Taliban attacks with improvised explosive devices. These
improvements in predictive power remain even after accounting for
possible confounders, including past violence, military bases, and
economic assistance."
The overall finding may be intuitively easy to accept: insurgents and counterinsurgents are trying to gain control over an area, therefore a successful "heart and minds" will trigger a response. However, the study highlights not only the dynamic nature of targeting but also of tactics and how exposure of risk varies (from targeted to indiscriminate attacks).While a single study a theory might not make, it is clear that insurgency targeting and decision making processes need further analysis and understanding.
The findings of the study do have many policy and programming consequences:
In many cases our risk matrix identifies things that could go wrong but rarely the risk of success and how to mitigate it (not the success but the risk). Do No Harm approaches do have some understanding of this but usually as a preventative measure (insurgents may prevent us implementation) and not necessarily as a result.
The forecasting power of the model is also quite interesting. Again, not only for counter-insurgency actors but also for development actors. If we can forecast the use of specific tactics as per changes in attitudes, implementation tools and modalities can vary over time to adapt to the changing risk. I.e. triggering Mine Risk Education activities (focused on IEDs) or switching to small group/household level meetings (to avoid large gatherings) in locations when an attitude indicator reaches certain level. Early Warning systems can also benefit from this model.
On the issue of transferability, I think the concept/methodology does lend itself to be used in other contexts, but of course the need for adapting it to the local insurgency tactics (not all insurgencies may respond the same way to successful hearts and minds due to operational, political or social constrains). It is also important to accept the adaptive nature of tactics and that they don't remain fix in time. Tactics evolve over time, sometimes as a response, sometimes due to technology/knowledge transfer; therefore both the programming and the forecasting teams will need to revise and analyze the model and results regularly.
Finally, development and security need to go together in the cases where development can be understood as undermining insurgencies' hold on a contested location. Many (most) NGOs make the claim of neutrality and also assume that working directly with beneficiaries or local 'communities' is also neutral. However, this may not be the way they are perceived by either local population and insurgents (and counterinsurgents for that matter). Ignorance on how our operations may alter local power dynamics not only puts our staff at risk, but also the wider population, as the study shows.
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