Street gangs & Insurgency

Phil Carter posts on an Army War College monograph studying the relationship between street gangs as criminal enterprises and insurgencies.

"Street Gangs: The New Urban Insurgency", by Dr. Max G. Manwaring. It analyzes something that the 4GW crowd has been articulating for some time, regarding the increasing convergence of the last 10-15 years between criminal activity and terroristic or guerilla warfare activity. (See, e.g., "Anticipating the Nature of the Next Conflict" [from DNI.net].

From Manwaring's Street Gangs synopsis:

The primary thrust of this monograph is to explain the linkage of contemporary criminal street gangs (that is, the gang phenomenon or third generation gangs) to insurgency in terms of the instability it wreaks upon government and the concomitant challenge to state sovereignty. Although there are differences between gangs and insurgents regarding motives and modes of operations, this linkage infers that gang phenomena are mutated forms of urban insurgency.

Carter says:

Stamping out the insurgency is necessary, but not sufficient. The Iraqis must also establish police forces capable of actual law enforcement, as well as civil justice systems capable of actually adjudicating cases. And ultimately, the Iraqis must create a civil society that does not tolerate such rampant lawlessness.

Manwaring's focus is on gang warfare as a political activity. It is in this respect that it not only resembles, but is itself a form of insurgency. A serious gang threat, therefore, is as substantial a threat to a country's sovereignty as any insurgency.

The degree of this threat depends on the level of legitimacy and sovereignty a country enjoys; something different for every country. Iraq's new government, obviously, is still weak in both its general political legitimacy, and even weaker in terms of its ability to defend its sovereignty. A country like the United States, however, can effectively rely on its non-military law enforcement institutions to deal with the very serious threat of a transnational gang like Mara Salvatrucha 13.

In countries like Columbia and Mexico, highly sophisticated gangs can actually coopt the state itself, and use its institutions for their own ends. In a situation like Iraq, gangs are political competitors with the state; competitors not just for political power as brute force, but for political power as existential legitimacy.

In studying such gangs as a political phenomenon, we can see they are competing with the state for sovereignty, and are not merely seeking to destroy "sovereignty" and expose state impotence. The durable non-state actor actually develops its own mechanisms of legitimacy; its own organizational logic with which its members identify and then obey, and to which the formal, constitutional order of a state is anathema.

In the end, the way the American mission in post-Saddam Iraq has evolved is similar to the threat posed by al-Qaeda's political pretenses. I.e., the survival of Iraq as a sovereign entity is becoming part of a more broad defense of state sovereignty itself. While Carter is right that capable police and a healthy civil society are essential, strategies must also be employed that buttress state legitimacy while directly attacking gang/insurgent legitimacy.

Update 1: Also see Global Guerilla's comments on all this. That blog just went right into the sidebar. Also see the US Marines' interesting Small Wars Center.

Update 2: Also, to emphasize my points above about legitimacy and sovereignty, listen to this March 23 NPR report from Baghdad. In its most chilling passage, an English-speaking Iraqi says repeatedly, in a painfully hushed voice, "We have no country. There is no security. We have no country."

Along the same lines, Fester blogs that the American practice of turning loose Iraqi criminals as a counter-insurgency tactic, along with not using intelligence resources against criminal networks is working to erode Iraqi sovereignty:

Chaos is the enemy of the United States for two reasons; first it creates more turbulence and insecurity that fosters an environment in which people will support whomever will credibly promise to bring some order and protection to their daily lives. SCIRI, Dawa and the Sadrists all cemented their power bases by providing quasi-governmental services; after the invasion they were the only institutions that were capable of providing basic public goods to the people. If there is chaos and an ineffective government, these extra-governmental ruling bodies will continue to be relevant and gain power.