Rebel Capacity and Combat Tactics

The authors use a robust dataset from the US Department of Defense in their paper, “Rebel Capacity and Combat Tactics,” to address these and other questions, and they offer a unique explanation: revenue shocks tied to opium production are a key factor in shaping rebel attack strategies.

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Figure 1 · Military Records Indicate the Location of Rebel Surveillance Operations Conducted in Afghanistan in 2006

Notes: Data on insurgent spy operations drawn from SIGACTS military records. Shaded blue areas indicates insurgents conducted at least one detected surveillance operations during 2006, the first year of our sample. District boundaries are drawn from the ESOC Afghanistan map (398 districts).

The political economy of conflict

Intrastate conflict, or armed aggression between rebels and government-led forces, has supplanted interstate war as the primary source of death and displacement among fighters and civilians over the last 20 years worldwide. The quantity and quality of arms, and the ability to feed and otherwise care for insurgents—as well as to pay their salaries—are key to rebel success. However, more than just provisioning fighters, the relative wealth and poverty of rebel forces may actually influence the manner in which those fighters attack, the authors reveal, in a finding that challenges the classic notion that rebels only employ brief, surprise assaults.

In many respects, the nature of armed conflict between coalition forces and rebel fighters in Afghanistan is driven by the opium market, specifically on the success of seasonal opium harvests. Opium is harvested and packaged in May and June, when Taliban commanders and veteran fighters return from their fighting positions to collect taxes from farmers (typically 10 percent), which is paid in currency, opium blocks, or other goods ranging from vehicles to weapons. Tax receipts are passed to district-level commanders (similar to US counties), then up to provincial and regional commanders, who keep careful records and are subject to audits by the Taliban’s Central Finance Committee. Most of those tax proceeds remain at the district level to cover salaries of fighters and informants and, importantly, to replenish weapons stocks.

The industrial organization of the insurgency emerged in 2006, which is when the authors’ analysis begins. Their data extends to 2014 and contains thousands of detailed accounts of various altercations between rebels and coalition forces, from IEDs to mortar attacks and to more conventional direct assaults. The authors’ investigation exploits an extraordinary data set—newly declassified military records that catalogue military skirmishes during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. The dataset was populated from detailed combat reports logged by NATO-affiliated troops as Afghan military and police forces. These data allow the authors to track insurgent activity by the hour, including indirect fire (mortars and other weapons deployed at a distance at random times), direct fire (close-combat battles determined in large part when coalition forces are most vulnerable), and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs (emplaced explosives that can be triggered automatically or at will).

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Figure 2 · Methodology for Estimating Annual District Drug Production

Notes: Methodological figures and details drawn from the 2016 UNODC-Afghanistan Drug Report. Panel (a) demonstrates the sampling design used when acquiring high resolution satellite imagery (location: Kandahar). Panel (b) illustrates the subsequent production estimation, which combines low and high resolution imagery (location: Nangahar).

What they find is that rebels alter their attack strategies depending on the quantity and quality of their weapons, which is directly related to the size of the opium crop. When crops are strong and tax returns are high, rebels can afford the newest and most effective weapons and at greater quantities. They can also afford to pay more fighters and informants. In this case, rebel forces tend to engage in larger, more direct, attacks at a perceived weak spot against the Coalition. When funds are low, though, and weapons scarcer, rebels tend to splinter into smaller groups and engage in sporadic attacks.

For effective direct confrontations to occur, insurgents need information. When are coalition forces planning to send out an expeditionary force, and where will those troops go? Are coalition forces planning to move materiel or personnel along a defensive line, perhaps leaving a particular site at a relative disadvantage for a period of time? Insurgents get such intelligence from implanted rebel forces, some of whom also conduct insider attacks. These surveillance operations are logged by coalition forces when they become known, and those incidents are included in the dataset, allowing the authors to incorporate the quality of intelligence gathering into their model of insurgent military activity.

Rebels alter their attack strategies depending on the quantity and quality of their weapons, which is directly related to the size of the opium crop. When crops are strong and tax returns are high, rebels can afford the newest and most effective weapons and at greater quantities. They can also afford to pay more fighters and informants.

A primary contribution of this work is that when key factors about rebel activity are employed in their model—from budgets to attack patterns and to quality of intelligence—it is possible to establish empirical regularities that could, at least to some degree, predict insurgent strategy. What appears to be randomness, in other words, is not always as random as it may seem. Rather, randomness in rebel activity is a function of financial resources, which impact the quality and quantity of weapons and fighters, and the effectiveness of surveillance.