Archipelagos of death: the assemblage of population-centric war in Afghanistan

Abstract

How is the notion of success rearticulated in the contemporary context of endless counterinsurgencies (COIN)? To answer, the paper engages the thesis that the recent COIN campaigns were founded on a dysfunctional disconnect between the "hearts and minds" principles and the reality of the indefinite use of force. I show that this tension (called the "tactical trap") is not a pathology of COIN, but one of its productive sites. The tactical trap is an assemblage of violence that brings together the endless use of force and the population-centric narrative through the principle of futurity, i.e. an indeterminate horizon of "progress." Taking inspiration from the Critical War Studies and the Afghan warfare as a case study, I highlight the paradoxical nature of populationcentric war: it is founded on a violence that makes COIN both a permanent state of failure and a probable success. The indeterminacy of violence is then analyzed as a new ordering of riskmanagement warfare, based on the everyday (re)invention of the potentiality of "progress."