Vol. III - Penn State Abington

2) Underdeveloped urban areas level the playing field between advanced militaries
and loosely organized armed groups. The United States and the United Nations are not the
only forces that have learned about urban combat the hard way. In December 1994, Russian
troops and armored columns entered Grozny in an effort to depose Chechnya’s anti-Russian
leader General Dzhokhar Dudayev. Although the Russians faced only irregular Chechen guerrilla
units, they found themselves desperately outmatched in the narrow, winding streets of Grozny.
Despite being outnumbered five to one and having no heavy weapons systems to speak of, the
Chechens managed to inflict massive casualties on the invading force. The Russians finally left
the city a year and a half later, but not without leaving behind thousands of dead soldiers and
about seventy percent of their tanks in the streets of Grozny (Rosenau, 1997).
More recently, the ongoing war in Iraq has proved to be a contemporary lesson in the
challenges of urban warfare for the US Army. Sadr City—Baghdad’s largest slum—has become
a breeding ground for extremist militants. Now unofficially named “Vietnam Street,” the main
thoroughfare through Sadr City has become a home base for the terrorist Mahdi Army (Davis,
2006). The little infrastructure which did exist in the area was destroyed during the initial US
bombing campaign, and residents now see few reasons to support the American-led transition to
democracy. Although US forces were extremely successful in winning the battle against Saddam
Hussein’s Ba’ath regime, they are proving rather unsuccessful in winning the war for the hearts
and minds of the Iraqi people, which by definition includes the growing numbers of disenchanted
slum dwellers in places like Sadr City.
3) Large slums foster extremism, organized crime, and terrorism. One influential
study from the US Army’s Arroyo Center for Research and Development suggests that the
combination of rapid population growth, rapid urbanization, and economic decline has resulted
in an “urbanization of insurgency” across the developing world (Hoffman and Taw, 1994).
Whereas revolutionary movements during the Cold War tended to be rural-based, today’s
insurgent groups recruit almost exclusively from the large pools of unemployed, disenfranchised
young men in the world’s megaslums. Today, notable examples of urban-based insurgency
include the rise of Hamas in Gaza, the Mahdi Army in Baghdad’s Sadr City, Hezbollah in Beirut,
the Party of Islam in Mogadishu, and the narcotraficantes in Bogota and elsewhere in Latin
America (Davis, 2006). Indeed, one recent report from the US Joint Special Operations
University went so far as to conclude that the growth of “informal peripheral housing” was the
single greatest national security risk for Morocco, because slums inevitably provide safe havens
for Islamic militants (Dalzell, 2006).
As such, urban rebellions can often be seen as “quasi-criminal” rather than ideological in
nature (Collier, 2000). When a city becomes trapped in a vicious cycle of slum population
growth, economic decline, and political impotence, disenfranchised slum dwellers will often turn
to insurgency or organized crime for a source of income, if nothing else. Although some
economists such as Hernando De Soto assert that urban poverty can be remedied through the
provision of micro-credit and land tenure (De Soto, 2001), such legal strategies for upward social
mobility are often impossible in situations of total economic collapse. Such is the situation today
in cities like Kinshasa, Mogadishu, and Harare, where economic conditions are so unstable that
foreign direct investment is almost nonexistent.
THE DIALECTICS ▲ 2009
www.abington.psu.edu/dialectics
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