Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

202 PLANET OF SLUMS
of responses to structural neglect and deprivation, ranging from charismatic
churches and prophetic cults to ethnic militias, street gangs,
neoliberal NGOs, and revolutionary social movements. But if there is .
no monolithic subject or unilateral trend in the global slum, there are
nonetheless myriad acts of resistance. Indeed, the future of human
solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to
accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism.
This refusal may take atavistic as well as avant-garde forms: the
repeal of modernity as well as attempts to recover its repressed
promises. It should not be surprising that some poor youth on the outskirts
of Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, or Paris embrace the religious
nihilism of al Salafia Jihadia and rejoice in the destruction of an alien
modernity's most overweening symbols. Or that millions of others turn
to the urban subsistence economies operated by street gangs, narcotraf
icantes, militias, and sectarian political organizations. The demonizing
rhetorics of the various international "wars" on terrorism, drugs, and
crime are so much semantic apartheid: they construct epistemological
walls aroundgecekondus,javelas, and chawls that disable any honest debate
about the daily violence of economic exclusion. And, as in Victorian
times, the categorical criminalization of the urban poor is a self-fulfilling
prophecy, guaranteed to shape a future of endless war in the streets.
As the Third World middle classes increasingly bunker themselves in
their suburban themeparks and electrified "security villages," they
lose moral and cultural insight into the urban badlands they have left
behind.
The rulers' imagination, moreover, seems to falter before the
obvious implications of a world of cities without jobs. True, neoliberal
optimism is dogged by a certain quotient of Malthusian pessimism,
perhaps best illustrated by the apocalyptic travel writing of Robert D.
Kaplan (The Ends of the Earth and The ComingAnarcby). But most of the
deep thinkers at the big American and European policy think tanks and
international relations institutes have yet to wrap their minds around
the geopolitical implications of a "planet of slums." More successful -
probably because they don't have to reconcile neoliberal dogma to
neoliberal reality - have been the strategists and tactical planners at the
Air Force Academy, the Army's RAND Arroyo Center, and the
Marines' Quantico (Virginia) Warfighting Laboratory. Indeed, in the
EPILOGUE 203
absence of other paradigms, the Pentagon has evolved its own distinctive
perspective on global urban poverty.
The Mogadishu debacle of 1993, when slum militias inflicted 60
percent casualties on elite Army Rangers, forced military theoreticians
to rethink what is known in Pentagonese as MOUT: "Military
Operations on Urbanized Terrain." Ultimately a National Defense
Panel review in December 1997 castigated the Army as unprepared for
protracted combat in the nearly impassable, mazelike streets of poor
Third World cities. All the armed services, coordinated by the Joint
Urban Operations Training Working Group, launched crash programs
to master street-fighting under realistic slum conditions. "The future of
warfare," the journal of the Army War College declared, "lies in the
streets, sewers, highrise buildings, and sprawl of houses that form the
broken cities of the world .... Our recent military history is punctuated
with city names - Tuzla, Mogadishu, Los Angeles [I], Beirut, Panama
City, Hue, Saigon, Santo Domingo - but these encounters have been
but a prologue, with the real drama still to come."8
To help develop a larger conceptual framework for MOUT, military
planners turned in the 1990s to Dr. Strangelove's old alma mater, the
Santa Monica-based RAND Corporation. RAND, a nonprofit think
tank established by the Air Force in 1948, was notorious for wargaming
nuclear Armageddon in the 1950s and for helping to strategize
the Vietnam War in the 1960s. These days RAND does cities: its
researchers ponder urban crime statistics, inner-city public health, and
the privatization of public education. They also run the Army's Arroyo
Center, which has published a small library of studies on the social
contexts and tactical mechanics of urban warfare.
One of the most important RAND projects, initiated in the early
1990s, has been a major study of "how demographic changes will affect
future conflict." The bottom line, RAND finds, is that the urbanization
of world poverty has produced "the urbanization of insurgency" - the
title of their report. "Insurgents are following their followers into the
cities," RAND warns, "setting up 'liberated zones' in urban shantytowns.
Neither U.S. doctrine, nor training, nor equipment is designed
8 Major Ralph Peters, "Our Soldiers, Their Cities," Parameters (Spring 1996),
pp. 43-50.