War misguidance: Visualizing quagmire in the US War in Afghanistan

The Vietnam syndrome

The War in Afghanistan has not faced charges of failure as much as the War in Iraq. But like the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan is a series of never-and-ever-ending victories and defeats. Rumsfeld declared an end to combat operations in Afghanistan in March 2003. 2008 was the deadliest year on record. Obama insisted that the war should come to a ‘responsible conclusion’ by the end of 2014. The stagnant ‘progress’ by US and NATO forces follows on from legacies of Western imperial interference in Afghanistan dating back hundreds of years. Afghanistan has thus been given many names by the West: ‘the graveyard of empires, the Central Asian roundabout, the highway of conquest, and the crossroad of empires’ (Jalali, 2017: 1). Ali Ahmad Jalali argues that the recent US and NATO allied intervention into Afghanistan is similar to the War in Vietnam, since international forces have fought ‘many one-year wars’, short-sighted battles with no shared, overall vision, multiple times (p. 506). That victory has been such a moving target in the War in Afghanistan evinces that the US’s prolonged involvement has done little to bring the war to a conclusion. The potential to blunder war, again, haunts US presidents who hope to shake the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’. George HW Bush in 1991 famously declared, ‘we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.’

The nomenclature of war quagmire arose during the Vietnam War. The New York Times international reporter David Halberstam published The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era (2007[1965]) after his time reporting about the war for The Times. The Making of a Quagmire recounted, through Halberstam’s immersive investigative journalism between 1962 and 1964, the fatal errors in US policy and disregard of the Vietnamese rural population during the Kennedy era. The book was published before President Lyndon Johnson’s astonishing commitment of US forces in the region. Daniel J Singal (2007[1965]) summarizes: ‘Halbertstam’s detailed accounts of the combat missions he went on make clear how poorly trained and motivated the ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] was, and how little attention its leaders paid to cultivating popular support’ (p. xiv). Through a series of misinformed decisions and neglect of the political nature of the war, the ARVN’s ‘position became hopeless’ (p. xv). In the final chapter, ‘What Should Be Done in Vietnam?’, Halberstam (2007[1965]) decides that the US is ‘caught in the quagmire’ and therefore too involved to withdraw from the battle (p. 202).

William Cronon (2010: x) states that Halberstam’s book ‘provided the single most influential metaphor for the war it depicted’. He notes that ‘quagmire’ is a curious word choice; the etymology of the word ‘quagmire’ (‘quag’ + ‘mire’) turns out to mean something like ‘bog’ + ‘bog’. Quag derives from 16th-century English language to mean ‘an area of wet, boggy land that gives way under foot; a quaking bog’ (‘quagmire, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary, 2020). Mire derives from a Norse word for ‘an area of swampy ground’ (also ooze, dirt, wet or soft mud; or, in less frequent use, dung). The two together, according to Cronon (2010: x), multiply ‘the muckiness of the marshy, swampy, watery ground’. The term feels like an apt descriptor for the War in Vietnam: ‘Without comprehending the consequences of their own actions, the best and brightest of the nation’s leaders found themselves mired in the jungles of Southeast Asia – bogged down, rudderless, entangled, entrapped.’ Quagmire has come to mean ‘a position or situation which is unpleasant or hazardous; esp. one from which it is difficult to extricate oneself’ (‘quagmire, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary, 2020). As a verb, ‘quagmire’ means ‘to sink or place in a quagmire’ (‘quagmire, v.’, Oxford English Dictionary, 2020).

The disastrous legacy of Vietnam has not ended. As Robert Hariman and John Lucaites (2007: 171) write, ‘There is reason to believe that the war never ended, for a fairly direct line can be drawn from the bitter disputes about Vietnam to those neoconservative policymakers who seized the opportunity to get it right this time.’ Sites of memory are often met with revanchism, including in attempts to glean lessons to prevent Iraq or Afghanistan from becoming ‘another Vietnam’. Indeed, Former Vice President Dick Cheney issued prophetic warnings about quagmire in Iraq both in 1991 and 1994 (Reinhardt, 2014). A New York Times Editorial on 30 June 2005 by Bob Herbert, entitled ‘Dangerous Incompetence’, argued that the War in Iraq was a quagmire due to the preponderance of careless mistakes, clumsy executions, and the US’s unwelcome presence:

The Bush crowd bristles at the use of the ‘Q-word’ – quagmire – to describe American involvement in Iraq. But with our soldiers fighting and dying with no end in sight, who can deny that Mr. Bush has gotten us into ‘a situation from which extrication is very difficult,’ which is a standard definition of quagmire?

Comparisons between the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam have been prominent from the very first weeks of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in 2001. On 30 October 2001, RW Apple Jr asked in The New York Times, ‘Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world?’ Donald Rumsfeld was perhaps aware of such comparisons, joking to the press on 27 November 2001, ‘It looked like we were in a –all together now – quagmire’ in the first phase of the invasion (‘Transcript: Rumsfeld, Franks on War in Afghanistan’, 2001). New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert (2009) labeled the War in Afghanistan a quagmire on 5 January 2009:

While we haven’t even figured out how to extricate ourselves from the disaster in Iraq, Mr. Obama is planning to commit thousands of additional American troops to the war in Afghanistan, which is already more than seven years old and which long ago turned into a quagmire.

Seven years later, The New York Times Editorial Board published a special piece entitled ‘The Afghan War Quagmire’ on 17 September 2016.

Part of the troubled legacy of Vietnam is the US military’s inheritance of Cold War tactics of counterinsurgency, which I analyze in the next section. In the foreword for David Ucko’s influential The New Counterinsurgency Era, Lt. Col. John A Nagl (2009: viii) wrote, ‘Irregular warfare found the United States, and suddenly the counterinsurgency lessons of Vietnam are again in high demand.’ US officials quickly clamored for these lessons.

COIN’s network(ed) ineptitudes

Counterinsurgency is a war tactic that combines killing insurgents, supporting local infrastructure, and infiltrating the daily life of a population (Owens, 2015). Infrastructural reform is meant to embolden a local government and turn local people against an insurgency. Reflecting on his command of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan and the ‘deeply embedded’ and ‘impressively agile’ enemy, McChrystal wrote in 2011: ‘In bitter, bloody fights in both Afghanistan and Iraq, it became clear to me and to many others that to defeat a networked enemy we had to become a network ourselves.’ COIN demands an extensive network that adapts civilian and military infrastructures for irregular warfare. COIN’s multiple limitations (ambiguities of purpose, extensive involvement of forces, institutional learning curves, and unwieldy field of operations) are baked into its philosophy.

Petraeus is the most well-known proponent of COIN strategies in the War on Terror (COIN is sometimes called ‘The Petraeus Doctrine’). Petraeus wrote the ‘flagship publication’ about COIN, a Field Guide (‘US Army Field Manual 3-24’) published 15 December 2006. The US military took little time to implement COIN in the War on Terror; three days after Petraeus assumed command of the Multinational Force-Iraq on 11 February 2007, he ordered Operation Fardh al-Wanoon (‘Operation Imposing Law’) in Baghdad. Operation Fardh al-Wanoon was ‘the first time since at least the Vietnam War that it [the US military] was officially directed to prosecute a community-oriented, population-centered counterinsurgency campaign’ (Ucko, 2009: 169). Implemented between February and November of that year, the operation installed US troops in neighborhoods in Iraq to control communities. COIN uses ‘clear, hold, and build’ strategies (clear insurgents, hold the area, build support).

COIN saw an improbable rise in influence after 9/11:

As recently as 2006, the country’s top generals were openly scorning counterinsurgency as a concept; the secretary of defense all but banned the term’s utterance. One year later, it was enshrined as army doctrine, promoted at the highest levels of the Pentagon, and declared official U.S. policy by the president. (Kaplan, 2013)

The use of COIN methods was ‘the fastest such adaptation of a conventional force in history’, in part because ‘the United States never debated whether Cold War-style counterinsurgency made strategic sense in Iraq and Afghanistan’ (Metz, 2017: 65). The Bush administration adopted the COIN strategy after needing a way to change course during instability in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, and the Obama administration followed suit in Afghanistan in 2008 and 2009. Both adoptions of COIN by Bush and Obama involved troop surges, and both followed from the suggestions of only a handful of COIN aficionados. US war strategy cycles back to COIN despite its multiple failings when politicians and officers forget just how invasive it is as a war strategy (Kaplan, 2013).

Because US and allied forces in Afghanistan had to become a network fighting another network, how those forces chose to visualize the networks of war matters. The confusing COIN slide points to an inherent limitation of networked war: the inability to spatially render all constituent parts involved in its execution. From a close reading of the COIN Field Guide, Nicolas Mirzoeff (2009: 1741) finds that proponents of counterinsurgency find it legitimate ‘because it alone can visualize the divergent cultural forces at work in a given area and devise a strategy to coordinate them’. Notably, from 2005 to 2015, the Army used the Human Terrain System (HTS) in Iraq and Afghanistan to facilitate the gathering and visualization of cultural knowledge for COIN, including in maps, link charts, time lines, topographies, and reports. Yet, the visual dominance of COIN cannot include a full topography of military and nonmilitary relations in a network due to war’s dynamism. McChrystal (2011) attested to limited visibility in ‘the new front line of modern warfare’: ‘A stream of hot cinders was falling everywhere around us, and we had to see them, catch those we could, and react instantly to those we had missed that were starting to set the ground on fire.’ Despite the US’s immense efforts to develop networks of war to execute COIN and devise an actionable visualization of security dynamics, counterinsurgency in Afghanistan was widely derided as a failed strategy by 2013.

Data visualization, PowerPoint and war

It can be said that war has always involved data visualization practices of some kind, insofar as war has included instrumentalized thinking using visual forms. Western nations have propagated wars using images ‘produced primarily to serve as expressions of knowledge’ (Drucker, 2014: 17), as statistics, graphics, diagrams, and design have emerged as objects and areas of study. The idea that images reflect knowledge comes from a ‘hierarchy of senses’ that privileges visuality, inherited from ‘the Ancients, and then, from the late Middle Ages through the Enlightenment’ (p. 21). Enlightenment principles that ‘what could be seen could be known’ informed the connectedness of visuality with rationality (p. 21). Charting a genealogy of visuality and rationality post-World War II, Orit Halpern (2014) studies the emergence of ‘communicative objectivity’, wherein data analysis and visualization became democratic virtues. In the post-war period, data visualization became an object for decision-making by policy-makers (p. 16).

Drucker (2014: 69) states that production of diagrams in graphical form ‘served a rationalizing sensibility committed to the bureaucratic management of the emerging modern state’. Since their popularization in the 19th century, graphics were a useful way to visualize populations, statistics, and losses in war. Perhaps the most well-known war-time data visualizer is Florence Nightingale for her cockscomb graphics about hospital conditions during the Civil War. Uses of graphics in war are undertheorized because graphics seem dull and trivial (Adelman, 2018: 59). Throughout the War on Terror, ‘the visual has been central to state and popular efforts to assess and contain the threat of terrorism’, and ‘infographics are a new addition to this repertoire’ (p. 63).

Crucial to the intertwining history of graphics and state management, the study of systems (‘systems thinking’) emerged in the early 20th century and quickly found uptake in the US military. MA Thomas (2019: 157–159) argues that ‘systems thinking’ has since influenced the Army most – a direct result of COIN – even though the Army adopted it later in comparison to other branches and Joint Forces Command. It found influence in the military in the 1950s through young defense analysts’ scholarship and RAND Corporation partnerships (p. 153). Systems thinking samples broadly from systems science (a predictive scientific-based field), systems analysis (a prescriptive field that uses mathematics and computer simulation to address problems), and design thinking (a collaborative problem-solving method using design) (p. 150). Examples include British physicist AP Rowe’s mathematical models for radar efficiency in World War II and Ed Paxson’s modeling of bomber aircraft designs (p. 152). By the mid-20th century, in the military, ‘design’ not only referred to weapons schematics but ‘creative thinking involved in defining open-ended problems and finding solutions’ (p. 152). Some systems thinking charts dynamic processes, i.e. the weather, using graphical diagrams.

PowerPoint is one of what Josef Teboho Ansorge and Tarak Barkawi (2014: 5) call ‘utile forms’, ‘media with a standardized layout that make knowledge available for particulate purposes’. In addition to PowerPoint, these forms include field manuals, handbooks, smartcards, and software and hardware used to input biometric data. British imperialism yoked utile forms to war; its bureaucracies relied on standardized forms of knowledge production to connect back to a centralized power (p. 11). The use of social sciences in applications of Western wars post-World War II saw a renewed incorporation of utile forms into war operations (p. 10). Most profoundly, utile forms enable Western powers to construct and spread truths about indigenous populations in war. As Ansorge and Barkawi indicate, ‘even banal utile forms, concerned with the most mundane matters, can instantiate world-views that legitimate and naturalise Western presence and policy in the non-European world’ (p. 12).

PowerPoint did not emerge as a militarized medium until the 1990s, and it had a stronghold influence on the Pentagon in the first decade of the War on Terror. Forethought, a Silicon Valley start-up, originally envisioned the presentation software (then called Presenter) for use in electronic, print, and video projector (35 mm slides) mediums in the early 1980s. ‘Presenter’ became ‘PowerPoint 1.0’ in 1987, and Microsoft purchased Forethought the same year. PowerPoint caught on in the military for US defense and battle management after DoD procured personal computing software between 1990 and 1992 and transitioned to Windows software from its earlier specialized programs (Gaskins, 2012: 428). Now, DoD offers ‘The Office 365-DoD Environment’, and Microsoft has a significant role in modernizing DoD’s defense infrastructure.

State actors have used PowerPoint at critical junctures to justify the War on Terror. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell’s PowerPoint performance to the UN Security Council in February 2003 presented obscure details about Iraq that government officials argued only they could understand. The Iraq Planning Group passed along a slide deck of 55 slides to the Chief of Staff of the US Army to convince him to implement COIN as the central strategy in the War on Terror during 2006 and 2007 (Kaplan, 2013). Most pertinent to COIN, Petraeus was known as a PowerPoint evangelizer, and many of his slides, David Gura (2010) of NPR (National Public Radio) reports, ‘were absolutely inscrutable’. Petraeus modeled that PowerPoint could be a key technology to implement COIN, and apparently, ‘among junior officers, his PowerPoint presentations were spoken of in reverent tones’ (Filkins, 2012). To others, Petraeus offered nothing more than ‘neocolonialism dressed up in PowerPoint’ (Fick and Nagl, 2009). The inscrutability of his presentations demanded an expert translator like Petraeus, who could narrativize the path to victory in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When presentations lack this context, their inscrutability – a quality most notorious in the DoD’s presentations – becomes hypervisible. US periodicals used the COIN slide to renew debates about whether the Pentagon’s overreliance on PowerPoint clarified or confused the war effort. McMaster went so far as to ban PowerPoint, because it ‘take[s] no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces’ (Bumiller, 2010). Bret Stephens (2010) for the Wall Street Journal argued that PowerPoint presentations ‘will not win the War in Afghanistan’. General James Mattis asserted, ‘PowerPoint makes us stupid’ (quoted in Bumiller, 2010). A report on making intelligence relevant in Afghanistan by Major General Michael Flynn, Captain Matt Pottinger, and Paul D Batchelor (2010: 23–24) argued, ‘Microsoft Word, rather than PowerPoint, should be the tool of choice for intelligence professionals in a counterinsurgency.’ At stake in debates over the best media with which to execute war is scrutability, whether image or text better serve the sensibilities of the state.

Eric Jenkins (2011) writes that deliberations over PowerPoint invoke well-worn topoi about whether it entrains viewers to be mindless automatons or lively public citizens. Jenkins argues that slideware is more than these reductive topoi; slideware is instead one medium in a media ecology that enables users to engage in ‘remediation and transmediation’ (p. 233). Remediation is ‘the modulation of one medium through another’, and ‘transmediation’ is ‘how the spread of media rebounds to affect audience perceptions, knowledge, norms, and expectations more broadly’ (p. 222). Military users of PowerPoint remediate (translate data into graphics into digital presentations), and, by doing so, they transmediate (normalize slideware as a method for knowledge production in military culture). The study of PowerPoint is important, because so-called ‘soft wars’, wars that target civil society to shape belief and win over populations, rely on software’s remediating and transmediating capacities. Michael MacDonald (2012) writes, ‘Info War targets not only the physical infrastructure of information (nodes, cables, links, servers, towers, routers, electricity grids) but also the decision makers, “human or automated,” plugged into the grid’, which include slideshow designers and audiences.

The COIN slide visualizes data through a form common to the Army: the causal loop diagram. A causal loop diagram depicts causal relations between elements by using arrows and text; the arrows represent formal loops (e.g. reinforcing loops, feedback loops, balancing loops), flows of productivity, and delays in resources and information. Causal loop diagrams emerged from a field called System Dynamics, a field within systems thinking that studies chains of relationships and maps complex systems. Founder Jay W Forrester first published in Harvard Business Review in 1958 about System Dynamics, which he then called Industrial Dynamics. Inspired by Operations Research and Organizational Management, Forrester believed the ‘field of operations’ of organizational supply chains could apply to ‘national and international policy issues’ (Dangerfield, 2014). Causal loop diagrams started to appear prominently in the 1970s. The US Army still uses systems thinking, like Systems Dynamics, in its Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) despite criticism that it fails to address underlying causes of social problems and simplifies systems: ‘The risk is that the Army will mistake its preconceptions for truth and develop plans that are fragile because they depend on a large number of untested and poorly articulated hypotheses’ (p. 202).

Even if the COIN slide is scrutable to some, one PowerPoint slide can hardly capture such a multitude of causal factors related to Afghanistan stability. And because the diagram complexifies, for commanders and the lay public, an already-complicated field of relations in Afghanistan, I analyze it in the context of quagmire.

The form of visual quagmires

To best conceptualize their ongoingness, quagmires should be considered through the study of ontogenesis, what Brian Massumi (2002: 232) calls ‘being-in-becoming’. Massumi writes:

The idea is that there is an ontogenesis or becoming of culture and the social . . . of which determinate forms of culture and sociability are the result. The challenge is to think that process of formation, and for that you need the notion of a taking-form, an informing on the way to being determinately this or that. (p. 9, emphasis is in the original).

A quagmire is an ontogenetic happening. The conceptualization of quagmire herein means that critics can read the quagmire, each time, not as single events or situations but as formations. A quagmire is a quagmiring, the entangling of bodies’ capacities to act and be acted upon in intractable positions. A quagmire is the knot-tying of relations-always-underway. In quagmiring, social, cultural, economic, and military relations of war become knotted, visually, conceptually, and materially, as to confound their disentanglement. The ontogenetic conceptualization of quagmire also enables critics to theorize how a nation-state’s capacity to wage war mutates as the war continues. The politics of the quagmire concerns the emergent capacity for a nation-state, community, or individual to disengage from war’s networked confusion. Bousquet et al. (2020: 103) write that inquiry into the ontogenetics of war scrutinizes ‘the enfolding of intensities, relations and attributes that give rise to war’s givenness’. How is quagmire an enfolding of intensities, relations, and attributes of war, namely every-which-way?

To study war-as-taking-form, it is important to study visual forms in war because visual forms alter the potentials for the war to coalesce differently in the future. Infographics used in military briefings, for instance, inform future tactics. The War in Afghanistan’s unraveling took shape through data visualizations within military briefings. Even while US officials found ways to suppress the extent of failures in briefings (Whitlock, 2019), visualizations of the war in ISAF Joint Command briefings in 2008 were bleak. In a briefing on 4 June 2008 in Kabul, Lt. Colonel Patrick McNiece informed then Commander of ISAF General David McKiernan that 52,000 US and NATO allied forces ‘were slowly but inexorably being driven back by a much smaller force of Taliban guerrillas’ (Aide, 2012: 11). At the end of the briefing, one of the general’s aides said to a colleague, ‘Oh my God, what have we gotten ourselves into!’ (p. 12). COIN’s failings form a trajectory through military briefings, taking its clearest confused form, I argue, in the form of the COIN slide.

Conceiving war as process means that the visual form of the quagmire is not confined to deliberate attempts to represent the mess, as in editorial cartoons (e.g. Granlund 2005; Bagley 2009). Weekly New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich’s editorial ‘Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco’ (2009) about the War in Afghanistan for instance included a cartoon by Barry Blitt that shows a politician playing a game of Whack-a-Snake. Representations of quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan depict quagmire as a place (a patch of quicksand, a hole or series of holes) that can suck US forces into an inescapable trap or an unwinnable game. Rather than confine visualization of quagmire to deliberate attempts at representing the ‘bog’ of war, critics can read war’s visual field as the violent vortex of quagmiring itself. In other words, the production of images during the War on Terror creates visual evidence of the war’s intractability. The form of war quagmire is the ongoing mess of war itself, including the production of images that assume the shape of the mess, even if inadvertently.

It helps to consider ‘cluster fucks’, because they, too, are emergent visual forms within war. Reading the disastrousness of Abu Ghraib prison torture in Iraq in Morris’s film Standard Operating Procedure, Williams (2010: abstract) argues that the frame of the ‘cluster fuck’ is the ‘most eloquent figure of American entanglement in Iraq’. Williams finds the figure eloquent for how it speaks across entanglements in the War in Iraq: pyramids of prisoners’ bodies, cluster bombs, the US military’s approach to sexual relationships, and US involvement in Iraq writ large (p. 42). The ‘cluster fuck’ is a visual form that best describes these phenomena. The COIN PowerPoint slide is a ‘cluster fuck’ in that it reflects the US military’s ‘impotency’ in the War on Terror (p. 49). I argue that the COIN slide is also a more specific visual form that showcases the limitations of counterinsurgency strategies in Afghanistan spearheaded by Petraeus. It is an eloquent figure of American entanglement in COIN in Afghanistan that emerged from the field of battle management itself.

Here, I analyze five ways that a visual quagmire eloquently acts as a visualization of a warring power’s catastrophic, self-inflicted entanglement in war: it discloses that the war has become too unmanageable; contributes to inertia; brings ironies about war to domestic audiences’ awareness; complicates viewers’ understandings of insurgent forces; and makes intractable situations salient. Visualizations are not passive representations of what is; they ‘make new relations appear and produce new objects and space for action and speculation’ (Halpern, 2014: 21). Visual quagmires render quagmiring visible by opening a space from which to consider a warring power’s failures.

Visual quagmires challenge the prevailing governmental narrative that war can be manageable. Journalists Elizabeth Bumiller (2010) and Sharon Weinberger (2010) write that the COIN slide resembles a ‘bowl of spaghetti’ and ‘spaghetti’, respectively. Rachel Maddow (2009) indicated that the slide represents, to some, ‘spaghetti logic’. Maddow puts it thus: ‘I don’t think they’re issuing this to people and telling them to follow it, but it does institute the – it does illustrate the – I don’t know – the daunting complexity of what it is we’re trying to do.’ Because counterinsurgency is a war of pacification, it is a ‘a form of war justified, in part, through domestic images of war and sentiments’ (Owens, 2015: 37; see De Graaf et al., 2015). What happens when the War in Afghanistan reaches the home front in the form of spaghetti? How is the Long War too long, too stringy, too much of a mess? The visual quagmire challenges the idea that a Long War can be broken down into manageable plans and progressive victories. As Stahl (2008) outlines, US national rhetoric proposes that a Long War can also be a manageable war. The manageable war is ‘a war that is continually on the verge of ending, a “just war” by virtue of its being “just about done”’ (p. 85). This rhetoric has a strategic purpose: ‘The war that is “always almost over” serves to discipline dissent on the principle that it is meaningless to protest against a war that very soon will not be’ (p. 85). The visual quagmire shows that the war is far more extensive than the ‘infinitesimal war’ narrative purports. A war strategy shaped like spaghetti challenges any notion that US forces are fighting a manageable war. Convoluted visualizations lack the timelines and benchmarks for success promised by ‘ever-ending’ war rhetoric (p. 86). Rather than tell a linear narrative for the War in Afghanistan, a visual quagmire collapses progress into non-linear loops.

Visual quagmires reveal how inertia impacts media ecologies of war. In its exhausting movements, the COIN slide speaks to inertia within the US military. Shawn Brimley and Paul Scharre (2014) argue in Foreign Policy that inertia is a force of the US military:

The hard truth is that inertia, not strategy, is the main force shaping the military. Major weapons programs take decades to develop and are nearly impossible to kill. Promising new technologies and concepts never see the light of day if they threaten traditional approaches. Byzantine bureaucracies comprising dozens of overlapping command structures stifle innovation, slow response time, and create needless barriers.

The slide does not merely depict military inertia in COIN; the slide contributes to war inertia, as it is part of a 30-slide deck presented at a Kabul briefing that tightens the nodes on the graph rather than untangles them. The ‘bog’ traversed by those who sat for the full COIN narrative is different than a muddy terrain in which soldiers move, but it is still an intractable terrain that mires those engaging it. While it does not have aesthetic connotations of muck and dirt, the slide is a disordered web of relations that can be described as a vortex. Viewing the COIN slide, a ‘staff officer in Afghanistan becomes lost in the vortexes of connectivity’ (Mirzoeff, 2011). The slide is a crystallization of the media environment of war: ‘the media environment is a “vortex” or “maelstrom” of material and immaterial forces in constant flux – a “whirlwind of violence”’ (MacDonald, 2012). The graph is an accumulation of visual cul-de-sacs. Weinberger wrote in 2010 that ‘the military may now be experiencing PowerPoint fatigue’ to the extent that ‘senior military leaders seem to be moving away from PowerPoint.’ That DoD’s inscrutable slides have been debated for decades demonstrates how long it takes to remediate data practices in war.

Visual quagmires that purport to represent knowledge reveal an irony: domestic, civilian witnesses to war may better grasp war’s intractability than those planning its missions. The Colbert Report highlighted this irony in its fake game ‘Afghanyland’ which used the COIN slide as the base of the board game. Colbert satirized the huge jumps between words and arrows, as if to indicate just how much relevant information is left out of the arrows between elements. Jumping between spaces in the game, Colbert narrates:

Now the Taliban can just set up a blockade between Ability to Reconcile Religious Ideology/Tribal Structures w/Gov’t Path and Perception of Coalition Intent and Commitment. This thing is worthless. Now we have to go to the drawing board. We did use a drawing board before we did this, right? I mean, this plan was so elegant. (‘Obama’s Nobel Prize Speech & Afghandyland’, 2009)

The irony here is that an image developed specifically for rationalizing purposes, to make order from chaos, is so patently unreasoned (perhaps by virtue of being overthought). Visual quagmires allow domestic audiences to bear witness to the US military’s ‘development of complicated, unsupported models as a basis for action’ (Thomas, 2019: 157). Looking at the COIN image, an overwhelming sense of the US’s own ineptitude with regard to executing war emerges. US officials claim to execute a ‘smart war’ against racialized insurgents, depicted as ‘medieval or archaic; as the embodiment of an eternal and unchanging refusal of modernity; as irrational . . .’ (Gusterson, 2012: 87). The slide reveals the baselessness of claims that US forces can know the enemy through data visualization in the War in Afghanistan.

Indeed, visual quagmires can complicate viewers’ understandings of the humanity of insurgents. Causal loop diagrams, in particular, perpetuate the ‘structural imbalance in the visual record’ of Iraq and Afghanistan identified by Susan J Carruthers (2015: 192): the near-total absence of depictions of insurgents as sentient beings. US officials faced difficulties parsing who exactly the enemy was in Afghanistan, between al-Qaeda and the Taliban (Whitlock, 2019), and the referent of ‘INSURGENTS’ on the diagram is unspecified. The COIN diagram disembodies insurgents not through the sexualized, homogeneous clusters of an Iraqi prison, but rather, through textual groupings and generalizations. Rebecca A Adelman (2018: 58) asserts, in her study of ISIS’s infographics, that infographics sanitize and de-spectacularize war. The banality of software contributes to a sense of sanitized and unspectacular war. In contrast to the outright dehumanizing images of captured insurgents, the COIN slide enacts a ‘soft’ disembodiment of insurgents. US media toggles between the fundamental knowability and unknowability of insurgents in its visualizations, and the absence of insurgents – ‘their ideological and existential evacuation’ – is ‘required’ for the US to have moral justification for the War on Terror (Gusterson, 2012: 85–86).

The separation of insurgents from the category of ‘POPULATION’ in green is by design, so that ISAF can target insurgents and populations’ beliefs separately. Slide 2 in the full slide show gives context for the strategy: ‘Influence insurgent-minded individuals to adopt a neutral disposition; Influence neutral-minded individuals to adopt a supportive disposition; Retain supportive individuals’ (See PA Knowledge Limited, 2009). Petraeus inherits the notion of a neutral-minded population, which is neither for insurgency nor counterinsurgency, from French military officer David Galula’s counterinsurgency theories about Vietnam. The image of the population as inherently persuadable enables US intervention in the entire field of social relationships (homes and economic forces, rural development programs, tribal politics, religion, state policies, etc.) (‘soldiers as social workers’) (Owens, 2015: 30). The grounding assumption is that the neutral population is ‘un-agentic’ – that they are ‘up for grabs’ so long as the US applies the right force (p. 231). Oddly enough, the intricate loops between categories are meant to specify the cultural differences of insurgents, the population, and tribal households and sectarian factions in Afghanistan, as COIN claims to document the ‘web of relations’ that comprises Afghan culture (p. 257). The slide’s infographic form limits the potential for viewers to understand insurgent sentience within this ‘web of relations’.

Visual quagmires make intractable situations salient to viewing audiences. Victor J Blue’s photograph of a bombed hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan in 2015 – which appears in a retrospective essay on ‘Photos from America’s Longest War’ in The New York Times – is an illustrative additional example of a visual quagmire for how it depicts entanglement. The retrospective includes the photo caption:

The aftermath of an American airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, in October 2015. Forty-two people were killed in the attack, which was later found to be the result of a cascade of human errors and mechanical and equipment failures. (Norland and Zucchino, 2020)

The photo shows the aftermath of an unfolding of error and miscalculation by US forces. Unlike the COIN slide, Blue’s photograph is not a data visualization, and it requires more context, like a caption, to speak to US failures. But, like the COIN slide, it makes the intractability of war conspicuous. Assuming a clear visual form of the whirlwind of war violence, it renders an encounter with a warring power’s failures unavoidable. Visual quagmires are visual forms of war’s becoming-quagmire. They assume the form of the quagmire itself, of obstructed, exhausted movement and unresolvable dilemmas and so showcase how the war has become a misadventure.

A quagmire is a happening: holes becoming dug, soldiers sinking, spaghetti piling up, arrows moving every way, virtual inertias weighing down forces, laughter marking defeat, error cascading, media fatiguing war strategy, software continuing soft war. Dominic Tierney (2010: 35) writes that the common metaphors for quagmire have been the ‘sand trap, swamp, quicksand, morass, sinkhole, bottomless pit, or the “Big Muddy,” Pete Seeger’s allusion to Vietnam’. Quagmire keywords should broaden to reflect war’s media ecology. Understanding that quagmire takes different aesthetic shapes is important for an ontogenetic understanding of war. Quagmires recast themselves within networked wars. A quagmire’s formation is the spatial confounding of populations, fighters, resources, and beliefs. It is the making of disaster. It is the looping of graphic shapes, lines, and text on a plane. It is misguidance in military intelligence.

Conclusion

Though the domestic audience for the War on Terror has diminished, especially in bearing witness to “casualties, bodies, and burials” (Carruthers 2008: 73), certain images that communicate war failure have become prominent in US media outlets: the 2008 images of journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi throwing his shoes at George W Bush at a press conference in Baghdad; the 2011 image of Petraeus posing with his biographer Paula Broadwell before news of their affair became public; the 2012 image of an Afghan man giving the finger to a soldier over the walls of Bagram Air Base, as Afghan demonstrators protested that NATO personnel burned copies of the Quran there; and the 2017 image of Myeshia Johnson crying on the casket of her husband Sergeant La David Johnson, who was killed by friendly fire in Niger, to name only a few. I have argued that the visual quagmire is an eloquent figure of the failure of America’s networked War in Afghanistan, especially the failure of COIN. Chillingly, top US officials have in recent years become comfortable describing the War in Afghanistan as a ‘stalemate’ to avoid public admissions that the US has lost the war (Bacevich, 2018). Can visualizations of quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan confirm the unwinnability of the War on Terror? Even at a glance, visual quagmires offer audiences a glimpse into strategic misguidance within the machinations of war and so can disclose the severity of the misguidance. Perhaps most productively, visual quagmires evince the fragility of a counterinsurgent state’s capacity to dictate what audiences can witness (Carruthers, 2015: 205).

Elaborating the form of the ‘visual quagmire’ has two overall implications for studies of war media, data, and visuality. First, the conceptualization of form-as-happening herein allows us to answer common concern when theorizing quagmire: How can we discern the contours of a happening so shot through with untraceable confusions? Answering means understanding that graphics are participatory forms that actors use to gain knowledge and make decisions: ‘Form is productive. It generates effects which are not wholly reducible to the knowledge the forms contain, and which can be analysed in their own terms’ (Ansorge and Barkawi, 2014: 7, original emphasis). Insofar as war graphics confound, they potentially participate in the becoming-disaster of Long Wars. Quagmires disclose themselves to viewers as untraceable confusions in the dynamic unfolding of war. Any notion of form thus demands attention to the specific ways these confusions disclose themselves. The confusedness shown in a cartoon about soldiers falling into quicksand in Iraq will be different than the confusedness of President Trump announcing the end of US involvement in Syria on Twitter without any plan. The quagmiring of the War on Terror is ongoing. Quagmires are processes underway, and they continue to take (messy) shape.

Second, this analysis shows that the US becomes responsible for how it misguides the War on Terror, meaning creates unintended effects and undoes its own intended effects, through the circulation of war images. It has been over 10 years since McChrystal mocked the slide in Kabul. Why is the war still happening, despite the abandonment of COIN after the surge under Obama? Williams (2010: 58) underscores ‘the real incriminating photo does not exist.’ No one photo will reveal all that conditions war’s violence, including decades of US funding those who would become its enemies in Afghanistan. For its part, the COIN slide is indexical. Invariably, by depicting COIN’s field of operations, it points back at the US military. It calls into question the military’s use of systems thinking and graphics, and its bureaucratic management of violence. By revealing the US military’s ineptitudes in knowledge production, the lasting legacy of the COIN slide may be that it stands as a mark of the US military’s strategic failures in COIN. One only hopes the awareness of COIN’s limitations carries into the future. For now, while no one image can claim to have ended wars, visualizations of the US’s extensive, self-imposed involvement might beckon for an end (enough, already).