Zachary Shore - A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rivals Mind

A SENSE OF THE ENEMY

THE HIGH-STAKES HISTORY OF READING YOUR RIVALS MIND

by

ZACHARY SHORE

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide.

Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by
Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Zachary Shore 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shore, Zachary.
A sense of the enemy : the high stakes history of reading your rivals mind / Zachary Shore.
p. cm.

Summary: A bold explanation of how and why national leaders are ableor unableto correctly analyze and predict the intentions of foreign rivalsProvided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 9780199987375 (hardback) 1. Political leadershipPsychological aspects. 2. Heads of statePsychology. 3. EnemiesPsychology. 4. Psychology, Military. I. Title. JC330.3.S56 2014

320.019dc23

2013035543

9780199987375

135798642

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For my parents

DESPITE A DECADE OF military operations across Afghanistan, by the winter of 2010 it had become clear that the United States was not succeeding. Hoping to induce the Afghan insurgents into peace talks, U.S. and NATO officials tried to bribe the Taliban to the conference table. They paid an undisclosed and hefty sum to Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour for his participation, at one point flying the Talibans second-in-command to meet with President Hamid Karzai in Kabul. The talks seemed to be proceeding well. Mansours demands were remarkably reasonable. Yet one thing did trouble some officials. Mansour was several inches shorter than he should have been.

Unfortunately, the Taliban commander was a fake, a shopkeeper from Quetta, Pakistan. Following the third round of negotiations, the clever merchant made off with a fortune, no doubt laughing as he spirited his wealth away. The episode exposed how poorly the United States knew its enemy in this ongoing war. On a superficial level, American and NATO officials could not even identify the number-two man in their opponents organization. On the more strategic level, they did not notice that throughout three separate meetings, the impostor never once requested that foreign troops withdraw from Afghan soila staple of Taliban demands. Without concrete descriptions of Mansours appearance, the U.S. and NATO had to focus on his behavior. Did he think the way a Taliban commander would? In a sense, they needed to read Mansours mind.

What NATO and U.S. officials lacked was strategic empathy: the ability to think like their opponent. Strategic empathy is the skill of stepping out of our own heads and into the minds of others. It is what allows us to pinpoint what truly drives and constrains the other side. Unlike stereotypes, which lump people into simplistic categories, strategic empathy distinguishes what is unique about individuals and their situation. To achieve strategic empathy, you must first identify the information that matters most.

Knowing how another thinks depends initially on gathering and analyzing information. Most leaders use the great mass approach. Drawing on intelligence networks, they gather up as much data as they can. The problem is that it is too easy to drown in an ocean of information. Determining which data matter and connecting the dots then grows even harder. In contrast to the great mass approach, others believe that a thin slice of information is more effective at revealing someones true nature. The danger is that we often choose the wrong slice, leading us painfully astray. The conclusion here is inescapable. The quantity of information is irrelevant; its the relevance of any quantity that matters. The key is not to collect a great mass or a thin slice but the right chunk.

The challenge that has long bedeviled leaders is to find heuristicsdecision-making shortcutsto help them locate those right chunks. Such shortcuts would not generate omniscience, but they would equip us with a sense for what makes our enemies tick. And that sense would greatly improve our odds of anticipating the enemys actions. This is what strategic empathy enables, and you can imagine how valuable this skill would be.

This is a book about prediction, though not of the ordinary kind. It is not about predicting sports matches, stock markets, elections, or any of the typical things people bet on. Instead, its about predicting other peoples behavior when the stakes are the highest they can beover matters of war and peace. Its a book about how we get out of our own minds and into someone elses head, and it focuses on how national leaders in modern times have struggled to do it well.

This is specifically a history of how leaders within governments have tried to think like their enemies. It explores the zig-zag stories when each side in a conflict sought to outmaneuver the other. It is a walk through one of the twentieth-centurys most challenging yet crucial quests: reading the enemy mind.

A Sense of the Enemy addresses two questions. First, what produces strategic empathy? Second, how has strategic empathy, or the lack of it, shaped pivotal periods in twentieth-century international conflict?

More than 2,000 years ago the Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu advised generals to know thy enemy. The question has always been how to do it. Though millennia have passed, we are still searching for the answer. Writing in 1996, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin argued that political genius, the ability to synthesize the fleeting, broken, infinitely various wisps and fragments that make up life at any level, is simply a senseyou either have it or you dont. But what if Berlin was wrong? What if that sense could actually be learned and improved?

Using the masterful nineteenth-century statesman Otto von Bismarck as a prime example of one who was exceedingly gifted at divining an opponents reactions, Berlin observed that the German Chancellor managed to integrate vast amounts of disparate data over a breath-takingly expansive range. Then, rather disappointingly, Berlin asserted that any careful study of this sense could never lead to any meaningful guides. As he saw it, the gift of political judgment came from seeing the unique in any situation, and any generalizations would be useless in future contexts. Berlin is so uncommonly sensible, so thoroughly compelling, that I am almost tempted to agree.