The World Is Not About Us: Information and Power in the Current Strategic Environment

Will Reno and Jesse R. Humpal

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The Taj Mahal Guest House made a unique offer: Give us data, get beer.1 The Jalalabad, Afghanistan, café offered beer to anyone who brought video files, voice recordings, documents, and data dumps. The Taj shut down after Jalalabad became too hostile to outsiders, but not before its proprietors amassed extensive finegrained data on local political and economic matters and supported projects that set up communications networks for local people. At least as important was the Taj’s role in facilitating informal personal relationships across government (foreign and local), commercial, humanitarian, and ordinary social networks. While not overtly a U.S.-led information operation, the Taj provided valuable intelligence for U.S. operations in the region. It showed how networks can be set up and used for multiple aspects of information warfare and local influence, a critical skill the United States neglected after the Cold War.

The Taj was an impromptu reflection of a Cold War–era approach to information and networks that served the United States well in containing Soviet power. It was flexible and relatively free of complex oversight. It adapted to local conditions to shape how people received information and occupied a critical juncture in the local economy for collecting information. The Taj was peripheral to U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. It is instructive, however, for thinking about indirect strategies in a competitive landscape where state competitors use influence operations, predatory economics, subversion, and network capture in the space between peace and war.2 The problem with Taj-like operations is that they are unsustainable under current U.S. operational conditions. Laws and procedures crafted after the end of the Cold War addressed many negative aspects of this kind of operation—risk, engagement with human rights abusers, opportunities for corruption, weak civilian oversight—but at the cost of the speed and flexibility necessary to compete against strategic adversaries unhindered by such restrictions.