Countering insurgency.

The theory of insurgency has a long history, going back more than two millennia to Sun Wu Tzu’s The Art of War. However, the concept has really been developed and expounded during the 20th century by writers such as Mao Zedong, Georgios Grivas, Vo Nguyen Giap, Ernesto « Che » Guevara and Kwame Nkrumah, to mention a few. The theory of counterinsurgency is more recent and more secretive (though David Gulula, Paul Aussaresses and, more recently, Jan Horvath have achieved a certain celebrity). And conceal it must, as the raison d’être of counterinsurgency can never be avowed. If an insurrection is a mass movement, then countering it can only be tyranny.
The basic ingredient of insurgency is popular support. Guerrilla tactics can only apply to a people’s war, where combatants may muster on the shore and disperse again into a human sea. Insurgents must be of the people, as they depend on them for information, supplies and recruits. Insurgents must also give something in return. Their aims should offer some hope of a better life and their actions should be in line with their professed ideals. However, the evidence so far shows that the promise of land reform for a rural society is more effective than the promise of socialism for an urban working class.
In the past, popular uprisings were crushed by brute force. Heads would roll in large numbers and the matter would be settled for a generation or two. But, after WW2, after the mass killings in Shanghai and Warsaw, the methods of old had to be put aside. At precisely the time when insurrection was sweeping through Europe’s colonial empires, with the call for national liberation. After watching and, for some, taking part in Europe’s fight against occupation by Nazi Germany, the colonized peoples of the world could only wish the same freedom from occupation for themselves. And the colonizers were hard put to counter these aspirations with an appropriate ideology. Finally, the Cold War was the determinant factor. Those national liberation movements who showed the slightest sympathy for the communist block(s) were subjected to all aspects of the developing science of counterinsurgency. The others were allowed the appearances but not the reality of national independence.
It is not a coincidence that two of the foremost theorists of counterinsurgency were career officers in the French army (Aussaresses & Gulula). As such, they were probably the best equipped for such a summing up. France’s military had faced Vietminh insurgents in the Red river delta and the surrounding hills from 1946 to 1954. At which date, after loosing a major battle (Dien Bien Phu), the French expeditionary force left for home. And from there to Algeria, where another insurrection had just started.
Out maneuvered and defeated by Giap and his coolie army, the French military command tried to lessen the dishonor by blaming the government. The executive had stubbornly refused their demands for an increased deployment of troops. This was not to be repeated in Algeria, where half a million soldiers, mostly conscripts and reservists, were finally stationed for a two year tour of duty. The debacle in the Tonkin had been a severe lesson which could be explained by the particular circumstances, the border with China, the jungle, the monsoon, etc. Algeria would be a very different matter. In particular, it was reassuringly close to France and the French army had already carried out a century of « pacification » in North Africa. Except that Bugeaud, in the 1840’s, or Pétain, in the 1920’s, had successfully dealt with tribal uprisings by employing the radical methods of their times. These were no longer suitable, as they were largely based on indiscriminate killing. A new approach was indispensable.
Nevertheless, some lessons learnt in Vietnam could be applied to Algeria. A strenuous and costly effort was made to stop gun-running across the border from Tunisia. An operation which brought about the first international condemnation of the war, after the bombing of a Tunisian village (Sakhiel Sidi Youssef, 1958) by eleven French B25’s. Large sweeping movements were organized, intended to flush out National Liberation Army units, usually with mediocre results. As, according to the sixteen-character formula of the Chinese Red Army : The enemy advances, we retreat ; the enemy camps, we harass ; the enemy tires, we attack ; the enemy retreats, we pursue. Populations were displaced and strategic hamlets were fortified. Internment camps were built and road blocks were set up. But it was intelligence gathering which imposed itself as the key element of counterinsurgent strategy. Knowing the enemy’s intentions and whereabouts became a priority. And the end justified the means.
Insurgents are few in number and poorly armed. Their only strength is popular support. Counterinsurgents, however powerful and numerous they may be, can never be successful if they are unable to separate the fish from the ocean. An intelligence officer in Indochina, colonel Lacheroy, had read the military writings of Mao Zedong. He called the new strategy guerre subversive (war of subversion). Its aim was to weaken and finally break the link between the armed insurgents and the rest of the population. The method experimented in Algeria was based on continual harassment coupled with the frequent disappearance of arrested suspects. Jokingly called « shrimps », they were usually tortured for information, killed and disposed of by plane, out at sea with their feet in concrete.
Notwithstanding a failed putsch, the French Army might have succeeded, for a time. Years later, some prominent members of the National Liberation Front admitted they were on their last legs when the agreement on a cease fire was reached in March 1962. But global politics were no longer in favor of colonial possessions. The balance of power was such that a pragmatic government led by Charles de Gaulle preferred a deal, rather than a fight to the finish. France kept its nuclear test sites in the Sahara and its oil wells until 1971. And a million or so colonials fled to France, just when full employment was putting pressure on wages.
South Vietnam was a hopeless case. The insurgents’ base area north of the 17th parallel could be bombed and was, copiously. But, being an established nation, it could not be invaded without a declaration of war. For logistic and diplomatic reasons, this was a step the United States was not able to take.
South America, with some notable exceptions, was more of a success. Partly due to the School of Americas (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC or WHINSEC) and operation Condor and partly to the absence of secure bases in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay). The ruthless methods experimented by the French army were put to use once again and taken to their ultimate conclusion, a military dictatorship.
1992 saw the beginning of a new cycle of violence in Algeria. The previous year, the floundering one-party regime had held the first open elections since independence. In which the newly formed Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) had won a majority of seats. This victory threatened the army generals who had taken power behind the scenes, when Houari Boumediene ousted Ahmed Ben Bella in 1965. Especially those of the Securité Militaire, which could be legitimately compared to the KGB. They put a stop to the electoral process, outlawed the FIS and arrested all the members they could catch. Those who escaped went into hiding, formed the Armée Islamique du Salut (AIS) and started an insurgency.
The insurgents of the yesterday command the counterinsurgency of the today. This is not unusual and is all the more ferocious because of that past experience. Algeria was no exception. The election results had shown precisely the extent of the support and its whereabouts. Which might have been premeditated and was, anyway, a useful guide for a strategy of eradication. By the end of the 1990’s, when an amnesty was negotiated, an estimated 100 000 people had been murdered or had disappeared, mostly young men. The generals had recourse to the whole gamut of possibilities and are reported to have even called in French military consultants. Death squads and napalm, torture and disappearances, false beards and, in the dead of night, real knives cutting real throats.
The French soldiers in Algeria had fought an enemy who was a native. As an alien being, he could be treated roughly and even inhumanly. But, as an indigenous person, he had ties to the land of his forbears that neither the French occupation forces nor the colonists could pretend to. The first attitude did nothing to win hearts and minds and invariably led to unnecessary brutality. The second attitude was problematic for a generation of conscripts whose childhood memories were of Nazi occupation. Both attitudes were a handicap.
When the Algerian military decided to interrupt the electoral process, because of the opposition’s victory or, alternatively, because they had used the electoral process to pin point the opposition, they were faced with the task of eliminating a significant minority of their fellow citizens. Just as the opposition to the totalitarian regime in Poland had used churches as meeting halls, in Algeria they had gathered in mosques. As the militants were on the run, these religious congregations were easily infiltrated. And all the means for a guerre subversive were brought into action. To such a point that the victims, the general public and the wide world, no longer knew who was killing who.
Insurgency is a mass movement, a response to injustice. Insurgent strategy increases this injustice by provocative acts of terrorism against government officials, the military and the police. The intention being to radicalize and intensify popular support. For counterinsurgency, reducing injustice is not an option. Counterinsurgency’s aim is to separate the insurgents and their supporters from the wider population and to exterminate in a monitory manner the more active elements. The first step is to make the insurgents seem as diabolic and perverse as possible. Which met that the old fashioned Communist insurgents were regularly presented as the Antichrist. Whereas contemporary Muslim insurgents have swung to the other extreme of absolute faith in a hereafter. Their faith as such, as the people’s opium, is too universally shared to be disputed. So it must be shown to deviate, to be heretical, to be no faith at all.
In Algeria, Islam is uniformly Sunni, right across the ethnic divide of Berbers and Arabs. The insurgents were branded as Wahhabites, trained and indoctrinated in Afghanistan by Al Q. They and their followers were a foreign contagion that had to be to be destroyed. What the counterinsurgency managed to avoid, as had the French in their time, was the pitting of Arabs against Berbers. The insurgents belonged to both communities and were countered with the same methods. These methods include dividing up the insurgents and getting them to fight among themselves. But in Algeria, the ethnic and linguistic difference was not put to this use. It was also avoided by the British in Cyprus. The Turkish minority was not called upon to fight against the Greek majority, who were behind the Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston (EOKA) commanded by George Grivas. It was not avoided in Northern Ireland, where Protestant Unionists sided with the British against Catholic Republicans. And, of course, it was unavoidable in Iraq. Where Kurds and Arabs, Sunni and Shia, Christians and Muslims, had been used against one another by the Baas party, since it took power in 1958.
Insurgency can be countered by radical methods and reduced to a low intensity conflict. But this invariably leads to a police state and dictatorial government. Insurgency can only be resolved by righting wrongs. Military power and guerre subversive are never more than a part of the solution. Land reform, political rights and local government, respect for native languages, traditions and laws, all these and more must taken into consideration. As for arming one ethnic or religious group against the others, it seems the best way to perpetuate the violence. Power sharing in Northern Ireland is still in its infancy, after forty years of infighting between the two communities. Is this the best the Iraqis can hope for?