Galula acknowledged the need for harsh interrogation. “As the insurgents don’t hesitate to employ terrorism, the counterinsurgent must do police work,” he wrote, referring to a euphemism for torture. He believed that the paratroopers needed to dirty their hands. “If anyone seriously believes that his purity will allow him to get information, all I can say is that he will learn a lot once he is faced with the problem.” But he also believed that torture could backfire, and expressed reservations. “My only interest,” he noted, “was to remain within decent limits and do no damage to my more constructive pacification work.”23
As this reference to “decent limits” suggests, Galula took a more legalistic or procedural approach to the use of brutality. He relied on the legal process to investigate and cover up disappearances. Because no war was declared in Algeria, any death as a result of the conflict would immediately require a homicide investigation. The officer or soldier had to appear before a judge and be charged with manslaughter. There had to be a manslaughter report. But those reports served only to whitewash the deaths. The law would be brought in, would perform a cursory investigation, and declare an accidental killing. On one occasion, when he was involved in the death of a prisoner who was being interrogated and who allegedly tried to run away from captivity, Galula himself underwent the charade. In his own words: “Gendarmes came to Ighouna, interrogated the sentry and me, made the usual manslaughter report, and the case, of course, was dismissed months later.”24
In effect, Galula used the legal process as a backdoor means of rationalizing practices similar to those that other commanders defended more openly. Rather than embracing brutality outright, Galula relied on legality. He let the legal mechanisms justify any excess.
Galula negotiated a fine line. He was hardheaded about the use of violence, including merciless violence. “It is necessary to punish in exemplary fashion the rebel criminals we have caught,” he wrote. “The rebels’ flagrant crimes must be punished immediately, mercilessly, and on the very spot where they took place.” Elsewhere, Galula emphasized the importance of always brandishing the stick along with the carrot. And in the last section of Pacification in Algeria, Galula, like Trinquier, attributed the failure in Algeria to a lack of firmness toward the population.25 But despite all of this, Galula did not justify torture explicitly, and he did not boast of his brutality—by contrast, say, to General Aussaresses.
It is probably for this reason that American military strategists would later privilege Galula over other French commanders when they would import French modern warfare. Galula always represented the kinder, gentler face of counterinsurgency theory—and still today, in fact, stands for the approach that emphasizes civil society or “population-centric” strategies by opposition to the more military and repressive “global war on terror.”26
Both versions of French counterinsurgency theory made their way across the Atlantic rapidly. Lieutenant Colonel Trinquier, you will recall, gained a reputation for his guerrilla-style antiguerrilla tactics in Indochina and drew the attention of American officers in Saigon. He was invited to visit US counterinsurgency training facilities in Korea and Japan, and was enlisted to train American commandos in the early 1950s. The United States also began to supply him with equipment for his behind-the-line guerrilla antiguerrilla missions. General Aussaresses traveled to the United States after his command in Algeria to teach counterinsurgency practices to elite American Special Forces. As early as May 1961, Aussaresses served as an instructor at Fort Benning, Georgia, and at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for soldiers who were being trained for special missions in Vietnam. Some of his students at Fort Bragg would eventually develop the CIA’s Phoenix Program, a controversial counterinsurgency program in Vietnam linked to assassinations and torture. Aussaresses then became the military attaché at the French embassy in Washington, DC.27
The importation of the harsh version of French counterinsurgency theory continued after 9/11. Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, the formerly banned film, The Battle of Algiers, was screened at the Pentagon by the US Department of Defense to serve as the basis of discussions regarding the political situation that the American troops were facing on the ground in Iraq. According to news reports, “The idea came from the Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, which a Defense Department official described as a civilian-led group with ‘responsibility for thinking aggressively and creatively’ on issues of guerrilla war.” The idea was to stimulate conversations about the parallels with Algeria. “As the flier for the Pentagon showing suggested, the conditions that the French faced in Algeria are similar to those the United States is finding in Iraq,” the report states. An official at the Pentagon said, “Showing the film offers historical insight into the conduct of French operations in Algeria, and was intended to prompt informative discussion of the challenges faced by the French,” adding that “the discussion was lively and that more showings would probably be held.”28
Meanwhile, the more palatable legalistic version was also quickly imported to the United States, especially through the writings of David Galula. Galula was originally identified and invited by the RAND Corporation to attend a gathering of experts in April 1962—a five-day symposium that essentially launched theoretical and comparative research on counterinsurgency practices.29 The participants at that RAND symposium studied and compared the various counterinsurgency strategies used in Algeria, China, Greece, Kenya, Laos, Malaya, Oman, Vietnam, and the Philippines. At the symposium, Galula seized the conversation right off the bat and laid out his vision of counterinsurgency. The summary of Galula’s first intervention goes on for three single-spaced pages. His subsequent interventions were equally impressive. An impartial reading of the symposium minutes clearly shows that Galula dominated the five-day meetings.
Galula so impressed his hosts, especially the RAND analysts, that they would commission him to write his memoirs of Algeria, and then translated and published them in 1963 as a confidential classified report titled Pacification in Algeria, 1956–1958. The following year, the RAND Corporation translated and helped publish Galula’s more theoretical work, Counter-insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice—in which Galula sets forth his eight steps of counterinsurgency.30 Galula also lectured at Fort Bragg, spent six months at the Armed Forces Staff College at Norfolk, Virginia, and spent two years at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs as a research associate. Galula’s writings had an important influence as well on the development of counterinsurgency strategies in Vietnam.31
As both schools of French counterinsurgency gained influence in the United States, the use of torture quickly emerged as a central problem. The historian Peter Paret, who initially popularized la guerre révolutionnaire, was one of the first to tackle the problem. His position on torture was carefully nuanced—to the point, possibly, of some ambiguity. Explicitly, Paret opposed torture. “Atrocities made re-education in a nontotalitarian sense impossible,” he wrote.32 But even so, Paret acknowledged, just as David Galula before him had, harsh and sometimes exceptional measures needed to be used—at least at the time Paret was writing, in 1962. “Rarely can guerrillas be isolated from the people without the use of unusually harsh coercive measures,” Paret observed. “Unless harsh measures are employed rationally and with the clear understanding by all that they are emergency measures, to be stopped as soon as possible, they may actually break down the sense of security with which the legitimacy of any non-totalitarian government is inextricably linked.”33
In other words, for Paret, unusually harsh measures were rational so long as they were exceptional. Indeed, Paret noted in passing in French Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria: “Reprisal and terror could be considered rationally as weapons in an intense struggle between ideologically opposed and necessarily ruthless opponents.” On the next page, Paret observed that “the efficacy of terror for immobilizing active opposition among a hostile people can hardly be doubted.”34 Given that eliminating the activ
e minority was at the very core of counterinsurgency, those words were suggestive to some, to say the least.
Decades later, General David Petraeus also carefully distanced himself from the torture that took place in Algeria, while simultaneously extolling French theory in general. His field manual explicitly repudiated torture, portraying it as a counterproductive method. Torture, the manual suggested, is what led to the French defeat. In fact, a central discussion of counterinsurgency practices in Algeria takes place in the context of avoiding torture. Torture, the manual noted, “empowered the moral legitimacy of the opposition, undermined the French moral legitimacy, and caused internal fragmentation among serving officers that led to an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1962. In the end, failure to comply with moral and legal restrictions against torture severely undermined French efforts and contributed to their loss despite several significant military victories.”35
At the same time, General Petraeus’s field manual read like a tribute to French modern warfare, which was at best deeply ambiguous about the place of brutality. Petraeus’s official biographer notes that he “realized the political sensitivity of the manual” and as a result personally edited the opening chapter “thirty to forty times.” His correspondence at the time reflects that he was acutely aware of the tension between the more and less brutal versions, and tried to weave a fine line between the different variants.36
It is not surprising, then, that some commentators soon argued it was an odd choice to rely so heavily on the French model. “Why do the manual writers put so much emphasis on that French experience,” one reviewer wrote, “given that the French failed strategically, engaged in immoral conduct during the war, provoked a civil-military crisis in France, and tolerated genocide and mass population displacement in northern Africa after the withdrawal of French forces? It seems that the French government could not have achieved a worse set of results, nor could US doctrine have chosen a worse model to admire, if admiration it is.”37
Preferring to avoid the French connection, the later edition of the US field manual published in 2014 excised all references to Galula and French theory, and expunged the annotated bibliography in which his work had figured prominently.38 The result was a far less theoretical document, and far more intellectually humble. A certain hubris had surrounded the earlier edition—especially that reference to the “graduate level” of warfare. All that is gone. The manual is now silent about those French commanders. But the tension remains.
The recurring strain between brutality and legality, so evident in Algeria and persistent in the writings of Paret and Petraeus, is inherent to counterinsurgency theory. Modern warfare is grounded on the policing of an entire population and the eradication of a minority; as a result, the specter of torture, disappearances, and terrorizing practices hovers over counterinsurgency, when it does not comprise it. Certainly, those practices alone do not always constitute counterinsurgency warfare. Sometimes its constituent parts are less brutal, even laudable—for instance, the provision of essential goods and services for the general population. But even when they are not laudable, experience shows how easily they can be rendered legal, as we saw in the manslaughter inquests in Algeria. And since 9/11, we have repeatedly witnessed the most brutal practices of counterinsurgency being rendered perfectly legal—as we will see in the lengthy legal memos justifying unconscionable practices in the war on terrorism.
In the end, the counterinsurgency model was—from its inception—Janus-faced. It is only recently that our government learned, or rediscovered, ways to mask this central tension.
PART II
A TRIUMPH IN FOREIGN POLICY
Developed by military commanders and strategists over decades of anticolonial wars, counterinsurgency warfare was refined, deployed, and tested in the years following 9/11. Since then, the modern warfare paradigm has been distilled into a concise three-pronged strategy:
1. Bulk-collect all intelligence about everyone in the population—every piece of data and metadata available. Everything about everyone must be known and rendered accessible for data-mining. All communications must be intercepted. All devices must be known. Every piece of data must be amassed. This is the model of the NSA’s Treasure Map program. In the NSA’s words, “every single end device that is connected to the Internet somewhere in the world—every smartphone, tablet, and computer” must be known.1 And not just the data of the active minority, but rather the information of everyone and every citizen in the population, especially the neutral or passive majority. That is the only way to accurately identify the insurgents. Whether through new digital surveillance technologies or enhanced physical interrogation, all intelligence must be obtained. Under the capitalized header “INTELLIGENCE DRIVES OPERATIONS,” General Petraeus’s field manual underscores the critical importance of “timely, specific, and reliable intelligence, gathered and analyzed at the lowest possible level and disseminated throughout the force.”2 The key here is total information awareness.
2. Identify and eradicate the revolutionary minority. Total information about everyone makes it possible to discriminate between friend and foe. Once suspicion attaches, individuals must be treated severely to extract all possible information, with enhanced interrogation techniques if necessary; and if they are revealed to belong to the active minority, they must be disposed of through detention, rendition, deportation, or drone strike—in other words, targeted assassination. Unlike conventional soldiers from the past, these insurgents are dangerous because of their ideology, not their physical presence on a battlefield. They need to be sequestered from the general population (when not outright eliminated) so as not to taint it. This corresponds to the “enemy-centric” aspects of counterinsurgency.3 Under the capitalized header “INSURGENTS MUST BE ISOLATED FROM THEIR CAUSE AND SUPPORT,” General Petraeus’s manual reads: “Clearly, killing or capturing insurgents will be necessary, especially when an insurgency is based in religious or ideological extremism.” It is difficult, though, to kill “every insurgent,” and so often more effective “to separate an insurgency from its resources and let it die than to kill every insurgent.” But “with respect to the hard-core extremists,” the field manual underscores, “the task was more straightforward: their complete and utter destruction.”4 The second objective, then, is to destroy any and all potential insurgents.
3. Pacify the masses. The population must be distracted, entertained, satisfied, occupied, and most importantly, neutralized, or deradicalized if necessary, in order to ensure that the vast preponderance of ordinary individuals remain just that—ordinary. This third prong reflects the “population-centric” dimension of counterinsurgency theory. Remember, in this new way of seeing, the population is the battlefield. Its hearts and minds must be assured. In the digital age, this can be achieved, first, by targeting enhanced content (such as sermons by moderate imams) to deradicalize susceptible persons—in other words, by deploying new digital techniques of psychological warfare and propaganda. Second, by providing just the bare minimum in terms of welfare and humanitarian assistance—like rebuilding schools, distributing some cash, and bolstering certain government institutions. As General Petraeus’s field manual stresses, “dollars and ballots will have more important effects than bombs and bullets.”5 Third, by demonstrating to the general population who is more powerful and who has control of the territory. One of the most important lessons from prior insurgencies is that it is possible to win the war militarily, but lose it politically and diplomatically.6 For this reason, it is essential to privilege these political dimensions of the counterinsurgency struggle. Under the header “LEGITIMACY IS THE MAIN OBJECTIVE,” the field manual emphasizes: “Military action can address the symptoms of a loss of legitimacy. In some cases, it can eliminate substantial numbers of insurgents. However, success in the form of a durable peace requires restoring legitimacy, which, in turn, requires the use of all instruments of national power. A [counterinsurgency] effort cannot achieve lasting success without the [host-nation]
government achieving legitimacy.”7
And this final step, of course, takes us back to the first prong, total information awareness, because in order to achieve state legitimacy it is necessary to know everything about the whole population in order to prevent gains by the active minority. As the former head of the NSA, General Michael Hayden, writes in his book Playing to the Edge, the primary task of the signals intelligence agency is essentially preventive counterterrorism.8 The idea is to identify the revolutionary minority before it materializes. Total awareness is directly tied into the other two prongs of counterinsurgency.
Counterinsurgency theory embraced its political nature and has gradually matured from a localized military strategy to a broader foreign policy. This distilled version of modern warfare was deployed first in Iraq, then more largely in the global war on terror, but now has reached beyond it to countries like Yemen or Somalia with which we are not at war. At first militarily, but now in foreign affairs, the United States governs abroad on the paradigm of modern warfare. In a short summary, General Petraeus’s field manual offers a concise table of best practices. It starts with “Emphasize intelligence,” “Focus on the population,” and “Isolate insurgents.”9 These best practices can now be read as our new paradigm of governing abroad.
3
The Counterrevolution Page 5