Counterinsurgency methods that had worked in obscurity in West Java were unacceptable when exposed to international scrutiny. Looking back, it is easy to see that practices commonly employed in the two successful counterinsurgencies described in this book, ranging from the concentration zones in the Philippines to Operation Starvation, the British food denial program in Malaya, would have brought worldwide scrutiny in today’s globalized media.
In contemporary conflicts, including Iraq and Afghanistan, American forces have followed the common pattern of history by heavily focusing on killing terrorists and insurgents. The Americans have brought an impressive technological prowess to this aspect of the fight. However, Al Qaeda’s resilience is predicated not on its current numerical strength but rather on its capacity to continue to recruit and inspire future fighters, supporters, and sympathizers; in other words, its resilience hinges on its success in the information fight. Again it must be emphasized that modern insurgents understand the importance of the media and manipulate it with great skill. Meanwhile, the United States continues to struggle in its efforts to explain to the world why a global war on terror is necessary. Moreover, U.S. attempts to justify the way it conducts this war have too often been inept. If, as has been asserted, the war on terror is at heart an information war, it is hard to see that the United States is winning.
One hallmark of successful counterinsurgencies is a willingness to learn and adapt on both the individual and institutional levels. Here the future looks brighter. After the successful invasion of Iraq and subsequent capture of Saddam Hussein, President George W. Bush’s administration was very slow to recognize accurately what the United States confronted. By the beginning of 2007, it appeared that Iraq was lost to the insurgents. Insurgent suicide bombers had triggered a deadly cycle of escalating sectarian violence for which the American occupation forces seemed to have no answer. Many of the problems in Iraq were familiar to students of counterinsurgency: unsecured borders that allowed the insurgents a free flow of men and supplies; a suspicious civilian population who resented the presence of foreign forces; a lack of security that prevented any except the bravest from providing the Americans with useful intelligence; an American public growing ever more discouraged.
Finally, staring defeat in the face, Bush made the politically unpopular decision to send more combat soldiers to Iraq, the so-called Surge, to confront the insurgents. The employment of those troops was informed by an essential institutional adaptation. In December 2006 the Department of Defense published Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency. It was a collaborative effort between the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps involving many of the nation’s brightest military minds. The result was a short distillation of the lessons of history that yielded a set of “principles and imperatives” to fight and win a counterinsurgency and a guide for the way forward. It began with a statement that with hindsight may seem obvious but at the time injected into the strategic discussion a much-needed call for change: “You cannot fight former Saddamists and Islamic extremists the same way you would have fought the Viet Cong.”4
It takes exceptional officers to overcome the institutional bias of military cultures. In 1840, at a time when France was embroiled in its fifteen-yearlong war against Algerian insurgents, a new commander arrived on the scene. Marshal Thomas Bugeaud, the man who would eventually win the war, said upon first meeting his officers, “Gentlemen, you have much to forget.” Lieutenant General David Petraeus had been closely involved in the production of Field Manual 3-24. Assigned at the beginning of 2007 as the commanding general in Iraq, Petraeus and his chief subordinates proved willing to change and adapt. They committed their forces to a counterinsurgency campaign featuring new practices, including sending American troops to live among the Iraqi people for whom they were trying to provide security. Given the difficult circumstances—a stressful and dangerous physical environment, a mysterious cultural environment rife with sectarian and tribal conflict—the American soldiers performed their duties with surpassing courage and skill.
However, any amount of intelligent doctrine or good leadership probably would not have ultimately mattered had not a fundamental change occurred among the Iraqis. Quite simply, the Al Qaeda leadership in Iraq overplayed their hand. The indiscriminate terror of foreign fighters—young Muslim zealots recruited from the entire span of the Muslim world, from Saudi Arabia to Chechnya to North Africa—and their stern demand that Iraqis live under a hard, fundamentalist version of Islam turned an important element of Iraqi society against the insurgents. This was the so-called Sunni Awakening, a movement that began among the Sunnis of An-bar Province, a population that heretofore had been the sympathetic base of the insurgency, and steadily spread elsewhere. In congressional testimony on September 10, 2007, Petraeus observed that tribal leaders were beginning to reject Al Qaeda. He called this trend one of the most significant developments in Iraq in the past eight months.
By any measure—reduction in the number of terror acts, substantial decline in civilian and military casualties—the Surge accomplished its goals. In recognition of nineteen months of progress in Iraq, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates promoted Petraeus. Of course, the “Endless War” was not over. Gates emphasized the importance of Petraeus’s posting to head the Central Command and explained that Islamic extremism within the Central Command, an area that encompassed the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa, still posed a special challenge “characterized by asymmetric warfare,” a conflict among professional national militaries and insurgents and other guerrilla fighters.5
As a new administration prepared to enter office in 2009, President-elect Barack Obama promised to reduce the American presence in Iraq and intensify the fight against the insurgents in Afghanistan. What this portends is unknowable. The American presence on the street corners of restive Baghdad slums dramatically tamped down sectarian violence, but would not American soldiers operating in the slums of Chicago or Detroit also reduce criminal gang violence? And when they left would security endure? As a result of the Surge, daily life in many Iraqi urban neighborhoods features comprehensive disruption with security provided by concrete barriers that divide Shiite from Sunni. Entry to one’s own neighborhood is through a fortified gate guarded by armed men, formerly Americans, as of early 2009 Iraqis backed by American soldiers, but in the near future Iraqis alone.
Meanwhile the insurgents in Afghanistan have risen from defeat to control large areas of the countryside. The American-backed president, Hamid Karzai, is derisively known as the “mayor of Kabul” because his rule does not extend beyond gun range of his foreign benefactors who provide security in his capital. A glance at the map of Afghanistan shows that the “secure” areas match the areas held by Soviet forces during their failed attempt to dominate a country whose most cherished history is a tale of opposition to foreign occupation. And then there are the familiar problems of counterinsurgency: unsecured borders; insurgent sanctuaries off-limits to the counterinsurgent force; a bewildering array of family and tribal relationships that trump an outsider’s understanding of the Afghan power structure; intelligence so uncertain that in spite of years of effort Osama bin Laden’s hideout somewhere along the Afghan border cannot be found. History informs us that foreign powers try to control Afghanistan at their peril. Yet apparently this is to be the task of the American military.
In sum, the luster of a new century of change has become tarnished by terrorism and war. How well the fight will go against those who resist America’s notion of world order remains an open question.
A Vicious Circle
Security
Insurgents blend into a population that includes active supporters—especially when the population views the counterinsurgents as foreign occupiers propping up an ineffectual or corrupt government—and neutrals who are held in thrall by insurgent terror. The historical record of counterinsurgency plays out as a vicious circle in which insurgents create an environment where the people are insecure. Under the threat of terror, the p
eople offer no intelligence to the government forces. Absent intelligence, military operations are unsuccessful, perpetuating poor security. To break this circle, a nation embarking on a counterinsurgency fought in a foreign land has to advance along multiple, interconnected paths. Progress along each path requires special qualities, including language skills and cultural awareness that are outside traditional military talents. A first destination is the provision of physical security for the people.
On the eve of his campaign against the Filipino insurgents in Batangas Province, General J. Franklin Bell described the paramount importance of security:
The people became so terrorized they did not dare to help us. Anyone suspected of sympathy or friendship for Americans was promptly assassinated. We could get no information and could accomplish nothing. There was no organized insurrection, but those who possessed the guns were living in the towns by day and raiding the countryside by night. The necessity for garrisoning every town, in order to give protection to those peaceably inclined, soon became apparent. The troops were obtained and the towns garrisoned. When the people saw we were able to protect them they began to help us, and through persistent efforts in detecting, arresting and confining the scheming, murdering, unscrupulous leaders and ladrones among the people, and through running down and capturing the arms, the province became very tranquil and peace reigned supreme. This was not accomplished, however, without having to do many disagreeable things.6
Sixty-seven years later, a high-ranking American civilian official serving in Vietnam, John Paul Vann, came to some similar conclusions. Vann noted that six years of failure proved very little about specific programs because no program would work until the first basic requirement of security was achieved. “This does not mean that the job of pacification is hopeless. It merely means we have to recognize the overriding requirement for security. Whether security is 10 percent of the total problem to be resolved or 90 percent, it is, inescapably, the first 10 percent or the first 90 percent.”7
The American experience in Iraq confirms this truth.
Intelligence and the Question of Torture
To provide physical security, the counterinsurgents need good intelligence. The battle for timely intelligence is a battle that must be won if a counterinsurgency is to succeed. Given that insurgents are hiding among the civilian population, civilians are an invaluable intelligence source. Throughout history insurgents deliberately blur the line separating combatant from civilian. They stage incidents to provoke retaliation that harms civilians. The security forces endure casualties under the apathetic gaze of local civilians and grow bitter. They know that some civilians had foreknowledge of the peril and they are tempted to extract that knowledge by what ever means necessary.
When William Howard Taft testified before a Senate committee on the topic of torture in the Philippines, a senator asked him, “When a war is conducted by a superior race against those whom they consider inferior in the scale of civilization, is it not the experience of the world that the superior race will almost involuntarily practice inhuman conduct?”
Taft replied, “There is much greater danger in such a case than in dealing with whites. There is no doubt about that.”8
Well-documented instances of abuse, including the routine use of torture, have been attributed to the security forces in two of the four case studies offered in this book, namely, the Americans in the Philippines and the French in Algeria. The French master torturer, General Paul Aussaresses, defended torture in these words: “Once a country demands that its army fight an enemy who is using terror to compel an indifferent population to join its ranks and provoke a repression that will in turn outrage international public opinion, it becomes impossible for that army to avoid using extreme measures.”9 The ongoing war against terror has again brought the disturbing subject of torture to the forefront of public debate.
Advocates of harsh interrogation methods, including what most people would call torture, justify the policy by using the “ticking bomb” analogy: a time bomb is hidden somewhere ticking toward a detonation that will kill countless innocents. To prevent a catastrophe, torture is not only justified but morally imperative.
Aussaresses defends his conduct on precisely this basis: by torturing suspects he could foil a planned bombing and thereby prevent casualties to the innocent. During the Battle of Algiers, the paratroop leader Colonel Roger Trinquier asked the divisional chaplain to sanction torture. The chaplain obliged and told the soldiers, “Between two evils: making a bandit, caught in the act—and who actually deserves to die—suffer temporarily, and [letting the innocent die] . . . it is necessary to chose [sic] without hesitation the lesser [evil]: an interrogation without sadism yet efficacious.”10
Today’s debate posits an even graver situation: authorities capture a person suspected of planting a nuclear or biological time bomb. Should such an extraordinary hypothetical serve as the basis for national policy? It should not. Surely a line can be drawn separating the catastrophic (a potential nuclear detonation in New York City) from the vile (a truck bomb at a mosque in the Middle East).
Torture sometimes provides useful tactical intelligence that can foil a suicide bomber or reveal the location of a roadside bomb. However, as victims of torture observe, a person under extreme physical duress will say what ever is required to escape the agony. The intelligence service thereby obtains an overwhelming volume of information, most of it false. It is not an efficient method to obtain intelligence. But the practice of torture is not done in a moral vacuum; it is not amoral. Civilized society condemns it. A country that endorses it suffers not only because it debases its moral standing but also because it is ultimately counterproductive. As the ugly American experience with Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison demonstrated, abuse and torture drive innocent victims into the enemy camp. Moreover, it provides insurgents with a powerful tool to convince the wavering to support them. “Successful” torture may uncover one plot, but it creates scores of new plotters who eventually extract a price higher than would have been paid.
In his book Defeating Communist Insurgency, Robert Thompson eloquently argued that torture not only was “morally wrong” but created more practical problems than it solved: “A government which does not act in accordance with the law forfeits the right to be called a government and cannot then expect its people to obey the law.”11 By abandoning the high moral ground associated with a lawfully constructed government, a counterinsurgency power descends toward the level of the terrorist. In a civil war, such a descent means neither side can claim legitimacy, thereby leaving the people without a strong reason to favor the government over the insurgents. Furthermore, when a government fails to act in accordance with its own laws it cannot expect its people to obey the law.
That is not to say that a government cannot enact very tough laws to meet an emergency. But this has to be done by regular legal processes. In the United States, the June 12, 2008, Supreme Court decision regarding the legal rights of detainees at Guantanamo is a highly encouraging affirmation of this position.
Insurgencies rely on guerrilla action and terrorism. That creates an enormous temptation for government forces to respond by unlawful acts, to use the excuse that the other side is not playing by the same rules, to assert that legal pro cesses are too cumbersome and ill-suited to contend with such affronts as terror. A French intellectual addressed this during the height of the Algerian War: “If really we are capable of a moral reflex which our adversary has not, this is the best justification for our cause, and even for our victory.”12
Understanding Culture
The famous phrase coined by British general Gerald Templer and adopted by Americans for the Vietnam War, “winning the hearts and minds of the people,” can serve as a useful component of a counterinsurgency strategy because it focuses on the role of the civilian population. By itself, it is an inadequate and flawed formulation. Neither in Vietnam nor anywhere else is there one “people.” Instead, all societies are made up of indivi
duals and groups who form relationships based on status, economics, and power.
Foreigners often accuse Americans of cultural arrogance, an accusation that astonishes most Americans, who are quite certain that they possess no such thing. They would probably concur with William Howard Taft, who said that his experience with Filipinos convinced him that they are “moved by similar considerations to those which move other men.” Taft did add the niggling caveat that “it is possible that crimes, ambush, assassination, are more frequent there than in other countries,” but the thrust of his comments was clear and remains widely shared: namely, that there are universal cultural norms.13
However valid this view—and it is important to note that other cultures firmly believe in universal norms, only they are not the same ones endorsed by Western society—it leads to the position that what others want must be similar to what we want. This outlook frames the mind-set of those who go overseas to combat the nation’s enemies. It ill-prepares them for what they actually confront. A war correspondent, Albert Robinson, who traveled extensively in the contested provinces in the Philippines during the Filipino insurrection concluded that the people plainly hated the Americans. He attributed the hatred to irreconcilable cultural differences and concluded, “We may mean well, but they don’t understand our ways. Neither do we understand theirs. When patience and forbearance would be immensely effective, the American methods hurry and irritate the people.”14
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