Guerrilla Warfare

by Walter Laqueur

  With the outbreak of the rebellion CRUA became the FLN, the ALN acting as its military arm. Unlike in China, Cuba or Vietnam, there was no one outstanding figure whose authority was undisputed: some of the founder members were killed in the war, and four leaders, including ben Bella and Khider, were captured by the French in 1957 and spent the succeeding years in prison. The ALN was subdivided into five regions (wilayat) under a colonel, with a sixth one (Sahara) added later. Estimates as to the number of Algerian guerrillas vary enormously; at the beginning there were only a few hundred of them, equipped mainly with rifles and some automatic weapons. By 1956 there were forty thousand according to Algerian sources, twenty-five thousand (including auxiliaries) according to the French. After 1955 the rebels were equipped with machine guns, mortars (German 81 mm) and recoilless rifles, and there was no shortage of mines and bangalore torpedoes.

  The rebellion had started in the mountainous regions of Kabylia, Aurès and northern Constantine; during 1955 it spread to other parts of the country. The hit-and-run tactics focused on destroying French farms, cutting lines of communication and punishing Algerian collaborators — sixty thousand Algerians were fighting in the French army. The attempt to carry the war to the capital in September 1956 ended in a débâcle; the French paratroopers smashed the ALN apparatus in Algiers with great losses to the insurgents. But the political objective was largely achieved — the internationalization of the conflict and the political isolation of the French government. The FLN gained increasing support in the Arab world and it was joined by Algerian political leaders who had initially been hesitant. The French army had at first underrated the extent of the rebellion; but after 1957, strong reinforcements were brought in and systematic measures employed to combat the insurgents. The ALN lost the initiative; the Morice line along the Tunisian border made crossing difficult, and the "regroupment" of villages cut the ALN off from much of its support. By 1961 the number of fellaghas inside Algeria was down to five thousand men, scattered in small groups; they could still vex the French but do nothing much of harm otherwise. If FLN morale was low, however, among the French it was at breaking point. They could not keep huge garrisons indefinitely in all the major centers, along with large mobile reserves besides. Twenty thousand Algerian guerrillas were concentrated in Tunis beyond the reach of the French. The European population of Algeria was up in arms against the défaitistes in Paris, the military commanders in Algeria paid no attention to the orders emanating from the capital. France, in brief, was on the verge of a civil war as General de Gaulle took over, nor did the danger pass until he had been in power for several years. Meanwhile the FLN had established itself as a government in exile, recognized de facto or de jure by some fifteen countries (including China and the Soviet Union). De Gaulle had been ready to cut France's losses without at first making his policy public; he had no illusions, was fully sensible that this meant surrender, the exodus of French Algerians and the loss of French property.

  Thus, after seven years of struggle, Algeria attained independence. The exodus of the Europeans did not ruin the country as many had expected, just as the influx of pieds noirs did not make for the Algerianization of France. Very much in contrast to what Fanon had hoped, Algeria became a dictatorship, first under ben Bella, later under Boumedienne. Ten years after victory, all but one or two of the surviving early leaders of the revolt found themselves in prison or exile. On the first day of the rebellion the FLN had published a proclamation defining its goal as national independence through the restoration of a sovereign democratic state within the framework of the principles of Islam, and the preservation of all fundamental freedoms. The Algerian state that emerged from the war of liberation was not exactly the country of the rebels' dreams; "Heureux les martyrs qui n'ont rien vu," one of them wrote.32

  According to some observers (such as Charles Andre Julien), the story of Algeria and of the Maghreb in general is one of the lost opportunities insofar as France is concerned. Much play has been made of Algeria's economic maladjustment, and the failure to integrate the Algerians into a modern economic system.33 But there is no good reason to assume that Algeria would have remained part of France even had there been a much higher standard of living and no unemployment. The Algerians belonged to a different civilization; given the upsurge of nationalism after World War II and the weakening of the European powers, neither economic or social or even political reforms would have made the slightest difference. It might have postponed the struggle for independence by a few years; the FLN did not demand total separation at the start of the rebellion. But whatever the timing and the means, Algeria would eventually, riding the current of the tide in the affairs of the world, have demanded and obtained its independence.

  Cuba

  Cuba and Algeria, scenes of the two major guerrilla wars of the 1950s, were different in almost every aspect except that the key to victory was political not military in both instances. The Algerian FLN faced a colonial power, Castro and his comrades fought native incumbents. The struggle in Algeria lasted for seven years, it was waged against an efficient regular army of half a million men and was exceedingly costly. The campaign in Cuba took two years and did not involve much fighting; the Cuban army was small (forty thousand men), ill equipped and lacked both experience and above all the will to fight. The Cuban war is very much the story of one man and his "telluric force"; without him the invasion would not have been launched in the first place, after the initial setbacks it would have been dropped.

  Castro's force was so small that it is hard to explain its success even in retrospect. Almost up to the end of the war there were no more than three hundred guerrillas, but they made as much noise and received as much publicity as three hundred thousand might have done. The materialization of three hundred guerrillas induced Washington to declare an arms embargo, weakening Batista both politically and militarily. Even professional military journals were quite deluded about the strength of the insurgents; according to an account in the Marine Corps Gazette (February 1960), Castro commanded not less than fifteen thousand men and women.34 From a Marxist point of view, Castro's success is not easy to explain either. It was neither an agrarian rebellion, certainly not a proletarian revolution, nor was it an opposition movement headed by the "national bourgeoisie," or a combination of all these forces, a people's war. If anything, it was Blanquism transferred to the countryside. Cuba was not an underdeveloped country; it was semideveloped, or, to be precise, suffered from arrested development. Its rate of literacy was high, its standard of living about equal to Italy's (before the miracolo) and higher than in the Soviet Union. Some of the most respected observers of the Cuban scene have laid Castro's victory variously to the state of the Cuban sugar industry (Hugh Thomas) or the tensions within Cuban social structure such as the disparity between cities and countryside and the sluggish rate of growth.35 It is of course perfectly true that Cuba was at the mercy of world demand, that the price of sugar was highly volatile and that the industry was in a state of decline (even though 1957 was a bumper year). There was indeed a great gap between the level of income in urban and rural areas, but there was a similar, even greater gap in many other parts of the world. As Theodore Draper stresses, vast tracts of sugar land belonged to American owners, but this was not one of the central issues in Castro's program; Draper emphasizes that there was less antigringoism in Cuba than almost anywhere else in Latin America. All this is so, but it still does not explain why Batista's regime collapsed like the walls of Jericho at the mere sound of trumpets. Hugh Thomas has it that the institutions of Cuba in 1958-1959 were for historical reasons amazingly weak. But were not the historical reasons largely accidental? Batista was a weak and ineffectual dictator, cruel enough to antagonize large sections of the population, yet not sufficiently harsh (or effective) to suppress the revolutionary movement. Cuba had a long record of political violence and (as in Algeria) of guerrilla warfare. The bureaucracy was weak and lazy, the police and army underpaid and demoralized, corrupt, sedent
ary and internally divided.36 But all this could with equal justification be said about a great many other countries. Batista had not been unpopular with the masses when he first came to power; in 1940 he had been, as Castro reminded him, the presidential candidate of the Communist party. But the Batista who came to power in 1952 was a changed man; he had become lazy, ate sumptuously and spent much of his time playing canasta or watching horror movies.37 Batista's coup in 1952 was by no means inevitable; another slightly more intelligent and energetic ruler or even Batista himself, fifteen years younger, would have realized that in the interest of survival he had to strengthen and modernize the police and the military establishment and to make both more efficient. However tyrannical and unpopular, such a ruler would not have been overthrown by Castro and his three hundred. It has been maintained that an unpopular regime cannot possibly be saved by means of repression, however well organized, but the Latin American experience simply does not bear this out. It was not so much Cuba the country, its economy, society and politics that were unique, but the specific political constellation prevailing there in the late 1950s. This is neither to magnify nor to belittle Castro's undoubted courage, personal magnetism and qualities of leadership; it is to point to the fact that the Batista colossus had feet of clay. It was not through farsightedness or by instinct, but through sheer foolhardiness that Castro dared to challenge the dictator, only to discover to his and everyone else's astonishment how brittle the regime was, and how near to collapse. Castro certainly did not lack self-confidence and Havana University, where he had studied in the late 1940s, had been an excellent training ground. It was, as he noted years later, much more dangerous than the Sierra Maestra. There still could have been an accident — a fatal mishap during the landing of his group, or perhaps a quarrel with Crecencio Perez, the popular bandit who during the critical period after the landing was Castro's main link with the "masses." It is doubtful whether any of Castro's companions had the qualities to lead the rebels from the Sierra to Havana. It was only in March 1957, four months after the landing, that Castro was joined by new recruits from the towns and became less vulnerable. The key questions with regard to the victory of the Cuban revolution concern not Castro, but his enemies and rivals. Why was there no resistance, why did the middle class, the Church, the foreign supporters desert Batista?

  The military operations were few and of no outstanding interest. Guevara, in his Episodes of the Revolutionary War, recounts various "battles," such as the battle of La Plata or the battle of Arroyo del Infierno. But these were either minor ambushes or attacks against small police or army posts carried out by twenty or thirty men.38 The decisive "battles" of the war were fought by a hundred men or less; there was only one serious counterinsurgency operation by Batista's force, the "big push" in May 1958. In mid-June the government forces made contact with the rebels, but Castro's combat intelligence was excellent, Batista's forces did not find their way in unfamiliar territory, they were bombed by their own aircraft, and within a few weeks the fighting was over. The "rebels" fought well on the rare occasions they had to fight; there is evidence that in some cases money was offered, and accepted, and that Castro's men did not owe their success entirely to their military prowess. There were certainly more victims during the fighting in the towns (as during and after the naval mutiny at Cienfuegos) than in the Sierra, where police or army posts often surrendered after being exposed to no more than a few minutes of shooting.

  Castro's officers and men showed infinitely more fighting spirit, initiative and intelligence than their opponents. Some of the regular army commanders were superannuated, having entered service before Castro and Guevara were even born. A capable and efficient officer was likely to be replaced because his superiors either envied or distrusted him. There was no overall plan and strategy on the part of Castro; neither he nor Guevara had read Mao at the time.39 If anything, they were guided by the experience of nineteenth-century Cuban guerrilla warfare — every Cuban child was familiar with the exploits of Antonio Maceo and Maximo Gómez; the heroes of the war of independence provided inspiration for the fighters in the Sierra Maestra.

  Some American observers insisted from 1957 on that Castro was a Communist, or surrounded by Communists, and Castro in later years himself declared that he had been far more radical in his political views from the very beginning than was generally known. His reasoning went that if he had come out openly in favor of Marxism-Leninism, the rebels would not have been able to get down to the plains, "because there would have been no support for them." But these are rationalizations after the event. The Castro who landed in Cuba was certainly not a Marxist-Leninist, but a radical who could have moved "left" or "right" with equal ease. Many Cubans who supported Castro expected a different revolution from the one they got; it is no less a certitude that Castro and his comrades were primarily men of action, and that while the fighting was going on in the Sierra Maestra they had little inclination to engage in ideological hairsplitting. Gradually they moved toward Communism. This conversion was not altogether surprising, for Fascism was in disrepute and liberalism was out of place in Cuba. On the other hand, there was a strong residue of free-floating radicalism in Cuba, and a growing estrangement from the United States. But all this belongs to a subsequent chapter in Cuba's history. The Cuban revolutionary war was not fought under the banner of Marxism-Leninism, its leaders were not members of the Communist party, and the Cuban Communists established contact with Castro only toward the end of the war. It was fought under the pennon of patriotism, national unity, of freedom from tyranny and corruption.

  The Middle East

  The Palestinian attacks against Israel have attracted far more attention than other guerrilla wars in the Middle East chiefly because of their international ramifications and the involvement of other Arab states. But there were other wars such as the insurrection in southern Sudan during the 1960s or the fighting in Kurdistan which punctuated most of the postwar period. Guerrilla operations in the Persian Gulf (Oman) have lasted for more than a decade and there was sporadic "urban guerrilla" warfare in both Turkey and Iran. The first armed raids into Israel by Palestinian fedayeen occurred in the early 1950s and provoked immediate Israeli reprisals. On a larger scale, attacks began only with the creation of Fatah in 1965. Its activities became more widespread after the Six Days' War (June 1967), for though the Arab armies had been routed, Israel had occupied lands with a population of more than a million Arab inhabitants. More important yet, the Palestinians now received very substantial support from Arab governments, whereas before 1967 such aid had been given only grudgingly and selectively. The refugee camps in Israel and outside provided a unique reservoir for the mobilization of new recruits, as well as centers for training and as hiding places. Between 1967 and 1970 Fatah expanded from a few hundred to between fifteen and twenty thousand members. Immediately after the Six Days' War it had attempted to stage "revolutionary guerrilla warfare" both in the cities of Israel and elsewhere about the country. But the terrain was unsuitable, the local Arab inhabitants not too cooperative and the Israeli countermeasures quite effective. (The Gaza region became the classic example of a successful counterinsurgency campaign.) After only a few months Fatah headquarters and most of its members had to be removed from the West bank to the other side of the Jordan; Fatah became a guerrilla movement in exile. Sporadic terrorism continued on a limited basis for many years and there were occasional demonstrations and strikes, but this was certainly not the "general insurrection" Fatah had been waiting for. Located abroad, there were three potential avenues open to the Palestinians for pursuing their war. They could infiltrate guerrillas into Israel either for hit-and-run attacks or in the hope that these would be able to establish foci. Alternatively, the Palestinians could shell Israeli settlements from beyond the border; they had missiles in their arsenal which reached fairly deep into Israeli territory. The Israelis would be unable to retaliate without putting themselves in the wrong vis-à-vis international law; Israeli reprisals mo
reover would aggravate relations between Jerusalem and its Arab neighbors and help prevent a "sellout" by some Arab governments. Lastly, the Palestinians could attack Israelis, Jews and even non-Jews, as well as Israeli installations and institutions outside the country; the "acts of despair" would demonstrate that unless justice were done to the Palestinians, there would never be peace in the Middle East.

  Fatah and the other Palestinian organizations tried all three approaches with varying success.40 Small units were infiltrated into Israel from Jordan, and later from Syria and Lebanon. But despite the covert sympathy for them among some of the domestic Arabs, the terrorists' position was more like that of goldfish in a bowl than fish in an ocean. Only very small units (up to four or five members) could be infiltrated. They were usually intercepted within a few hours, at most within a few days; only one or two groups managed to stay undetected in Israel for as long as two months, and this primarily because they refrained from outright violence. Between 1968 and 1971 there were nonetheless innumerable cases of infiltration, or random shootings, of bombs, resulting not alone in losses to the Israelis, but in sizable ones to the raiders, and gradually this type of tactic was restricted to a very few hit-and-run attacks with clearly defined aims. Because of their dramatic character, they were to attract far more publicity; instances of this were the Lod Airport massacre (carried out by Japanese terrorists), the attack against a school at Ma'alot (1974), and a hotel in Tel Aviv (1975). The shelling from across the borders began early in 1968 in the Jordan valley, spread in October 1968 to southeast Lebanon, and during 1969 to the whole of southern Lebanon (Fatahland). Again there was Israeli retaliation, first against the Jordanians and later against the Lebanese. A certain pattern emerged. The Palestinian terrorists would shell Israeli settlements from across the border. The Israelis would then retaliate, but since the Palestinians would have evaporated, the Jordanian and the Lebanese regular army units would have to bear the brunt of the Israeli attack, which did not improve relations between the Palestinians and their hosts. Following heavy clashes with the Jordanian army in 1970, the Palestinians had to transfer their activities to Lebanon, which became their major springboard for attacks against Israel. In the south of Lebanon the Palestinians established a virtual "state within a state," leading to severe tension and to bloody encounters in turn with the Lebanese.