Diplomacy & Statecraft
ISSN: 0959-2296 (Print) 1557-301x (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fdps20
The Cold War and Counter-Insurgency
Geraint Hughes
To cite this article: Geraint Hughes (2011) The Cold War and Counter-Insurgency, Diplomacy &
Statecraft, 22:1, 142-163, DOI: 10.1080/09592296.2011.549751
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09592296.2011.549751
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Date: 21 June 2016, At: 06:13
Diplomacy & Statecraft, 22:142–163, 2011
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0959-2296 print/1557-301X online
DOI: 10.1080/09592296.2011.549751
The Cold War and Counter-Insurgency
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GERAINT HUGHES
Due to the American-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq,
theories surrounding counter-insurgency, or COIN, have aroused
intense debate in political, military, and academic circles in the
United States, Britain, and other Western countries. This article shows that current thinking about how to fight and defeat
insurgent movements is based primarily on Cold War-era theories and conflicts. It traces the evolution in COIN thinking both
before and during the Cold War—incorporating Western and
Eastern bloc experiences of war against insurgents from Malaya
to Afghanistan—but also illustrates the conceptual difficulties of
applying doctrines based on the historical record of this era. The
article concludes by arguing that theories derived from the experiences of states involved in COIN campaigns from 1945 to 1991
still retain utility, but that there are significant differences between
Cold War insurgencies and current conflicts associated with the
“war on terror”/“long war” which affect the applicability of doctrines based on historical analysis and the works of Thompson,
Kitson, Galula, and other “classic” theorists.
After assuming command of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)
forces in Afghanistan in May 2009, United States Army General Stanley
McChrystal criticised the manner in which American and allied forces had
conducted counter-insurgency (COIN) operations against the Taliban. Airstrikes and conventional military sweeps by ground troops alone did not
diminish the insurgency’s strength, and often caused significant civilian
casualties, generating popular resentment against both NATO and Hamid
Karzai’s government. McChrystal declared that his priorities were to protect
the Afghan civilian population from the Taliban, and to build up the Kabul
regime’s military and police forces. He stressed the need to co-ordinate military operations with both socio-economic reforms to alleviate Afghanistan’s
chronic poverty, and state-building measures to rebuild a country fractured
by endemic warfare since 1978. McChrystal also stipulated that both NATO
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and the Karzai government needed to split the insurgency by negotiating
with Taliban elements motivated less by religious fanaticism and more by
specific grievances—notably poverty, official corruption, the marginalisation
of Pashtun tribes, and anger at the presence of “infidel” troops in a Muslim
country. His specific intention was to replicate the COIN methods employed
by the American military in Iraq since 2007, but his strategic concepts have
deeper roots.1
The American armed forces have traditionally been regarded by its
critics—both in academia and within its officer corps—as being institutionally incapable of addressing the complexities of COIN.2 Prior to 2003, they
were organised primarily to fight inter-state wars of short duration such
as the Gulf War of 1991, and its personnel—with the arguable exception
of the United States Marine Corps (USMC)—were not trained to deal with
the challenges of what the retired British general, Sir Rupert Smith, calls
“war amongst the people.” The invasion and occupation of Iraq forced
the United States Army in particular to reassess both its doctrine and its
training for COIN, contributing to the publication of a joint Army/USMC
manual in December 2006 (FM3/24).3 These doctrinal reforms—combined
with the “surge” of United States troops from February 2007 and a Sunni
Arab tribal revolt against al-Qaeda and other Islamist insurgents—led to a
dramatic decline in insurgent and sectarian violence in Iraq.4 The reversal of American military fortunes in that particular campaign has been
treated as a vindication of FM3/24, but it also reflects the revival of principles of COIN that evolved during the Cold War. FM3/24 utilised case
studies—the Americans in Vietnam, the French in Algeria, and the British
in Malaya—theorists and above all lessons from that era to shape its
doctrine on fighting insurgents in the context of the post-9/11 “war on
terror.”5
American and British military debates on COIN, or “stabilisation operations,” as they are dubbed, hark back to previous controversies over this
inherently contentious type of conflict. Critics drew parallels between the
American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq and the Vietnam war, whilst
opponents of Operation Enduring Freedom often compare it to the Soviet
Union’s disastrous involvement in Afghanistan between 1978 and 1989, not
to mention the three Anglo–Afghan wars of 1839–1842, 1879–1880, and 1919.
Today’s COIN practitioners seek to fight in a manner that minimises civilian deaths and gains the consent of the indigenous population by winning
“hearts and minds.” Current critics consider any military intervention in Third
World conflicts to be the contemporary equivalents of colonial and imperialist wars fought to suppress indigenous demands for self-determination. In
both cases, the debates and arguments are shaped by the legacy of East–West
competition during the Cold War.6
The strategic arms race between the superpowers and the development
of nuclear weapons may have precluded a Third World War, crises such
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as those over Cuba in 1962 and Able Archer in 1983 notwithstanding. But,
as a consequence, the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective
allies competed by proxy, which often meant either assisting insurgencies
or aiding governments fighting the latter.7 One of the contributory causes
of the European Cold War was the civil war in Greece during 1944–1949
between a pro-Western government and Communist guerrillas, and the
Anglo–American perception that the latter’s insurgency was a product of
Soviet subversion, rather than a purely internal conflict.8 The tactics and the
technologies employed by both government and guerrilla forces during this
era are best dealt with in a separate article. Instead, this paper traces the evolution of strategic ideas on how insurgencies either win or are defeated, and
how these shape Western COIN concepts today. Yet Cold War-era concepts
can give practitioners and scholars a distorted view of the current characteristics of internal strife in “weak” states, in particular the de-centralised and
chaotic organisation of many insurgent movements, the challenges associated with conducting nation-building—or “stabilisation”—in conjunction
with COIN, and the consequences of insurgent success for the state stability.
The intellectual constraints of Cold War COIN theories are discussed in more
detail in this article’s conclusions.
An insurgency is defined here as an internal conflict waged by an armed
group using a combination of means—including guerrilla warfare, terrorism,
civil disobedience, and political agitation—to secede from a state, to overthrow its government, or to resist foreign occupation.9 Although insurgencies
can receive external support, they are generally waged by irregular fighters
with support from at least a section of the civilian population. Insurgent
movements have occasionally prevailed by taking on their adversaries in
conventional-style warfare, winning power by defeating enemy armies in
the field, as the Communists did against the Guomindang in China between
1946 and 1949, and as the Viet Minh did against the French at Dien Bien
Phu in 1954.10 However, in most historical examples, insurgencies wage
a strategy of exhaustion, embroiling their foes in a protracted, indecisive
struggle in which their will to fight is gradually eroded. Paraphrasing Henry
Kissinger, insurgents often win by possessing a greater will to continue the
fight than their adversary; whether the latter is an indigenous government
or an intervening power.11
For Cold Warriors in Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and elsewhere,
insurgencies in Third World countries were examined through the prism of
East–West rivalries. As with the Americans in South Vietnam and the Soviets
in Afghanistan or, indirectly, through the sponsorship of allied governments
or their internal foes, the perception of whether the guerrillas or the government were “Communist”—or “progressive”—influenced the decision to
intervene directly. But for indigenous soldiers, guerrillas, and civilians, insurgencies and COIN campaigns were characterised by the mixture of ethnic,
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clan, social, and even personal vendettas that emerge in civil wars. The
ideological motivations of insurgent movements could also be as convoluted
and as opportunistic as those of the UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi, whose
carefully cultivated reputation as an anti-Communist “freedom fighter” belied
both his lust for power, and his willingness to accept aid from apartheid
South Africa to achieve his ends. It is easy to forget that in internal conflicts
indigenous actors—whether governments or their foes—often manipulate
and exploit the assistance of their patrons to their own advantage, without
becoming beholden to those that assist them.12
When fighting insurgents, a state’s government and its military and
security forces can wage an enemy-centric campaign aimed at physically
exterminating its enemies, an approach which often leads to draconian measures against the civilian populace. At its most extreme, this can involve
the systematic terrorisation of an entire community, including ethnic cleansing and genocide. Prime examples include Nazi Germany’s Bandenkrieg in
occupied Russia, Poland, and the Balkans during the Second World War;
and Baathist Iraq’s war against the Kurds in 1987–1990.13 In contrast, in
a population-centric campaign the government tries to win the allegiance
or at least the acquiescence of the population. This can only be gained
by securing civilians from insurgent intimidation—and also security force
excesses—and by addressing the popular grievances which contributed
to the outbreak of an insurgency and the growth of its support base.
These grievances might include socio-economic deprivation, official misrule
and corruption, or the perpetration of ethnic, sectarian or racial prejudice
through either minority rule or “the tyranny of the majority.” The historical
record shows that in practice a government side’s COIN strategy often oscillates between both extremes.14 For example, the British Army’s doctrinal
publications lauded the successes of the British “hearts and minds” campaign against Communist guerrillas in Malaya from 1950 to 1957. Yet during
the initial phases of the Malayan Emergency, in 1948–1950, the British colonial authorities conducted an openly coercive campaign—involving mass
arrests, the destruction of property, and population control—aimed at intimidating the ethnic Chinese community, the insurgency’s main supporters,
into obedience.15
European colonial wars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
and the United States Army’s occupation of the Philippines and Cuba after
the Spanish–American War of 1898, provide examples of both approaches,16
and two British theorists are commonly cited by COIN analysts. Colonel
C. E. Callwell’s Small Wars, first published in 1896, focused on combat
tactics, and emphasised the efficacy of force in compelling “[savages] and
semi-civilised races” to accept European domination.17 In contrast, Major
General Sir Charles Gwynn’s 1934 Imperial Policing stressed the requirement to subordinate the military to civilian authority, the importance of
co-ordinating intelligence-gathering, and also the need to avoid alienating
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the population with the overwhelming and disproportionate employment of
violence—known as the doctrine of minimum force.18
The key weakness of both texts was the automatic assumption that
European colonial rule was inherently legitimate. Whilst Gwynn stressed the
need for the British Army to treat indigenous peoples within the empire as
citizens, not as enemies, he could not acknowledge that the latter might
resent the perpetuation of British rule. He also ignored the two most contentious conflicts of his contemporary experience, the Iraqi revolt of 1920
and the Irish war of independence of 1916–1922, in which British military methods fell significantly short of the ideals of “minimum force.”19
In this respect, the 1940 USMC’s Small Wars Manual implicitly recognised
that indigenous support for the counter-insurgents could not be guaranteed. This manual was based on the USMC’s repeated involvement in
overseas interventions during the late nineteenth–early twentieth centuries,
in particular in Central America and the Caribbean. It highlights issues—
such as co-operation with American State Department representatives, the
requirement for discrimination and discipline in counter-guerrilla operations, the importance of training local constabularies, and the supervision of
elections—which have enduring relevance. For like many Cold War COIN
campaigns, and indeed current operations such as Afghanistan, the Marines
were not deployed to establish direct colonial rule over states like Haiti or
Nicaragua, but to force an end to civil strife and to establish a stable political
order in accordance with American national interests.20
The Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz devoted a chapter of
his On War to “the nation in arms,” although he treated insurgency as a
last resort for a state conquered and occupied by a superior adversary, as
Spain was by Napoleonic France between 1808 and 1812.21 T.E. Lawrence
provided generic tactical lessons from his experiences assisting the Arab
revolt against Turkish rule from 1916 to 1918, notably the ability of a small
band of mobile insurgents to paralyse a numerically superior conventional
army, with hit-and-run attacks across its lines of communication. But the
first theorist to stress that insurgency could be a tool for political revolution,
and social transformation was Mao Zedong. Citing the Chinese Communist
movement’s experiences against the Guomindang, and, in 1937–1945, the
Japanese, Mao outlined a three-stage model of “revolutionary warfare.” This
would begin with an organisational phase of recruiting cadres, and of mobilising civilian support, followed by a guerrilla phase of attrition, proceeding
to a phase of “mobile war” aimed at overthrowing the government once
the revolutionaries had the manpower, support, and momentum to seize
power.22 The Maoist concept of insurgency provided the template both for
leftist insurgencies in the post-1945 era, and for military thinkers seeking
means to defeat them.
The writings of both Callwell and Gwynn reflected the inherent faith of
European colonial authorities that the status quo was both inherently natural
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and also beneficial for the subjects of imperial rule in Africa and Asia. Such
notions became progressively discredited both in the metropolitan states and
the colonies during the course of the twentieth century. After 1945, decolonisation acquired a momentum of its own, due in part to the economic
exhaustion the European imperial states had suffered during World War
Two but also—in South-East Asia—to the shock of the Japanese conquests of
1941–1942. Whilst Spain and Portugal, both neutral during the Second World
War, and both governed by conservative autocracies until the mid-1970s,
tried to preserve their empires, Britain and France moved towards decolonisation through a variety of pressures. In France’s case, popular opposition
to the wars in both Indochina (1946–1954) and Algeria (1954–1962) contributed to defeat and withdrawal in both cases, and also Charles de Gaulle’s
decision to grant African colonies independence in 1960. The British experienced protracted insurgencies in Palestine (1946–1948), Malaya (1948–1960),
Kenya (1952–1957), Cyprus (1955–1959) and South Arabia (1962–1967) that
compounded Britain’s financial weaknesses and sapped the domestic will to
maintain an overseas empire. Human rights abuses committed by the colonial security forces also contributed to a growing cross-party consensus in
Westminster that imperialism was not only morally discredited, but was also
of doubtful strategic utility and economically costly.23
Anti-colonial movements could also count on the solidarity of the
Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), beginning with the Bandung Conference
in Indonesia in 1955. For example, the National Liberation Front (FLN) in
Algeria was militarily suppressed by the French by 1962, but had gained
international legitimacy as a result of NAM support, which eventually translated into growing influence in the United Nations (UN) General Assembly.
Above all, anti-colonial nationalists were able to convince informed opinion within the metropolitan states of the inherent legitimacy of their cause,
even as they waged a violent struggle for self-determination.24 However, the
willingness of the NAM to condemn Western colonialist oppression—and,
from the early 1970s, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians—was matched
by a tendency to avoid criticism of often more egregious cases of barbarity
and misrule within newly independent states. Furthermore, as the British
Foreign Secretary, Lord Home, noted in a speech in December 1961, the
NAM’s hostility towards “imperialism” conflicted with its members’ tolerant
attitude towards Soviet domination over Eastern Europe.25
Decolonisation became interlinked with the Cold War, although in
many cases anti-colonial insurgencies had little to do with East–West politics. For example, EOKA’s campaign in Cyprus was a nationalistic one,
although British propagandists disingenuously portrayed its leader, Colonel
George Grivas, as a Communist.26 The Soviet Union, with its officially
“anti-imperialist” ethos, sought to present itself as the natural friend of
“national liberation movements,” as reflected in Nikita Khrushchev’s speech
to the Supreme Soviet on 6 January 1961. By this time, the Soviets were
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in competition with the Chinese for the support of “progressive” Third
World states and nationalist movements, and as the Sino–Soviet rift intensified Beijing became more strident in its declarations to support revolutions
world-wide.27 Cuba also emerged as a proponent of revolutionary insurgencies in Latin America and Africa after 1959. Fidel Castro’s Argentinean
companero, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, became the proponent of “focoism,”
the belief that a revolutionary movement could generate its own momentum without undergoing the tiresome process of preliminary organisation
prescribed by Mao. Focoism was tested to destruction in the former Belgian
Congo in 1965 and Bolivia in 1967, the latter failure leading to Che’s death.
His global appeal as the face of revolutionary martyrdom has eclipsed his
inadequacies as both a theorist and a guerrilla leader, and the Cubans subsequently enjoyed more success in backing the anti-Portuguese rebellions in
Guinea-Bissau and Angola.28
For anti-colonial insurgents, Soviet bloc, Chinese, and Cuban support
provided a much-needed source of arms, funds, and training, although the
acceptance of such assistance did not necessarily lead recipients to offer
ideological allegiance to its donors. China’s readiness to back anti-Western
insurgents ended with Mao’s rapprochement with the United States and
other former adversaries in 1972. In certain cases, guerrilla movements were
undermined by assistance from Marxist-Leninist states. The Dhofar Liberation
Front (DLF) in Oman benefited from a safe haven in the Peoples’ Democratic
Republic of Yemen after 1967, and the training of its cadres by the Soviets
and the Chinese. However, as a consequence the DLF changed its character,
renaming itself the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab
Gulf (PFLOAG) in August 1968, assuming objectives that were both overly
ambitious—promoting revolution across the Arabian peninsula—and which
had an anti-Islamic ethos that alienated the indigenous population. Whilst
the Sultanate of Oman prevailed over the PFLOAG largely due to British,
Jordanian, Iranian, and Saudi support, the insurgency’s ideological contamination undermined its appeal to Omanis, and also contributed to a damaging
rift between the DLF old-guard and Marxist-Leninist ideologues which Sultan
Qaboos’ regime was able to exploit.29
British COIN thinking underwent a significant transition during the Cold
War. “Imperial policing” was intended to maintain Britain’s authority over its
colonial possessions, but the theories associated with General Frank Kitson
and Sir Robert Thompson recognised that this objective was no longer tenable. Although the British began their campaigns in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus,
and South Arabia with the objective of preserving imperial rule, the UK’s
strategy eventually shifted in all these cases to effecting a transition to independence, albeit under a sympathetic post-colonial regime. Both Kitson and
Thompson stressed that a purely military solution to insurgencies did not
exist. Armed force had to be subordinated to political measures to address
popular grievances, to effect socio-economic reforms, and to bolster the
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authority and legitimacy of a friendly indigenous government. Soldiers and
police were obliged to both employ “minimum force” and to act within
established legal bounds.30 Despite these prescriptions, a common feature
of the UK’s COIN practice from Palestine to Northern Ireland was the
British Army’s tendency to repeat the same heavy-handed measures at the
outset—often involving tactics such as “cordon-and-search” and internment
of insurgent suspects that alienated the civilian communities. Furthermore,
the defeat in South Arabia in 1966–1967, notably the failure to establish
a credible Federal government, the infiltration of the indigenous security
forces by insurgents, and the successful takeover by the Marxist-Leninist
NLF following the British withdrawal, showed that Kitson and Thompson’s
principles were not always applicable in practice.31
The French experience in Indochina and Algeria led one veteran of both
campaigns, David Galula, to outline theories similar to those of Kitson and
Thompson. However, these wars also inspired the more ruthless concepts
expressed by Roger Trinquier’s Modern Warfare, including the argument
that the military should respond to acts of insurgent terrorism with counterterror.32 Galula’s theories are cited with approval by the authors of FM3/24,
but it is important to note that they were published two years after the end
of the Algerian war, and that during this conflict French COIN thinking was
shaped by the exponents of guerre révolutionnaire.33 Guerre révolutionnaire theory was characterised by both an intense anti-Communist fervour
and the conviction it was the French Army, rather than the civilian government, which understood the country’s interests best.34 The latter sentiment
contributed to the military putsches of 1958 and 1961, and the subsequent
terrorist campaign of the OAS. The former was reflected in the methods used
to crush the FLN during “the Battle of Algiers,” which included the systematic
torture and murder of detainees. In this respect it is disturbing to see that the
introduction to the English language translation of General Paul Aussaresses’
memoirs, which contain a shocking and unapologetic account of his own
role in the anti-FLN campaign, justifies such measures on the grounds that
they “defeated” terrorism. The editor appears unaware of the fact that the
French Army’s methods in Algeria exacerbated rifts within domestic politics
and society, and almost led to civil war in France itself.35
Portugal’s wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau demonstrated tactical dexterity, but also the absence of a strategic rationale. Whilst
the colonial power’s success in recruiting African soldiers to fight for its
cause was noteworthy, the Portuguese officer corps became convinced
of the futility of these wars, launching a coup which overthrew Marcel
Caetano’s regime in April 1974. The Rhodesian Front and South Africa’s
apartheid regime likewise demonstrated an inability to relate tactical military
success against, respectively, the Zimbabwean chimurenga and the SWAPO
rebellion in Namibia into a lasting political outcome. Whilst both Ian Smith
and P.W. Botha claimed that they were fighting the West’s cause against
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Soviet-backed Communism in Africa, the fact was that White minority rule
and officially sanctioned racism in both Rhodesia and South Africa enabled
the Soviet Union and other Marxist-Leninist states to pose as the liberators of Black Africans.36 Like the Portuguese in Angola, both the Rhodesian
armed forces and the South African Defence Force (SADF) recruited substantial numbers of Black troops into their ranks, and also inflicted a heavy
toll on their adversaries both in internal COIN operations and also raids
into neighbouring states. What neither they nor their governments could do
was persuade the majority Black African population in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe,
Namibia, and South Africa to accept indefinitely a political order monopolised by Whites, and a socio-economic order which pampered the European
minority at their expense.37
In much the same way that the American body politic has an ambivalent
attitude towards imperialism—with the Philippines war of the early 1900s
demonstrating the gap between theoretical condemnation of colonialism and
a political readiness to “take up the White man’s burden”—the United States
military has demonstrated both a doctrinal aversion to “small wars” and
a continued history of waging them. Although, by the mid-1940s, United
States policymakers were officially committed to self-determination in Africa
and Asia, they subsequently re-assessed their views, particularly in cases
such as French Indochina in the 1950s and Angola in 1975, where the end
of European colonial rule was considered likely to lead to a Communist
takeover.38
Shortly after his inauguration in January 1961, President John F.
Kennedy declared that COIN was a national security priority. In response
to both Khrushchev’s “wars of national liberation” speech and Mao’s revolutionary agenda, Kennedy declared that the Communist powers were
unlikely to risk overt aggression against the West, but were instead seeking global domination through the subversion of newly independent states
in Africa and Asia, and the sponsorship of radical leftist insurgencies in the
Third World. The traditional American military establishment, with its institutional bias towards inter-state warfare, resisted Kennedy’s enthusiasm for
COIN. Even though Army and United States Air Force “advisors” were sent
to South Vietnam during the early 1960s to help the Saigon government
fight the Viet Cong, their directions to the Armed forces of the Republic
of Vietnam (ARVN) reflected their focus on major combat operations. The
COIN campaign in rural South Vietnam during the early 1960s was therefore
firepower-intensive and highly destructive, not only failing to eliminate the
Viet Cong as a fighting force, but also contributing to popular anger against
the Saigon government and the latter’s loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the
civilian populace.39
A similar accusation has been made concerning the “search and destroy”
operations that American combat forces conducted once they became
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engaged in Vietnam after the summer of 1965, although it should be noted
that the overall American commander, General William Westmoreland, was
not simply fighting an insurgency, but was waging what Frank Hoffman
would now call a “hybrid war.”40 Critics like Andrew Krepinevich state
that Westmoreland should have followed a population-centric approach,
dispersing troops across the countryside to secure hamlets, raise civildefence militias, and fight a small unit war against the Viet Cong, much
as the USMC’s Civil Action Programme (CAP) platoons did between 1965
and 1971. The problem was that American forces were also engaged in
an inter-state conflict against North Vietnamese Army units in much of
South Vietnam. Conventional warfare calls for a concentration of military
power so that smaller—and weaker—forces are not eliminated piecemeal.
From 1967 Westmoreland did support civic action aimed at improving
the socio-economic welfare of the South Vietnamese peasantry, notably
the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS)
programme.41 But his principal problem was that he fought adversaries—
the Viet Cong and North Vietnam—that pursued a strategy of protracted
warfare, moving from the second and third phases of Mao’s revolutionary
war theory as circumstances dictated. Westmoreland’s dilemma reminds us
that no matter whether the government’s focus is to track down and destroy
guerrillas, or to build schools and clinics for the local population, a competent adversary will adopt tactics—avoidance and dispersal in the first case,
disruption and intimidation in the second—that will thwart its adversary.42
The Vietnam War also demonstrated the importance of domestic support. In the imperial era Western governments did face popular criticism of
overseas interventions, notably in the case of Britain and the Boer War of
1899–1902, although this did not force them to disengage from such conflicts. As United States military involvement in Vietnam intensified many
Americans began to question why their troops were fighting in South-East
Asia. The war appeared to its critics to be an illegitimate and a senseless
conflict, which also inflicted hideous suffering on the Vietnamese, Laotian,
and Cambodian peoples. The response to the My Lai massacre, once it was
publicised in April 1969, showed that many Americans thought that the conflict was inherently brutal, and that it had a corrosive effect on the ethical
standards of American soldiers serving in Vietnam.43 The anti-war movement did incorporate genuine pacifists and idealists who saw no reason
why American troops and indigenous civilians should die in an unjust and
un-winnable war, but other activists adhered to a double standard. They
vociferously condemned atrocities committed by American troops and their
indigenous allies, whilst ignoring or excusing similar acts committed by their
opponents either during the war or following the Communist seizure of
power in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in 1975.44
In Vietnam, the United States military was directly engaged in COIN, but
in two other cases its primary contribution was to advise and assist allied
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G. Hughes
governments and their armed forces involved in the fight against Communist
guerrillas. The first case involved the Joint United States Military Advisory
Group (JUSMAG) attached to the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in
their struggle against the Hukbalahap rebels in Luzon from 1950 to 1957. Just
as Malaya was the model campaign for the British, the Philippines provided
a positive example for the Americans. The struggle against the Hukbahalap
included reforms by the Filipino authorities to wean support away from the
insurgency—an amnesty for surrendered insurgents, land reform, legal assistance to peasants embroiled in disputes with landlords—as well as efforts
by the AFP to track down and eliminate guerrilla bands in the field.45
In contrast, American assistance to the government of El Salvador
against the FMLN in 1979–1992 remains intensely controversial, because
of the Salvadoran military’s atrocities against the civilian population, which
included the sponsorship of “death squads.” In El Salvador’s case, American
diplomats and military advisors were in a position of responsibility without influence; the host government chose to disregard American proposals
to undermine insurgents’ support through political and socio-economic
reforms, whilst critics of United States intervention blamed security force
abuses upon those that helped train, arm, and fund them. So whilst in
the Philippines JUSMAG was fortunate to work with a Defence Minister,
Ramon Magsaysay, and an AFP officer corps that recognised the need for a
population-centric strategy, in El Salvador American advisors were thwarted
by a military elite that committed egregious human rights abuses.46 Within
the context of the current “war on terror” a similar dilemma affects the
United States and other Western countries with reference to the governments of Uzbekistan, Yemen, Pakistan, and other states deemed to be of
strategic importance within the Islamic world.47
Even with El Salvador COIN, or “Foreign Internal Defense,” was a
minority preoccupation within the American armed forces, and responsibility for advising allied militaries in Central and South America was left to
special forces units. The United States Army emerged from Vietnam not with
a collective intention to improve its ability to fight guerrillas, but with a determination to focus on waging inter-state conflicts which were directly related
to the national interest, guaranteed firm domestic support, and which could
be brought to a swift and decisive conclusion by the overwhelming application of military power. This was a sensible calculation for senior American
officers to make at a time when the Communist threat still existed, and the
United States armed forces might be called upon to defend its NATO allies
in Europe, or to protect South Korea from an onslaught from the North. Yet
this attitude endured beyond the end of the Cold War until recently. The low
priority which the commander-in-chief of Central Command (CENTCOM)
General Tommy Franks placed on post-conflict planning during the preparatory phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom—late 2002–early 2003—reflected
this institutional bias against COIN, or other similar “military operations other
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than war” entailed in “nation-building.” Yet the lack of attention that George
W. Bush’s administration devoted to planning for contingencies following
Saddam Hussein’s fall—and the unwillingness of its officials to even concede that American forces would then become involved in an occupation
mission—showed that this sentiment was not confined to the military.48
The East European revolutions of 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991 and China’s adoption of a free-market economy epitomised the failure of Marxism-Leninism as a political and socio-economic model, but if
there is one aspect of this ideology which retains some credibility it is its
utility for would-be insurrectionists. In opposition, Communist parties can
count on their traditions of rigid discipline, their clandestine and robust
cell-based structure, ruthless internal security, and the ability to infiltrate
the institutions of a hostile state. These characteristics are such that the
Communists’ organisational model has been emulated by those—such as
the Iraqi Baathists—that detest their ideology.49 Likewise, the successful revolutions in China (1949), Cuba (1959), Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (1975),
and Nicaragua (1979) still provide an inspiration for far-left insurgents in
Colombia and the Indian sub-continent.50
Once Communist parties seized political power—either after a revolution or, with the East European states after 1945, as a consequence of
Soviet occupation—they established a pervasive police and security force
apparatus, modelled on the Soviet KGB and MVD, that would prevent internal opponents from even organising themselves, let alone conducting active
resistance. Communist states also copied the Soviet practice of staffing the
armed forces’ officer corps with loyal party members, complete with a network of security police agents and “political officers” to ensure that they
remained politically reliable.51 Although Marxist-Leninist regimes did experience insurgencies and domestic revolts, their structure enabled them to
pre-empt internal dissent, and with the exception of Ethiopia in 1991 and
Afghanistan in 1992 no state of this political character was overthrown by
insurgents.
The one weakness that Communist parties had with COIN was a
product of ideological myopia, which automatically considered internal
opponents as malevolent “counter-revolutionaries” that should be crushed
with brute force. There were exceptions, such as Mikhail Frunze’s campaign
against the Basmachi rebels in Soviet Central Asia during the early 1920s,
which combined military operations with political measures to win the allegiance of the Muslim population, and the Polish regime’s tolerance for the
Catholic Church after 1956.52 In general, however, Marxist-Leninist regimes
faced with internal rebellion or dissent showed an attitude best expressed by
the Afghan President Nur Mohamed Taraki; “Lenin taught us to be merciless
towards enemies of the revolution and millions of people had to be eliminated in order to secure [victory].”53 A similar attitude could affect guerrilla
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movements, causing them to neglect Mao’s tenets on the need to generate popular support; a prime example of this being the atrocities that the
“Shining Path” (Sendero Luminoso) committed during the 1980s against the
Peruvian Indians they were supposedly fighting to “liberate.”54 Comparisons
can be drawn with the brutality that radical Islamist insurgents have displayed against fellow Muslims, whether in Algeria during the civil war of the
1990s, or in Iraq in the context of the American-led occupation after 2003.55
Soviet COIN theory was based not only on Marxist-Leninist theory, but
also on Tsarist traditions. The latter were best expressed by General Mikhail
Skobelev after his campaign in Turkmenistan (1880–1881): “the duration of
the peace is in direct proportion to the slaughter you inflict on the enemy.
The harder you hit them, the longer they remain quiet.”56 The campaigns
against peasant risings by the Red Army during the Civil War (1918–1921)
and the suppression of nationalist insurgencies in Ukraine and the Baltic
States during the 1940s and 1950s conformed to this pattern, although the
Soviets also showed themselves adept at conducting “pseudo-operations”:
establishing bogus guerrilla groups to infiltrate resistance movements, sow
internal discord, and to commit “false flag” atrocities against civilians that
could be blamed on the insurgents.57 The Soviet Army’s suppression of East
Berlin riots of June 1953 and the Hungarian uprising in October–November
1956 also demonstrated that Moscow would use overwhelming force to suppress any “counter-revolutionaries” who tried to overthrow client regimes
in Eastern Europe. One key factor behind the collapse of the latter in the
autumn of 1989 was Mikhail Gorbachev’s explicit admission that the Soviet
Union would no longer intervene militarily to protect them from popular
unrest.58
Other Communist states likewise faced insurgencies and revolts—China
in Tibet in 1958,59 the MPLA regime in Angola after 1975,60 and Colonel
Mengistu Haile Mariam’s junta in Ethiopia after 1974—and adopted an
enemy-centric response in the process. Insurgencies that could be deprived
of significant external support, such as that in Tibet could be contained.
Those that received substantial foreign aid, such as that provided by South
Africa to UNITA in Angola and RENAMO in Mozambique, proved less easy
to crush.61 Two facets of the Communist COIN experience are apparent,
the first being that armed forces found that their own successful experience
of guerrilla warfare did not help them prevail against insurgents. This was
demonstrated by the Cuban troops embroiled in the MPLA’s Luta Contra
Bandidos in Angola from the mid-1970s62 or the Vietnamese army’s fruitless campaign against the Khmer Rouge and other Cambodian resistance
movements between 1979 and 1989. The second is the capacity for MarxistLeninists to wage war a l’outrance regardless of the civilian death toll which
ensues. Mengistu’s own tactics for dealing with the Tigrean and Eritrean
rebels in Ethiopia led directly to the catastrophic famine that swept the
country in 1984–1985.63
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The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan (1979–1989) likewise demonstrated both the conceptual inability of Moscow’s civilian and military elite
to understand the complexities of COIN, and the scale of the human suffering caused by Soviet ideological dogma. Not only did the Soviets fail to
crush the mujahidin, who derived lavish assistance from the West, China,
and Islamic countries, but the indiscriminate destruction of the rural infrastructure contributed to the one million deaths caused in that conflict, and
also encouraged the majority of Afghans to loathe both the “infidel invaders”
and their “puppet” government in Kabul. Yet the worst consequences of
Russian intervention followed the withdrawal of Soviet troops in February
1989. France’s defeat in Algeria, Britain’s in South Arabia, and the United
States’ in Indochina did have tragic consequences for indigenous communities, as shown by the FLN’s pogrom against pro-French loyalists, South
Yemen’s periodic descents into internecine strife, and the mass exodus of
the “boat people” from Vietnam in 1978–1979. But the victorious insurgents
were at least able to establish governments capable of preserving the basis
of a stable—albeit authoritarian—civil order. Yet the downfall of Communist
authority in Afghanistan in April 1992 led only to civil war and anarchy,
demonstrating that the future challenge for COIN was not to avert state
takeover by a hostile political movement, but to prevent state collapse.64
The current Anglo–American conception of COIN has its roots in the
Cold War. These roots can be seen with the repeated emphasis placed on
the need to relate military means to wider political objectives; to be as discriminate in the use of lethal force in order to minimise civilian casualties; to
co-ordinate the implementation of policies on the government side to reduce
an insurgency’s appeal, in what British doctrine currently dubs “the comprehensive approach”; to conduct military operations to secure the population
from insurgent and other forms of internecine violence, such as banditry
or tribal feuding; to foster the conditions for socio-economic development,
notably education, improved transport links, better health care, the provision of electricity and clean water; and finally to train indigenous military
and police forces capable of assuming responsibility for local security once
Western forces have left their country. The “concerned local citizens” militias
in Iraq have their precedent in the CAP platoons the USMC raised in Vietnam,
whilst the “Human Terrain Teams” (HTTs) assisting the United States military in Afghanistan can be compared to the State Department and USAID
officials working for CORDS forty years earlier. Both the United States and
British armed forces now explicitly see COIN as an activity not just for soldiers and police officers, but for diplomats, aid workers, and academics,
whether it be embassy officials advising the host government on specific
policy measures, specialists drilling a well for a village, or scholars advising
a brigade commander on the social, cultural, and ethnic characteristics of his
area of operations.65
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Whilst Western concepts of COIN and “stabilisation” do derive in part
from the pre-1945 era of “imperial policing”, the Cold War added one crucial
element to counter-insurgent theory; namely, the requirement for political
legitimacy. Kitson described COIN as “a struggle for men’s minds”, in which
both sides essentially try to convince several audiences—the indigenous
population, foreign governments, external spectators such as the international media, and ultimately their enemies—that they represent popular
aspirations in a particular state or within a particular community. One can
compare the tendency of Cold War insurgents to depict their struggle as
one of “national self-determination” against imperialism or “neo-colonialism”
with the current claim by Islamist militants from Algeria to the Philippines
that they are fighting to defend Muslims from “crusaders” and their puppet
governments.66 The Cold War was not just a strategic confrontation between
the two superpowers and their respective allies, but an ideological competition in which both sides sought to prove that their model of governance
and society, liberal-democratic or Marxist-Leninist, was best suited to meet
human needs and aspirations. This struggle was waged locally as well as
globally, in a series of COIN campaigns from Greece in the 1940s to Latin
America in the 1980s. Bernard Fall noted that insurgents often win by outgoverning rather than out-fighting their enemies, and the enduring relevance
of this point is demonstrated by the damaging effect of Afghanistan’s rigged
Presidential election in August 2009 on both the credibility of the Karzai
government and the NATO mission.67
Ironically enough, criticisms of current United States-led interventions
also demonstrate a Cold War mindset, reminiscent of the anti-Vietnam
protests of the 1960s. COIN remains controversial for academic scholars,
particularly if, as was the case with El Salvador in the 1980s, and Iraq
after 2003, it is seen as imperialistic in intent.68 During the Vietnam War
the administrators of Michigan State University were condemned within
American academia for participating in a police training programme in
South Vietnam. Currently, American anthropologists are at odds over the
involvement of some of their number in HTTs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Proponents of engagement with the armed forces argue that academics can
help the American military conduct COIN operations in a more discriminate manner.69 In contrast, the “Network of Concerned Anthropologists”
(NCA) argue that academic research would be used to facilitate the killing
and maiming of innocents, and to incite internecine violence within wartorn states. The problem with the NCA and like-minded academics is that
they do not acknowledge the realities of a world where organisations like Al
Qaeda and affiliated groups exist—such as the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban,
Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, or the Somali Shabab—or where insurgencies
can be inspired by uncompromising religious fanaticism. The controversial
American-led intervention in Iraq is also automatically associated with other
COIN missions, such as in Afghanistan, which have a greater degree of
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international and indigenous support. Furthermore, the NCA does not seem
to recognise the often disastrous implications of insurgent violence for social
cohesion and state stability, as noted below.70
Both participants in, and critics of, Western COIN are in danger of
assuming that current insurgencies are identical to Cold War ones. In the
process, analysts fall into the following intellectual traps. Firstly, there is
the increasing tendency of insurgent movements to destroy the machinery
of government within a state, rather than to take it over and establish their
own administration. The prime examples are Afghanistan after 1992, Somalia
after the fall of Siad Barre, and the civil wars Sierra Leone and Liberia experienced during the 1990s.71 Cold War insurgent movements were not immune
from internal rifts, but they tended to possess ideological objectives which
would provide the basis of authority once they had prevailed, even if the
new order could often be as—if not more—repressive and corrupt than the
old. But in the post–Cold War era, insurgents deprived of patronage from
East or West, such as UNITA in Angola or FARC in Colombia, fought for
economic wealth rather than ideological principle. UNITA sought control
over Angola’s diamond mines in 1992–2002, whilst FARC acquired a stake
in Colombia’s narcotics trade. With certain exceptions, such as the Nepalese
Maoists, insurgencies have also become less cohesive; anti-Coalition insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan are unified only by their determination to expel
the Western “infidels” and overthrow the government, but lack a coherent
political programme that offers a viable alternative to the indigenous population. In Afghanistan’s case it is likely that if NATO forces withdraw from the
country in the immediate future, the ensuing consequences will resemble
those that followed the Soviet defeat in 1989: the deaths of untold thousands in the civil wars, the reduction of Afghan society into a state of abject
poverty, and the sanctuary the Taliban gave to Al Qaeda from 1996, which
ultimately enabled the latter to plan the attacks committed in New York and
Washington DC on 11 September 2001. Any scholars or activists who claim
to care about the welfare of ordinary Afghans can surely not contemplate a
repetition of these developments.72
A second problem concerns superficial historical understanding. The
United States armed forces’ deliberate neglect of its COIN experiences after
Vietnam undoubtedly handicapped its ability to deal with insurgencies in
Afghanistan and Iraq thirty years later, but so too did the highly selective approach with which the British Army approached its own historical
record. A collective complacency affected the British officer corps regarding the supposedly inherent ability of their forces to perform complicated
missions—COIN, peace-keeping, “aid to the civil power”—in operations
short of major inter-state war, in which the Malayan Emergency assumed
an almost totemic status. Questions as to whether the conditions of the campaign would remain relevant in future COIN scenarios—or indeed whether
more benefit would be gained from studying failures such as South Arabia
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G. Hughes
rather than successes, did not occur to the British military establishment
prior to the occupation of South-Eastern Iraq in 2003–2009.73 The British
Army’s unhappy experiences in Basra showed that the UK not only lacked
the troops and resources, but also the conceptual understanding and political
judgement needed to make COIN work. The “comprehensive approach” was
absent in Whitehall, whilst a doctrine that stipulated that the armed forces
were accountable to political authority did not explain to whom troops were
accountable if, as was the case with the national government in Baghdad and
the provincial authorities in Basra, the host nation was affected by political
infighting and fragmentation.74
A third conceptual challenge relates to the coalition environment.
Generals Gerald Templer, Maurice Challe, and William Westmoreland only
had to answer to their own governments, and commanded forces either exclusively or predominantly drawn from national militaries. The same cannot be
said of NATO in Afghanistan, where certain contingents operate under national
caveats and restricted rules of engagement imposed by their own governments. There are, of course, historical sensitivities that explain why the Italian,
German, and Spanish governments and armed forces shy away from COIN,
and the fragile state of public support within European NATO member states
for the Afghan mission should be borne in mind. Nonetheless, the strategic
co-ordination of political objectives with both non-military and military means
becomes far harder in cases where COIN is waged by a coalition.75
A fourth issue concerns the profound misunderstanding of what “hearts
and minds” can achieve. There may be cases where all the civic action programmes that money can afford will not overcome basic popular resentment,
as the Chinese authorities are currently discovering in Tibet, decades after
the end of insurgent activity. In other cases, “hearts and minds” operations
often fail because they are not backed by sufficient force to support them.
Even in cases where the government side can boost popular support—
and perhaps “turn” some insurgents—through socio-economic reforms, a
hard-core of the insurgency will continue to fight. The latter’s ideological
certitude, whether based on Marxism-Leninism, or militant religious extremism, cannot be overcome by aid packages or dollars. COIN is war, and the
government side needs to have a capacity for “counter-coercion”, which
can defeat the efforts by hard-core insurgents to intimidate the civil populace. The key factor in ensuring popular support for either an insurgency or
its enemies—the government, and any external backers—is often the local
community’s perception of which side will ultimately prevail. Civil action
programmes will fail if the counter-insurgent side cannot concurrently promote the security of the civilian population. Afghans will not send their
children to school if they believe that they will be subjected to insurgent
reprisals as a result.76
The fifth challenge concerns support for any indigenous government
and its security forces. External allies providing advice and military assistance
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159
to host regimes do not necessarily have the advantage of working with
leaders either willing or able to implement much-needed socio-economic
reforms. Indigenous troops or police can also inflict abuses against the
civilian population, as demonstrated by the propensity of the Afghan police
to extort money from travellers at checkpoints, and Western militaries may
end up creating security forces dominated by specific ethnic groups or
clans. In Afghanistan, the Afghan National Army (ANA) could become a
force of Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara troops, thereby contributing to Pashtun
grievances at loss of status and disenfranchisement. Furthermore, many of
its recruits have experienced warfare from the Soviet occupation onwards,
and their methods, which include the execution of Taliban prisoners, reflect
the experiences of a prolonged and often savage civil war.77
The sixth problem concerns how COIN can be conducted alongside the
concurrent establishment of indigenous governing institutions. In Cold War
cases, notably in the context of decolonisation, the counter-insurgent side
did at least have an administrative framework and existing security forces to
work with; even if, as was the case of successive South Vietnamese regimes,
these were inherently corrupt and decrepit. The key problem with concepts
of “stabilisation” is that it takes a prolonged period of time to develop efficient indigenous government and effective local security forces. For all the
excesses of the Baathist era, Iraq at least had a legacy of central administration and a widespread social understanding of national unity, at least
amongst its Arab population. Neither of these applies to Afghanistan now,
and the problem for the United States, NATO, the UN, and other parties
involved in the “state-building” process is that they are trying to establish
institutions of governance that were feeble even before the Soviet intervention, and at a time when domestic will in the intervening states is becoming
progressively weaker.78
Finally, the enemy-centric approach to COIN still exists, and both the
Sri Lankan and Russian governments argue that their defeat of, respectively,
the Tamil and Chechen insurgencies shows that insurgents can be crushed
by military force. Enemy-centric tactics are often the default model for the
armed forces of any state, including liberal democracies that neglect COIN
doctrine, as demonstrated by the United States Army’s counter-productive
methods in the first two years of the occupation of Iraq. There will always
be a temptation for even democratic governments to abandon legal and
ethical norms whenever insurgents or terrorists are perceived as an existential threat, adopting policies such as the Bush administration’s “enhanced
interrogation” techniques. which have potentially disastrous consequences
both for a state’s international reputation and its constitutional framework.79
The fact that the international community is still dealing with the long-term
consequences of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan demonstrates that
enemy-centric COIN not only makes systematic violations of the laws of
war more likely, but also that, in the long-term, such an approach can have
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unanticipated consequences for international peace and security, contributing to cases of state failure which are too destabilising to ignore, but which
are also too troublesome to resolve.80
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NOTES
Some of the content of this article derives from conversations and debates over COIN with colleagues
from the Defence Studies Department, notably Huw Bennett, Warren Chin, Patrick Porter, and Christian
Tripodi. The analysis, opinions and conclusions expressed or implied are those of the author and do
not necessarily represent the views of the JSCSC, the Defence Academy, the Ministry of Defence, or any
other UK government agency.
1. “From Insurgency to Insurrection,” Economist (22 August 2009); “McChrystal in the Bull Ring,”
Economist (5 September 2009); David Martin-Jones and M.L.R. Smith, “Whose Hearts and Whose Minds?
The Curious Case of Global Counter-Insurgency,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 33(2010), pp. 81–121.
General McChrystal was relieved of his command after the magazine Rolling Stone published slighting
remarks made by him and his staff against President Barack Obama and members of his Administration.
“More Than a One-man Problem,” Economist (26 June 2010).
2. “A failure in Generalship,” Armed Forces Journal, ( 27 April 2007): www.armedforces
journal.com/2007/05/2635198. For the current debate within the US Army, see John Nagl, “Let’s Win
the Wars We’re In”; Gian Gentile, “Let’s Build an Army to Win all Wars,” Joint Forces Quarterly, 52(2009),
pp. 20–33.
3. The US Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2007); Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: the Art of War in the Modern World (London, 2006), pp.
1–28.
4. Austin Long, “The Anbar Awakening,” Survival 5/2 (2008), 67–94; Matthew B. Arnold, “The US
‘Surge’ as a Collaborative Corrective for Iraq,” RUSI Journal, 153/2 (2008), pp. 24–29.
5. Frank Hoffman, “Neo-Classical Counterinsurgency?” Parameters 37/2 (2007), pp. 71–87. Gian
Gentile, “A Strategy of Tactics: Population-centric COIN and the Army,” Parameters 39/3 (2009), 5–17.
6. Simon Jenkins, “Obama Must Call off this Folly before Afghanistan Becomes his Vietnam,”
Guardian (25 June 2009). Stephen Biddle dissects the Vietnam analogy with reference to Iraq in “Seeing
Baghdad, Thinking Saigon,” Foreign Affairs 85/2 (2006), pp. 2–14.
7. Lawrence Freedman and Geraint Hughes, “Strategy,” in Saki Dockrill and Geraint Hughes,
Advances in Cold War History (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 130–65.
8. Tim Jones, “The British Army and Counter-Guerrilla Warfare in Greece, 1945–1949,” Small Wars
and Insurgencies, 8(1997), pp. 88–106; Beatrice Heuser, Western “Containment” Policies in the Cold War:
the Yugoslav Case 1948–53 (London, 1989), pp. 26–35.
9. Ian Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies: Guerrillas and Their Opponents
Since 1750 (London, 2001); Anthony James Joes, Resisting Rebellion: the History and Politics of
Counterinsurgency (Lexington, KY, 2006); Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian, eds., Counterinsurgency
in Modern Warfare (Oxford, 2008); Bard O’Neill, Insurgency and Terrorism: Inside Modern Revolutionary
Warfare (London, 1990).
10. Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounter: the Chinese Civil War, 1945–1950 (Stanford, CA, 2003).
Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy (New York, 1972).
11. Michael T. Flynn, Matt Pottinger and Paul D. Batchelor, Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for
Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan (Washington DC, 2010): www.cnas.org/files/documents/
publications/AfghanIntel_Flynn_Jan2010_code507_voices.pdf;
Henry
Kissinger,
“The
Vietnam
Negotiations,” Foreign Affairs 47(1969), pp. 211–34.
12. Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge, 2008); Assis Malaquias,
“Angola: How to Lose a Guerrilla War,” in Morten Boas and Kevin C. Dunn, eds., African Guerrillas:
Raging Against the Machine (Boulder, CO, 2007), pp. 200–10.
13. Philip W. Blood, Hitler’s Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe (Dulles
VA, 2007); Gareth Stansfield, Iraq (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 112–16.
14. David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
(London, 2009), pp. 1–38.
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The Cold War and Counter-Insurgency
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15. Huw Bennett, “‘A Very Salutary Effect’: The Counter-Terror Strategy in the Early Malayan
Emergency, June 1948 to December 1949,” Journal of Strategic Studies 32(2009), pp. 415–44.
16. Christian Tripodi, “Enlightened Pacification: Imperial Precedents for Current Stabilisation
Operations,” Defence Studies 10(2010), pp. 36–70.
17. C.E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (Lincoln, NE, 1996). The “savages”
quote is p. 249.
18. C.W. Gwynn, Imperial Policing (London, 1934), pp. 1–33.
19. Charles Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century (London,
1986), pp. 51–67, 93–99.
20. United States Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual (Washington, DC, 1940).
21. Carl von Clausewitz [trans. J. J. Graham], On War, Book VI (London, 1997), pp. 308–15.
22. T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Wordsworth, 1997), pp. 177–86, 327–30; John Shy and
Thomas Collier, “Revolutionary War,” in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to
the Nuclear Age (Princeton:, NJ, 1986), pp. 830–45.
23. Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind. The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan,
1941–1945 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 677–731. Martin Meredith, The State of Africa: a History of Fifty Years of
Independence (London, 2005), pp. 66–69, 90–92.
24. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our
Times (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 73–109; Frantz Fanon (introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre), The Wretched of
the Earth (London, 1965).
25. Michelle Sieff, “Nasser’s Legacy: Pushing Anti-Zionism in Africa,” “Z Word,” August
2008: www.z-word.com/z-word-essays/nasser%25E2%2580%2599s-legacy%253A–pushing-anti-zionismin-africa.html; Kenneth Young, Sir Alec Douglas-Home (London, 1970), pp. 137–40.
26. Richard Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London,
2002), pp. 514.
27. William Taubman, Khrushchev (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), pp. 486–88; Odd Arne
Westad et al., eds., 77 Conversations Between Chinese and Foreign Leaders on the War in Indochina,
1964–77, Cold War International History Project Working Paper 22 (Washington DC, 1998).
28. Ché Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare (London: Souvenir Press, 2003); Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting
Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–76 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002).
29. Westad, Cold War, pp. 245; Geraint Hughes, “A ‘Model Campaign’ Reappraised: the CounterInsurgency War in Dhofar, Oman, 1965–1975,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 32(2009), pp. 271–305.
30. Frank Kitson, Bunch of Five (London, 1977); Kitson, Low Intensity Operations (London, 1991);
Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency (London, 1972).
31. Ashley Jackson, “British Counter-insurgency in History,” British Army Review, 139(2006), pp.
12–22; Jonathan Walker, Aden Insurgency: The Savage War in South Arabia (Staplehurst, 2005).
32. David Galula, Counter-Insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (London, 1964), pp. 7–8,
87–135; Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare (New York, 1964).
33. Etienne de Durand, “France,” in Thomas Rid and Thomas Keaney, eds., Understanding
Counterinsurgency: Doctrine, Operations and Challenges (London, 2010), pp. 11–27.
34. Lou DiMarco, “Losing the Moral Compass: Torture and Guerre Révolutionnaire in the Algerian
War,” Parameters, 36/ 2 (2006), pp. 63–76.
35. See Robert L. Miller’s introduction to Paul Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah (New York,
2006); Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (Basingstoke, 2002).
36. John P. Cann, Counterinsurgency in Africa: the Portuguese Way of War, 1961–1974 (Westport,
CT, 1997); Vladimir Shubin, “Unsung Heroes: The Soviet Military and the Liberation of Southern Africa,”
and Piero Glejeses, “Cuba and the Independence of Namibia,” Cold War History 7(2007), pp. 251–62,
285–304.
37. John W. Turner, Continent Ablaze: the Insurgency wars in Africa, 1960 to the Present (London,
1998), pp. 16–99.
38. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York,
2002); Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: the Failure of US Counterinsurgency Policy (Princeton, NJ,
1988); Westad, Cold War, pp. 8–36.
39. David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson and the Origins of the Vietnam War
(Cambridge, MA, 2000); Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
(London, 1990), p. 317.
40. Frank Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars (Arlington, VA, 2007).
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41. Andrew Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore, MD, 1986); Dale Andrade,
“Westmoreland was Right: Learning the Wrong Lessons from the Vietnam War,” Small Wars and
Insurgencies, 19/2 (2008), pp. 145–81.
42. William Duiker, Sacred War and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam (New York, 1995).
43. Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai: A War Crime and Its Aftermath (London,
1992). This is evident also in the controversy over United States and South Vietnamese COIN tactics, 1968–
72: Mark Moyar, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam
(Lincoln, NE, 2007).
44. Gerard DeGroot, A Noble Cause? America and the Vietnam War (London, 2000), 359; Noam
Chomsky and Edward Herman, “Distortions at Fourth Hand,” The Nation (6 June 1977).
45. Eva-Lotte E. Hedman, “Late Imperial Romance: Magsaysay, Lansdale and the Philippine–
American ‘Special Relationship’,” Intelligence & National Security, 14/4 (1999), pp. 181–94.
46. Daniel Byman, “Friends Like These: Counterinsurgency and the War on Terrorism,”
International Security, 31/2 (2006), pp. 79–115; Todd Greentree, Crossroads of Insurgency: Insurgency
and Counterinsurgency Lessons from Central America (Westport, CT, 2008), pp. 73–108.
47. Carlotta Gall, “In Remote Pakistan Province, a Civil War Festers,” New York Times (2 April
2006); James Hider, “Yemen Forces ‘Shoot al-Qaeda Militants’ as Country Nears Ruin,” The Times (4
January 2010).
48. Richard Lock-Pullan, US Intervention Policy and Army Innovation: from Vietnam to Iraq
(London, 2006); Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and
Occupation of Iraq (London, 2006), pp. 138–63.
49. Perry Anderson, “Renewals,” New Left Review (January–February 2000), pp. 5–24; “Samir alKhalil” [Kanan Makiya], Republic of Fear: The Inside Story of Saddam’s Iraq (London, 1991), pp. 216–28.
50. Thomas A. Marks, Insurgency in Nepal (Carlisle PA, 2003); P. V. Ramana, “Red Storm Rising:
India’s Intractable Maoist Insurgency,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, 20/6 (2008), pp. 14–19.
51. R. J. Crampton, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century (London, 1994), pp. 240–51; Zoltan
D. Barany, Soldiers and Politics in Eastern Europe, 1945–90: The Case of Hungary (Basingstoke, 1993),
pp. 6–23.
52. Norman Davies, Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland (Oxford, 1986), pp. 412–16; Alex
Marshall, “Turkfront: Frunze and the Development of Soviet Counter-insurgency in Central Asia,” in Tom
Everett-Heath, ed., Central Asia: Aspects of Transition (London, 2003), pp. 5–29.
53. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the
Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (London, 2005), p. 41.
54. Thomas A. Marks, Maoist Insurgency since Vietnam (London, 1996), pp. 279–80.
55. Gilles Kepel, Jihad, Expansion et déclin de l’islamisme (Paris, 2003), p. 389–419; Lawrence
Wright, “The Rebellion Within,” New Yorker (2 June 2008).
56. Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: on Secret Service in High Asia (Oxford, 1990), p. 407; Ian
Beckett, The Roots of Counter-Insurgency: Armies and Guerrilla Warfare (London, 1988), pp. 83–101.
57. Stephen Dorril, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations (London, 2001), 278; Yuri Zhukov,
“Examining the Authoritarian Model of Counter-Insurgency: the Soviet Campaign Against the Ukrainian
Insurgent Army,” Small Wars and Insurgencies, 18(2007), p. 454.
58. Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to
Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA, 1996), pp. 162–63, 186–87; Crampton, Eastern Europe, pp. 407–09.
59. John Kenneth Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War. America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival
(New York, 1999), pp. 127–310.
60. Fernando Andresen Guimaraes, The Origins of the Angolan Civil War: Foreign Intervention and
Domestic Political Conflict (Basingstoke, 1998).
61. William Finnegan, A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique (Berkeley, CA, 1992);
William Minter, Apartheid’s Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique
(London, 1994).
62. Edward George, The Cuban Intervention in Angola, 1965–1991: From Ché Guevara to Cuito
Cuanavale (London, 2005), pp. 116–23.
63. Grant Evans and Kelvin Rowley, Red Brotherhood at War: Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos Since
1975 (London, 1990), pp. 201–30; Meredith, Africa, pp. 331–43.
64. Scott McMichael, Stumbling Bear: Soviet Military Performance in Afghanistan (London, 1991);
William Maley, The Afghanistan Wars (Basingstoke, 2002).
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65. Counterinsurgency Field Manual, passim; JP3-40, Security and Stabilisation: The
Military Contribution (London, 2009): www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/C403A6C7-E72C-445E-824611002D7A852/0/20091201jdp_40UDCDCIMAPPS.pdf.
66. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, p. 31. Geraint Hughes and Christian Tripodi, “Anatomy of
a Surrogate: Historical Precedents and Implications for Contemporary Counter-insurgency and Counterterrorism,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 20(2009), pp. 4, 6.
67. Bernard B. Fall, “The Theory and Practice of Counterinsurgency,” Naval War College Review,
(1998), pp. 46–57 [reprinted from April 1965]
68. Michael Klare and Peter Kornbluh, eds., Low Intensity Warfare: How the USA Fights Wars without Declaring Them (London, 1989); Eric Herring and Glen Rangwala, Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation
and its Legacy (London, 2006), pp. 172–206.
69. “The University on the Make,” Ramparts (April 1966): www.cia-on-campus.org/msu.edu/
msu.html; Montgomery McFate, “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of their Curious
Relationship,” Military Review (March/April 2006), pp. 24–38.
70. See the NCA’s “Frequently Asked Questions”: http://concerned.anthropologists.googlepages.
com/faq.
71. John Mackinlay, “Globalisation and Insurgency,” Adelphi Paper 352 (Oxford, 2002).
72. Barnett Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (New Haven, CT, 2002), pp. ix–xxxv, 1–15,
246–80; “Resolution passed by 200 Women’s Rights and Afghan Civil Society Organizations,” 29 January
2010: http://nawaaye-afghanistan.net/spip.php?article10773.
73. “Losing Their Way?” The Economist (31 January 2009); Warren Chin, “Why Did It All Go Wrong?
Reassessing British counterinsurgency in Iraq,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, 2/4 (2008), pp. 119–35.
74. James K. Wither, “Basra’s not Belfast: The British Army, ‘Small Wars,’ and Iraq,” Small Wars
and Insurgencies, 20/3 (2009), pp. 611–35.
75. Timo Noetzel and Benjamin Schreer, “NATO’s Vietnam? Afghanistan and the Future of the
Atlantic Alliance,” Contemporary Security Policy, 30(2009), pp. 529–47.
76. Lawrence Freedman, “The Transformation of Strategic Affairs,” Adelphi Paper 379 (London,
2006), p. 84; “Pilgrims and Progress,” The Economist (6 February 2010); Jones and Smith, “CounterInsurgency,” pp. 92, 103–05.
77. “Get out of the way,” The Economist (13 February 2010); Douglas Beattie, Task Force Helmand
(New York, 2009), pp. 237–53; Patrick Hennessey, The Junior Officers’ Reading Club: Killing Time and
Fighting Wars (London, 2010), pp. 16–24.
78. Noetzel and Schreer, “NATO’s Vietnam?”; “Dutch Confirm Afghan Troop Pullout Sparking Fears
of Domino Effect,” The Times (22 February 2010).
79. Lawrence Freedman, A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East (London, 2009),
pp. 395–96.
80. Newsnight Special, “A Fighting Future?” BBC2 (23 February 2010): http://news.bbc.co.uk/
1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8533978.stm.