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Fighting Fire with Fire? How (Not) to Neutralize an Insurgency

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 9; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13698240701699482

1743-968X

Michael G. Findley, Joseph K. Young,

Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence

Abstract From as early as the Roman Empire to the present day, governments have grappled with how best to respond to political violence from organized insurgent groups. In response to insurgent groups, some governments have emphasized a direct military response or what is often called 'attrition'. Other states have stressed a softer, political strategy or what is often called the 'hearts and minds' approach. Either approach places the population at the center of a struggle between the government and violent dissidents. Despite numerous works emphasizing either 'attrition' or 'hearts and minds', few theoretical studies have attempted to compare their relative success. Using an agent-based computational model, we examine which approach is more successful at quelling insurgencies and find that a hearts and minds approach is superior to an attrition strategy. We illustrate the model with insights from the Iraqi insurgency and, more generally, the model has implications for other insurgencies, such as in Chechnya. Notes 1. For a review of various metrics to assess the war on terror see Daniel Byman, 'Measuring the Effectiveness of the War on Terrorism: A First Look', presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 28–31 Aug. 2003. 2. Donald Rumsfeld, 'Global War on Terror', memo, 16 Oct. 2003 < www.usatoday.com/news/washington/executive/rumsfeld-memo.htm>. 3. For examples of other work, see T. David Mason, 'Insurgency, Counterinsurgency, and the Rational Peasant', Public Choice 86 (1996) pp.63–83. 4. James D. Fearon and David Laitin, 'Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War', American Political Science Review 97/1 (2003) pp.75–90. 5. Insurgency as described by the Central Intelligence Agency is divided into several components. First, it is a protracted political–military action aimed at total or partial control of the state apparatus. Second, this action is pursued through the use of irregular armies and 'illegal' political entities. Third, actions carried out by these groups include warfare, terrorism, and political mobilization aimed at creating propaganda to delegitimize the current authorities while increasing the legitimacy of the insurgent group. Fourth, the common thread of all insurgent groups is the desire to control a particular area. See Central Intelligence Agency, Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency (Washington DC: CIA Publication nd). 6. In contrast, Bard O'Neill's definition of insurgency is a 'struggle between a non-ruling group and the ruling authorities in which the non-ruling group consciously uses political resources (e.g., organizational expertise, propaganda, and demonstrations) and violence to destroy, reformulate, or sustain the basis of legitimacy of one or more aspects of politics'. This definition mirrors the key points of the CIA definition while including specific tactics and resources employed in the struggle. O'Neill's extension into tactics later helps decipher types of insurgency which leads to policy implications for dealing with each type. See Bard O'Neill, Insurgency and Terrorism (Dulles, VA: Brassey's 1990). 7. Contrary to public perceptions, guerrilla warfare is not a modern creation. It has a long, illustrious history reaching back to Asia as early as the fifteenth century BC. Modern times, however, have seen a proliferation of guerrilla warfare as small wars have blazed across the globe as practitioners have written influential treatises For examples, see Ernesto (Che) Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books 1969); Vo Nguyen Giap, People's War, People's Army Military Review (Honolulu: UP of the Pacific 2001); Mao Tse-tung, On Guerrilla Warfare (New York: Praeger 1961); Carlos Marighella, For the Liberation of Brazil (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books 1971). 8. The US State Dept. defines terrorism as, 'premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience'. Accessed March 2005 at < www.cia.gov/terrorism/faqs.html>. 9. See Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr, Rebellion and Authority (Chicago: Markham Publishing/ RAND Corp. 1970) pp.3–4. Leites and Wolf claim that the terms insurgents and counterinsurgents are vague and evoke strong feelings. They argue 'rebellion' and 'authority' are 'more accurate' and 'less partisan'. 10. NATO defines counterinsurgency as 'those military, paramilitary, political, economical, psychological and civic actions taken to defeat an insurgency'. US Dept. of Defense 'Counterinsurgency' (2003) < www.answers.com/topic/counterinsurgency>. Military and political means are both important in defining the operations of a counterinsurgent. During the Cold War, counterinsurgency was equated with counter-communism. Focus on ideology rather than commonality in insurgency across regions and across time led to inaccurate solutions to a possibly systemic problem. See D. Michael Shafer, 'The Unlearned Lessons of Counterinsurgency', Political Science Quarterly 103/1 (1988) pp.57–80. 11. Daniel Byman, Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements (Washington DC: RAND 2001). Also see Paul Staniland, 'Defeating Transnational Insurgencies: The Best Offense is a Good Fence', Washington Quarterly 29/1 (2005) pp.21–40. 12. Eric Wendt, 'Strategic Counterinsurgency Modeling', Special Warfare 18/2 (2005) pp.2–12. 13. Eric Wendt, 'Strategic Counterinsurgency Modeling', Special Warfare 18/2 (2005) pp.2–12 14. Within a particular strategy, tactics that both persuade and punish are used. When we refer to a state following an attrition strategy, we assume that a majority of the tactics employed impose costs while when a hearts and minds strategy is used, most tactics provide benefits to the population. As stated earlier, most counterinsurgency campaigns mix tactics and thus each strategy we outline is an ideal type. 15. Shafer (note 10). 16. Robert M. Cassidy, 'Back to the Streets Without Joy: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Vietnam and Other Small Wars', Parameters 34/2 (Summer 2004) pp.73–83; Robert R. Tomes, 'Relearning Counterinsurgency Warfare', Parameters 34/1 (Spring 2004) pp.16–28. 17. Julia A. Heath, T. David Mason, William T. Smith, and Joseph P. Weingarten, 'The Calculus of Fear: Revolution, Repression, and the Rational Peasant', Social Science Quarterly 81/2 (2000) pp.622–33. 18. Some other notable examples of this approach include Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (New York: Praeger 1964) and Susan L. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media, and Colonial Counter-Insurgency 1944–1960 (London: Leicester UP 1995). Trinquier argues that the French experience in Algeria could directly be related to its inability to win the allegiance of the indigenous people. In a study of the British historical experience with insurgency, Carruthers argues that counterinsurgency should target the hearts and minds of both the target population as well as the population of the aggressor state. 19. Gavin Bulloch, 'Military Doctrine and Counterinsurgency: A British Perspective', Parameters 26/2 Summer (1996) pp.4–16. 20. Austin Long, On Other War: Lessons from Five Decades of Rand Counterinsurgency Research (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corp. 2006). 21. Leites and Wolf (note 9), 1970. 22. Leites and Wolf (note 9), 1970 pp.20–1. 23. David Galula, Counter-insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (New York: Praeger 1964) p.70. 24. Rarely is only one of these strategies employed in isolation, but usually one is more prominent than the other. In general, our claims refer to campaigns that greatly privilege one approach above the other. 25. Fearon and Laitin (note 4), 2003. 26. Mason (note 3); T. David Mason, Caught in the Crossfire: Revolutions, Repression, and the Rational Peasant (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2004). 27. Norma J. Kriger, Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices (Cambridge, UK: CUP 1992). 28. Leites and Wolf (note 9). 29. Inputs for their model included people, food, material, information and other similar items needed to sustain a rebellion. Outputs are the activities of the guerrillas aimed at destabilizing the regime. Inputs must be converted and combined to make the outputs. According to this perspective, the supply chain can be broken at this point (Ibid. p.35). 30. Richard Shultz, 'Breaking the Will of the Enemy during the Vietnam War: The Operationalization of the Cost-Benefit Model of Counterinsurgency Warfare', Journal of Peace Research 15/2 (1978) pp.109–29. 31. Ian F. Beckett, Encyclopedia of Guerrilla Warfare (New York: Checkmark Books 2001). 32. This approach, of course, is morally repugnant and most likely infeasible in today's world of 24-hour news coverage and especially for modern democracies. (See Edward N. Luttwak, 'Dead End: Counterinsurgency Warfare as Military Malpractice', Harper's 314 (2007) pp.33–42.) Limited attrition is a more likely strategy. 33. Mao Tse-tung (note 7) p.93. 34. To reiterate, these are not mutually exclusive options, but often one is privileged over the other. 35. Galula (note 23) p.70 suggests classifying areas according to their degree of insurgent control. Red areas are insurgent strongholds, pink areas contested, and white areas are controlled by the government. For Galula, counterinsurgents should then attempt to make red areas pink and pink areas white. 36. Scott Peterson, 'Friend and foe blurred on urban streets', Christian Science Monitor, 15 Nov. 2004, < www.csmonitor.com/2004/1115/p01s01-woiq.html>. 37. O'Neill (note 6), 1990; T. David Mason and Dale A. Krane, 'The Political Economy of Death Squads: Towards a Theory of the Impact of State-Sanctioned Terror', International Studies Quarterly 33/2 pp.175–198;. Heath et al. (note 17) pp.622–33. 38. This is consistent with what Wendt (note 12) calls the 'Area-of-Influence Model' of counterinsurgency. 39. Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes Since 1956 (Princeton UP 1992). 40. Ronald J. Deibert and Janice G. Stein, 'Hacking Networks of Terror', Dialogue IO 1/1 (2002) pp.1–14 41. This contact has traditionally been physical, but as we mention above, contact may also be virtual. 42. Mason and Krane (note 37), 1989; Bulloch (note 19); Andrew Krepinevich, 'The War in Iraq: The Nature of Insurgency Warfare', 2 June 2004, < www.csbaonline.org/cgi-local/pubfind.cgi?PubCategory = Homeland+Security&no_top>. 43. Stathis Kalyvas, 'The Logic of Massacres in Algeria', Rationality and Society 11/3 (1999) pp.243–85. 44. Timur Kuran, 'Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989', World Politics 44 (Oct. 1991) pp.7–48; Ravi Bhavnani and David Backer, 'Localized Ethnic Conflict and Genocide: Accounting for Differences in Rwanda and Burundi', Journal of Conflict Resolution 44/3 (2000) pp.283–306; Lars-Erik Cederman, 'Articulating the Geo-Cultural Logic of Nationalist Insurgency', 'Origins and Patterns of Political Violence I: Violence in Civil Wars' Workshop, Santa Fe Institute, NM, 16–18 Jan. 2004). For a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of agent-based models, see Lars-Erik Cederman, Emergent Actors in World Politics: How States and Nations Develop and Dissolve (Princeton UP 1997) pp.49–69. Our model, although not comprehensive nor free of shortcomings, provides a useful perspective on insurgency and counterinsurgency. 45. Parameters are varied one at a time to control for all other factors. 46. A summary of notation used in the model appears in Table 1. 47. Galula (note 23) pp.75–6. 48. Our model assumes that 'nature' provides a small number of insurgents initially. In other words, our model does not attempt to explain the onset of insurgency or the reasons individuals initially choose to mobilize an insurgency. Recall that we suggested earlier that factors such as ideology or identity might serve as underlying sources of commitment to an insurgent movement, but such concerns are beyond the scope of this paper. 49. Mark I. Lichbach, The Rebel's Dilemma (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press 1995). 50. T.E. Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia, similarly observed, 'rebellion can be made by two per cent active in a striking force, and 98 per cent passively sympathetic'. Cited in Andrew Krepinevich Jr, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP 1986) p.9. 51. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1965). 52. Gordon Tullock, 'The Paradox of Revolution', Public Choice 11 (1971) pp.89–99. 53. Krepinevich (note 42). 54. Lichbach (note 49). 55. Where represents a uniform distribution and represents a normal distribution. For and to ensure that at 3 standard deviations out on either side, 99+ per cent of . Any or are rounded to zero and one respectively. These are rare. 56. This can also be conceptualized as having a commitment to an opposite ideology, different goals, or alternative leadership. 57. These distributional choices are justifiable on both modeling and empirical grounds. Whether the insurgents or counterinsurgents are distributed uniformly or normally is going to matter little, because the distribution is in such a small range (0–0.2). For the population, empirically there is reason to argue that the vast majority of the people are (and remain) in the middle and support the side they expect will win (Krepinevich [note 42]). Thus assuming a normal distribution is well-justified. 58. Others also allow vision to vary across agent types (e.g., Joshua Epstein, 'Modeling Civil Violence: An Agent-based Computational Approach', Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 99/3 pp.7243–50). For tractability, we assume that members of the population do not have any vision. They move randomly in all cases. 59. Its new level of commitment is based on the initial distribution of commitment in each experimental condition. 60. Changing groups might similarly be thought of as 'tag-flipping' (Joshua Epstein and Robert Axtell, Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science From the Bottom Up [Washington DC: The Brookings Institute Press 1996]). 61. For tractability in the model, we do not allow the population to provide benefits or costs to either insurgents or counterinsurgents. In reality, members of the population perform this role, but because they do so for both insurgents and counterinsurgents, we assume that the provision of benefits and costs 'washes out'. Accordingly, members of the population always move randomly. Finally, and also for tractability, intragroup interaction is prohibited. 62. This is also justifiable, because members of the population are not likely to demonstrate large fluctuations in their commitment in the short run. Over time, agents could certainly fluctuate widely, and our model captures that. We conducted 'sensitivity analysis' wherein agents' responsiveness is distributed higher: and . We explicitly vary this range to gauge its effect on the key parameters and note the effect in the experimental results section. 63. Mason (note 26) p.169. 64. This is consistent with Kalyvas (note 43). 65. Mason (note 26), p.159. 66. Christopher Ford, 'Speak No Evil: Targeting a Population's Neutrality to Defeat an Insurgency', Parameters 35/2 (2005) pp.51–66. 67. In addition to theoretical reasons for allowing insurgents to neutralize the population, this mechanism creates more symmetry between the effects of counterinsurgent and insurgent cost strategies, by allowing insurgents to swing support for the counterinsurgency back in favor of the insurgency, just as counterinsurgents are able to neutralize insurgents. 68. Note that we conduct sensitivity analysis altering the vision of counterinsurgents and insurgents, the responsiveness of population members, the threshold for joining the insurgency, and the algorithm for searching in one's neighborhood. We find that, in all cases, changes in the number of insurgents occur, but these changes are confined to increases or decreases that are comparable. In other words, although absolute numbers change, the comparative dynamics are stable across sensitivity analysis, thereby allowing us to make robust conclusions about how the costs and benefits strategies relate to each other. For example, higher responsiveness leads to proportionally greater insurgents, but the comparative relationship between the costs and benefits strategies remains similar. 69. Recall that low, normal, and high commitment simply refer to a distribution (1) skewed such that most of the population has a low level, (2) not skewed such that the population is in the middle, and (3) skewed such that most of the population has a high level of commitment ex ante. 70. The results of Experiments 3 and 4 also relate to Proposition 3 in that we explore the effects of increasing the level of commitment to moderate levels. 71. Cited in Richard Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960 (Oxford: OUP 1991) p.259. 72. Ellen Knickmeyer, 'Bombing Shatters Mosque in Iraq', Washington Post, 26 Feb. 2006, < www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/22/AR2006022200454.html>. 73. Peter Eisler and Tom Squitieri, 'Foreign Detainees are few in Iraq', USA Today, 6 July 2004, < www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-07-05-detainees-usat_x.htm>. 74. Bloom, for example, argues that the presence of multiple groups leads to 'outbidding' or an increase in violent actions by groups to attract supporters away from rival insurgent groups. See Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia UP 2005). 75. We conceive of a case as a particular 'phenomenon for which we report and interpret only a single measure on any pertinent variable' (Harry Eckstein, 'Case Study and Theory in Political Science', in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby [eds.], Handbook of Political Science V. 1: Scope and Theory [Reading, MA: Addison Wesley 1975] p.85). 76. We could increase the number of observations by disaggregating these three groups as well. For parsimony, we only discuss these three cases. 77. An even smaller portion of Sunnis from Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, enjoyed a disproportionate share of government power and wealth. 78. John Karl, 'Insurgency Gains Alarming Support Among Iraq's Sunni Muslims', ABC News, 19 June < http:abcnews.go.com/WNT/stoty? id = 2470183>. 79. James D. Fearon, 'Commitment Problems and the Spread of Ethnic Conflict', in David Lake and Donald Rothchild (eds.), The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear, Diffusion, and Escalation (Princeton UP 1998). 80. Rory McCarthy, 'Uneasy Truce in the City of the Ghosts', The Guardian, < www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,1202143,00.html>. 81. Jim Miklaszewski, 'Still Locked Down, Fallujah Slow to Rebuild', MSNBC, 14 April 2005, < http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7503610>. 82. Based on reports by the US Defense Dept. on the average number of attacks by insurgents per month. 83. Lisa Burgess and Jeff Schogol, 'Pentagon Report: Insurgent attacks Hit Postwar High', Stars and Stripes (2006), < http://stripes.com/article.asp? section = 104&article = 34434&archive = true>. 84. USA Today/ABC news poll, 4 March 2007. The margin of error is 2.5 per cent. 85. 'Al Sadr back with call for US forces to leave', The Herald, 18 Oct. 2007, Web issue 2968, Glasgow, UK < http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/foreign/display.var.1428567.0.0.php>. 86. Jill Carroll, 'Sadr's Militia's New Muscle in South', Christian Science Monitor, 21 Sept. 2005, < www.csmonitor.com/2005/0921/p01s03-woiq.htm>. 87. A notable exception is the work of Mason (note 3), although he uses decision-theoretic models focused on the population member's decision to join or not. Thus, there is not explicit modeling of the insurgent or counterinsurgent choices. 88. Shafer (note 10); Mason (note 26). 89. Kalyvas (note 43).