Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Counter-insurgency, Victorian Style

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 54; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00396338.2012.709395

1468-2699

David Betz,

Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East

Abstract Charles Callwell’s classic Small Wars, first published in 1896, is today more frequently footnoted than quoted (or read). Yet much that he has to say can be usefully applied to modern campaigns. Notes Counterinsurgency Field Manual, FM 3-24 (Washington DC: Headquarters, Department of the Army, 2006). The standard account of the ‘surge’ (in which the writing of FM 3-24 plays a major role) can be found in Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble: General Petraeus and the Untold Story of the Surge in Iraq, 2006–2008 (London: Allen Lane, 2009). James Baker et al., Iraq Study Group Report (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace, December 2006), p. 6. See David Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the US Military for Modern Wars (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009), Chapter VI and passim. Among the writings reworked by the manual are Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency (St Petersburg, FL: Hailer Publishing, 2005); and David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (London: Praeger, 1964). See, for example, John Mackinlay, Globalisation and Insurgency, Adelphi Paper 352 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2005). Raymond Odierno, ‘The U.S. Army in a Time of Transition: Building a Flexible Force’, Foreign Affairs, May–June 2012, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137423/raymond-t-odierno/the-us-army-in-a-time-of-transition. FM 3-24 cites Callwell (on p. 3-33.5) in an annotated bibliography, describing him as ‘a British major general who fought in small wars in Afghanistan and the Boer War [and who] provides lessons learned that remain applicable today’. But the manual does not elaborate further, nor does it quote him directly in the text. Oddly, the United Kingdom's Army Field Manual Countering Insurgency (Warminster: Land Warfare Development Group, January 2010) does not mention him at all. In FM 3-24, ‘legitimacy’ is a constantly reiterated theme; see, in particular, p. 1-21. Ethics also has its own section in the manual, beginning on p. 7.21. On p. 7-9, the overall message is conveyed in the epigram ‘Lose Moral Legitimacy, Lose the War’, which heads a discussion on the lessons of the Algerian Civil War. Max G. Manwaring and John T. Fishel's SWORD model of counterinsurgency also puts a great deal of stock in the quality of ‘host government legitimacy’ in the outcome of such campaigns. See their ‘Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency: Toward a New Analytical Approach’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, vol. 3, no. 3, Winter 1992, pp. 272–310. See, in particular, Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, ‘Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression’, available at http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter7.shtml. See Prime Minister David Cameron, press conference in Brussels, 11 March 2011, http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/press-conference-in-brussels/. See also David Loyn, Butcher and Bolt: 200 Years of Foreign Intervention in Afghanistan (New York: Hutchinson, 2008). The ‘Pottery Barn rule’ is American jargon for ‘you break it, you buy it’. Colin Powell recalled his own formulation in a speech at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Aspen, CO, July 2007, as reported in ‘Ideas and Consequences’, The Atlantic, October 2007, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/10/ideas-and-consequences/6193/. Michael Howard addressed this notion in his essay ‘A Long War?’, Survival, vol. 48, no. 4, Winter 2006–07, pp. 7–14. See, for example, Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 2002); Branko Milanovic, ‘The Two Faces of Globalization: Against Globalization as We Know It’, World Development, vol. 31, no. 4, 2003, pp. 667–83; and Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, ‘Globalization: What's New? What's Not? (And So What?)’, Foreign Policy, no. 118, Spring 2000, pp. 104–20. On the concept of the nineteenth century as the century of invention, see Barry Buzan and Eric Herring, The Arms Dynamic in World Politics (London: Lynne Rienner, 1998), especially chapter 2. For an excellent primer on the information-technology revolution, see the BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, first broadcast in 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n4j0r. On the nineteenth century's revolutionaries, see Alex Butterworth, The World That Never Was: The True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents (London: Bodley Head, 2010). Amongst the best analyses of twenty-first-century revolutionaries is Tim Jordan and Paul Taylor's Hacktivism and Cyberwars: Rebels with a Cause? (London: Routledge, 2004). See Quinn Norton, ‘Anonymous 101: Introduction to the Lulz’, Wired, 8 November 2011, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/anonymous-101/2/; the post by David Betz and accompanying comments by Barratt Brown (the group's self-declared strategist and propagandist) and others on ‘Anonymous Spokesman Opens Nechayev's Tomb, Becomes Possessed’, Kings of War, 14 March 2011, http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2011/03/anonymous-spokesman-opensnechaevs-tomb-becomes-possessed/; and Mark Ward, ‘A Brief History of Hacking’, BBC, 9 June 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13686141. The classic work on this subject is Paul Virillio, Speed and Politics (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2006). Carl von Clausewitz (Michael Howard and Peter Paret, trans.), On War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Everyman's Library ed., 1993), p. 101. Dexter Filkins, The Forever War: Dispatches from the War on Terror (London: Bodley Head, 2008), is amongst the most poignant recent examples of literature on this subject. It could be argued that such sentiments are a universal reaction to war, with reference to such works as Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London: Penguin, 1929); or, more recently, Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (New York: Scribner, 2003). Callwell's argument might then be taken as essentially relative: small wars are especially alienating, presenting particular difficulties for soldiers attempting to place their physical and psychological sacrifices into a broader context. This is a prominent leitmotif of American soldiers' accounts of the Vietnam War, the quintessential example of which is perhaps Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976). The broader issues are addressed by Christopher Coker in ‘The Unhappy Warrior’, Historically Speaking, vol. 7, no. 4, March–April 2006, pp. 34–9. FM 3-24, p. 1-26. For a more in-depth discussion see the introduction of Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (eds), The Changing Character of Warfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), especially pp. 3–6. Quoted in Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, p. 89. But what is true for revolutionaries is true for their opponents as well, as one sees, for instance, in the words of the American counter-insurgent Colonel John Paul Vann, speaking in Vietnam in 1962 to the New York Times reporter David Halberstam: ‘This is a political war, and it calls for the utmost discrimination in killing.’ As recounted in William Prochnau, Once Upon a Distant War (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), p. 162. This was the American army's reaction to Vietnam, as explored in John Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), which makes the case that the postVietnam neglect of counter-insurgency was not accidental but purposeful. According to Nagl, the US Army set out to forget and to limit its utility as a counter-insurgent force in the hopes that this would prevent it from being used in that way again. The 1976 revision to the FM 100-5 operations manual under the direction of General William Dupuy was key to this process. See Paul Herbert, ‘Deciding What Has To Be Done: General William E. Dupuy and the 1976 Edition of FM 100-5, Operations’, Leavenworth Papers, 16 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, July 1988). Philip Gordon makes this argument in ‘Winning the Right War’, Survival, vol. 49, no. 4, Winter 2007–08, pp. 17–46. See John Mackinlay, The Insurgent Archipelago (London: Hurst, 2009), p. 190. David Betz, ‘Communication Breakdown: Strategic Communications and Defeat In Afghanistan’, Orbis, Fall 2011, pp. 613–30. Callwell is not alone in suggesting that the selection and preservation of objectives is vital to the success of any counter-insurgency campaign. Sir Robert Thompson's oft-cited counterinsurgency principles, for example, place great emphasis on the need for a clear political aim to allow for the meaningful refutation of insurgent propaganda and to effectively align the efforts of everyone involved in the campaign, whether civil or military, police or intelligence. See Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency; and FM 3-24, p. CS-2. Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 97. The Taliban has been much better at acting in a strategically coherent way over time than has NATO's International Security Assistance Force. See Alex Marshall and Tim Bird, Afghanistan: How the West Lost its Way (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). Countering Insurgency, pp. 5-4–5-8. See, for instance, the vignette provided by the commanding officer of a British Army infantry battalion in Afghanistan in ibid., p. 5-7. Academic research on the efficacy of such systems is still relatively scant. Deirdre Collings and Rafal Rohozinski's Shifting Fire: Information Effects in Counterinsurgency and Stability Operations: A Workshop Report (Carlisle Barracks, PA: US Army War College, 2006) was one of the first publications to look at the issue systematically, drawing on practitioner experience from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as well as US and British operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bing West's account of the US campaign in Iraq, The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq (New York: Random House, 2008), is the only major account to consider the role of biometrics. An unclassified US Army Center for Army Lessons Learned newsletter entitled ‘Biometrics in Support of Identity Dominance’, No. 09-35, May 2009, provides further data. See Mackinlay, The Insurgent Archipelago, p. 144. Thank you to Ryan Evans, Department of War Studies, King's College London, for these figures. See also Andrew Mackay and Steve Tatham, Behavioural Conflict: Why Understanding People and their Motivations will Prove Decisive in Future Conflict (Saffron Walden: Military Studies Press, 2011), especially pp. 58–62. ‘Interview: General David Petraeus’, PBS Frontline: ‘Kill/ Capture’, 14 June 2011, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/afghanistan-pakistan/kill-capture/interview-general-david-petraeu/. Saul David's Victoria's Wars (London: Penguin, 2007) provides an engaging account of this period. The threshold for demonstrating ‘military necessity’ under International Humanitarian Law is high. See ‘Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I)’, 8 June 1977, which prohibits, inter alia, targeting of the civilian population or objects indispensable to their survival. For further discussion of this issue see David J. Betz, ‘Redesigning Land Forces for Wars Amongst the People’, Contemporary Security Policy, vol. 28, no. 2, 2007, pp. 221–43. That said, there are always exceptions. According to Bing West in The Strongest Tribe, for example, American forces had a good deal of success in cutting insurgent ‘ratlines’ in Iraq. See Mackinlay, The Insurgent Archipelago, p. 6. The most prominent exponent of this argument is probably the software entrepreneur cum strategist John Robb, whose thinking on ‘superempowerment’ and ‘systems disruption’ as a mode of warfare is laid out in his book Brave New War (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2007), as well as on his popular blog ‘Global Guerrillas’. The essential point, however, pervades the work of contemporary security experts, from ‘Fourth Generation Warfare’ theorists such as T.X. Hammes, ‘War Evolves into the Fourth Generation’, Contemporary Security Policy, vol. 26, no. 2, 2005, pp. 189–221, to prophets of cyber power such as Richard Clarke, Cyberwar: The Next Threat to National Security and What to do About It (New York: Harper Collins, 2010). Bruce Berkowitz, The New Face of War (New York: The Free Press, 2003), p. 17. The fascination with road-building in Afghanistan discussed by David Kilcullen in ‘Political Manoeuvre in Counterinsurgency’, Small Wars Journal, 24 April 2008, is a symptom of this. So too is the massive recent investment of armed forces in heavy mine-protected vehicles, which provide protection for ground movements at the cost of mobility, limiting forces to prepared roads and thereby enhancing their predictability and vulnerability. For more on the ‘virtual dimension’ see David Betz, ‘The Virtual Dimension of Contemporary Insurgency and Counterinsurgency’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, vol. 19, no. 4, 2008, pp. 513–43. For more on ‘diffused war’ see Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin, War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), especially the discussion on ‘mediatisation’ on pp. 4–5. The idea that contemporary war has been ‘mediatised’ is not merely a scholarly fancy; it is a key underpinning of Rupert Smith's concept of ‘wars amongst the people’, for example, as outlined in his book The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2006), especially pp. 284–5. David Richards, the United Kingdom's current chief of defence staff, has also said that today's wars are being fought ‘through the medium of the communications revolution’. See ‘Future Conflict and Its Prevention: People and the Information Age’, speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, 18 January 2010, http://www.iiss.org/recent-key-addresses/general-sir-david-richards-address/. See Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War, Illustrated Edition (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979), particularly the illustrations from L'Assiette au Beurre on pp. 250–1, 286, 288. See ibid., p. 215, especially the illustration of a postcard produced by an enterprising publisher featuring BadenPowell in a triumphant pose with the words ‘Well done, Gallant Little Mafeking. The Empire is Proud of You’. Alexander Downes, ‘Draining the Sea By Filling the Graves’, Civil Wars, vol. 9, no. 4, 2007, p. 432. Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War [original unillustrated edition] (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979), p. 549. See Douglas Porch's preface to the reprint of Small Wars (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. xi. My thanks to Daniel Whittingham, Department of War Studies, King's College London, for this observation drawn from his PhD research on Callwell. This subject is addressed throughout Chapter VI (and also on p. 90) in Small Wars. Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, p. 73. Consider, for instance, two books entitled The Suicide of The West. One, by James Burnham (New York: Regnery, 1985), considers liberalism to be the primary cause of Western decline, while the other, by Richard Koch and Chris Smith (London: Continuum, 2006), posits that liberalism is likely to be a casualty of this decline. See Betz, ‘Communication Breakdown’. This idea is explored in depth by Christopher Ankersen in The Politics of Civil–Military Cooperation (Basingstoke: Palgrave, forthcoming in 2012). As Michael Ignatieff once wrote, ‘imperialism doesn't stop being necessary just because it becomes politically incorrect’. Empire Lite (Toronto: Penguin, 2002), p. 54. Julian Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988), p. 57. See David Betz and Tim Stevens, Cyberspace and the State (Abingdon: Routledge for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2011), particularly chapter 4 on ‘Cyberspace and Dominion’, for an elaboration of this point. John Mackinlay, ‘After 2015: The Next Security Era for Britain’, Prism, vol. 3, no. 2, 2012, pp. 51–60. Stephen Walt, ‘Top Ten Lessons of the Iraq War’, Foreign Policy, 20 March 2012, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/20/top_ten_lessons_of_the_iraq_war?page=full. General James Mattis, speaking at the Foreign Policy Research Institute conference, ‘Defence Showstoppers: National security Challenges for the Obama Administration’, February 2009, http://www.fpri.org/research/nationalsecurity/showstoppers/. A point made forcefully by David E. Johnson in Hard Fighting: Israel in Lebanon and Gaza (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2011). The slogan ‘the population is the prize’ appears numerous times in Galula's Counterinsurgency Warfare, but is particularly prevalent in chapter 1, ‘Revolutionary Warfare: Nature and Characteristics’. See West, The Strongest Tribe. See Robert Gates, ‘A Balanced Strategy: Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 81, no. 1, January–February 2009. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid Betz David Betz is a Senior Lecturer in the War Studies Department, King's College London, where he heads the Insurgency Research Group.