Counterpunch
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By Jeet Heer
The Boston Globe
Sunday 04 January 2004
Revisionists argue that counterinsurgency won the battle against guerrillas in Vietnam, but lost the larger war. Can it do better in Iraq?
Supremely confident in winning conventional wars on the battlefield, the United States military tends to become skittish when combating small-scale insurrections. More than 40 years ago, as the United States was struggling to shore up the faltering regime in South Vietnam, President John F. Kennedy advised West Point graduates that they would have to confront ''another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin -- war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him.''
In Iraq today, as rockets are launched from donkey carts and the occupation death toll climbs past that of the war itself, we see exactly the type of conflict Kennedy warned about: American soldiers fighting cloaked insurgents who practice hit-and-run murders before melting into the general population. The Cold War may be over, and the Iraqi rebels may lack significant popular support or even a coherent cause. But as the United States faces the prospect of a drawn-out and unconventional struggle in Iraq, the turbulent history of guerrilla movements -- and the counterinsurgency campaigns mounted against them -- has received new attention.
Last August, the Pentagon screened Gillo Pontecorvo's classic 1965 film ''The Battle of Algiers,'' which portrayed the moral corruption of the French military as it resorted to torture to subdue a nationalist rebellion in Algeria in the 1950s. (The film will be rereleased in select US cities next Friday.) According to the Pentagon flyer, the movie shows ''how to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas . . .. Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar?''
Although guerrilla warfare doesn't enjoy the chic it had in the 1960s, when leftist radicals and American military strategists alike poured over the writings of Chairman Mao and Che Guevara, many still believe that small but highly motivated irregular forces have the ability to defeat large and lumbering military organizations. Indeed, throughout the 20th century, many wars of national liberation and communist revolutions were in fact won by irregular forces: T.E. Lawrence in Arabia (who aided Arab tribes against the Ottomans), Mao in China, Castro in Cuba, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, the mujahideen of Afghanistan.
Yet some military experts believe the whole idea of guerrilla warfare has been oversold. In his 1973 book, ''Autopsy on People's War,'' political scientist Chalmers Johnson made the startling argument that ''none of the people's wars of the Sixties did very well, including the one in Vietnam.'' More recently, a diverse school of revisionists -- including military analyst Lewis Sorley, former CIA director William Colby, and maverick liberal journalist Michael Lind -- have picked up on the idea that the Viet Cong were in fact defeated as a popular insurrection, although their North Vietnamese ally won a conventional war against exhausted South Vietnamese and American forces.
''The US military has defeated most guerrilla movements it has faced,'' argues Max Boot, author of ''Savage Wars of Peace'' (2002), which chronicles US victories in ''small wars'' against forces ranging from the American Indians (''the best irregular warriors in the world'') to the first Sandinista movement in Nicaragua in the 1930s.
With the unfurling of Operation Iron Hammer, which has seen the United States take the offensive on the guerrilla war by bulldozing homes and bombing areas that supposedly house insurgent forces, the US military seems to have adopted the hardline counterinsurgency tactics that emerged in Vietnam in the late 1960s. After the spectacular failure there, can America get it right now?
Guerrilla warfare has a long history, from the Iberian bandits who harassed the Roman Imperial Army to the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord. But only in the 20th century did fully developed theories of guerilla warfare, usually articulated by communist thinkers, start entering into the canon of military literature.
For Mao, one of its major theorists and practitioners, guerrilla warfare was an extension of politics onto the battlefield. Holding small bits of territory at a time, the guerrilla wins the support of the local population by implementing popular social reforms, often involving the redistribution of land among the peasantry. ''A revolution's need for a base area . . . is just like an individual's need for a buttocks,'' he once observed. ''If an individual didn't have a buttocks, he . . . would have to run around or stand around all the time.''
More famously, he noted that ''the guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea,'' entering into conventional warfare only after a long struggle to whittle down the enemy. Thus it took two decades of fighting before Mao's own forces won in China in 1949.
Mao's ideas were hugely influential even outside the communist world: the National Liberation Front (FLN) which led the Algeria uprising of the 1950s modeled its tactics after Maoist ones. Battling the French colonists, and later the US-sponsored regime in Saigon, Ho Chi Minh also followed Mao's strategy but placed a greater emphasis on using terrorism, especially the assassination of government officials, to undermine enemy morale. (In Iraq today, we see a variation of this policy, with insurgents targeting any Iraqi seen associating with the United States, especially the police force.)
Che Guevara, impatient with the protracted nature of Maoist war, suggested that cells of highly motivated militants (the foco) could ignite mass uprising by flamboyant displays of revolutionary violence without prior support from the peasantry. To make a revolution, he once noted, all you need are revolutionaries. After helping Castro seize control of Cuba in 1959, Guevara's ideas traveled to Argentina, Guatemala, and elsewhere in Latin America, where they invariably ended in bravura flameouts, including Guevara's own assassination in Bolivia in 1967 by a local army assisted by an American counterinsurgency unit.
Counterinsurgency also has deep roots in history. The American marines, for example, practiced forms of ad hoc counterinsurgency throughout the late 19th and early 20th century as they fought various ''bandits'' (in fact often popular rebels) in Haiti, Nicaragua , and elsewhere. Yet it was only after World War II, in direct response to the Maoist challenge, that counterinsurgency began to develop a sophisticated doctrine in the Anglo-American world.
The two great practical theorists of counterinsurgency were Sir Robert Thompson and Edward Lansdale. As a British colonial official in Malaya in the 1950s, Thompson helped implement a campaign to clamp down on Maoist guerrillas. In keeping with the time-honored practices of the empire, the British school of counterinsurgency emphasized the importance of draining the ''sea'' of support for guerillas through political reform. In addition to creating an honest civil service and police force, the British relocated communities into tightly guarded ''New Villages'' that provided both the carrot of political reform and the stick of surveillance. By the late 1950s, the insurgency had been effectively quashed.
Presidents Kennedy and Nixon often consulted with Thompson, the head of the British mission to Vietnam from 1961 to 1965, on how to combine political reform and security there. Yet in seeking to apply the lesson of Malaya, Thompson was constantly frustrated by the corrupt and incompetent regimes of South Vietnam seemed allergic to reform. Thus the ''strategic hamlets'' the Diem regime created in the 1960s, where peasants were often forced to labor without payment (against the advice of Thompson), were much more oppressive than their prototypes, the New Villages.
Like Thompson, Edward Lansdale, a San Francisco ad-man turned military intelligence officer, saw counterinsurgency as a political as well as military dilemma. Gifted with imaginative flair, Lansdale often used the techniques of psychological warfare to win popular support for regimes threatened by insurgency. (The colorful Lansdale made it into literature as the inspiration for both Alden Pyle, the antihero of Graham Green's ''The Quiet American,'' and Edwin Barnum Hillandale, the protagonist of the 1958 bestseller ''The Ugly American.'')
When the corrupt Philippine government of the early 1950s faced a rural uprising, Lansdale decided the country needed a stronger and more legitimate government. Using front organizations, he created a mass movement to win the presidency of the country for Ramon Magsaysay, a former guerilla and businessman who ultimately defanged the insurgent forces with a combination of land reform and a more appropriate military response. Rather than alienate the rural population with the big artillery of conventional forces, Lansdale and Magsaysay broke up the army into a smaller units that would fight the guerrillas on their own level.
Lansdale was first sent to Vietnam in 1954 by the Eisenhower administration. In the mid-1960s, Lyndon Johnson named him head of an interagency group to do political work with the South Vietnamese government. As Daniel Ellsberg, a member of the group, recalls in his 2002 memoir ''Secrets,'' Lansdale was critical of the heavy-handed military approach and idealistic in his commitment to democracy. ''The Communists have let loose a revolutionary idea in Viet Nam,'' Lansdale wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1964, ''and it will not die by being ignored, bombed, or smothered by us.''
Viewing popular support as the key to guerrilla war, Lansdale could be as flashy and gimmicky as a political spin doctor. He once hired widely followed astrologers in Vietnam to give readings favorable to the American ally Diem and unfavorable to Ho Chi Minh. But like Thompson, Lansdale ran up against a fundamental political problem. Since what little political support the South Vietnamese regime had was based on its ability to deliver favors, the government could not reform itself. In his classic 1977 study, ''The Counterinsurgency Era,'' the late Douglas Blaufarb, a former CIA agent who oversaw counterinsurgency operations in Laos, called this the problem of ''self-reform in crisis.'' Only under favorable circumstances, as in Malaya and the Philippines, where the British and Americans had long-standing ties with local elites and political leverage, could outsiders successfully press for political reform.
Counterinsurgency, with its emphasis on improving social conditions and spreading democracy, was initially a favorite among liberals. The Green Berets and the Peace Corps were emanations of the same restless, reforming spirit. But counterinsurgency's faddish glamour also had its ugly side. ''Word went out from the Chief of Staff of the Army that every school in the Army would devote a minimum of 20 percent of its time to counterinsurgency,'' CIA official Robert Amory once recalled of the Kennedy era. ''Well, this reached the Finance School and the Cooks and Bakers School, so they were talking about how to make typewriters explode . . . or how to make apple pies with hand grenades inside them.''
This boyish adventure side of counterinsurgency died on the battlefields of Vietnam. As the war ground on, the Americans started echoing the harsher tactics of the Viet Cong, particularly the targeting of enemy collaborators for assassination. In the infamous Phoenix Program that began in 1967, a direct outgrowth of counterinsurgency, the American government paid for the murder of thousands of civilians allegedly tied to the Viet Cong. This was precisely the type of program that turned many Americans against the Vietnam War (though US-backed military forces went on to use similarly bloody techniques elsewhere, notably in Guatemala). Writing in The New Yorker recently, Seymour Hersh worried that the ''preemptive manhunting'' of insurgents in Iraq may replicate the horrors of the Phoenix Program.
Counterinsurgency might have had some short-term success in Vietnam, but it was a long-term failure. Numbed by years of killing, South Vietnamese peasants adopted a quietist philosophy that rejected both sides of the conflict. When the North Vietnamese launched a conventional offensive in 1975, South Vietnam couldn't rally its own population to resist.
As the specter of protracted guerrilla warfare raises its head in Iraq, it's worth recalling the mixed lessons of the past. Successful counterinsurgency involves a deep familiarity with the local culture, which is difficult to gain on the fly. Gaining political legitimacy is the key to successfully defeating an insurgency, yet building such popular support can take years if not decades. Moreover, there's an inevitable tension between obtaining security for one's troops and winning popular support. Iraq, with its shadowy enemy of uncertain ideology, is very different from Vietnam. However, the troubling legacy of that conflict should cast doubt that there will be any easy or quick solution this time either.
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