Counter-insurgency redux

Survival

Volumn 48, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 111-130

  Kilcullen, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33751107707     PISSN: 00396338     EISSN: 14682699     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00396330601062790     Document Type: Article

References (102)

1. See William Rosenau, 'Subversion and Terrorism: Understanding and Countering the Threat', in The MIPT Terrorism Annual 2006 (Oklahoma City, OK, National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, 2006), pp. 53-4; also the extensive media reporting surrounding the publication of the US military's new counter-insurgency doctrine in 2005-06.
2. See David Kilcullen, 'Countering Global Insurgency', The Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 28, no. 4, August 2005, pp. 597-617.
3. The dates take in the period from the beginning of the Greek Civil War in 1944 to the end of the Rhodesian Civil War in 1980, and include all the wars of decolonisation associated with the end of European empires after the Second World War, and the contemporaneous nationalist, separatist and communist-inspired insurgencies.
4. 3-24/FMFM3-24, Counterinsurgency, Final Draft, 16 June 2006, paras 1-61, available online at http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24fd.pdf.
5. This paper builds on evidence gathered in the 1990s during fieldwork for a doctoral dissertation on insurgency: David Kilcullen, Political Consequences of Military Operations in Indonesia 1945-99, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of New South Wales, 2000. It draws on personal experience as a commander, operations officer, intelligence officer and military adviser to indigenous forces during operations in the Middle East, Pacific and Southeast Asia over the past decade. More importantly, it reflects insights gained since 11 September 2001, including firsthand observation of counter-insurgency in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, Thailand and the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan. The author was an adviser with Indonesian forces in 1994-95, commanded an infantry company on counter-insurgency operations in East Timor in 1999-2000, was operations officer of the Peace Monitoring Group in Bougainville during the final stages of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army insurgency in 1998, served as a counterterrorism adviser to an Arabian Gulf state in 2004 and has worked with police, paramilitary and military forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere since 11 September.
6. The Australian Joint Services Glossary defines counter-insurgency as 'those military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological and civic actions undertaken by a government to defeat a subversive insurgency'. The equivalent British and United States publications use the identical definition, except for the absence of the word 'subversive'.
7. For a discussion of the concept of 'counter-warfare', see Loup Francart and Jean-Jacques Patry, 'Mastering Violence: An Option for Operational Military Strategy', Naval War College Review 53, no. 3, Summer 2000, pp. 144-84.
8. This definition follows that put forward by Gordon H. McCormick, who suggests that 'an insurgency is a struggle for power (over a political space) between a state (or occupying power) and one or more organized, popularly based internal challengers'. Gordon H. McCormick, 'Things Fall Apart: The "Endgame Dynamics" of Internal Wars', RAND, draft paper, forthcoming, p. 2. But, to take into account the transnational nature of several contemporary insurgencies, I have replaced McCormick's notion of a single state entity facing an internal challenger with the broader concept of a state or group of states confronting one or more (internal or external) non-state challengers.
9. Ibid.
10. C.E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, 3rd ed. (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996 (first published 1896, 3rd ed. originally published 1906))
11. Department of the Navy, United States Marine Corps, NAVMC 2890, Reprint of USMC Small Wars Manual 1940, Washington, 1987.
12. David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (London: Pall Mall, 1964), p. 3.
13. Robert Thompson, Revolutionary War in World Strategy 1945-1969 (New York: Taplinger, 1970), pp. 20-21.
14. For examples of this pattern in resistance warfare see Robert B. Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History, 2 vols (New York: Doubleday, 1975)
15. Ian F.W. Becket, The Roots of Counter-Insurgency: Armies and Guerrilla Warfare 1900-1945 (London: Blandford, 1988)
16. Walter Laqueur, Guerrilla (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977)
17. and Alexander Orlov, Handbook of Intelligence and Guerrilla Warfare (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1963).
18. Discussion with Mahsud informant, Northwest Frontier Province, June 2006. The informant noted that each Mahsud family has contributed one fighter to the anti-government insurgency in order 'to protect their traditional ways' while Ahmadzai Wazir tribesmen have joined the fight in a less-organised but more fanatical manner. These patterns of behaviour are highly consistent with the cultural characteristics of these tribes. See Olaf Caroe, The Pathans (London: St Martin's Press, 1958), pp. 390-413
19. and Akbar S. Ahmed, Resistance and Control in Pakistan, rev. ed. (London: Routlege, 2004), pp. 11-29.
20. For a discussion of these effects in relation to Indonesia, see David J. Kilcullen, 'Globalisation and the Development of Indonesian Counterinsurgency Tactics', Small Wars and Insurgencies, vol. 17, no. 1, March 2006, pp. 44-64.
21. See Thompson, Revolutionary War and Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, pp. 38-41.
22. See 'Al Qaeda Takes Media Jihad Online' at http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=14500.
23. Audrey K. Cronin, 'Cyber-Mobilization: The New Levée en Masse', Parameters, Summer 2006, p. 77.
24. Ibid., p. 85.
25. Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 45-53.
26. See Kilcullen, 'Countering Global Insurgency' for a more detailed discussion of these issues.
27. See US Joint Publication 1-02 which defines insurgency within a single-state, single-insurgent paradigm, as 'an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict'.
28. Kilcullen, 'Countering Global Insurgency'
29. see also David W. Barno, 'Challenges in Fighting a Global Insurgency', Parameters, Summer 2006, pp. 15-29.
30. 'English translation of Ayman al-Zawahiri's letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi', The Weekly Standard, 12 October 2005, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/ 203gpuul.asp.
31. For example, see ibid. and other correspondence between al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and insurgents in Iraq and Southeast Asia.
32. AFPS, 'IED Components Moving Across Iraq-Iran Border, General Says', 17 March 2006.
33. Interview with Pakistan government official, North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan, June 2006.
34. For example, in July 2006 Shia militias in Iraq conducted operations in sympathy with Hizbullah fighters engaged in conflict with Israel, while in 2005 al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia conducted a hotel bombing in Amman, possibly in an attempt to disrupt support for coalition forces in Jordan.
35. See materials captured in the possession of Jemaah Islamiyah operative Dr Azahari in November 2005, and the so-called 'Camp Hudaibiya manual' used by Jemaah Islamiyah and Abu Sayyaf Group insurgents in the Philippines, which drew on al-Qaeda source materials produced in South Asia.
36. CIA analyst, unclassified personal communication, July 2006.
37. Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, p. 3.
38. See Thompson, Revolutionary War, for a discussion of the differences between 'rebellion' and 'revolutionary warfare' in this context.
39. I am grateful to Rob Smith for this insight.
40. Anthony Cordesman, The Iraq War and Lessons for Counterinsurgency (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2006), pp. 3-4.
41. Interview with former senior officer of British Intelligence, Kabul, July 2006.
42. Jeffrey Record and W. Andrew Terrill, Iraq and Vietnam: Differences, Similarities and Insights (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2004), p. 2.
43. Partly, this lack of counter-government simply reflects the insurgents' desire to fall back on tribal governance systems (pre-classical) or the focoist (post-classical) nature of the insurgency in Iraq. But these concepts have little traction in the 'watered-down' version of classical counter-insurgency adopted by some modern commanders (Rob Smith, personal communication, September 2006).
44. See Pamela Constable, 'In Tribal Pakistan, a Tide of Militancy', Washington Post, 20 June 2006, p. A11
45. and 'Waziristan: A New Strategy', Dawn, 24 June 2006, p. 7.
46. Attempts by the Shia Badr Organisation to control the population in Basra governorate, and by Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and Tal Afar to intimidate local leaders into supporting insurgent objectives, are examples of limited attempts to create a counter-government, but these lacked the sophistication and elaborate administrative structures favoured by many classical insurgent movements.
47. Joel S. Migdal (1988) identifies four key capabilities of the state, including 'the capacities to penetrate society, regulate social relationships, extract resources, and appropriate or use resources in determined ways' (quoted in William Maley, The Afghanistan Wars (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 13.
48. Maley, The Afghanistan Wars; see particularly pp. 108-26 and 218ff.
49. See Bard E. O'Neill, Insurgency and Terrorism: Inside Modern Revolutionary Warfare (Washington DC: Brassey's, 1990), p. 95 for a discussion of this concept in classical counter-insurgency.
50. See Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, for the classic exposition of this viewpoint.
51. Personal observation, Taji, January 2006 and discussions with US military intelligence officers, Baghdad and Kuwait, January-February 2006.
52. US Department of the Army, Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of South Vietnam, 1966, http://www.carrscompendiums.com/ ccSEA/Documents/AD0377743_TOC.html.
53. Lewis Sorley, 'To Change a War: General Harold K. Johnson and the PROVN Study', Parameters, Spring 1998, pp. 93-109.
54. Thompson, Revolutionary War, p. 25.
55. HQ Malaya Command, The Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya, 2nd ed. (Kuala Lumpur, 1954), especially ch. 2, p. 10 and ch.3, pp. 1-5.
56. Bernard Fall, 'The Theory and Practice of Counterinsurgency' Naval War College Review, April 1965.
57. US Department of Defense, Counterinsurgency.
58. CNN, 'Transcript of bin Laden's October Interview', 5 February 2002, http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/south05/05/ binladen.transcript/index.html.
59. I am indebted to Gordon McCormick of the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterrey and to Colonel Derek Harvey for insights into the 'small world, scale-free' aspects of insurgent social networks and the enduring influence of the pre-war Iraqi oligarchy on the current Iraqi insurgency.
60. See McCormick, 'Things Fall Apart', for comments on this discourse.
61. For a good example of this perspective, see Fall, 'Theory and Practice'.
62. Cordesman, The Iraq War, p. 3.
63. See Charles C. Krulak, 'The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block War', Marines, January 1999.
64. See Associated Press, 'Lynndie England Convicted in Abu Ghraib Trial', USA Today, 26 September 2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/ 2005-09-26-england_x.htm.
65. The marine was subsequently judged to have acted in self-defense; see Jamie McIntyre, 'Marine Cleared in Videotaped Shooting', 5 May 2005, http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/05/05/falluja.marine/index.html.
66. Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), pp. 330-35.
67. Ibid., pp. 341-3.
68. George Packer, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. 297-8.
69. For a detailed discussion of civil-military tensions in classical counter-insurgency see H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998).
70. Rob Smith, personal communication, September 2006.
71. See Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, pp. 197-28.
72. Personal communication, Central Intelligence Agency officer, Baghdad, February 2006.
73. See collected videos at the SITE institute, http://www.siteinstitute.org, for examples.
74. Personal observation, Baghdad and Taji, January 2006 and Khost, Afghanistan, June 2006.
75. See H.Q. Malaya Command, Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations, p. II-10.
76. Mao's Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla Warfare (May 1938) is the most detailed exposition of this argument.
77. Mike Forces, Regional Forces, Popular Forces and main force ARVN in Vietnam, and Special Operations Volunteer Force, Malayan Scouts (SAS), Police Jungle Squads and Police Anti-Terrorist Field Force in Malaya are examples of this 'force-mirroring' approach (see Kilcullen, Political Consequences, for a detailed description of this element of classical counter-insurgency).
78. See Louis Beam, 'Leaderless Resistance', The Seditionist, Issue 12, February 1992, http://www.louisbeam.com/leaderless.htm. Beam, a right-wing extremist leader in the United States, proposed an organisational method for revolutionary movements that has since been employed by movements as diverse as Iraqi insurgents, European Islamist movements and the Earth Liberation Front (see http://www.earthliberationfront.com/main.shtml for a description).
79. The focoist school of insurgency, originating in Latin America during the classical period, sought to employ a cadre of armed revolutionaries as a catalyst or focus (foco) around which popular insurgency would coalesce.
80. See Martin Dillon, The Dirty War (London: Routledge, 1999) for a description of the Active Service Unit and specialised cell-based methodology applied by the Irish Republican Army to its much smaller movement of a few hundred active members only.
81. Personal communication, allied intelligence officer, Kabul, June 2006. See also Ahmed S. Hashim, Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006) for a comprehensive description of Iraqi insurgent methods.
82. HQ Malaya Command, Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations, p. III-2.
83. Ibid.
84. Interview with Australian military officer in an operational headquarters in Baghdad, November 2004.
85. Australian intelligence officer, Baghdad, August 2004.
86. See Packer, Assassins' Gate, especially pp. 251ff.
87. Thompson, Revolutionary War, p. 21.
88. Cordesman, The Iraq War, and interview with Multinational Force Iraq intelligence officer, January 2006.
89. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 312.
90. Personal observation, Baghdad, Taji and Basra, February 2006.
91. Interview with Pakistan Government civilian official, Khyber Agency, June 2006.
92. Interview with senior Iraqi Government national security official, Green Zone, Baghdad, January 2006.
93. McCormick, 'Things Fall Apart'.
94. Dillon, The Dirty War.
95. Personal communication, private security detail commander, Baghdad, January 2006.
96. Personal observation, Taji, February 2006 and discussions with special forces officer, November 2004.
97. See examples relating to Afghanistan at http://www.acbar.org/index.php, the website of the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, and http://www.adf.gov.af/, website of the Afghan Development Forum. Both are interactive web portals where independent aid and relief agencies can share information, develop collaborative approaches, pool resources, deconflict activities and self-synchronise effects - all without belonging to a single overarching command structure.
98. Quoted in Simon C. Smith, 'General Templer and Counter-Insurgency in Malaya: Hearts and Minds, Intelligence, and Propaganda', Intelligence and National Security, vol. 16, no. 3, Autumn 2001, p. 65.
99. Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, p. 89.
100. Ibid., p. 77.
101. For example, the Malayan Emergency ended in 1960, but Malayan Communist Party leader Chin Peng and the last band of guerrillas surrendered only in 1989.
102. Fall, 'Theory and Practice'.