William R Polk: Violent Politics

William R Polk: Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, & Guerrilla Warfare, From the American Revolution to Iraq (2007, Harper)

Chapter 1: The American Insurgency (p. 14):

What the American insurgents were doing piecemeal foreshadowed a pattern. Everywhere insurgents spend more energy attacking their fellow inhabitants than the foreign enemy. They do so in part, no doubt, because civilians are easier targets than soldiers, but this is not the crucial reason: it is that unless they can forge a solid core of like-minded people, they cannot hope to survive, much less to "win." Those natives who join the foreigners are more dangerous to the national cause than the foreigners themselves because, unlike the foreigners, they have the capability to form a native government. Thus, in America in the 1760s and early 19770s, as in each subsequent guerrilla war including most recently Iraq, insurgents more often attack their recalcitrant fellows than the foreign soldiers. By war's end, nearly one hundred thousand -- roughly one in each twenty colonists -- had fled.

Chapter 2: The Spanish Guerrilla Against the French (p. 26):

The sack of Cordova showed the people of Saragossa and other cities what a French attack involved: the city was looted, men were massacred, and women were molested; by ransacking the cathedral and gang-raping nuns, the French made the Church their enemy, and it responded in its traditional way. Miracles proclaimed the defeat of the invader. Priests exhorted the people to take up arms and fight the "Godless French." Foreshadowing the role of mullahs and imams in modern Islamic resistance movements, priests proclaimed, "Heaven will be attained by killing the French heretical dogs" and promised that "any soldier wounded fighting the French was ensured 100 years relief from purgatory [and that] anyone killed would be reborn three days later in paradise."

(p. 30):

The guerrilla strategy, which evolved in the circumstances of the confrontation, came down to two key activities. The first was to eliminate or neutralize those Spaniards who tried to collaborate with the French. This was essentially the same as the American insurgents did with the American Loyalists. Within a year or so after the fight began in 1808, those who sided with the French were safe only in cities garrisoned by French troops. Later, when the French evacuated Madrid, they took with them these afrancesados. The second aspect of guerrilla strategy was to draw the French out to protect their supply lines. The French answer, then and later in Vietnam, was to station troops in blockhouses along the routes. At nighttime, when they could no longer communicate with one another (as they did with semaphores) each small garrison became vulnerable. What happened with blockhouses also pertained to towns. One guerrilla band was, in this way, able even to capture a small French-held city. To prevent the guerrillas from gaining local superiority, the French had to give up trying to control all Spanish territory and concentrate only on cities and supply routes. To keep from being overwhlemed at any given location, they had to employ large numbers of troops. One relatively small guerrilla partida, under the leadership of Javier Mina, is said to have occupied ten thousand French troops. This was more or less comparable to what Tito was able to do against troops of the German army and Ho Chi Minh did against the French. Finally, to keep the supply route from the French frontier to Madrid open, about a quarter of the entire French force had to be spread out along the way.

(pp. 32-33):

Consequently, as soon as the French began to withdraw, the Spanish rulers began to dismantle the guerrilla organizations. It proved far easier than anyone could have anticipated. With the French in retreat, there were no longer convoys to be looted. With French soldiers no longer threatening them, villagers who had supported the guerrilla bands no longer saw any need to do so. Contributions ceased to be given freely, and when demanded focused hostility on the guerrillas. As the royal government co-opted or purged the popular juntas, it reestablished its monopoly of taxation and customs so that the guerrilla leaders were no longer able to pay their followers. In desperation, the most successful of the guerrilla leaders, Javier Mina, appealed to the newly restored monarch, Fernando, to incorporate his disintegrating force into the Spanish army. In reply, Fernando issued a proclamation effectively proscribing the entire resistance: all organizations, both military and civil, that had not existed before the French invasion were to cease operation immediately. They had, in effect, been turned, as the French always insisted they were, into outlaws.

Chapter 3: The Philippine "Insurrection" (p. 36):

The southern population was converted to Islam in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by traders and teachers coming from Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Islam spread quickly, and two Muslim kingdoms dominated the Philippines when the Spaniards first began to arrive in the sixteenth century. From their own historical experience, the Spaniards saw the native Muslims as just another species of the Arabs and Berbers, whom they had recently evicted from Spain and were then fighting in Africa; so they fastened the name Moro (Moor) upon the Muslim Filipinos. Spanish policy toward the Moros was simple: it was genocide. After three centuries of sporadic but intensely savage warfare, Muslims had been reduced from more than 50 percent to about 5 percent of the total population.

(pp. 44-45):

In the meantime, to try to square what was actually happening with what the administration wanted the American public to believe, the high command tried to keep American casualties low. So it began to recruit a native army, as the French had done in Spain and were later to do in Algeria. In the Philippines, these special forces were known as the "Scouts." Divided into small flying columns, as Callwell had advocated and as the British later did with their "shock companies" in Ireland and South Africa, these groups raided villages, captured men they could turn by bribery or torture, and carried out savage reprisals. In a particularly daring raid, one small detachment penetrated Aguinaldo's hideout, took him prisoner, and convinced him -- he had previously shown himself particularly susceptible to such convincing in return for money -- to declare the surrender of his partisans.

What happened then was what almost half a century later ensured the collapse of the Greek EAM/ELAS insurgency: the insurgents split into two camps. Those who followed Aguinaldo put down their arms, while the others, deprived of Aguinaldo's leadership, lost coordination and were driven into places where they could not supply themselves. The Filipino population was confused. Since Aguinaldo was the best-known leader, most followed his example, relieved that their struggle had ended. [ . . . ] Loss of popular support was mortal to the resistance. The process was speeded up and spread by various forms of counterinsurgency: those Filipinos who were thought likely to continue to support the insurgents were "regrouped" to places where they were cut off from the still-active insurgents and watched helplessly as their villages were burned and their food supplies confiscated; to prevent the insurgents from getting arms, even the newly created Filipino police were disarmed. The suppression was as brutal as in any guerrilla war.

The Filipino resistance reemerged with the Japanese occupation in WWII, producing a group known as the Hukbalahap ("Huks"). That group was in turn suppressed when the US recovered the Philippines (p. 48):

[General Douglas] MacArthur's background showed in his first actions: he disarmed as many of the Huk guerrillas as could be trapped, arrested their leaders, and arranged that men of the old regime, even those known to have worked for the Japanese, be appointed to senior government posts. His policy seemed almost calculated to provoke the guerrillas, since more than a million people had been killed during the Japanese occupation. Undeterred, MacArthur pardoned Manuel Roxas, the best known and most senior Filipino collaborator, and threw American support (and money) into Roxas's campaign to become Philippine president in 1946. Then on July 4, 1946, he moved to undercut the Hukbalahap movement by what in most circumstances would have been a winning ploy, recognizing Philippine independence.

Chapter 4: The Irish Struggle for Independence

Chapter 5: Tito and the Yugoslav Partisans

Chapter 6: The Greek Resistance

Chapter 7: Kenya and the Mau Mau (pp. 114-115):

Certainly the Mau Mau had objective reasons to revolt. The European and South African settlers had taken lands that the 1.5 million Kikuyu regarded as their national patrimony and had converted virtually the entire Kikuyu people into serfs to work it for them. The Kikuyu had no civil rights and were subjected daily to arbitrary police and settler humiliation and violence. They had no effective say in the management of their own affairs and certainly none in managing Kenya. Moreover, while at that time other areas of Africa seemed to be moving toward freedom -- uhuru -- Kenya looked to be poised to slip even further under white control as was then happening in South African and Southern Rhodesia. Even where Britain loosened the reins of its empire, it was not natives who benefited but white colonists. Thus, the Kikuyu had no reason to hope for improvement and much to fear from the twenty-nine thousand whites who dominated them.

Chapter 8: The Algerian War of National Independence (pp. 142-143):

The cost of the war was horrific and in some ways is still being paid. During the eight years of fighting, at least half a million Algerians -- about one in each sixteen natives -- and about twenty-five thousand French troops were killed in combat. Tens of thousands of Algerians were locked away in concentration camps. One camp I saw when I toured Algeria was still filled with hundreds of what the French called "street Arabs," orphan children. About 1.2 million Europeans fled or wee driven out of the country along with about two hundred thousand Algerian "Loyalists." Far from the battle, France itself was severely damaged. The much vaunted French civilisation was corrupted by the horrors of the conflict. In the memorable phrase of the time, torture had become "the cancer of democracy." Hate, fear, and shame overcame everything. Even so civilized a man as the writer Albert Camus became an apologist for French brutality. Among the most vicious of the paratroopers were men who had suffered in Nazi concentration camps or had fought in the French resistance, yet saw no moral inconsistency between their struggle for freedom in France and torturing or murdering Algerians. Civilization itself was a victim of the war. The costs have yet to be fully reckoned: Algeria remains a wounded society, so far unable to gain a sense of civic balance, while the ugly racism of the colons has been transferred to France itself.

Chapter 9: The Vietnamese Struggle Against the French (p. 152):

To solidify their rule, the French set out to win over what remained of the Vietnamese bureaucracy, the mandarins. As the man who was perhaps the most effective French governor-general, Jean-Marie de Lanessan, explained his policy, i twas based on the notion that "in every society there exists a ruling class, born to rule, without which nothing can be done. Enlist that class in our interests." The mandarins were initially willing to collaborate, but they soon realized that collaboration was leading to the replacement of their way of life by an alien system and their religion by Catholicism; so instead of "pacifying" their fellow countrymen, they began in the last years of the nineteenth century to lead them against the French.

Chapter 10: America Takes Over From France in Vietnam (p. 180):

Militarily the Tet offensive was nearly a disaster for the Viet Minh, as many thousands of their troops were killed, but politically it was the masterstroke that won the war. After Tet, the American public had no stomach for Vietnam. It even brought about a "regime change" in America as Lyndon Johnson withdrew his candidacy for the presidency. Thereafter, the war wound down by fits and starts, with more emphasis on punishing aerial attack, which aimed ostensibly to create a "negotiating climate." That policy had a hard edge for America: during the withdrawal period an additional twenty-one thousand American soldiesr were killed. Thus, the American phase of the war that began in 1945 ended in the Communist victory on January 27, 1973. It was the longest, most brutal, and most destructive guerrilla war in modern history.

Chapter 11: The Afghan Resistance to the British and the Russians (p. 191):

The Pukhtunwali rested on the concept that every village, clan, or tribe was a separate entity, virtually a miniature nation-state. Each had the collective obligation to defend its citizens, their property, and their honor. Thus, it absolutely commanded the taking of revenge (badal) for wrongs or insults to any of its members by outsiders, as the British had learned and the Russians soon would. As among the pre-Islamic Arabs, in the absence of overarching civic institutions and organizations, the certainty that revenge would be taken was the final, indeed the only, safeguard for the individual. That was the theory, but the practice was unending feuding. Consequently, every Afghan was armed and always ready to fight.

The imperative of revenge was softened by the parallel imperative of hospitality (melmastia). Afghan refuges or travelers could demand, and would receive, both hospitality and protection even from enemies. In villages where the inhabitants teetered on the brink of starvation, my team and I were greeted with ruinous generosity. To have attempted to pay for or to have refused what was offered would have been a mortal insult. As guests we were under the protection of our hosts, who had the absolute obligation to defend us or die trying. (Americans would later be babbled by the silent refusal of such poor people to turn over Osama bin Ladin for the, to them, astronomical sum of $25 million.)

(p. 197):

Unlike most of the insurgencies I have studied, the Afghan insurgency was motivated neither by nationalism nor by ideology. It defined itself in terms of its enemy. The enemy was not so much Communism as Russia, and not only Russia alone but all foreigners. The Afghans accepted outside help but did so reluctantly and without affection for the donors. Xenophobia must be considered to have been a major motivation. Insofar as it was refined into something like an ideology, it was defined by Islam. But it was not religion, per se, that seems to have most motivated people: it was the Afghan "way," the social code that was encapsulated in Islam, that Afghans felt was being attacked and that they determined to protect. As a Hezb-i Islami commander told the English visitor Peregrine Hodson, "It is true that Afghanistan is a poor country, but the most precious thing we have is our faith; without it we have nothing. We are fighting to protect our religion."

(pp. 199-200):

Even more impressive was that when ground-to-air missiles began to be made available, the mujahideen claim to have destroyed four hundred aircraft. The Russians virtually stopped flying, and lacking air cover that had tied down and discovered guerrilla forces, Russian ground forces were more vulnerable to ambush and tended to pull back to the cities. As a result, for most of the war, they occupied only about a fifth of the country.

Much as the Americans did in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 and the Germans did in Yugoslavia, the Russians employed the most brutal forms of counterinsurgency: they aimed essentially to destroy the country and kill the inhabitants. Carpet bombing was used on towns and villages; dikes and irrigation works were blown up so that agricultural production fell by about half; forests were burned; roads and bridges were cut; and millions of small bombs were seeded into the countryside killing or wounding animals and people. As Jeri Laber and Barnett Rubin of Helsinki Watch summarized their findings, "the stories that we were to hear over and over again were these: 'The Russians bombed our village. Then the soldiers came. They killed women and children. They burned the wheat. They killed animals -- cows, sheep, chickens. They took our food, put poison in the flour, stole our watches, jewelry, and money.'" The report continued, "The strategy of the Soviets and the Afghan government has been to spread terror in the countryside so that villagers will either be afraid to assist the resistance fighters who depend on them for food and shelter or will be forced to leave . . . We were told of brutal acts of violence by Soviet and Afghan forces: civilians burned alive, dynamited, beheaded; bound men forced to lie down on the road to be crushed by Soviet tanks; grenades thrown into rooms where women and children have been told to wait." Prisoners were summarily shot since the Russians claimed that they were illegal enemy combatants not covered by the Geneva Conventions.

Conclusion: The Very Expensive School. This lists and summarizes seven points from the US Counterinsurgency Field Manual, edited by Lieutenant Generals David Petraeus and James F. Amos based on their experiences in Iraq. This is just one of the seven points (p. 209):

Third, "nation building." Have outsiders ever accomplished that task? Look at the American experience. American forces have been sent abroad to fight more than two hundred times since our country was founded. But in recent years only sixteen times have we attempted "the core objective of nation building . . . regime change or survivability." Of these sixteen, Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper found in a study for the Carnegie Endowment, eleven were "outright failures." Two, Germany and Japan, can be regarded as successes, while two others, tiny and nearby Grenada and Panama, were probably successful. Considering this record, John Tierney asked in the May 17, 2004, International Herald Tribune, how could neoconservatives or any conservatives "who normally do not trust their government to run a public school down the street, come to believe that federal bureaucrats could transform an entire nation in the alien culture of the Middle East?"

posted 2008-06-22