Authors: James R. Arnold
In sum, the luster of a new century of change has become tarnished by terrorism and war. How well the fight will go against
those who resist America’s notion of world order remains an open question.
A Vicious Circle
Security
Insurgents blend into a population that includes active supporters—especially when the population views the counterinsurgents
as foreign occupiers propping up an ineffectual or corrupt government—and neutrals who are held in thrall by insurgent terror.
The historical record of counterinsurgency plays out as a vicious circle in which insurgents create an environment where the
people are insecure. Under the threat of terror, the people offer no intelligence to the government forces. Absent intelligence,
military operations are unsuccessful, perpetuating poor security. To break this circle, a nation embarking on a counterinsurgency
fought in a foreign land has to advance along multiple, interconnected paths. Progress along each path requires special qualities,
including language skills and cultural awareness that are outside traditional military talents. A first destination is the
provision of physical security for the people.
On the eve of his campaign against the Filipino insurgents in Batangas Province, General J. Franklin Bell described the paramount
importance of security:
The people became so terrorized they did not dare to help us. Anyone suspected of sympathy or friendship for Americans was
promptly assassinated. We could get no information and could accomplish nothing. There was no organized insurrection, but
those who possessed the guns were living in the towns by day and raiding the countryside by night. The necessity for garrisoning
every town, in order to give protection to those peaceably inclined, soon became apparent. The troops were obtained and the
towns garrisoned. When the people saw we were able to protect them they began to help us, and through persistent efforts in
detecting, arresting and confining the scheming, murdering, unscrupulous leaders and ladrones among the people, and through
running down and capturing the arms, the province became very tranquil and peace reigned supreme. This was not accomplished,
however, without having to do many disagreeable things.
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Sixty-seven years later, a high-ranking American civilian official serving in Vietnam, John Paul Vann, came to some similar
conclusions. Vann noted that six years of failure proved very little about specific programs because no program would work
until the first basic requirement of security was achieved. “This does not mean that the job of pacification is hopeless.
It merely means we have to recognize the overriding requirement for security. Whether security is 10 percent of the total
problem to be resolved or 90 percent, it is, inescapably, the first 10 percent or the first 90 percent.”
7
The American experience in Iraq confirms this truth.
Intelligence and the Question of Torture
To provide physical security, the counterinsurgents need good intelligence. The battle for timely intelligence is a battle
that must be won if a counterinsurgency is to succeed. Given that insurgents are hiding among the civilian population, civilians
are an invaluable intelligence source. Throughout history insurgents deliberately blur the line separating combatant from
civilian. They stage incidents to provoke retaliation that harms civilians. The security forces endure casualties under the
apathetic gaze of local civilians and grow bitter. They know that some civilians had foreknowledge of the peril and they are
tempted to extract that knowledge by what ever means necessary.
When William Howard Taft testified before a Senate committee on the topic of torture in the Philippines, a senator asked him,
“When a war is conducted by a superior race against those whom they consider inferior in the scale of civilization, is it
not the experience of the world that the superior race will almost involuntarily practice inhuman conduct?”
Taft replied, “There is much greater danger in such a case than in dealing with whites. There is no doubt about that.”
8
Well-documented instances of abuse, including the routine use of torture, have been attributed to the security forces in two
of the four case studies offered in this book, namely, the Americans in the Philippines and the French in Algeria. The French
master torturer, General Paul Aussaresses, defended torture in these words: “Once a country demands that its army fight an
enemy who is using terror to compel an indifferent population to join its ranks and provoke a repression that will in turn
outrage international public opinion, it becomes impossible for that army to avoid using extreme measures.”
9
The ongoing war against terror has again brought the disturbing subject of torture to the forefront of public debate.
Advocates of harsh interrogation methods, including what most people would call torture, justify the policy by using the “ticking
bomb” analogy: a time bomb is hidden somewhere ticking toward a detonation that will kill countless innocents. To prevent
a catastrophe, torture is not only justified but morally imperative.
Aussaresses defends his conduct on precisely this basis: by torturing suspects he could foil a planned bombing and thereby
prevent casualties to the innocent. During the Battle of Algiers, the paratroop leader Colonel Roger Trinquier asked the divisional
chaplain to sanction torture. The chaplain obliged and told the soldiers, “Between two evils: making a bandit, caught in the
act—and who actually deserves to die—suffer temporarily, and [letting the innocent die] . . . it is necessary to chose [
sic
] without hesitation the lesser [evil]: an interrogation without sadism yet efficacious.”
10
Today’s debate posits an even graver situation: authorities capture a person suspected of planting a nuclear or biological
time bomb. Should such an extraordinary hypothetical serve as the basis for national policy? It should not. Surely a line
can be drawn separating the catastrophic (a potential nuclear detonation in New York City) from the vile (a truck bomb at
a mosque in the Middle East).
Torture sometimes provides useful tactical intelligence that can foil a suicide bomber or reveal the location of a roadside
bomb. However, as victims of torture observe, a person under extreme physical duress will say what ever is required to escape
the agony. The intelligence service thereby obtains an overwhelming volume of information, most of it false. It is not an
efficient method to obtain intelligence. But the practice of torture is not done in a moral vacuum; it is not amoral. Civilized
society condemns it. A country that endorses it suffers not only because it debases its moral standing but also because it
is ultimately counterproductive. As the ugly American experience with Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison demonstrated, abuse and torture
drive innocent victims into the enemy camp. Moreover, it provides insurgents with a powerful tool to convince the wavering
to support them. “Successful” torture may uncover one plot, but it creates scores of new plotters who eventually extract a
price higher than would have been paid.
In his book
Defeating Communist Insurgency
, Robert Thompson eloquently argued that torture not only was “morally wrong” but created more practical problems than it
solved: “A government which does not act in accordance with the law forfeits the right to be called a government and cannot
then expect its people to obey the law.”
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By abandoning the high moral ground associated with a lawfully constructed government, a counterinsurgency power descends
toward the level of the terrorist. In a civil war, such a descent means neither side can claim legitimacy, thereby leaving
the people without a strong reason to favor the government over the insurgents. Furthermore, when a government fails to act
in accordance with its own laws it cannot expect its people to obey the law.
That is not to say that a government cannot enact very tough laws to meet an emergency. But this has to be done by regular
legal processes. In the United States, the June 12, 2008, Supreme Court decision regarding the legal rights of detainees at
Guantanamo is a highly encouraging affirmation of this position.
Insurgencies rely on guerrilla action and terrorism. That creates an enormous temptation for government forces to respond
by unlawful acts, to use the excuse that the other side is not playing by the same rules, to assert that legal pro cesses
are too cumbersome and ill-suited to contend with such affronts as terror. A French intellectual addressed this during the
height of the Algerian War: “If really we are capable of a moral reflex which our adversary has not, this is the best justification
for our cause, and even for our victory.”
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Understanding Culture
The famous phrase coined by British general Gerald Templer and adopted by Americans for the Vietnam War, “winning the hearts
and minds of the people,” can serve as a useful component of a counterinsurgency strategy because it focuses on the role of
the civilian population. By itself, it is an inadequate and flawed formulation. Neither in Vietnam nor anywhere else is there
one “people.” Instead, all societies are made up of individuals and groups who form relationships based on status, economics,
and power.
Foreigners often accuse Americans of cultural arrogance, an accusation that astonishes most Americans, who are quite certain
that they possess no such thing. They would probably concur with William Howard Taft, who said that his experience with Filipinos
convinced him that they are “moved by similar considerations to those which move other men.” Taft did add the niggling caveat
that “it is possible that crimes, ambush, assassination, are more frequent there than in other countries,” but the thrust
of his comments was clear and remains widely shared: namely, that there are universal cultural norms.
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However valid this view—and it is important to note that other cultures firmly believe in universal norms, only they are not
the same ones endorsed by Western society—it leads to the position that what others want must be similar to what we want.
This outlook frames the mind-set of those who go overseas to combat the nation’s enemies. It ill-prepares them for what they
actually confront. A war correspondent, Albert Robinson, who traveled extensively in the contested provinces in the Philippines
during the Filipino insurrection concluded that the people plainly hated the Americans. He attributed the hatred to irreconcilable
cultural differences and concluded, “We may mean well, but they don’t understand our ways. Neither do we understand theirs.
When patience and forbearance would be immensely effective, the American methods hurry and irritate the people.”
14
As the insurgency continued, Robinson revised his view, warning that the greatest obstacle to success in the Philippines was
misguided American interference: “We assert a glorious American liberty and insist that all shall live by American standards.”
15
Trouble arose, in Robinson’s mind, from American inflexibility that “makes no allowance for people whom it does not know
and for conditions it does not understand.”
16
In contrast to Americans in the Philippines and Vietnam, the French
képis bleus
of the Special Administrative Section (SAS) possessed considerable knowledge of North African culture. By war’s end, SAS officers
as well as many in the regular army had come to realize that knowledge about an Algerian village’s history and how that history
had formed village attitudes was not a matter of mere academic interest. Rather it was a necessary prerequisite for an effective
pacification program. It is noteworthy that the capture of Saddam Hussein resulted from painstaking social analysis of tribal
connections performed by an American special intelligence group.
However, it is discouraging to observe that only in late 2007, six years into the Afghan war, did the U.S. military come to
the conclusion that its troops did not sufficiently understand how to battle the Taliban insurgency. The U.S. Army captain
charged with creating a new “Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy” told his American students that the important battles
are 80 percent political and 20 percent military. To engage in the political contest, the students had to learn about local
culture and history in order to think like the Taliban.
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If the United States is to engage effectively in the “Long War,” it should not take six years to arrive at the starting point.
Language
Back in 1940 the Marine Corps’
Small Wars Manual
had emphasized the importance of cultural knowledge and most especially language skills, noting that “political methods and
motives which govern the actions of foreign people and their political parties . . . are practically beyond the understanding
of persons who do not speak their language.”
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Sadly, this key insight has had little influence on policy.
In the 1950s, when American advisers began training the South Vietnamese army, fewer than a dozen men in the Military Assistance
Advisory Group spoke Vietnamese. The U.S. Army did not have a Vietnamese-language school. Little had changed by 1965 when
the marines landed. Even those serving in Combined Action Platoons seldom acquired anything beyond a few words picked up while
working in the villages. More than forty years later the challenge of overcoming a lack of language skills and ignorance of
a foreign culture returned to hamper a new generation of counterinsurgency warriors. A March 2007 article in the
Marine Corps Gazette
paraphrased comments from the codirector of the navy’s Center on Terrorism and Irregular Warfare: “The general lack of cultural
preparation for the Iraq campaign, including an insufficient number of people with language skills to understand even the
basic information, is one of the causes of failure to effectively combat this insurgency.”
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