Counterinsurgency's Failures, from Afghanistan to Vietnam—August 26, 2021

This is the dish in global affairs, going beyond the headlines and critical global issues. I'm Brian Hansen with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and this week we're taking a closer look at the counterinsurgency strategy that was used in Afghanistan. As the United States pulls out of Afghanistan, there's much finger pointing about who's to blame over the failed US military intervention. But there's a bigger more consequential question, namely whether the strategy that we relied on, counterinsurgency doctrine or coin for short, which its focus on winning hearts and minds of the local population is what really failed. And if so, what are the lessons we should learn about the strategy? Our guest today argues that, indeed, counterinsurgency doctrine fundamentally misunderstands how insurgents are defeated. Looking at successful campaigns against its surgencies around the world, she argues that the US strategy in Afghanistan was bound to fail. Good governance campaigns and democratic reforms do not defeat rebels, and great powers have little ability to shape the domestic politics of smaller, weaker states. Instead, successful counterinsurgency campaigns require costly and violent effort, usually including violence against civilians. Yet, disbelief in winning hearts and minds persists in the United States despite the failures of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam, and as long as the US clings to this doctrine, we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes, incurring massive costs and compounding human suffering. So why does counterinsurgency doctrine fail? How are insurgencies actually defeated? And what are the implications for US foreign policy? To explore these questions, I'm talking today with Dr. Jacqueline Hazleton, who goes by Jill. Jill is an associate professor at the US Naval War College and author of the new book, Bullets Not Ballots, Success, Encounter Insurgency Warfare. She has also written a thought-provoking piece in foreign affairs, titled, "The Hearts and Minds Myth, How America Gets Counter Insurgency Wrong." Welcome to Deep Dish, Jill, but so good to have you here. Thank you so much for the invitation, I've been looking forward to it. So before we get into your critique, I want to start out by just setting out what is counterinsurgency doctrine? Where did it come from and what are its basic tenets? There are obviously a number of different types of approaches to counterinsurgency, with simply means trying to defeat an insurgency, which is an armed, organized, persistent challenge to the state from within. That has become known as counterinsurgency in the United States and also largely in Britain really since the end of World War II with the rise of the anti-colonial wars with a return to attention for Vietnam and then when things started to go bad in Iraq about 2005. What counterinsurgency means in this policy context is providing support to the threaten government, so the threaten government can provide good governance to its people. For unfair elections, open media, respect for civil and human rights, these kinds of things, economic opportunity. And the idea is that good governance provisions will gain popular support for the government and decrease it correspondingly for the insurgency and the sway of popular support to the government will enable the threaten government and its great power backer to defeat the insurgency. So the focus is on the people, the masses, what they want and the assumption is what they want is modern liberal democracy. So in a lot of ways, this sounds very appealing. It's very consistent with US values, it allows us to come in and support the kind of policies that we've been talking about in Afghanistan trying to supply better governance to the Afghan people. What I think is one of the things that's so striking about your book is that you look at counterinsurgencies that are successful and you find a completely different pattern there. So what do you find as what it really takes to beat a consurgency? I do want to know that I did not expect to find what I did. The understanding of good governance counterinsurgency is indeed normatively feeling, especially to Americans who believe that liberal values are universal and that everyone aspires to democracy and that the universe is driving towards a teleological and in which everything is US liberal democracy, the whole world, that has problematical in a variety of ways. But that is the foundational belief behind the good governance approach. What I actually found in the five probably most famous cases of counterinsurgencies success when the governments were backed by Western governments was that success does not rely on reforms, reforms did not take place in these campaigns, success does not rely on popular support. Government did not gain further popular support in these campaigns. What caused success was a combination of the brute force control of civilians, tight military control of communities, the resettlement of entire communities in prison camps with the goal of blocking the flow of resources to the insurgency. And also the elites in the threat and government accommodating rival elites, whether they're leaders in communities, clan leaders, intellectuals, insurgents, leaders, co-opting them by providing them with relatively cost-free things that satisfy their personal interests. In exchange the threat and government gets information, it gets cooperation, and it gets increased military power. If, for example, it's making a deal with a warlord who has a militia to share. The third thing that causes success is a direct military campaign against the insurgency to not only break its ability to fight, but to break the insurgency's will to fight, show them that they cannot achieve their political objectives and they should give up. So this is really interesting and I want to unpack some of the things that you just laid out. Because one of the things that strikes me immediately is whereas the American counter-exergency doctrine focuses on winning over the population and getting their goodwill, you really focus on this elite level politics that you talked about and this accommodation with elites. Can you talk a little more and maybe give some examples from your case studies about why is this elite level politics so important and what are some examples of how it works? A lead accommodation is important in counter-insurgency success because the threat and government needs to increase its capabilities. It needs to know more about rival elites, whether they're simply unaligned or whether they're partnering with the insurgency or in fact within the insurgency. It needs to know things, strategic information about partnerships, alliances, relationships, goals, personal and political. And it is it's the elite that shape government and popular choices. This is not at all what I expected to find but is very, very clear in the contemporaneous documents of these campaigns. It is the elites who have to be brought on side in order to gain their cooperation and their military power. So one example is in the war in Dohfar, a month from 1965 to 1972. This was a British-led campaign, the British bath of sultan against communist nationalist insurgency in the far south of Oman next to what was then the people's Democratic Republic of Yemen. And one of the things that the British-led military did was win over insurgent leaders. Those insurgent leaders could provide political information about the insurgency and ultimately the British formed them into Furqas, into militias who were able to fight in the ways that the British and the other members of the sultan's armed forces could not. The Furqas knew that terrain, they knew the people, they knew the languages, they knew the politics and they were able to fight irregularly which is something that the British-led staff really had a problem with, particularly in the very difficult terrain in Dohfar. So the British won over these insurgent leaders. The insurgent leaders were formed into Furqas, incredibly useful fighting forces, but there were a number of familiar elements to working with the Furqas. The British were frustrated because the Furqas would only do what was in their own interests. If they saw a benefit in an operation, they would conduct it, if they didn't, they wouldn't. And we can think about how this works in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. The Furqy crossed over insurgent leaders could also go talk to the members of communities and say, "Look, I've seen the light, I was wrong, you're going to get things are going to go better if you side with staff," or at least if you give them information, right? Because what this research turns out to show is that personal allegiance is not what matters. It's who gains politically from what? And there are cases in which the co-opted elites gain goods or services that trickle down to the people, but very often they don't. A word Lord might receive a quite lucrative post at a border taxation point, for example, or maybe a place for a child, an Oxford or Harvard. There are a number of different ways in which these elites can be accommodated to gain their cooperation. Another example, which is really the only one that is palatable in normative terms to Americans, is the elite relationship in Malaya. The British rulers of the colony of Malaya, dreamed of and planned for the independent state of Malaysia to be a pluralistic, democratic, liberal state with a pluralistic military. They very early learned that they had to give up those hopes and those plans because the politically dominant Malaya-Salt towns were not going to stand for it. They refused to give up the political dominance that they had held. For other ethnic groups, particularly Chinese, ethnic population, for example, I would assume. The ethnic Chinese and the ethnic Indian populations, both of which were formal, prosperous, but the salt towns, with good reason, given their own interests, insisted on retaining the greatest political power. And Malaysia today is still a state with ethnically-based parties and coalitions in which ethnic malays are privileged over others. So I think these are two fascinating stories and a couple of things jump out to me. One is you emphasize the need to draw elites in or accommodate elites by providing stuff they care about personally. In the Afghanistan case, we called that corruption and we were trying to get rid of that. It was all about stuff for the general population, and you are arguing that actually that's the stuff that makes it work. The things that we tend to call corruption are how you build these coalitions. The other thing that I want to explore a little further is you also talked about in your examples how it's very hard for the outside power supporting a client government to get these groups to do things that they don't want to do. And again, the echoes in Afghanistan are so profound here where we talk about all the failures of the governments not doing what we wanted. Why is that? The U.S. comes in, if we just think about it, Afghanistan, U.S. comes in with trillions of dollars, troop presence, a world power. Why is it that outside powers aren't able to have more of an impact on the choices that these local leaders actually make? This is an important point, and I'm glad you raised it. The reason that liberal great power interveners have very limited leverage over their threatened partners is that those great powers have given up their leverage in declaring that the survival of the threatened government is an important security interest for themselves. The threatened government does not need to fear abandonment. It knows that it's great power backer, really, really, really wants it to stay in power. And the more the great power invests, whether it's money, troops, diplomatic support, the more secure the threatened government is in its knowledge that the great power is not going to walk away. That's fascinating. So we focused on this elite level politics and the fact that it's about building these coalitions, that it's about providing things that are valuable to elites. I want to now shift our focus to the broader public, because the U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine assumes that you need to provide good things for the public to win their allegiance. You've already touched on this a little bit, but you find the public often gets treated very, very brutally. So in the successful counterinsurgency campaigns, what is the role of the public and in the successful ones, what are the goals in interacting with the public and how do you go about doing it? The role of the public in these successful campaigns is basically to be acted upon. And that is very sad and normative terms, but that's what I found. In these cases, the threatened government, the military tightly controlled civilian movements and behavior, in some cases destroying communities and putting everyone in armed camps for the duration. In Malaya, these camps persisted well after the defeat of the insurgency and as did other controls on civilians, things like food rationing. There really is no competition for the heart or the mind of the people in these cases. The concern on the part of the counterinsurgency is the insurgency and elites, and that's it. The civilians are basically a tool. The idea is to control them to cut the flow of resources to the insurgency, so they serve a use, but it has nothing to do with their role as citizens or members of the larger community. And what are some of those resources that the broader public can provide to the insurgents that the government is trying to cut off? There are things like information, food, secrecy is a big one, running errands for the insurgency. All of these ways in which members of the public's civilians can interact with the insurgency whether or not they support it, largely because they're just trying to survive. And often we see civilians also cooperating with the government when it's necessary to stay alive. And this is actually likely to be a problem with the Afghan refugees. There's already been a problem in France with one Afghan refugee who was apparently formally a member of the Taliban or worked for the Taliban. And it's not unusual in civil wars to see individual civilians working with whatever side they need to to protect themselves and their family. So we'll have to see how it plays out with resettling Afghans who may well have had interactions with the Taliban. Yeah, so this is really fascinating, just in terms of completely turns on its head, how we think about dealing with the mass public. And it reinforces the sense that, you know, it's really sadly but violence is the currency that matters and the civilians are trying to take care of themselves. And you know, if the insurgents are going to be violent against them, the government also needs to include force in their interactions with them. The third piece that you talk about in these successful campaigns is breaking the insurgents will and capacity to fight. What are some particularly strong examples that illustrate how that works from your case studies? Once again, in Malaya, and I often reference Malaya because it's probably the most famous Western counterinsurgency campaign in Malaya with the reduced flow of resources because of tight military control civilians and with the direct military attacks on the insurgency, we see the insurgency relatively quickly broken up into smaller bands that have a great deal of difficulty communicating. Ultimately, they get to the point where they can't communicate, they cannot mass force, they cannot, they can barely survive themselves. One of the points that the leader made later on in life, he was ultimately captured but not killed, is that the thing that probably hurt the insurgency the most was the control of civilians that prevented the insurgents getting, the material goods and the secrecy that they needed, but primarily the material goods. So the bands of insurgents are scattered off in the jungles and the government forces pursue them there. They use artillery, they use aerial bombing, they use a number of indiscriminate uses of force. They also send in special forces in small groups to track down the insurgents. They bring in some headhunters from Borneo and it's a similar situation in the Philippines. The hook insurgency was made up largely of peasants, people from the countryside who were increasingly unhappy with the commodification of their relationship with the great landlords and who truly believed that the government would be on their side when they brought their troubles to the government. But the problem is the great landlords were the government, as is often the case. This is one of the problems with the western consumption of good governance counterinsurgency. There's this idea that the counterinsurgent comes to protect and rescue the people but in fact the case is usually that the people are far more fearful of the government than they are insurgents and often insurgents protect the people from government security forces and irregular proxy forces. Going back to the Philippines, as the Philippines' military capability rose thanks to provision of US material, including planes, the hook were on the run very quickly. They could no longer communicate with the communities that they came from that were supporting them largely willingly. They had lost command of control, they were fleeing through the mountains trying to survive. The hook leader who also was not killed but was later arrested, in their case also one of the biggest blows that they faced was their separation from the people who were supporting them, which was a significant percentage of the rural population. It's a fabulous example and the number of pieces in there one I want to draw that was embedded in one of your stories is that sometimes this military push against the insurgents used the word indiscriminate. One of the things in US counterinsurgency doctrine is we need to really work so hard to minimize civilian casualties, just kill the bad people but not hurt the civilians. You actually find that that kind of concern gets in your way. You need to use a lot of brute force and if people get killed who are civilians, they get killed and in cases like the Philippines where it's a peasant uprising, it's really hard to tell who is who. How important is that dynamic in what you see in the cases you looked at? It's important and there's a very interesting larger point here about the use of force that I want to draw out. You're absolutely right that the Western conception of good governance counterinsurgency involves the excruciatingly careful use of force around civilians in order to prevent civilian death of damage because the belief is that if you hurt a civilian or his or her interests, you will create another insurgent. In fact, we don't see that and there is interesting work to be done on why we don't see uprisings in these prison camps, but that's a project that I'm not working on to return directly to your question. Typically, in political science, we talk about the use of indiscriminate force when it's directed against individuals or groups regardless of their own behavior. If you use artillery against civilian village, you are hurting, damaging, punishing everyone in that village regardless of what their political beliefs are, regardless of whether they're helping the insurgency or the government. That does not produce useful results for the government. The difference is, in the cases I look at, the governments don't simply use force as a bludgeon. They use force with specific political objectives, thus it's not indiscriminate. The specific political objective, which they largely achieve, is to cut the flow of resources to the insurgency. It's quite claseless, Ian. You have the use of force directed specifically to a political objective, which of course claseless argues is the only appropriate way for a state to use force. You've laid out this understanding based on looking at these counterinsurgencies, very, very different than US counterinsurgency doctrine, and as we've touched on many times, really unappealing in terms of, let's get behind this campaign. I want to take this apply it to the Afghanistan case, and particularly those folks who continue to say the US counterinsurgency doctrine, yes, it didn't work out in Afghanistan, but there are reasons for that, and we shouldn't condemn the doctrine. The doctrine is still important, we should still use it. Some of the arguments that we hear are Afghanistan failed, because it wasn't resourced sufficiently enough. We have enough people on the ground to provide the kind of benefits to society that would have won the hearts and minds. And indeed, if you look at a period like 2011, 2012, the height of the counterinsurgency, that was successful and was creating that kind of stability. Unfortunately, we didn't follow through with it and never resourced it further. In the case of Afghanistan, you had a refuge in Pakistan so that the Taliban fighters could escape the battlefield, regroup, get external support, and then come back in. That's just simply something that is outside the scope, and you can't blame the doctrine for that. And then I guess the last thing we hear is that the Afghan government was just too corrupt. Counterinsurgency doctrine, the US version, is all about good governance and providing good governance. But one government after another was just incredibly corrupt, so they could never succeed if we only had a better partner in the Afghani government we would have won. So how do you respond to that assessment of what happened in Afghanistan? All of the problems that you identify are baked into the concept of good governance counterinsurgency. You cannot separate them from the fundamentals of trying to make another state govern well. First of all, in terms of external sanctuaries, one, two, three, four of the campaigns that I'd look at, so far El Salvador, Greece, and Turkey, the insurgents had external sanctuaries in all of these cases, and in all of these cases, the insurgents were defeated. So an external sanctuary is not necessarily determinative in terms of counterinsurgent success or failure. Second, you raised a question of corruption before, and this is a critical element. Corruption is politics. Corruption is how politics works. We can think about Chicago historically. We can think about Italy now. It is impossible to force another country to end corruption. Governments that rule corruptly do so because they gain from it. It's not a mistake, it's not an accident, it's not an ignorance about how to do it right. It's because the elites in those states gain from the corruption and continue to flourish by it, the only time or condition under which we see some small degree of reform implemented is when the domestic political context changes and the elites decide that they need to make some small concession in order to shore up their own power. So we see this, for example, in South Vietnam, when President Thu actually influenced the land reform plan that the US had been insisting on for years and that President D.M. had used only to enrich his own supporters. Thu changed his position on land reform because the United States was leaving, and he had no domestic political base. He was losing his backer and he needed to gain new supporters and the only place to look for them was domestically. So he implemented land reform, it was extremely effective, it reduced the number of sharecroppers in South Vietnam significantly and it helped him domestically shore up his support. Unfortunately, his major problem was North Vietnam and the state did not survive the final birth Vietnamese onslaught. In addition, I think we have to think about values. The United States thinks that liberal values are universal. Respect for individual rights, civil rights, human rights, women's emancipation, literacy for all, free and fair elections, free press, capitalism, all of these things. And in fact, there are serious disagreements even within the United States about what those things mean when implemented into policy terms. So the idea that these US values which reflect American ideals rather than American practice can be imposed on another state from without using primarily the military tool is unwise to impossible and we can see the costs in Iraq and Afghanistan in Vietnam and in these successful cases. The good governance approach to counterinsertioncy says you must get the threat and government your partner to implement reforms. What this fails to recognize is that for the threat and government which is fighting to keep its wealth and power reforms are resumed suicide. Death elites may perform to increase political participation, to reduce corruption, to hold free and fair elections, to create respect to free press. They are destroying their own wealth and power. By opening up avenues for others to gain that power presumably. So if what it takes to be successful at a counterinsertioncy is not the kind of US good governance version. But it is these other pieces of elite deals and repression of civilians and strategic military force to crush the will and capability of the insurgents as we've talked about. That's a much less appealing kind of political program. So coming back to the US and what we should learn from this, what are the policy lessons for the US about insurgencies and how we should think about engaging them or whether to engage in them? I think the first policy lesson is the really big one, the elephant in the room. US power is limited, US military power is limited. It's simply a fact is something we don't often think about, but we can see in the evacuation of Afghanistan going on right now that the United States, much less the United States military cannot simply wave one and make magic happen. That's simply the way it works. I think the second big policy takeaway is don't do it, don't mount military interventions counting on good governance reforms because you will raise the human cost, you will raise the moral cost and you will most likely prolong the conflict far beyond reason as we've seen in both Iraq and Afghanistan and as we saw Vietnam. Jill Hazelton of the US Naval War College and author of the new book Bullets and Not Ballots Success Encounter Insurgency Warfare, I want to thank you so much for being on deep dish and help us reflect on the basic strategy that we tried to use in Afghanistan and give us another set of tools and a set of questions about why things failed there and what the implications are for the future. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much. And thank you for tuning into this episode of Deep Dish. Looking for more deep dish in your week? Tap the subscribe button on your podcast app. You can find our show under deep dish on global affairs wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you think you know someone who would enjoy today's episode, please take a moment, tap the share button and send it to them as well. As a reminder, the opinions you heard belong to the people who express them and not the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. This episode is produced by Molly Meyer, edited by Joe Palermo and coordinated by Kira Daryl. I'm your host, Brian Hanson and we'll be back soon with another slice of deep dish. [BLANK_AUDIO]