Recent attempts to revive counterinsurgency strategies for use in Afghanistan and Iraq have been marked by a determination to learn lessons from history. Using the case of the campaign against the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya of 1952—60, this article considers the reasons for this engagement with the past and the issues that have emerged as a consequence. The article disputes the lessons from British colonial history that have been learned by military planners, most obviously the characterization of nonmilitary forms of British counterinsurgency as nonviolent. Although it contests some of these supposed precedents for successful counterinsurgency in British military history, the article also identifies more generalizable elements of the Kenyan case. Particular emphasis is given to the effects on the nature of counterinsurgency, a reliance on locally recruited allies, and the decentralization of command.
Eric Hobsbawm, Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism ( London: Little, Brown, 2008), 77.
2.
George W. Bush, "Remarks by President Bush at Boeing, St. Louis , Missouri," April 16, 2003.
3.
Iraq Body Count database, March 17, 2009, http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/.
4.
Donald Rumsfeld, interview with Tony Snow, Fox News Sunday, broadcast November 2, 2003, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,101956,00.html .
5.
Warren Chin , "Examining the Application of British Counterinsurgency Doctrine by the American Army in Iraq," Small Wars and Insurgencies18, no. 1 ( 2007): 7-9; Alastair Finlan, "Trapped in the Dead Ground: US Counterinsurgency Strategy in Iraq,"Small Wars and Insurgencies16, no. 1 (2005): 11-13.
6.
For an example of this assumption of difference, see Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York : Penguin, 2006), 232-34, 250-51, 279-90.
7.
Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War Part III (New York : Simon & Schuster, 2006), 44.
8.
Quoted in Nancy Montgomery, "Counterinsurgency Training at the Heart of Iraq Effort,"Stars and Stripes, February 15, 2006, http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=144&article=35059 .
9.
Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, interview with Al Jazeera Television, February 25, 2003 , Department of Defense, http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=1946 .
10.
BBC News , "US Iraq Chief Warns of Long War," July 9, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6285156.stm .
11.
June Nash, Practicing Ethnography in a Globalizing World: An Anthropological Odyssey (Lanham, MD: AltaMira , 2007), 201.
12.
John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 128-29.
13.
Thomas R.Mockaitis, BritishCounterinsurgency, 1919-60 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), 9-10.
14.
Geoffrey D. T. Shaw, "Policemen versus Soldiers, the Debate Leading to MAAG Objections and Washington Rejections of the Core of the British Counterinsurgency Advice," Small Wars and Insurgencies12, no. 2 (2001): 51. For a contemporary argument of the need to develop an independent U.S. counterinsurgency strategy for South Vietnam without significant reference to Britain’s experience in Malaya, see Robert O. Tilman, "The Non-Lessons of the Malayan Emergency ," Asian Survey6, no. 8 (1966): 407-19.
15.
Nagl, Learning to Eat, 131.
16.
Thomas Ricks, "In Iraq, Military Forgot Lessons of Vietnam," Washington Post, July 23, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/22/AR2006072201004.html.
17.
David Elliot , "Parallel Wars? Can ‘Lessons of Vietnam’ Be Applied to Iraq?" in Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, or, How Not to Learn from the Past, ed. Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn Young (New York: New Press, 2007), 19-23.
18.
Thomas Ricks , "Officers with PhDs Advising War Effort," Washington Post, February 5, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/04/AR2007020401196.html.
19.
David Galula , Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006).
20.
John Nagl, "Foreword," in The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), xlv-xlvi.
21.
Finlan, "Trapped," 12-13; Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (London: Fourth Estate, 2006), 672.
22.
Lieutenant Colonel James S. Corum, "Fighting Insurgents-No Shortcuts to Success," Newsletter of the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College , May 2004, 1.
23.
Lieutenant Colonel Wade Markel, "Draining the Swamp: The British Strategy of Population Control,"Parameters36 (Spring 2006): 37.
24.
Nagl, Learning to Eat, 28-30.
25.
Nagl’s blog can be found at the Small Wars Journal Web site, http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/authors/john-nagl/ .
26.
Peter Maass , "Professor Nagl’s War,"New York Times Magazine, January 11, 2004; The Daily Show, Comedy Central, episode broadcast August 23, 2007 , http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=92011&title=lt.-col.-john-nagl .
27.
For those produced for and by the U.S. military and policy makers, see Lieutenant Colonel Robert M. Cassidy, "The British Army and Counterinsurgency: The Salience of Military Culture," Military Review 85 (May-June 2005): 53-59; Lawrence Cline, Pseudo Operations and Counterinsurgency: Lessons from Other Countries (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 2005); Lieutenant Colonel James S. Corum, Training Indigenous Forces in Counterinsurgency: A Tale of Two Insurgencies (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 2006); Lieutenant John A. McConnell, "The British in Kenya (1952-1960): Analysis of a Successful Counterinsurgency Campaign" (MSc diss., Naval Postgraduate School, 2005); Eric McFadden, "Contemporary Counterinsurgency Operations: History as a Guide to Assist in the Development of the Joint Interagency Task Force," Comparative Strategy 24, no. 4 (2005): 361-78; Paul Pillar, "Perceptions of Terrorism: Continuity and Change," in Law vs. War: Competing Approaches to Fighting Terrorism (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 2005), 3-10; Kavlev Sepp, "Best Practices in Counterinsurgency," Military Review 85 (May-June 2005): 8-12; Lieutenant Colonel James D. Campbell, "French Algeria and British Northern Ireland: Legitimacy and the Rule of Law in Low-Intensity Conflict," Military Review 85 (March-April 2005): 2-5.
28.
See, e.g., David Kilcullen , "Counterinsurgency Redux," undated essay available at Small Wars Journal Web site, http://smallwarsjournal.com/documents/kilcullen1.pdf .
29.
Cassidy, "British Army,"56.
30.
Rod Thornton , "The British Army and the Origins of its Minimum Force Philosophy," Small Wars and Insurgencies15, no. 1 (2001): 83-106.
31.
See, e.g., Michael Dewar, Brush Fire Wars: Minor Campaigns of the British Army since 1945 (London: Hale, 1984).
32.
Martin Thomas , "The British Government and the End of French Algeria, 1958-62," Journal of Strategic Studies25, no. 2 (2002): 172-98.
33.
Richard C. Thurlow, "The Irish Negative," Journal of British Studies36, no. 2 (1997): 240.
34.
Montgomery, "Counterinsurgency Training."
35.
Robert Knox Dentan, "Bad Day at Bukit Pekan,"American Anthropologist97, no. 2 (1995): 225-31; Karl Hack, "‘Iron Claws on Malaya’: The Historiography of the Malayan Emergency,"Journal of Southeast Asian Studies30, no. 1 (1999): 99-125.
36.
Elliot, "Parallel Wars? " 19.
37.
Ibid.
38.
E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, "The Formative Years: 1945-55," in Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940-93, ed. B. A. Ogot and W. A. Ochieng (London: James Currey , 1995), 44.
39.
David Anderson , Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005), 4.
40.
Caroline Elkins , Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Jonathan Cape , 2005), 366.
41.
John Blacker , "The Demography of Mau Mau: Fertility and Mortality in Kenya in the 1950s, a Demographer’s Viewpoint," African Affairs106, no. 423 (2007): 205-27.
42.
Anthony Clayton , Counterinsurgency in Kenya 1952-60 ( Nairobi, Kenya: Transafrica, 1976 ), 37.
43.
David Anderson , Huw Bennett, and Daniel Branch, "A Very British Massacre,"History Today26, no. 8 (2006): 20-22.
Huw Bennett , "The Mau Mau Emergency as Part of the British Army’s Post-War Counterinsurgency Experience," Defense and Security Analysis23, no. 2 (2007): 143-63.
48.
Anthony Kirk-Greene , "The Thin White Line: The Size of the British Colonial Service in Africa," African Affairs79, no. 314 (1980): 25-44.
49.
Daniel Branch , Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Civil War, Counterinsurgency and Decolonization (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 55-93.
50.
Rhodes House Library, Oxford (RHL) Mss Afr s 1580, file 1 , Johnston to Hinde, December 3, 1953.
51.
Kenya National Archive (KNA) DC/KBU/2/1, DO Gatundu, "Gatundu Division Handing Over Report," September 6, 1954, 11.
Frank Kitson, Bunch of Five (London: Faber, 1977).
55.
Nagl, Learning to Eat, xiv.
56.
RHL Mss Afr s 1580, file III, Hinde to Chief of Staff, December 11, 1954.
57.
David A. Percox, "Mau Mau and the Arming of the State," in Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration, ed. E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale (Oxford, UK: James Currey , 2003), 123, 130.
58.
Branch, Defeating, 117-47.
59.
Susan Carruthers , Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counterinsurgency 1944-1960 (London : Leicester University Press, 1995 ), 2-3.
60.
RHL Mss Afr s 1574, "Transcript of Recording of a Discussion Between Lord Howick and Dame Margery Perham," November 19, 1969, 24.
61.
KNA DC/EBU/1/2/7, DO Ndia, "Ndia Division Handing Over Notes: Gordon-Johnson," April 1957, 8.
62.
M.P.K. Sorrenson , Land Reform in the Kikuyu Country: A Study in Government Policy (Nairobi, Kenya: Oxford University Press, 1967), 149.
63.
KNA WC/CM/1/1, Emergency Joint Staff, "Control of Villages," January 29, 1955, 1.
64.
Sorrenson, Land Reform.
65.
W.O. Maloba , Mau Mau and Kenya: An Analysis of a Peasant Revolt (Oxford, UK: James Currey, 1998), 143.
66.
Sorrenson, Land Reform , 166.
67.
KNA VP/1/27, R. G. Wilson, L. Ward, and R. Sandford, "Fort Hall District: Land Reform," April 7, 1954, 7.
68.
KNA DC/KBU/1/45, Kiambu District Annual Report 1957, 4.
69.
Sorrenson, Land Reform , 241.
70.
Nicola Swainson , The Development of Corporate Capitalism in Kenya 1918-77 (London: Heinemann , 1980), 130-32.
71.
Branch, Defeating, 148-78.
72.
Keith Kyle , The Politics of the Independence of Kenya (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999); Cherry Gertzel, The Politics of Independent Kenya 1963-8 (Nairobi, Kenya: East African Publishing House, 1970).
73.
Robert Bates , Beyond the Miracle of the Market: The Political Economy of Agrarian Development in Kenya (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 11-44; Branch , Defeating, 179-224.
74.
Also see David Throup, The Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau (London : James Currey, 1987), 77-118.
75.
John Lonsdale , "Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya," Journal of African History31, no. 3 (1990): 393.
76.
Anderson, Histories, 77-118.
77.
David Petraeus , "Preface," Military Review supplement to 86, no. 5 ( 2006): ii.
78.
Yuan FoongKhong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
79.
Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn Young, eds., Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, or, How Not to Learn from the Past (New York: New Press, 2007).
