Field Manual 3-24 and the Heritage of Counterinsurgency Theory

I

The most appropriate starting point for an analysis is David Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare (1964), a work that a historian would study in conjunction with the report on his Algerian service that he produced for the RAND Corporation. The latter reveals that Galula was a French officer of relatively robust opinions, whose view, for example, of ‘tortures’ (the scare quotes are his) was close to that expressed by the notorious Trinquier: some measure of enhanced interrogation was an unpleasant feature of the modern art of war analogous (both said) to civilian bombing. ¹⁶ He had achieved results that he found satisfactory by means of imprisoning suspects inside ovens in which he threatened to incinerate them. ¹⁷ On at least one occasion, he let a prisoner be executed without the benefit of legal process. ¹⁸ Not surprisingly, he supported the initial pro-Gaullist coup (which he regarded as the turning point that led to the defeat of insurrection), and traced the French withdrawal to a needless collapse of the will in metropolitan opinion. ¹⁹ He was, however, definitely republican in feeling in ways that probably eased his thought’s American reception: he preferred the term ‘counterinsurgency’ to ‘counter-revolution’ because the latter struck him as being reactionary, ²⁰ and felt contempt for the efforts of ‘the psychologists’ at brainwashing the native population. ²¹ Moreover, he had an uncritical faith in the inherent attractiveness of secularisation; he favoured an aggressive assault on what he revealingly called the ‘Islamic church’ ²² (this arguably influenced one of his major assumptions: his unargued expectation of sustained passivity among a clear majority of ‘neutrals’). The drafting team were not, of course, composing history; they might, however, have understood his theory rather better if they had borne in mind this information.

Galula’s central teaching was that insurgencies are of their very nature local problems that need to be addressed by local methods. Counterinsurgency takes place when there is an insurgency to counter, and an insurgency can be defined (in a mild parody of Clausewitz) as ‘the pursuit of the policy of a party, inside a country, by every means’. ²³ This careful formulation has at least four elements that need a little further exposition. Firstly, insurgency is ‘the pursuit of the policy of a party’, that is, of a programme adopted by a sectional interest. But secondly, the party pre-exists the policy and may, at least in principle, outlive it; all parties need a programme, but the programme can be changed if an ingenious party can find a substitute. Thirdly, any insurgency is in its essence an internal conflict. Even if the territory where it happens is in a formal sense a colony, and even if the conflict has significant external ramifications (which was of course true – or believed to be true – of every Cold War conflict), the insurgents will be challenging a local ruling power with the intention of displacing it. Lastly, their party’s policy is one that is pursued by ‘every means’. Insurgencies are distinguished from revolutions and from coups d’état by being relatively protracted struggles. They sooner or later involve a resort to lethal violence, but their defining quality is not the violence, but readiness, when the moment comes, to use it.

The implication of this definition is that insurgencies are understood as violent extensions of local politics; they are, in fact, a kind of civil war. Galula’s distinctive approach to the military problem was to insist on seeing this conflict from within: to act within the system of local politics through a party he had moulded for this purpose. This insistence on abstracting from the wider political context (composed, for example, by formal or informal empires) was a brilliant conceptual innovation; it also lent his thought a universal quality that eased its intellectual transplantation. Though many of his suggestions appear to presuppose an almost total absence of political constraint, he did not mean their usefulness to be confined to places that formed a part of an imperial system. He took it as axiomatic that in any territory there would be some kind of minority who were, or might become, the government’s allies. The counter insurgent’s task is to locate this little group and help it dominate the population: ‘To find the favourable minority, to organize it in order to mobilize the population against the insurgent minority’. ²⁴ In consequence, he had a clear conception of his role: ‘Its essence’, he said, ‘can be summed up in a single sentence: Build (or rebuild) a political machine from the population upward’. ²⁵

It is often supposed that Galula’s central insight was that a counterinsurgency is asymmetrical – to use his own Maoist expression, ‘a fight between a fly and a lion’ ²⁶ – and he does, of course, stress the importance of restraint and the essential pointlessness of simply killing people. But at a deeper level, there is a symmetry between the strategies of the two sides. Both sides will have to live among the people (the counterinsurgent in much larger numbers). Both need to establish ‘control’ over the people. Lastly, both need to find themselves some kind of political programme; a counterinsurgent victory will be only temporary unless it has this ideological backing. In other words, the authorities need a ‘competing cause’. ²⁷ Unfortunately, finding such a cause is difficult. The insurgents have after all had first choice of cause, and it is likely that the counterinsurgent will ‘be left with a narrow choice of secondary issues that appeal almost invariably to reason at a time when passion is the prime mover’. ²⁸ It is very important to grasp that Galula expected that counterinsurgents would bear an ‘ideological handicap’; ²⁹ Galulan techniques are intended to help the less attractive cause.

It was, in part, this gloomy expectation that was the rationale of his insistence that counterinsurgents should divide their efforts into phases. The ‘First Step’ took the fairly traditional form of the expulsion from a given area of any sizeable insurgent forces. The Second Step was the static deployment of troops so that ‘the population and the counterinsurgent political teams are reasonably well protected’ and the troops ‘can participate in civic action at the lowest level’. ³⁰ The space in question should be subdivided down to the level of the ‘basic unit’, which is ‘the largest unit whose leader is in direct and continuous contact with the population’. ³¹ As contact with the populace was to be maximised; one such unit should be stationed in each community. If a disaffected rural population was too dispersed for such arrangements to be practicable, that population would have to be resettled. Galula naturally stressed that this should not be undertaken lightly; it is, however, worth noting that the criterion of resettlement was not the safety of the population, but the achievement of an optimal deployment. As the counterinsurgents made progress, they should be loyal to the principles of maximum contact and maximum prudent dispersal; Galula disapproved of building barracks, if only because ‘soldiers living in barracks would always appear … as outsiders, as people apart’. ³²

The Third Step, which follows deployment, is ‘contact with and control of the population’. This Step at most prepares the ground for later political action. Galula suggests that the people should be made to do some task – repairing the streets, for example – to get them into the habit of compliance. ³³ At this early stage, counterinsurgents should obviously set out to be helpful – providing any relevant essential services – but should avoid ambitious social measures. Galula emphasises that it is premature to implement whatever reforms the counter-cause has promised or will promise. ³⁴

Such measures should never precede the Fourth Step, which is the weeding out of the ‘political agents’ of the insurgency. The best approach is to arrest large numbers of apparently suspect people and use them to identify the leaders. This Step is bound to be unpopular: it is ‘a police operation directed not against common criminals but against men whose motivations, even if the counterinsurgent disapproves of them, may be perfectly honorable’. ³⁵ In consequence, it should be given to ‘an organization that must in no way be confused with the counterinsurgent personnel working to win the support of the population’, perhaps a police force created for the purpose. ³⁶ If popular behaviour still fails to improve, the counterinsurgent has a serious problem, but there is no need for premature despair:

he can still get (rather than win) the needed support. If his energy matches his unpopularity, he may wait until peace becomes the key issue, and he can rely to a greater extent on his own strength and on his small minority of supporters. ³⁷

Even in this unhappy situation, the counterinsurgent can move on to the Fifth Step of holding local (as opposed to national) elections. If possible, these elections should be ‘absolutely free’: ‘the danger that neutrals or even undetected insurgent supporters could be elected is small because the population will realise that the counterinsurgent knows by now who was for whom’. ³⁸ The real danger here is that the people will elect ‘not natural leaders but men chosen for their presumed ability to placate the counterinsurgent’. ³⁹ But Galula is optimistic that leaders can be found. In Step Six, the people elected can be ‘tested’ by giving them administrative tasks; and those who pass the test can be provided with resources before (in Step Seven) they are formed into a national party.

A party will be necessary because ‘a party is the instrument of politics’. It must be national because its enemy is also national. It must provide ‘the framework, the support and the guidance’ for militants among the population. Lastly, it should ‘select its members carefully, and rely more on quality than on quantity’. ⁴⁰ No ordinary party – ‘with the notable exception of the Communists’ ⁴¹ – would follow this eccentric policy, but this is not, of course, a normal party; it is an instrument designed to mirror the insurgents organisation. Building a party is by no means easy, but when it is successfully accomplished, the one remaining step will be Step Eight (the mopping up), which is a large-scale but conventional operation. A ‘victory’ in this kind of war will take the form of ‘the permanent isolation of the insurgent from the population, isolation not enforced upon the population but maintained by and with the population’; Galula’s example is ‘the Oran region in Algeria in 1959–60’. ⁴²

Galula’s text possesses some literary power, deriving, in part, from a tension between its clinical style and glimpses of its real subject matter. Although he once presented his objective as ‘the support of the population – support not only in the form of sympathy and approval but also in active participation in the fight against the insurgent’, the passage that follows explains that this achievement depends on the assistance of a minority. ⁴³ He goes on to speak about his ‘law of power’, the law that dictates the requirement to use a minority group to mobilise the general population. Significantly, it is in this context that he expresses a degree of ethical discomfort:

The counterinsurgent who refuses to use this law for his own purposes, who is bound by its peace time limitations, tends to drag the war out without getting closer to victory.

How far to extend the limitations is a matter of ethics, and a very serious one, but no more so than bombing the civilian population in a conventional war. All wars are cruel, the revolutionary war perhaps most of all because every citizen, whatever his wish, is or will be directly and actively involved in it by the insurgent who needs him and cannot afford to let him remain neutral. The cruelty of the revolutionary war is not a mass, anonymous cruelty, but a highly personalized, individual one. No greater crime can be committed by the counterinsurgent than accepting, or resigning himself to, the protraction of the war. ⁴⁴

Galula does not, then, advocate Long Wars. His hints about the ‘law of power’ suggest that he hopes to avoid them by letting his indigenous friends be ruthless. It also seems that he applies a utilitarian standard: it is tactically helpful to be seen to be benign, and very important not to cause disorder, but the supreme importance of finishing the war will justify virtually any kind of short cut.

II

When we turn back from Galula to FM 3-24, we find extensive evidence of the former’s influence. But the fragments that were borrowed took on a different sense within their altered intellectual context. Galula set out to create a political movement, but had no special commitment to liberalism or democracy. It is true he believed in the virtue of local elections, but this was a way of finding local leaders who could be grouped into a national movement; he did not suggest that specific political structures must form a part of any lasting end-state. Indeed, he had no faith in lasting end-states. He thought that any victory might be temporary and fragile (at least from a Western outsider’s point of view); if the insurgents’ grievances had a degree of merit, the counterinsurgents’ party might in time adopt their cause. ⁴⁵ He did not promise permanent solutions.

The Manual’s assumptions are completely different. Where Galulan counterinsurgents were ‘to build or rebuild a political machine from the population upwards’, it tells its readers that their task – ‘the primary objective of any [COIN] operation’ – is ‘to foster development of effective governance by a legitimate government’. ⁴⁶ The concept of ‘legitimacy’ is central:

military action can address the symptoms of a loss of legitimacy. In some cases, it can eliminate substantial numbers of insurgents. However, success in the form of a durable peace requires restoring legitimacy, which, in turn, requires the use of all instruments of national power. A COIN effort cannot achieve lasting success without the HN [host nation] government achieving legitimacy. ⁴⁷

It may be supposed that this focus makes little difference or that the idea is implicit in the classics. Frank Hoffman, for instance, regards ‘the emphasis on “legitimacy”’ as an example of a principle ‘not reflected in the writings and teachings of the masters, but …absorbed over time’. ⁴⁸ But in fact, the appeal to this famously difficult concept is at the heart of what is wrong with the Manual’s recommendations.

Fortunately, its underlying theory can be recovered with some confidence. Stathis Kalyvas has remarked that the Manual’s social theory ‘is squarely located within the “grievance” line of thinking’ suggestive of ‘the older literature on revolutions’, ⁴⁹ but it is possible to be more specific. As might have been expected, the Manual’s thinking drew upon existing American writings. The leader of the drafting team has written that they began by using ‘a definition developed by Max Manwaring at the Army War College that was based very much on Western liberal values of political participation. Later revisions recognised that other factors, such as security concerns or religious beliefs, could shape local definitions of legitimacy.’ ⁵⁰ The Manual’s text corroborates this statement; with the exception of ‘security’, the Manual’s six ‘indicators’ of legitimacy were drawn from an essay – ‘The Central Political Challenge: Government and Legitimacy’ – that Manwaring had published three years earlier. ⁵¹ Manwaring’s thought in turn appealed to an empirical project – ‘A Model for the Analysis of Small Wars’ – that he had undertaken for US Southern Command in 1984–87. ⁵²

The Model derived lessons from 43 Small Wars by asking his informants (mostly ex-participants) to use a scale from one to four in answer to 72 questions. These answers were then aggregated in six categories, of which the most important, for present purposes, was the ‘legitimacy’ of government (good scores on this measure correlated strongly with the eventual outcome of the conflict). ‘Host Government Legitimacy’ was defined as follows:

The Host Government is considered legitimate when it has a significant degree of domestic support as measured by electoral results, opinion polls, and/or media commentary; when its people do not perceive its actions to be corrupt; when it delivers necessary governmental services with reasonable efficacy and impartiality; and when political change can be effected without resort to violence. (This latter usually involves a relatively free and open electoral system, i.e., democracy). ⁵³

At bottom, Manwaring’s theory was simple; it can quite plausibly be seen as an updating and elaboration of the idea within the Small Wars Manual that the point of intervention is to sort out ‘government’. As he put it in an early publication, ‘the root causes of “people’s wars” are longstanding political, economic, and social injustice’; ⁵⁴ when grievances are taken away, legitimacy will follow. In consequence, he emphasised that struggles for legitimacy were basically struggles to be seen to meet popular ‘needs’: in the Philippines, for instance, ‘the objective was the people … the attack was against the argument that the government could not and would not be responsive to ordinary people’s needs’. ⁵⁵ The problem he went to some lengths to obscure was the relationship between legitimacy-for-the-West and what might be called legitimacy-for-locals. He quoted Gurr’s Why Men Rebel (1970), for instance, which cited a study suggesting that ‘the legitimization of leaders through election gives them a greater influence over group members than the assumption of leadership without election’; he refrained, however, from quoting the following sentence: ‘The implication is not necessarily that election is a requirement for legitimate authority; it is likely to be in democratic societies, not necessarily so in others.’ ⁵⁶ Samuel P. Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) is similarly cavalierly treated. Huntington’s work is quoted for its statement that ‘successful great revolutions do not occur in democratic political systems’. ⁵⁷ No mention is made of Huntington’s larger conclusion that democratic suffrage may be an obstacle to socio-economic modernisation and that ‘it is authority that is in scarce supply’. ⁵⁸ The social science that Manwaring appealed to was thus a shaky basis for his optimistic view that the reform of the political system went hand in hand with other forms of progress.

The drafting team’s initial definition thus drew upon a somewhat problematic body of work that was, to put it mildly, shaped by preconceived commitments. It is relevant that the context in which this work arose was Southern Command in the mid-Reagan period; Max Manwaring and his immediate colleagues were primarily Latin American experts whose understandable preoccupation was with the conflict in El Salvador. Their reading of this conflict was that oligarchic rule was ultimately unsustainable: ‘it was clear to even the most obtuse that the country was either going to follow the way of Nicaragua or Chile’. Under these circumstances, the American instinct was to seek a return to ‘normalcy’ (presumably meaning something not unlike Pinochet), but the Salvadorans wisely chose ‘a modification of the Chilean model’. Salvadoran counterinsurgents ‘centered their efforts around basic reforms and the establishment of the foundations of participatory democracy’. ⁵⁹ In other words, El Salvador was prey to social forces that led to an inexorably modernising process; the role of the Americans was to assist that process towards a liberal democratic outcome. It is not, for present purposes, important to decide if this interpretation of the Salvadoran war was generous to his allies’ motivations. ⁶⁰ What is relevant and important is that the strategy that he imputed – a strategy of removing all kinds of grievances in the context of a modernising programme – was taken to be relevant to other kinds of problems in rather different socio-cultural settings.

Implicit in Manwaring’s approach was a call to activism in which the idea of ‘legitimacy’ combined a practical judgement about stability with a view of what Americans expected. ⁶¹ An essay on peace operations from 1998 declared that:

The days of delineating a successful international political end-state as simple short-term self-protection, limited adherence to human rights and the election of civilian political leaders, or material compassion for a humanitarian problem are over. The American public expects US efforts … to make the world – and the United States – a better place in the long term. ⁶²

His 2003 essay ‘The Central Political Challenge: Government and Legitimacy’ was part of a volume that argued for a ‘Grand Strategy’ to which ‘legitimate governance’ was central, principally on the grounds that ‘legitimate governance is inherently stable because it has the political competence and societal support to adequately manage internal problems’. ⁶³ Although he thought that ‘forcible imposition’ would not work, he also believed that:

When U.S. interests are threatened by events in a weak and menaced State, the main element of U.S. policy and strategy must go beyond promising simple democracy (i.e. the election of civilian leaders) to facilitating and guiding responsible leaders in a long-term, patient, but firm and vigilant pursuit of moral legitimacy. ⁶⁴

III

As we shall see, the Manual’s underlying theory has close affinities with Manwaring’s, but it is overlaid with rather different material that hides this fact from any casual reader. In part, this is a consequence of the authors’ policy of trying to draw authority from mainstream social science. ⁶⁵ The theory of ‘legitimacy’ adopted is plainly meant to be recognised as Weber’s. It is true the authors never quite define legitimacy; they do, however, illustrate its meaning by noting that:

Governments described as ‘legitimate’ rule primarily with the consent of the governed; those described as ‘illegitimate’ tend to rely mainly or entirely on coercion. Citizens of the latter obey the state for fear of the consequences of doing otherwise, rather than because they voluntarily accept its rule. ⁶⁶

In its clearest single treatment of the subject, the Manual defines ‘power’, following Weber, as ‘the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his or her own will despite resistance’. ⁶⁷ Authority is ‘legitimate power associated with social positions’ and ‘is justified by the beliefs of the obedient’. There are three primary types of authority. It can be ‘rational-legal, which is grounded in law and contract, codified in impersonal rules, and most commonly found in developed, Western societies’. It can be charismatic, ‘which is exercised by leaders who develop allegiance among their followers because of their unique, individual charismatic appeal, whether ideological, religious, political, or social’. And lastly, it can be traditional, ‘which is usually invested in a hereditary line or particular office by a higher power’. ⁶⁸ These plainly Weberian statements might be taken to suggest that the Manual is also Weberian in treating value-judgements as in essence arbitrary; one reason its production was greeted with relief was its apparent openness to cultural difference, especially in its insistence upon the urgent need to gather knowledge of what counts as being ‘legitimate’. ⁶⁹

But appearances are deceptive. The Manual has a simple view of human motivations that feeds into a simple view of culture. There are ‘interests’ or ‘core motivations that drive behaviour’, including ‘physical security, basic necessities, economic well-being, political participation, and social identity’, that will, if neglected, give rise to ‘grievances’. ⁷⁰ Conversely, settling grievances will, other things being equal, gain popular support. The Manual is prone to implying that ‘effective governance’ can be the basis of legitimacy; ⁷¹ some cultures will be quite content with mere security, ⁷² but a rational-legal order of a broadly Western type is a ‘major factor’ in securing acceptance. ⁷³ Legitimacy may, of course, take other, competing forms, but the default assumption is that, other things being equal, good government will in itself build up legitimacy. ⁷⁴

Within the context of this theory, the influence of Weber does have one interesting consequence. Weber’s own treatment of legitimacy as a matter of ‘legitimacy-beliefs’ ⁷⁵ is the most likely source of a focus on beliefs that has some quite important implications. The Manual defines ‘culture’ as ‘a system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviours and artifacts that members of a society use to cope with their world and with one another’, ⁷⁶ but closer reading shows that it is just ‘beliefs’ that matter. An artefact gains its importance from its function within the ‘customs’ and ‘behaviours’. But if they are more than casual, those customs and behaviours rest on ‘values’, which are in turn defined as ‘enduring beliefs’. ⁷⁷ This means that a culture consists in beliefs, that is, to use the Manual’s definition, in ‘concepts and ideas accepted as true’. ⁷⁸ There may, of course, be some beliefs that people are not consciously aware of; but the clear implication is that culture can be grasped as a determinate list of propositions.

Moreover, beliefs can in principle be altered. There are, we are told, three different kinds of belief – core, intermediate and peripheral – which are, it seems, hierarchically ordered. On core beliefs, the Manual is quite cautious (though not perhaps cautious enough):

Core beliefs are those views that are part of a person’s deep identity … attempts to change the central beliefs of a culture may result in unintended second- and third-order consequences. Decisions to do so are made at the national-strategic level. ⁷⁹

Intermediate beliefs, we are told, ‘are predicated on reference to authority figures or authoritative texts. Thus, intermediate beliefs can sometimes be influenced by co-opting opinion leaders’. ⁸⁰ Lastly, from intermediate beliefs flow peripheral beliefs. These beliefs are open to debate, consciously considered, and easiest to change. ⁸¹

There are signs, then, that the Manual’s insistence that soldiers must be sensitive to culture does not exclude a confidence that there exist techniques for bringing about large-scale cultural changes. The existence of pre-modern ways of exercising power may be part of the ‘human terrain’ ⁸² on which the soldier operates, but there are elements of that terrain that can, with difficulty, be adjusted. Such optimism will be necessary, as the default objective of US policy is a demandingly specific project. The counterinsurgent will secure ‘effective governance’ by working simultaneously along several ‘logical lines of operations’. Unlike Galula’s carefully phased programme, the Manual’s encourages soldiers to do everything at once. It is open to commanders to vary or omit particular ‘logical lines of operation’, but there is a tacit assumption that they will all be mutually supporting. The Manual’s only image (as opposed to diagram) is of a piece of rope composed of a number of parallel strands. ⁸³ The counterinsurgents will set up a police force with impartial practices, generally meritocratic promotion procedures and rigorous civilian oversight. ⁸⁴ They will restore what is described as ‘freedom to conduct lawful commerce’ ⁸⁵ involving rough equality of opportunity within a basically free-market order. They will avoid encouraging militias and do their best to minimise sectarian divides, promoting instead a ‘national perspective’, ⁸⁶ from which, it is hoped, the people will opt to cast their votes in the eventual national elections. ⁸⁷ In all this, the Manual is loyal to Max Manwaring’s assumption that there can be no conflict between types of modernisation.

But one of its well-meant objectives in practice receives much more stress than all of the remainder put together. The government must install a rule of law: a heading in bold type announces that ‘Security Under the Rule of Law is Essential’. ⁸⁸ ‘The rule of law’, we are informed, ‘is a key goal and end-state in COIN’. ⁸⁹ In other words, the ideal is a part of the end-state from which the military logic flows. However extreme the local situation, the counterinsurgents themselves exist in a law-governed world: ‘every action by counterinsurgents leaves a “forensic trace” that may be required sometime later in a court of law’. ⁹⁰ Their first priority is to bring this blessing to the general population; this in itself may be enough to give legitimacy. To take a fairly representative statement, ‘a government’s respect for pre-existing and impersonal legal rules can provide the key to gaining it widespread, enduring societal support’. ⁹¹ Great faith is reposed in the use of legal procedures, in part because ‘when insurgents are seen as criminals, they lose public support’. ⁹² The Manual fails to entertain the possibility that this inverts the arrow of causation: that acts are seen as criminal only in situations in which their perpetrators are not supported.

The rule of law is something that comes first in every sense. The counterinsurgent’s earliest objective is the local population’s ‘physical security’. But before the population is physically secure, there must be a ‘functioning police and judiciary system’ and the police and courts must be ‘fair and non-discriminatory’. ⁹³ If there is no such system, the counterinsurgent forces may need to set one up; if it exists, but it is weak, then they should do their utmost to support it, if necessary by lending civilian personnel. ⁹⁴ One reason that this is important is that the insurgents themselves, if they are captured, will have to be processed through the legal system: ‘they are not, when captured, prisoners of wars’, but ‘criminal suspects within the legal system of the host nation’. ⁹⁵

In its largest sense, the rule of law is short-hand for detailed and specific political ideals. In the Manual’s fullest treatment of the subject, we are told that:

Some key aspects of the rule of law include

A government that derives its powers from the governed and competently manages, coordinates, and sustains collective security, as well as political, social, and economic development …

Sustainable security institutions. These include a civilian-controlled military as well as police, court, and penal institutions. The latter should be perceived by the local populace as fair, just, and transparent.

Fundamental human rights. The United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and the International Convention for Civil and Political Rights provide a guide for applicable human rights.

Although there may of course be derogations from these rights in a condition of emergency, the Manual insists that ‘respect for the full panoply of human rights should be the goal of the host nation’. ⁹⁶

IV

Thus, the Manual’s well-meant, indeed laudable, objectives involve an ideological commitment. One can, indeed, be rather more precise: other things being equal, the end-state will deliver a highly American mix of equality of opportunity, free access to free markets, and self-defence through private litigation; there is a remarkable fusion between its ‘logical lines of operation’ and a specific kind of social order. The very first part of the operation, the establishment of so-called ‘physical security’, involves the implementation of ethical ideals – the complex norms involved in the creation of relatively impartial legal systems – that may well be new to the host nation’s culture and that are bound, if taken seriously, to come at a degree of political cost. One difference that results is especially striking. As we have seen, Galula’s Fourth (and arguably most important) Step was the eradication of the ‘political agents’ of the insurgency. This should follow the establishment of ‘control’, but precede attempts to create a political party. As we have also noticed, Galula emphasised that this particular Step would be distasteful; it was important to prevent the unpopularity from tainting the main body of the counterinsurgent forces. By contrast, the Manual notes blandly that:

after insurgent forces have been eliminated, removing the insurgent infrastructure begins. This should be done so as to minimize the impact on the local populace. Rooting out such infrastructure is essentially a police action that relies heavily on military and intelligence forces until HN police, courts, and legal processes can assume responsibility for law enforcement within the cleared area. ⁹⁷

The Manual does not see the purge as anomalous and distasteful; it is a ‘police action’ in the straightforward sense that it is part of normal law enforcement. Like everything done by the counterinsurgent forces, it is an element in the seamless process of setting up a Western rule of law.

This is a significant pointer to the nature of the shift between Galula and the Field Manual. Galula’s purge established the conditions in which his ‘favourable minority’ could act upon and mobilise the undecided neutrals; the central purpose of his strategy was to create an instrument (his party) and to enable it to dominate. The Manual ignores the party and puts in place no similar coercive mechanism. Where Galula postulated a kind of iron law of oligarchy – ‘this holds true for every political regime, from the harshest dictatorship to the mildest democracy’ ⁹⁸ – that minorities mobilise majorities, the Manual envisaged an ‘end-state’ in which the ‘neutral or passive’ were greatly outnumbered by government supporters. ⁹⁹ It is relevant that the Manual’s ‘Guide for Action’ (Appendix A) ¹⁰⁰ presumes that local allies can win in a fair fight. We are informed that ‘successful trusted networks’ will ‘grow like roots into the populace. They displace enemy networks, which forces enemies into the open’. ¹⁰¹ This exactly inverts Galula’s recommendations; Galula took it for granted that the eradication of those he had described as ‘political agents’ should precede efforts to create networks of loyalists. The explanation for the loss of phasing is that the Manual takes the central problem to be the intensification of proper government; that is why COIN operations can properly be called ‘armed social work’. ¹⁰² The idea that gets lost is the notion that, when all is said and done, all government is by and for a faction, that is, that the essential problem is political. A telling verbal detail illustrates the difference. In Galula’s work, the concept of ‘mobilisation’ refers to the activities promoted by his party. In the Appendix, it refers to motivations that are supplied by the American forces (in essence by convincing the local populace that its true interests are best served by defeating the insurgents). ¹⁰³

As should by now be obvious, there is a pattern here. The Manual neglects politics – understood as the activity of giving one group power over others – in favour of improved administration. The upshot is a kind of schizophrenia. The culturally sensitive general will want to deal with human beings wholesale: he will learn from one part of the Manual how to discover groups, suborn their leaders and so detach them from the opposition. He will accept Galula’s hint that ‘it may be useful to remember that a peacetime political machine is built essentially on patronage’. ¹⁰⁴ Meanwhile, his specialist helpers, pursuing their ‘logical lines of operations’ in deference to the Manual’s other features, will want to deal with human beings retail: they will set up institutions that are designed to face towards rights-bearing individuals. These institutions, it is hoped, will build ‘legitimacy’ through the politically risky tactic of favouring the weak against the strong. Where Galula advised systematic use of patronage, they will instead prefer to ‘send the message that favouritism and partisanship [in contracting] are not part of the process in a legitimate government’. ¹⁰⁵ Kalyvas perceptively notes that ‘the manual allows its unrealised longer-term objectives of intervention (i.e. political development) to influence its methods (i.e. its understanding of society as entailing direct and unmediated links between national actors and the population at large)’. ¹⁰⁶ But this is not an oversight that could be remedied by looking at provincial power structures with the aid of improved empirical social science; the Manual’s whole conception of the relationship between ‘legitimacy’ and governance simply equates the ‘methods’ and ‘objectives’.

V

The Manual thus departed from Galula in ways that show its authors were culturally remote from the whole spirit of his enterprise. It may be thought their real debt was to the British School and in particular to Robert Thompson. Thompson’s account of victory in Malaya placed one of the least morally problematic of British counterinsurgency campaigns in an exceptionally attractive light. Moreover, he can certainly be quoted as stressing the importance of effective government. But even this most promising of texts gives little support, when closely read, to the Manual’s core assumption that Western-style governance in itself has the capacity (other things being equal) to make a government ‘legitimate’. ‘Government’ in Malaya was already up and running; it was an apparatus that would be inherited by the colonial power’s Malay successors. So long as the insurgency was confined to the Chinese, all that the British had to do was promise independence on terms that effectively guaranteed Malay predominance. ¹⁰⁷ The British were thus assisted by the local ethnic fault lines. In this strategic context, Thompson was less committed to particular Western values than to the rather vague idea of ‘development and progress’, which might, if steadily pursued ‘with an air of established order’, trump the two rival forces of nationalism and ‘religion and customs’. ¹⁰⁸ He was sceptical about democracy ¹⁰⁹ and seems to have had no particular views about markets. His principal reason for being optimistic about the appeal of ‘material well-being’ was that Asians typically live ‘in peasant communities where the family tradition is venerated and the instinctive loyalties are to the advancement of closest relatives’. ¹¹⁰ This may be patronising, but it does not presume that Western moral ideas are universal.

In any case, Thompson shared Galula’s feeling that the importance of the ‘cause’ diminished over time:

the government must demonstrate both its determination and its capacity to win. These are the foundations of popular support … if the issue is evenly balanced, neither the government nor the insurgent cause is a matter of great importance. ¹¹¹

By his own account, the British displayed the will to win in ways the Manual does not contemplate; it is striking, for example, that the Manual has nothing to say on the mechanics of resettlement. Even in this relatively clean war, they also made use of some tactics that subsequent commanders could hardly emulate. Thompson set a high value upon the rule of law, but he was the first to point out that the law could be savage. Apart from the forcible shifting of more than half a million Chinese peasants, ¹¹² the British were ready for ruthlessly punitive action, including collective punishment of whole communities, the imposition of ‘repatriation’ (i.e. deportation to China) for relatively trivial offences, a mandatory death penalty for carrying a gun, and life imprisonment for supplying food. ¹¹³

Even so, it could be argued that their strategy had failed because it was inadequately Maoist. Thompson himself contributed a Preface to the American John McCuen’s The Art of Counter-revolutionary Warfare (1966). He cannot, however, have been much pleased with some of McCuen’s conclusions. As a more rigid counter-Maoist writer, McCuen saw the methods that the British had employed as instruments of popular ‘mobilization’. He recommended that ‘the final step in mobilizing the masses is counter-revolutionary organisation of the people … every possible person must be included, influenced, and committed’. ¹¹⁴ In consequence, he was critical of British policy for neglecting ‘political and psychological counter-organization’; ‘kindness and propaganda achieved little more than benevolent neutrality’. ¹¹⁵ As he had grasped, the logic of the classical tradition pointed towards the methods of the French ‘psychologists’.

There is no need to think that such measures were morally acceptable, politically wise or likely, in the long term, to be crowned with much success. They did, however, at least address the problem of how ‘support’ was to be generated without assuming that a Western order would automatically be found attractive. The Manual forswears such methods and puts nothing in their place: in a world in which counterinsurgents are increasingly confined by moral and political limitations, and some insurgent groupings have an ideology that has a wider appeal than communism, its strategy consists in offering better government. If the population should reject this blessing, the Manual is imaginatively barren. In their French-language Preface to Galula, Petraeus and Nagl appear to suggest that they have got no answer to religion: ‘one does not in general overcome religious fanatics except by imprisoning them or killing them’ (which possibly implies the rather dubious assumption that only religions cause problems of this nature). ¹¹⁶

As this bleak observation suggests, it is wrong to assume that wars over ‘legitimacy’ will be less ferocious than wars that have apparently more cynical objectives. It is relevant that such conflicts are hard to terminate; when the declared objective is liberal governance, it is hard for the counterinsurgent to compromise and run without experiencing loss of face. If the Long War for the rule of law is in the end foreshortened by means of a tolerable treaty with local notables, the mission is experienced as a failure. Success as Galula or even as Thompson conceived it will be experienced as marred by gross ‘sectarianism’ and ‘corruption’. It is not obvious that the feeling will be much assuaged if (as is not unlikely) the oppression that results reflects the outcome of a free election. And actors that repeatedly regard themselves as failures are unlikely, in the long term, to retain the will to fight.

There are, of course, less instrumental reasons for disapproving of the Manual’s project; there is a moral case against the use of violence in order to remake an alien culture. But the point of comparing the Manual with its most important sources has been to show the reasons why it fails in its own terms. The sources its authors acknowledged (Galula and Thompson) were read in a way that they derived from the sources they did not (the kind of American thinking that is found in Manwaring). The result was not just that the classics were sentimentalised – that the text ignored unpalatable tactics – but that its recommendations involved utopian goals. No doubt this was over-determined; a very long-established disposition to think of intervention as correcting ‘governance’ (conceived of as protection of life and property) was reinforced by recent, human-rights-based, rhetoric. But the upshot was a startling level of failure to understand the words upon the page. The worrying implication is that this level of failure was not the fruit of cynicism or incompetence, but of an incapacity to think in other ways. Given that governance was the key objective, the equation between governance and human-rights-based order meant the strategic problem was the defence of rights. In other words, insurgencies were thought of as obstacles to a political order that was the likely outcome of convergent modernisation. The ideology concealed within ‘legitimacy’ replaces a political view of counterinsurgency – as the struggle of some groups to govern others – with a less troubling picture of a modernising process that only a ‘fanatic’ could object to. If so, the kind of thinking that the Manual inculcates will lead to many future disappointments.