The British counter-insurgency myth *

For many years, the British Army has presented itself as the world’s most successful practitioner of counter-insurgency warfare, whose extensive experience can provide lessons for other armies. The British defeat of the communist insurgency in Malaya was contrasted with French failures in Indochina and Algeria, with American failure in Vietnam and Russian failure in Afghanistan. Crucial to British success were, it was argued, two related factors: British recognition of the importance of a ‘hearts and minds’ strategy (the winning of the support of the local population) and the British doctrine of ‘minimum force’. The British, it was argued, unlike the Americans, never unleashed indiscriminate violence, but instead always strove for proportionality, seeking to minimise casualties, so as to avoid alienating the local people. Most recently, the long war in Northern Ireland was presented as some sort of triumph whereby the IRA had been forced to come to terms. No army had more experience of this kind of warfare and there was a confident expectation in the 2000s that the Americans would be grateful to have this expertise made available in their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The British would show their cousins how it should be done.

To a considerable extent the academic literature endorsed this perception of British success and expertise. This consensus (not too strong a word) has in recent years broken down, and indeed all but collapsed. British military failure in Basra and Helmand provided the backdrop for this, but what is of interest here is the growing body of academic work that challenges what Andrew Mumford describes as the British counter-insurgency myth. One other point worth making is that, since 9/11, there has been an explosion of literature, both academic and non-academic, on counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency. Indeed, a small industry has grown up, complete with journals, conferences, monographs, funding opportunities and postgraduate degrees in both Britain and the United States. While much of the work that this academic-military-industrial complex has produced is intended to assist the military in the waging of their wars, it is still of considerable interest to the opponents of those wars.

The key work in completing the demolition of the British counter-insurgency myth is likely to be David French’s The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945–1967. French is, without any serious doubt, the foremost historian of the modern British Army, the author of numerous acclaimed books, and, indeed, the publication of his counter-insurgency volume was accompanied by the publication of what is likely to be the standard academic history of the postwar British Army: Army, Empire and Cold War. ¹ His counter-insurgency volume is similarly likely to become the standard work on the subject. Thankfully, he avoids the temptation to adapt the book to the contemporary concerns of the academic-military-industrial complex. Instead, his arguments and conclusions make uncomfortable reading for those who continue to delude themselves that the British waged a kinder, more restrained and humane kind of counter-insurgency.

French looks at British counter-insurgency campaigns from 1945 up to the so-called Aden Emergency, the war in South Arabia. For some reason, he does not discuss the failure of the IRA Border campaign in the 1950s, which is unfortunate, as his thoughts on that episode would have been very useful. Instead, he (somewhat inevitably) focuses on the Zionist insurgency in Palestine, the communist insurgency in Malaya, the ‘Mau Mau’ rebellion in Kenya, the EOKA insurgency in Cyprus and the humiliating debacle in South Arabia – though he does touch upon other campaigns. As he puts it, with typical understatement, despite all the talk of ‘hearts and minds’, it ‘was never pleasant’ for those on the receiving end of British counter-insurgency operations.

The rhetoric of British counter-insurgency in the postwar period was very much about ‘hearts and minds’, a sort of welfare state counter-insurgency, intended more to pacify public opinion at home than to inform practice on the ground. As French writes:

The cornerstones of most British counter-insurgency campaigns were coercion and counter-terror, not kindness and economic development … A commitment to waging counter-insurgency operations by employing coercion and intimidation continued to be a mainstay of British practice after 1945. Policy-makers remained convinced of its efficacy. They assumed that their subject populations were rational beings who would calculate that any benefits they might gain in the future by supporting the insurgents would be outweighed by the immediate costs of doing so. That the innocent were bound to suffer alongside the guilty was inevitable, acceptable and could be beneficial.

This was the reality. Local populations were to be brought under control rather than won over. If they gave insurgents assistance, then they would be punished. Looking back on the Palestine conflict, Sir John Hackett made what was a commonsense observation as far as the British military was concerned when he remarked that when confronted ‘with a thoroughly non-cooperative, unscrupulous, dishonest and utterly immoral civilian population, such as the Jewish Community in Palestine … reprisals are the only effective weapon’. And, of course, in the right circumstances, coercion could and did work. In Malaya, for example, where support for the insurgency was largely confined to the ethnic Chinese minority, the British could in practice rely on old-fashioned ‘divide and rule’ rather than ‘hearts and minds’. With the support of the Malays, they could use coercion against the Chinese in the confident expectation that, once it was clear who was winning, they would give up their support for the insurgents. The scale of the coercion in Malaya was enormous. As French points out, something like half of the Chinese population was forcibly resettled, brought under government control and police supervision. Their homes were destroyed and they were herded into the new villages at gunpoint. There was nothing ‘hearts and minds’ about it. In Kenya, the resettlement process was even more brutal. Between June 1954 and October 1955 some 70 per cent of the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru people were forcibly resettled, often in the most appalling slum conditions. The idea that forcible resettlement was all about winning ‘hearts and minds’ was simply the best way to dress up these operations for consumption back in Britain.

What of the British doctrine of ‘minimum force’? There are a number of factors that account for the level of violence used in the suppression of rebellion and insurgency. Doubtless, some armies resort to excess much more quickly and with less provocation than others, sometimes massacre is actually sanctioned, even encouraged by government, and, of course, some ‘native peoples’ can be killed with less concern than others. Nevertheless, French is surely right when he ascribes the British Army’s minimum force reputation more to the scale and intensity of the postwar conflicts it has been involved in than any other factor. The British never fought anyone against whom it was necessary to deploy the level of violence used by the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam or the Russians in Afghanistan. Even so, as Christopher Soames put it at the time of the Cyprus Emergency, minimum force could still be ‘quite a lot of force’.

The fact that the British were prepared to use ‘maximum force’ to suppress insurrection where necessary was conclusively shown in Athens in 1944 when the communist-led resistance was put down and in Surabaya in 1945 when the Indonesian nationalists were crushed. The bombing and shelling of heavily populated built-up areas was carried out with little concern for civilian casualties. When the use of the same methods was proposed in Palestine against the Zionist insurgents, the government of the day was horrified at the thought, not, one suspects, out of any humanitarian concern, but because of the diplomatic and public relations consequences of such action. The same Attlee Labour government had no such scruples when it came to bombarding Surabaya. Similarly, there was no problem when it came to bombing Arabs in Oman in 1958. Over a six-month period the RAF dropped over 1,000 tons of bombs on defenceless villages, ‘more than twice the weight of bombs that the Luftwaffe dropped in Coventry in November 1940’. From this point of view, proportionality seemed to matter less than the likelihood of bad publicity and political embarrassment.

The most brutal postwar counter-insurgency campaign was conducted in Kenya. It is clear that the killings, beatings and torture that characterised security operations here were prompted by racism. Black Africans could be killed and mistreated with comparative impunity. As is well known, the British hanged over a thousand rebels and suspected rebels, many on the basis of flimsy and perjured evidence, to encourage the others. This was an unprecedented judicial massacre. Operation Anvil, the clearing of the Mau Mau from Nairobi, was, as French points out, ‘probably the largest cordon and search and mass detention operation in the history of the British Empire’. Some 24,000 people, overwhelmingly Kikuyu, were detained. It was an exercise in collective punishment. When General Sir George Erskine arrived to take command of military operations in Kenya, he privately acknowledged that ‘there was a great deal of indiscriminate shooting’ and that ‘torture was a feature of many police stations’. He made clear his opposition to any sort of enquiry into this because ‘I think the revelations would be shattering’. Instead, the most appalling crimes were covered up and are only today beginning to find their way into British courts, sixty-odd years after the event. With regard to the use of torture by the British more generally, as French puts it, the historian finds him or herself ‘walking through a hall of mirrors’. We know it took place and continues to take place, but the extent to which it took and takes place is impossible to determine with certainty.

How did the British Army maintain its reputation for counter-insurgency success and expertise, for ‘hearts and minds’ and ‘minimum force’? One crucial factor already mentioned is the low intensity of the campaigns the British undertook. If, post 1945, the Army had been tasked with suppressing the nationalist movement in India, then the story would be very different. A long bloody war, with any pretence of minimum force abandoned, would have ended in humiliating defeat. The British Army’s reputation would have suffered the same damage as was self-inflicted by the French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam. Instead, the British retreated. Indeed, it is important to remember that British postwar counter-insurgency operations, whether successful or unsuccessful, with the exception of Northern Ireland, all took place as part of a great strategic retreat. One of the most dangerous aspects of the Army’s contemporary operations is that, since the Blair government, strategic decision-making has been effectively surrendered to the United States. No British government would, of its own volition, have sent troops to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. The consequences have, of course, been disastrous.

While David French’s book is written very much in the style of a veteran historian summing up a debate, Andrew Mumford’s The Counter-Insurgency Myth is much more a book for the moment. It is informed by an urgent awareness that we are, in the nonsense language of the academic-military-industrial complex, in an era of ‘globalised post-Maoist insurgency’. What Mumford sets out to show is that the supposed British model of counter-insurgency will be of little use in this global conflict. While the British Army has, he acknowledges, ‘a wealth of asymmetric warfare experience’, too often ‘this quantity of experience has been misguidedly conflated with quality’. In fact, the British have ‘consistently proven to be slow learners’. The Army’s poor performance in Basra served to ‘pull the mask away from the hitherto rosy popular trans-Atlantic perception of British competence at counter-insurgency’. Far from Malaya being a model of how to conduct a counter-insurgency campaign, he considers the twelve years that it took ‘to eradicate an isolated insurgent group’ as hardly ‘deserving of the academic salutations it has parenthetically achieved’. He acknowledges British brutality in Kenya, although he puts this down to ‘colonial interpretations of Mau Mau’s atavism’. My own view is that this was how the ferocity of the repression was justified rather than its cause. And he is similarly uncomplimentary about the British performance just about everywhere. With regard to the much vaunted British success in Northern Ireland, he is particularly scathing. This was ‘the zenith of Britain’s application of an outright civil-military counter-insurgency strategy’. The initial British response to the Republican challenge had, as he argues, all the ‘heavy-handedness of a reactionary colonial force’. He, quite correctly, singles out the Falls Road Curfew of July 1970 as indicative of ‘an out-of-touch quasi-colonial approach’. Far from containing and suppressing the developing Republican insurgency, the British response seriously exacerbated the situation. And he is similarly scathing with regard to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, the British performance in Helmand reinforced the perception of the British Army as ‘a struggling and stretched military, searching for a level of strategic clarity and operational potency’, as lacking ‘the political stomach and military edge to undertake prolonged counter-insurgency campaigns abroad’. The conclusion that seems to follow inescapably from Mumford’s hard-hitting and overwhelmingly convincing indictment is that there should be no more of these costly and damaging military adventures. Yet this is not a conclusion that he seems prepared to draw. Instead, he writes sympathetically of the ‘new found American confidence in the realm of counter-insurgency’. With defeat in Afghanistan looming, this seems an over-optimistic conclusion.