Abstract
The US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the rapid collapse of the Afghan government in August 2021 provoked renewed calls to rethink the assumptions that have undergirded counterinsurgency or ‘stabilization’ operations for the past twenty years. Luckily for us, such calls are hardly new, and two books published the same year offer important correctives to some of those basic assumptions. Jacqueline L. Hazelton’s Bullets Not Ballots and Christian Tripodi’s The Unknown Enemy approach the subject from different angles. Hazelton questions whether popular support is really the key to successful counterinsurgency, and Tripodi interrogates whether cultural knowledge about local societies can really be instrumentalized to win popular support in the ways that counterinsurgents often claim. Both, however, make clear that the orthodox arguments about why counterinsurgencies succeed – by understanding their target societies, by limiting the use of violence, and by building popular legitimacy – are not only misleading, but come at a high moral and material cost. Based on a series of comparative historical case studies and bolstered by a degree of archival research that is often lacking in the literature, both books make important interventions that should attract the lasting attention of scholars and practitioners alike. As Hazelton demonstrates, counterinsurgent success requires elite coalition building and brute force; not ‘good governance’ (p. 149). Likewise, as Tripodi evinces, the search for cultural intelligence misleads counterinsurgents as often – if not more so – than it aids them.
In Bullets not Ballots, Jacqueline L. Hazelton aims to reassess the dynamics that lead to success in counterinsurgencies. Challenging conventional narratives that emphasize popular support, legitimacy building, or effective governance, Hazelton argues that successful counterinsurgencies rely on a twofold process of accommodation and compellence. Counterinsurgent governments form a coalition of elites who can secure the social and material resources necessary to marginalize insurgents, and then direct brute force toward civilians and insurgents alike in order to break their will and capacity to fight (pp. 14–15). In Hazelton’s account, the process of coalition-building is decidedly not an effort to win broad support through reforms or similar measures, but rather a process of capturing the support of a select audience of elites within and outside the counterinsurgent government, as well as within the insurgency itself. Likewise, as Hazelton makes clear through the cases she examines, the use of military force that accompanies such efforts is most often systematic, intentional, and directly targeted at civilians (p. 148). Counterinsurgency success, in other words, is the ‘outcome of a violent process of state building’; one which carries high moral and human costs that are seldom acknowledged (p. 4).
The significance of Hazelton’s intervention lays in large part in her frame of analysis, which shifts the focus from great power sponsors like the United States and Britain to local governments and redefines ‘success’ in terms of political stability. This allows her to focus on what counterinsurgent governments actually do, rather than what they proclaim they do. The results are grim, but instructive. Hazelton tests her compellence theory through a range of classic and unconventional case studies: the Malayan Emergency (1948–1957), the Greek Civil War (1947–1949), the Hukbalahap Insurrection in the Philippines (1946–1954), the British campaign in Dhofar, Oman (1965–1976), and the US-backed counterinsurgency in El Salvador (1979–1992), as well as the Turkish government’s repression of the PKK (1984–1999), which she includes to demonstrate the utility of her model across a wide variety of contexts. With all of these cases (and particularly in the first three) Hazelton offers a fruitfully revisionist account that pays close attention to the dynamics of violence, situating it as central rather than dismissing it as ‘early military errors’ as other scholars have often done. The result is a nuanced analysis of events that foregrounds governments’ push-pull of efforts to build coalitions of supporters, demonstrates the peripheral impact of reforms, and notably points to the limited impact of intervening powers. Thus in Dhofar, for example, Hazelton demonstrates that that the Omani government defeated insurgents largely by cultivating a network of local warlords and militias ‘interested in getting a bigger share of the government’s pie’ and then empowering them to use force, all while resisting British pressure for liberal reforms (p. 91). Likewise, in the Philippines, Hazelton flips conventional interpretations, demonstrating that Ramon Magsaysay built a successful coalition against the Huk insurgency precisely by resisting the sweeping reforms often credited with success in favour of lower-cost gestures that left patronage structures in place and allowed military forces to deploy tremendous violence against civilians for the duration of the conflict. Hazelton’s broader point is not to endorse such violence, but to convince policymakers of the need to make a sober assessment of the human and moral costs of liberal military interventions. There is, she concludes, slim hope of finding a ‘better way of war’ (p. 151).
This cautionary tone is echoed by Christian Tripodi, who like Hazelton seeks to question several key assumptions that have structured western counterinsurgencies over the past several decades (or longer). With The Unknown Enemy, Tripodi aims to interrogate the utility of ‘cultural intelligence’ and the conviction that an understanding of local societies can be instrumentalized to change attitudes, forge alliances, or engineer systems of political control (p. 2). For Tripodi, the search for cultural intelligence contains a fatal paradox. On its surface, the idea that understanding a target society might allow counterinsurgents to act more effectively makes sense. But, as the book drives home across a range of case studies, the opposite is more often true. In reality, Tripodi argues, the search for cultural intelligence rests on a number of flawed assumptions and historical misreadings, and as a result it not only consistently fails to deliver results but distracts military leaders from far more important considerations about the moral and ethical stakes of such operations, about the need for clear policy objectives, and about the complex and highly contingent nature of warfare (p. 19). Rather than approaching conflicts through a Clausewitzian focus on policy objectives and the means to achieve them, counterinsurgents gravitate toward a ‘violent and unpredictable’ model of social engineering that often results in long, drawn-out, and ultimately unsuccessful campaigns (p. 202).
Comparative in nature, Tripodi’s text opens with two helpful theoretical chapters before diving into his case studies. Chapter 2 examines four key themes that unite the studies: the imperial nature of counterinsurgent interventions, the highly contingent nature of war, the reductive nature of doctrine, and the operational codes that shape military thinking about the use of cultural intelligence. Chapter 3 sets out to address the ‘bad history’ problem that plagues such efforts by tracing the intellectual genealogy of counterinsurgency back to empire; an approach Tripodi adopts not in service of any political argument, but as a way to elucidate the shared assumptions, practices, and recurrent features of this particular mode of warfare. Tripodi then extends the nuanced discussions framed by these chapters into five detailed case studies: the British experience on the North-West Frontier of India (1919–1939), the French war in Algeria (1954–1962), the American war in Vietnam (1964–1972), Al Anbar and Basra in the Iraq War (2006–2009), and the Helmand Province of Afghanistan (2006–2014). The first two cases are particularly well grounded in archival sources, which allows Tripodi to construct a nuanced narrative of military thinking and its oft-unintended consequences on the ground. His discussion of the Algerian War, for example, offers a thoughtful analysis of the logic undergirding the action of the Special Administrative Sections, a key French Army institution for engaging the population that has nevertheless gone largely neglected in the literature on the war. This attentiveness to detail runs through the subsequent cases as well, not only in Tripodi’s analysis of the various efforts to formulate a ‘culturally informed’ approach to war, but when he dissects the social or cultural complications that rendered those approaches ineffective. As Tripodi notes, a tension exists between recognizing military officers as ‘sophisticated intellectual actors’ (p. 203) and seeing wartime societies as ‘complex systems’ (p. 19). And it is precisely in foregrounding this tension that The Unknown Enemy exposes the faulty assumptions that have undergirded population-centric counterinsurgencies for the past century.
In some ways, readers may find the conclusions reached by Hazelton and Tripodi unsatisfying, not because of their scholarship, which is meticulous, but because they offer a pessimistic assessment of the possibilities for finding a ‘better way’ of war. That, however, is where the significance of both books lies. Both offer a critical reassessment of established counterinsurgency narratives across several contexts. Both likewise offer nuanced assessments of the various dynamics that drive the outcomes of counterinsurgency campaigns grounded in careful research. But most importantly, both books point to an insight that is vital to recognize in the wake of the US war in Afghanistan: that the moral and human costs of counterinsurgency are often far higher, and the results obtained far more fragile, than conventional wisdom admits. For these reasons, Bullets Not Ballots and The Unknown Enemy are certain to become important texts for students, scholars, and practitioners alike.