Abstract
The issue of coping with the twin and often inter-related threats of violent extremism and insurgencies driven by various ideological, geopolitical, historical, socioeconomic and other drivers has long been a subject of concern to policymakers and academic specialists globally, and certainly in South and Southeast Asia. The voluminous extant literature includes seminal studies of countering insurgencies such as Robert G. K. Thompson’s research on the successful British counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign against the Malayan Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s as well the far less successful American effort in South Vietnam a decade later. Other classic accounts of COIN have, inter alia, included studies by Roger Trinquier of France’s experience with insurgencies in their colonies or more generic guides for low-intensity military operations by former military officers such as David Galula or Frank Kitson. In the past two decades, with the emergence of Al Qaeda—and since mid-2014 its virulent spin-off the Islamic State (IS)—as prototypical globalised violent Islamist extremist networks, much has been written as well about the evolving threat of the so-called religiously motivated ‘new terrorism’. These have included, inter alia, the edited book by Tan and Ramakrishna entitled The New Terrorism: Anatomy, Anatomy, Trends and Counter-Strategies (2002) and the more Southeast Asia-centric After Bali: The Threat of Terrorism in Southeast Asia (2003), edited by Ramakrishna and Tan. Of particular note have been David Kilcullen’s studies of the developments in Islamist militancy and Western responses which have offered fresh insight into how COIN thinking has evolved in the post-September 11 world. More recent and notable studies of violent extremism and COIN in Southeast Asia, South Asia and further afield have included Combating Terrorism: Evolving Asian Perspectives edited by Pandalai (2019) and the especially notable Policing Insurgencies: Cops as Counterinsurgents (2014), edited by Fair and Ganguly.
Into this rather saturated field has come Countering Insurgencies and Violent Extremism in South and Southeast Asia, edited by Shanthie Mariet D’Souza, the founder and President of Mantraya and Member of the Research and Advisory Committee of the Naval War College in Goa, India. D’Souza has built a fine reputation for herself as a specialist on COIN and violent extremism in South Asia and to her credit, she managed to assemble a strong slate of contributors from a nicely diverse mix of backgrounds, both academics and those with policy experience. The book is divided into three parts. Part I, ‘Emerging Challenges’, has chapters on the Islamic State in Asia in general and in the Philippine and Indonesian state responses to it; a chapter on Myanmar’s highly militarised counter-terrorism approach to Rohingya militants and a useful account of the little-discussed emerging violent Islamist threat in the Maldives. Part II purports to ask the rhetorical question: ‘Cautious Optimism – or False Dawn?’ To this end, it includes chapters on the Singaporean and Malaysian responses to Islamist extremism; two chapters on India, one focusing on the state response to the Naxalite movement and wider analysis of India’s COIN approach, and a meaty discussion of how the Nepali ‘people’s war’ should be conceptualised as a ‘new’ or ‘hybrid war’. Part III: ‘Quagmires’, examines three such cases in four chapters—two looking at Pakistan, and the others on Afghanistan and Southern Thailand. Finally, Part 4: ‘Victory?’ unpacks the controversial, highly militarised if operationally decisive Sri Lankan State’s defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 2009 in two chapters, before D’Souza ties the analysis together in the pithy conclusion.
To be sure, while all the contributions have merit to various degrees, the individual chapters, namely those on Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nepal are particularly informative, outstanding and deserve close study. That said, this book appears to suffer from a few deficits. First, it does seem that this volume could have benefitted from a clearer central organising structure around which the various contributors could have better organised their material. For instance, the Pakistan chapters do an outstanding job of analysing the COIN and counter-extremism challenge and identifying lessons learned. The chapter on southern Thailand, by contrast, appears to be relatively shorter and more in the nature of a literature review. It would have helped if the writers had been asked to follow a central structure so as to facilitate greater ease of comparison of salient points between chapters. For example, a more effective structure could have focused on establishing how the balance between kinetic and non-kinetic measures in COIN and counter-extremism efforts is struck; the relative effectiveness of such a balance struck in the country under review; and wider lessons learned.
Second, while D’Souza appears to hew to the argument by Thomas Marks that ‘insurgency is an armed political campaign—a mass mobilisation of a counter-state to challenge the state for political power’ (pp. 4, 358) this helps frame the context for many of the cases in the book but not all. While the violent Islamists in Singapore and Malaysia have certainly tried to create an Islamic State alternative to the current political structures in these countries—it really is difficult to characterise these two countries at the current time as having an Islamist insurgency problem, because there is no mass mobilisation of a counter-state against the state. The same could be generally said for Myanmar and the Maldives. These countries at the time of writing have an Islamist extremist rather than an insurgent challenge. Of course, the title of the volume makes a distinction between insurgencies and violent extremism, but a case could be made that a focus just on those Southeast Asian countries such as the Philippines and southern Thailand with a recognisable Islamist insurgency challenge, may have made for a conceptually and analytically tighter volume, facilitating easier comparisons between conceptually recognisable insurgent movements across South and Southeast Asia. Those countries with a violent Islamist extremism problem like Singapore, Malaysia and arguably perhaps the Maldives and Myanmar, could have been covered in a separate volume.
Third, an opportunity to impose a stronger central organising theme appears to have been lost. After all, concepts as conceptually disparate as ‘new war’ and ‘people’s war’ were touched upon by the contributors to the volume. The opening chapter could have thus discussed ‘hybrid’, ‘grey zone’ or ‘new war’ as a useful conceptual framework for the various contributors, explaining how in new wars, the insurgent groups may use a range of tactics from non-kinetic means to kinetic measures including terrorism, to attain their political objectives. Perhaps if such a central theme of ‘new war’ has been more obviously and systematically adopted upfront and centre from the outset, it would have helped create the previously discussed central organising structure for better marshalling the material of all the contributors to facilitate more structured and meaningful comparisons of each national context. Lastly, it must be said that the presence of niggling typos did not enhance the overall effect. As a sampling, the names of the respected Southeast Asian scholars Sidney Jones and Joseph Liow were misspelt as ‘Sydney Jones’ (p. 53) and ‘Joseph Liew’ (p. 210), respectively, Sabrina Chua was misspelt as ‘Sabina Chua’ (p. 278) while bibliographical references at times went missing as well.
This is not to argue that this book makes no substantial contribution at all. One overall message that is important and clearly emerges from the discussion is that, after decades of counterinsurgency experience, most countries in South and Southeast Asia still tend to downplay the political and overplay the military dimensions of state response in COIN. That more needs to be done to strike a more meaningful balance between kinetic and non-kinetic measures is thus a timely takeaway. Finally, it should be reiterated that the editor has done a good job in pulling in some particularly excellent contributions. On the whole, the discussions within this volume provide a valuable, if imperfect, addition to the literature on COIN in general and South Asia and Southeast Asia in particular.