What Happens in Insurgencies by William R. Polk

William R. Polk's superb study: "Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism & Guerrilla War from the American Revolution to Iraq" is just out. In the days to come, there should be reviews of it to be posted. In the interim, here is a talk that he gave that relates to the topic.

WHAT HAPPENS IN INSURGENCIES

(Talk before the National Arts Club, September 21, 2007)


The people who have fought insurgencies in the last few hundred years have spoken various languages, followed different religions, been motivated by diverse ideologies, made their livings in dissimilar occupations and lived apart from one another all over the world.

So are there common features from which we can construct a rough model that will help us to understand what is now happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Chechnya, Colombia, the Philippines and other countries?

This is a question that began to puzzle me back in 1962 when I began to observe the Vietnam war. But Vietnam was not the first guerrilla war I had seen. I was in the Palestine Mandate in 1946 and Greece in 1947. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to study, sometimes uncomfortably closely, several other insurgencies. It was Vietnam, however, that challenged me to try to understand.

I was then fortunate in being a Member of the Policy Planning Council of the U.S. Department of State whose Chairman, Walt Rostow, has been called the "architect" of American policy on Vietnam. Rostow was a true believer in the war. I was not. And our differences more or less forced me to begin the process that has led me to write Violent Politics.

The first major task to which I was assigned in Government was the chairmanship of the interdepartmental task force charged with helping to bring to an end the guerrilla war the Algerians were fighting against the French.

The American role in Algeria was only peripheral: General de Gaulle did not want outside interference (although he was happy to take the money we provided to pay for his army ) and he refused to share his thoughts or information with us.

Thus, we were somewhat blind, but we got ready to act if our action was demanded – the CIA thought that we might be asked to evacuate the 1 million 200 thousand Europeans then living in Algeria from the beaches like the British at Dunkirk. Fortunately, the French and Algerians reached agreement to give Algeria its freedom. So, while the whole pro-French population got out with all deliberate speed, as the lawyers say, their leaving was not a rout. Our Sixth Fleet, which was standing by, was not needed.

Vietnam was quite a different story. Almost every branch of the American government – even the Department of the Interior – became deeply involved. And, whereas few Americans could have placed Algeria on a map, Vietnam (in Michael Arlen's famous phase) was our "living room war." Every American experienced it at least on TV. No country was ever so reported upon as was Vietnam by Americans.

Consequently, I spent a part of each day perusing a deluge of cables, intelligence reports, summaries, and policy papers in addition to myriad press dispatches.

In all the mass of materials, thousands upon thousands of pages, one looked in vain for a penetrating definition of guerrilla warfare. Indeed, there was little coherent analysis of what was happening in Vietnam. The single exception was the work done by the small team that functioned under the leadership of my friend and colleague Tom Hughes in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Although its voice was usually drowned out, it was consistently right about what was happening and what was not happening in Vietnam. Almost everything else was episodic, short on questions but quick on answers.

In 1962 and 1963, the brilliant work on the war done by Frankie FitzGerald, Neil Sheehan, Chalmers Johnson, Joseph Buttinger and a few others was still far in the future. As the months passed, I came to believe that our lack of criteria – lack of what came to be called a paradigm or model -- to make sense of the rush of daily events was immensely dangerous. So, with Walt Rostow's permission -- and tolerance -- I took six weeks off from my regular duties on the Council and immersed myself in Vietnam

Learning about my study, the National War College invited me to summarize my findings for its graduating class of the "best and brightest" Navy captains and Army, Air Force and Marine colonels who were headed for senior command – and for combat in Vietnam.

I knew they would be a highly critical audience but one whose lives rode on an understanding of insurgency.

The gist of what I told them was that I had found that guerrilla warfare was made up of three parts that fell roughly in a sequence and which could be weighted in impact.

The first component was politics. In that phase, the principal task of the guerrillas was to establish their claim to speak for their people, that is, to establish their legitimacy. Generally, they did this by portraying themselves as the only true nationalists.

The second component was administration. The guerrillas had first to destroy the institutions and mechanisms by which the existing government interfaced with the population – how it delivered essential services, kept the peace, adjudicated disputes and prevented starvation. Then, the guerrillas had to step in to do what government had been doing.

The third component was combat. The guerrillas had to show that they could defeat the government, drive it away from the population, and force it to surrender, withdraw or collapse.

* * *

Applying these criteria or stages to the Vietnam conflict, I argued that Ho Chi Minh had embodied Vietnamese nationalism already by the end of the Second World War. He had long opposed French colonialism and the French forces who collaborated with the hated Japanese occupation. His leadership of the nation was symbolized when the French puppet ruler, the Emperor Bao Dai, turned over rule to him in a ceremony in Hanoi on August 25, 1945. Thereafter, fighting the French who were determined, despite initial American opposition, to reimpose their rule on Vietnam, his prestige increased to the point that President Eisenhower believed that Ho could have won any election for president with an 80% landslide victory. No other Vietnamese figure or group could challenge Ho and the Viet Minh. It wasn't so much that Ho was carried to power by Communists as that Communists rode on the coat tails of nationalism as embodied in Ho.

In those days, political scientists loved statistics and I guessed that this, the political component of insurgency, was about 80% of the whole effort.

In administration, the Viet Minh were less active, at least in the south, for a decade. Many of the cadres of what was then known as Giai Phong Quan , the Viet Minh of the southern area, had gone north in a population swap that brought the Catholics south.

When the Viet Minh cadres returned and became active, they systematically murdered government-appointed village officials. The astute French journalist Bernard Fall estimated that the Giai Phong Quan killed about 700 officials during 1957-1958, 2,500 from 1959 to 1960 and 4,000 from 1960 to 1961. But it was not just the officials who were liquidated. As George Carver of the CIA wrote in 1966 in Foreign Affairs, "The terror was directed not only against officials but against all whose operations were essential to the functioning of organized political society, school teachers, health workers, agricultural officials, etc."

Thus, by about 1960 the South Vietnamese government had virtually ceased to function. It could not collect taxes or even deliver mail much beyond downtown Saigon. Its officials could move only during daylight. Even in Saigon, as I witnessed one night standing next to Henry Cabot Lodge on from the roof of our embassy, government patrols avoided the streets when darkness fell because they were apt to be ambushed. The one we saw was.

Disruption is followed by replacement. Having killed or chased away the representatives of the regime, the insurgents immediately begin to create an alternative administration or "anti-state." That happened in Vietnam where the Viet Minh set up a variety of local government institutions in which virtually the whole southern population became involved.

My guess was that this second stage of the insurgency amounted to about 15% of the total effort leading to Viet Minh "victory."

Thus, 95% of the insurgency was lost before the Americans became active in Vietnam. From 1963 to 1974, we grasped the short end of the lever.

So I told my War College audience in 1963 that we had already lost the war.

The War College audience in 1963 was no more receptive to that analysis than at least some of our senior generals are today. The idea that we would – or even could – lose the war to a rag-tag bunch of what we regarded as mere hooligans was then regarded as rank heresy.

So we plunged ahead militarily, "surging" from a few thousand to half a million troops and turning our whole economy toward fighting the war. Despite graphic body counts and glowing proofs of success, casualties mounted. Finally the public would take no more. Lyndon Johnson gave up and America began to wind down the war. Many of the phrases we hear today were coined then. More time was needed. We were near success. Conditions were improving. If we left, Vietnam would collapse into chaos. So, trying to be statesmanlike and not wishing to do anything precipitous or rash or radical or to appear unpatriotic, we moved slowly. It took 4 years to get out. And in those 4 years we lost an additional 21,000 young Americans.

* * *
I had resigned from government in 1965 and became professor of history at the University of Chicago. In 1967, I also became president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. That position enabled me to encourage others to work on Vietnam. It was there that David Halberstam wrote The Best and the Brightest and Neil Sheehan began the study on counterinsurgency that became A Bright and Shining Lie. To bring out all the viewpoints, the Institute also held a conference of hawks, doves and those who thought of themselves as owls that resulted in a book called No More Vietnams?

When I left Chicago, I changed the focus of my research to the problems of the Middle East. It was partly Afghanistan and partly Iraq that pulled me back into the study of insurgency.

* * *

Both to test what I had proposed in 1963 and to deepen my knowledge, I decided to study other insurgencies. The first I picked is not one that is usually described as insurgency, the American Revolution.

Somewhat to my surprise, I found the same elements as in Vietnam.

From roughly 1760, the American colonists began the process that would lead to the Revolution. They were very reluctant insurgents. Virginia's ties were with England, not with New York or Massachusetts. The colonists were widely scattered and hardly knew one another. It took the British to help them do what they could not do themselves, unify them in opposition.

Ironically, they remained loyal to the monarchy. It was Parliament that they opposed. Today we look back on that period and see the rise of democracy as Parliament asserted itself against royal tyranny, but our ancestors did not see it that way. For them, Parliament was the tyrant usurping their by-then "traditional" rights as free-born Englishmen. They were the conservatives; Parliament was the innovator. And its representatives in the Colonies were corrupt and greedy. Why did they think these things?

To stop the drain on the Treasury caused by wars with the Indians, Parliament sought to prevent the colonists from expanding into Indian territory, thus thwarting their desire for free or cheap land and, sensitive to the demands of the leaders of the Industrial Revolution, Parliament enacted laws that made what the colonists thought was their right to commerce into felonies – blockade running, customs evasion and dealing in prohibited goods.

Consequently, avoiding British administration was both common and popular. Only if the colonists evaded the authorities could they get the goods they needed to live; John Hancock was said to have had about 500 indictments against him for smuggling, which led his contemporary John Adams to remark that it was the British attempt to curtail his smuggling that made him a patriot.

But flouting the law was dangerous; only if they disrupted the British-sponsored colonial governments could the merchants move safely and only if they made impossible the implementation of British laws could they avoid paying the price for disobedience.

So, in the decade after the end of the French and Indian wars, what amounted to an unarticulated strategy of avoidance turned increasingly into insurgency.

Both the colonists and the British more or less stumbled into combat. In part the Colonists were pushed by agitators, mainly the small group headed by Sam Adams in the Boston Town Meeting, but the really crucial events were a series of British edicts beginning with one in 1763 aiming to stop colonists from moving into Indian lands and then in 1774 voiding all land grants in the disputed area.

The British then sought to crush the Colonists' defiance with the promulgation in June 1774 of what the insurgents called the "Coercive Acts" or "Intolerable Acts." The Boston Port Act effectively closed Boston to commerce and was a death sentence on the merchant community of that city; the Massachusetts Government Act enlarged the powers of the royal governor at the expense of the already traditional legislature; the Administration of Justice Act provided for trial without jury and authorized the rendition of people charged with sedition to England; the Quartering Act allowed the British effectively to seize property from the colonists; and, finally, the Quebec Act stripped Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut and Virginia of lands they claimed beyond the Alleghenies and awarded them to Quebec, whose Catholic status was affirmed. This latter act thus raised in the colonial context the very religious issue that had caused many of the colonists to leave England.

These actions by the British government drew a sharp contrast between what the colonists had come to regard as their rights and what they saw as illegal British innovation. The rhetoric of colonial agitators was now proclaimed in bold script by the British government.

Taken in sum, the Coercive Acts offended almost every sector of the colonial society: merchants lost trade; settlers lost at least the dream of cheap land; householders feared confiscation of their property; the religious members of the population, who were almost entirely Protestants, saw the dread hand of the Papacy, which they had escaped in the Old World, thrusting toward them in the New; and those who were testing the boundaries of Mercantilist regulations or political prohibitions feared that they would be dragged off in chains to British courts where they were certain to be convicted. Thus, these acts virtually forced a "climate of insurgency" upon the colonists. For the first time, large numbers of colonists began to share the sense of opposition to the British Parliament. It was Britain that fastened upon the diverse colonies a sense of nationhood. Phase one of the insurgency was thus accomplished.

Phase two occurred more or less simultaneously. Collections of colonists gathered themselves into a number of small groups with such colorful names as "The Liberty Boys," "Mohawk River Indians," "Sons of Neptune," and the "Philadelphia Patriotic Society." Not to mince words, they were terrorist organizations. Working outside the law and at cross purposes with the existing authorities, they imprisoned government officials, tarred and feathered would-be sellers of tax stamps, assaulted customs inspectors, dumped tea into the sea, ran blockades, coerced juries or prevented courts from sitting. Under their attacks, British administration in the colonies virtually ceased to function.

Substitution followed almost automatically. All through the colonies, villages and towns established what came to be called "Committees of Public Safety." These ad hoc groups moved into the void caused by the collapse of the Colonial administration. Caught up in local issues, like land ownership, many were more radical in espousing independence than the better known leaders. One historian has found that over 90 of them issued their own declarations of independence before the one we know best. Thus motivated, they began to store shot and powder.

Since many of their local leaders had been active in the militias that had fought the Indians, they had an existing organization. And this they used to handle local affairs and to purge their communities of those who favored the British cause.

They also used the threat of terrorism as a recruiting incentive. One Scottish visitor describes in July 1775 in North Carolina what probably was a common occurrence. "An officer or committeeman enters a plantation with his posse. The Alternative is proposed: Agree to join us, and your persons and properties are safe…if you refuse, we are directly to cut up your corn, shoot your pigs, burn your houses, seize your Negroes and perhaps tar and feather yourself."

Wavers joined and opponents fled. By war's end, nearly 100,000 -- roughly one in each 20 colonists -- had been chased away or had fled.

The British saw these acts for what they were, terrorism and they responded with force. The British Army and its German auxiliaries were perhaps most disciplined, best equipped army in the world.

What the colonists had was pathetic. When in June of 1775 Washington arrived in Cambridge to take command of the Revolutionary army, he found that he did not have one. It was just a collection of town militias eager to go home. Washington had no money, no staff, no commissary, few serviceable arms, even fewer men who knew how to shoot and little ammunition. Nowhere in the colonies was gunpowder then produced – it had always been imported from England -- and no domestic source of flints had yet been found. Without flint, the guns of the period could not be fired. About one soldier in each four had no weapons of any description. Many did not even have serviceable shoes.

Not surprisingly, George Washington commented that "When I took command of the army, I abhorred the idea of independence."

Thus began Phase three, combat.

The British chased Washington disintegrating force down through New England and across the Hudson, almost trapping them several times along the way. One of Britain's most able officers found the American pretensions "a mystery indeed." The British announced Mission accomplished.

But then, while Washington retreated and dodged toward Valley Forge, the guerrilla war began. Far from Washington's command, mainly in the southern colonies, little groups of Colonists turned guerrilla began to engage in hit and run attacks on British targets. As General Cornwallis found, the whole country, particularly in the Carolinas, was "in an absolute State of Rebellion; every friend of the Government has been carried off, and his Plantation destroyed; & detachments of the enemy have appeared on the Santee, and threatened our Stores, & Convoys on that river." To try to protect both his own supplies and the few colonists who dared to declare for him, Cornwallis had to divide his forces and go on the defensive.

In sum, what the American insurgents were doing foreshadowed a pattern that we can see in the insurgencies that would follow right down to our own times.

Insurgents begin by learning who they are politically; then they disrupt the existing order; next they try to replace it; and finally they attempt to forge a core of like-minded people and to ensure that none of their fellows can work for the other side because those natives who join the foreigners are more dangerous to the national cause than the foreigners as they have the capability to form a native government. Thus, in America in the 1760s and early 1770s, as in each subsequent guerrilla war including most recently Iraq, insurgents more often attack their recalcitrant fellows than the foreign soldiers.

I have focused on the American Revolution both because I thought it might amuse you to see it in terms that we are more apt to use for Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam and because I think it is important to realize that insurgency is not an exotic subject related only to Islam or to Africa or Asia. It is a process that is undertaken when other means of politics are foreclosed.

* * *

Now I want to turn briefly to three final issues: first, how insurgencies begin and grow; second, counterinsurgency; and third how insurgencies end:

Insurgencies are nearly always started by tiny groups of people. The radical leaders of the Boston Town Meeting, led by Sam Adams, were less than a dozen. In the Palestine Mandate, the members of the most militant groups, the Stern or LEHI and Irgun Zeva'i Leumi in 1943 were together less than a hundred; the Yugoslav Chetniks were begun by 26; in Greece, the EAM was founded by only 15; the Viet Minh was founded by 34; on Cyprus the total insurgent force was less than 80; Castro began with about a dozen; the Algerian revolt was begun by less than a hundred and so on.

What emerges from these numbers is that, at inception and for the early phase, insurgency cannot be a guerrilla war; rather, those who engage their opponents must use the weapon of the weak – terrorism.

That it what happened in each case from the American Revolution onward.

Then, as terrorist acts succeed, the dominant government, usually a foreign entity or a government thought to be its puppet, seeks to suppress them. In doing so, it inevitably disrupts the lives of bystanders and hurts or kills others. In Spain, Napoleon's forces hanged not only the rebels but those they thought were helping them; in the Philippines both the Spaniards and the Americans killed thousands of villagers in search and destroy operations; in Yugoslavia and Greece, the Germans engaged in a draconian policy of reprisals in which they executed hundreds of hostages for each German killed by the Partisans. Relatives, friends and supporters of the dead seek vengeance and the place to get it is in the Resistance.

Thus, the Resistance rapidly multiplies. In Cuba, Castro's force grew from a dozen to 1,500 in a year; in Vietnam, the Viet Minh grew from 34 in 1944 to 5,000 in less than a year; in Algeria, the less than 100 Resistantes (as the French called them) soon reached 13,000.

Insurgents are always outnumbered -- in Algeria, the roughly 13,000 Algerians faced 485,000 French soldiers armed with aircraft, tanks and heavy weapons and guided by a sophisticated intelligence and surveillance service. In Yugoslavia and Greece, an average of eight or nine first-rate German divisions were held down by forces that rarely reach ten percent of their size and were far outclassed in mobility, supply and firepower.

So the dominant power seeks to destroy them. In Afghanistan, the Russians engaged in genocide; we did the same in Vietnam. Force Fails.

* * *

When raw force fails, the dominant power reverts to other techniques. Often it tries to isolate the combatants. In Malasia, the British even prevented villagers from cooking their own food so that they could not pass any of it to the rebels. In Kenya the British put about 150,000 people in concentration camps; in Vietnam, the Americans forced virtually the entire rural population – 11,000 of the 16,000 hamlets in South Vietnam -- to move out of their villages into some 6,800 barbed-wire-encircled strategic hamlets, ap-chien-luoc. As the editors of the Pentagon Papers wrote, "The long history of these efforts were marked by consistency in results as well as in techniques: all failed dismally."

So we are now being told by Generals Petraeus and Amos that the answer is a package of techniques that go under that buzzword, counterinsurgency. But what exactly is counterinsurgency?

Generals Petraeus and Amos give us a great many suggestions, mostly harking back to Vietnam, but, in their manual which sets the current policy in Iraq, they finally come to its heart: as they write and I quote,

"Political power is the central issue in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies; each side aims to get the people to accept its governance or authority as legitimate."

Is this a feasible objective for foreigners? One searches the historical record in vain for an example of success.

The foreign occupying force, by definition, is alien. Vietnam showed that even when the aliens had a numerous and established local ally, that ally (the South Vietnamese government) was more apt to be alienated by its association with the foreign military force than that force to be "nativized" by the natives.

Nationalism, or more crudely xenophobia, overwhelms even idealistic objectives and beneficial programs. In the Spanish war against Napoleon, even when what the French wanted to make the society more open, more productive and more just, the Spanish people regarded those objectives as unimportant when weighed in the scales of nationalism.

On what grounds can we expect that the attitude of Iraqis or Afghans or Somalis will be significantly different. Nowhere in the Manual could this final problem be adequately addressed; it certainly could not be convincingly solved.

Force has made the chaos worse; we have not won "the hearts and minds of the people;" money has not triumphed – incidentally, while I have been speaking, the American government has spent another 12 million dollars on the Iraq war.

* * *

So what happens if the dominant power does not win?

If foreign power stays, the fight goes on. Months turn into years, and years become generations. The Irish fought the British for hundreds of years; the Chechens have fought the Russians since the middle of the 18th century; the Algerians fought the French for over a century.

If the foreign power leaves, does fighting continue? Once an insurgency achieves what the leaders and enough of the public regard as an acceptable outcome, usually meaning that the foreigners leave and their local surrogates give up power, the guerrillas become superfluous. At that point, their leaders often become leaders of the government. That is what happened when Éamon De Valera became president of Ireland, Tito became president of Yugoslavia, Ahmad Ben Bella became president of Algeria and Fidel Castro became president of Cuba. At that point, the old guerrilla organization comes to seem not only an anachronism but a threat. The new regime then usually side-lines or suppresses it. That is what De Valera, Tito, Ben Bella and Castro did. As natives and as national heroes, they could do what foreigners could never do. Thus, the insurgency dies.

Does this not create chaos? No, chaos already exists in the final stages of a guerrilla war, but unless there are strong leaders, chaos may continue while the wounded society struggles to put itself back together. This is not an easy process. The greater the damage, the longer and more difficult it will be. Outsiders can help to ameliorate it – as the plan Senator George McGovern and I laid out would do -- but they cannot completely prevent it.

We have been constantly told, as President Bush repeated on August 22, 2007, the consequences of leaving "without getting the job done would be devastating." He then invoked Vietnam (confusing it in part with Cambodia and the Viet Minh with the Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge); he was right to emphasize the pain and suffering the Vietnamese continued to undergo – they had already suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths -- when America withdrew.

But, President Bush missed two crucial points: a painful transition at the end was inevitable from the beginning of America's involvement. Staying in Iraq, as President Bush vowed to have America do at least for the rest of his term, will certainly not avoid the agony of reconstitution.

Those who led us into Iraq – or would lead us into new wars – incur and must reckon with these costs when they advocate their policies.

* * *

Generals Petraeus and Amos tell us that we should study the history of guerrilla wars. They are right. It is long past the time that we should have learned from history.

But as the great German philosopher of history Georg Wilhelm Hegel warned us, "peoples and governments never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it." We had better hope he is wrong because as the American philosopher George Santayana told us those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Repeating it is a real national danger because we are poised on the brink of still more devastating adventures like Vietnam and Iraq.

Thus, in conclusion, as in 1963 when I was addressing the National War College on Vietnam, I must again must say that this war too is lost.

Let us end it quickly and, for the sake of our children and grandchildren, not start another!

Thank you.