Why should we study counterinsurgency theory and practice?

Excerpts from Monograph

It would be impossible to trace, in one post [chapter], all that has been said about insurgency and counterinsurgency. I could easily point to Sun Tzu’s Art of War published in the 6^th century BCE, Nicola Machiavelli’s The Prince and Art of War, and Carl von Clausewitz’s On War to illustrate the long entangled history of insurgent and counterinsurgent thought and praxis. Both contain conceptualizations of war that go beyond conventional warfare. I could also focus on the counterinsurgent techniques Spanish conquistadores employed or the way travel writing, as well as ethnological, ethnographic, and anthropological studies, was used to “uncover” the social and political structure of Indigenous peoples, including ways to weaken it by using existing tensions within and between Indigenous communities. Moreover, I could also use Gerald Horne’s interpretation and critique of the American Revolution as a Counter-Revolution, which was led by a counterinsurgent and reactionary settler class.

One could also situate this discussion in the 16th century to understand the relationship between the university and counterinsurgency, but this would unfortunately require more than one post [book] to cover the pervasive ways universities actively participated in colonial dispossession. It should suffice to say that universities were one of the major pillars, if not the most important, in sustaining colonialism. In a previous post, I discussed Plan Camelot in more detail. The university’s production of knowledge materialized into weapons, surveillance, and counterinsurgency against the colonized. The instrumental rationality constitutive of dominant knowledge production did not only serve as an ideological underpinning of the modern/colonial capitalist world, it resulted in the production of efficient modes of social and psychological control via the categorization and social classification of “races” designated for manual and intellectual labor, free, enslaved, coerced, or otherwise. Modernity’s instrumental rationality produces the cultural bombs in one instance, as Thiongo noted, but it also produces the very real bombs used against the wretched of the earth. This Euromodern rationality culminated in the Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet its project is unfinished within the contexts of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, including the use of artificial intelligence and other technologies of colonial violence tested on Palestinians.

From the missionaries of the 16th century promoting salvation to the social scientists of the 20th century advancing progress and modernization, and to the proponents of democracy in the 21st century promoting peace through their Global War on Terror, all have aligned with imperial interests. The only difference, as mentioned already, is that the latter form of knowledge production manifests itself in concrete weapons that are battle tested on the colonized, such as the way Israel has become a laboratory to test weapons, surveillance, and techniques for dispossession, genocide, and population control, all of which serve US imperialism greatly for these are then deployed within the US and in regions linked to its “national interests”, that is, its imperial futurity.

Although these accounts are certainly worth including, in this chapter I will only focus on theories of counterinsurgency and insurgency that emerged within the context of decolonization and liberation movements after the second world war, a period commonly referred to as the Cold War era. It is within this time period that one sees counterinsurgency become more programmatic and systematic, where one also sees a proliferation of symposia and publications on the topic. This chapter does not provide an exhaustive account but it integrates the writing of counterintelligence agencies and academics/intellectuals in the service of empire. I balance the discussion by including the writing of revolutionaries who inverted the colonial gaze to study counterinsurgency by carefully examining the way counterinsurgent thought infiltrated the work of colonized intellectuals who, rather than committing themselves to liberation movements, worked diligently with colonial powers to co-opt them.

Geographically speaking, my book will only focus on a few countries colonized and dominated by France, England, United States, and Israel. It would be difficult to focus on all cases equally so I limit my attention to Vietnam, Algeria, Kenya, Ireland, Latin America, the US, Israel, and Palestine. I selected these cases since they will allow for examining counterinsurgency’s form and content in distinct colonial contexts responding to insurrections. While direct counterinsurgent action is addressed, the psychological and epistemological dimensions will also be examined to point to the importance of ideology, propaganda, and knowledge production in the protracted struggle to obtain the legitimacy of a population.

Indeed, the counterinsurgency that took shape after the second world war is what is referred to as a population-centered framework and approach that persists until today. This counterinsurgent framework evinces that it is insufficient to engage in armed counterinsurgency solely directed at an insurrectional movement and its members, insofar as the social and cultural fabric supporting an insurgency remains intact. It’s also insufficient to wait for insurgencies to manifest themselves as an armed struggle. Preventative counterinsurgency through psychological warfare must anticipate its emergence. With mass communication, counterinsurgency has made a systematic intent to dissuade communities from supporting insurrections, persuading and coercing them to offer their loyalty to the established matrix of power and the meager rewards it has to offer.

Legitimacy is a constitutive feature of (counter)hegemony, as I elaborate in a following post, and is thus at the heart of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Without the support of the people, both will lose the collective power needed to win a revolutionary and counterrevolutionary war. The battle of ideas is, therefore, central to maintaining, losing, or gaining legitimacy from the people that nourish a struggle for liberation. As Ghassan Kanafani wrote, the objective of counterrevolutionary forces is not only the destruction of the

“military power of the resistance, but at undercutting the social and political ground beneath its feet, effectively ending it as a movement that represents the fighting will of the Palestinian masses….This cannot be done in any straightforward way. It would require a meticulously planned strategy that can divide the loyalties of the Palestinian masses, undercutting the social pillars that the resistance relies upon not only in order to achieve its emancipatory objectives, but those that form the bedrock on which the resistance justifies its very existence. The “Palestinian state project” is precisely the bomb planted to undermine the social foundations of the resistance. This project would need to be specifically designed to obliterate popular loyalty to the resistance movement. If the opposing forces can guarantee the elimination of the resistance movement’s standing as representative of the Palestinian will, it will be quite easy to impose any form of surrender upon the Palestinian masses.”

Kanafani showed us the importance of studying counterinsurgency. The point is not only to study insurgency and counterinsurgency from the standpoint of revolutionaries. This is insufficient. From the reviewed sources, counterinsurgent intellectuals don’t hastily disregard revolutionary texts, which means that we should also engage counterrevolutionary theorists to understand their tactics and strategies, and how they studied and examined insurgencies as a means to co-opt and destroy them.

As the biographer of David Galula writes, “Combating Communist insurgency was as urgent a task as defeating Al Qaeda is now. Mao was much studied, for the same reasons we now read the Quran and jihadist doctrine.” Despite their distorted racist worldview, our enemies read revolutionary texts, and we should thus return the analytical gaze to see exactly what they are writing and how it is being put into counterinsurgent practice. As one of the authors of Ugly American writes, which popularized the notion of counterinsurgency in the US, “When I was in Korea, I picked up a book by Mao Tse-tung. . . . I hate what he stands for, but he does have a kind of genius.” (op cit, p. 127).

We must study counterinsurgency not for studying’s sake but rather because of the ethico-political responsibility the insurgent intellectual has in revealing how the past lives in the present. Or, as CLR James wrote “On the Question of Power,” we must seriously study the art and historical circumstances of (counter)insurgency so that we don’t make the same mistakes others made, particularly when considering the unforgivable betrayals that took place in past revolutionary movements. We must study the past because the present demands we dedicate our energies to what will best inform the ongoing struggles of today, even if our analyses and interpretations are only modest contributions to the knowledge that’s already born in sites of struggle.

In my next post, I will focus on Mao’s writing and why it shaped the way counterinsurgency theory was articulated after World War II.