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The Insurgent Archipelago THE INSURGENT ARCHIPELAGO JOHN MACKINLAY The Insurgent Archipelago From Mao to bin Laden Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2009 John Mackinlay All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mackinlay, John. The insurgent archipelago : from Mao to Bin Laden / John Mackinlay. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-231-70116-7 (alk. paper) 1. Counterinsurgency—Asia. 2. Peacekeeping forces—Asia. 3. Counterinsurgency—Afghanistan. 4. Peacekeeping foreces—Afghanistan. 5. Communism—Philosophy. 6. War on Terrorism, 2001- 7. Afghan War, 2001– 8. Mao, Zedong, 1893–1976. 9. Bin Laden, Osama, 1957– I. Title. U241.M332 2009 355.02'18095—dc22 2009032743 ∞ Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in India c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 PART I MAOISM Introduction 9 1. Mao the Prototype 15 2. Evolution 27 3. Gaps in Our Knowledge 43 4. The Chronology of Neglect 61 PART II POST-MAOISM Introduction 77 5. Multiple Populations and Mass Communications 81 6. The Migration Factor 99 7. The Virtual Battlefield 123 8. Post-Maoism 143 PART III RESPONDING TO POST-MAOISM Introduction 163 9. The Expeditionary Approach 171 10. The Domestic Approach 197 11. The Insurgent Archipelago 221 Notes 237 Bibliography 267 Index 279 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Very many colleagues have helped me to produce this book. I espe- cially thank my publisher Michael Dwyer who remained undaunted by several elastic deadlines, and the British Academy for their gener- ous research grant. I also wish to thank my post-graduate assistants from the Department of War Studies at Kings College London: Joshua Huminski, Will Hartley, Eric Randolph, Rudra Chaudhuri, Ryan Evans and Adam Stahl. Their energetic efforts kept the project moving ahead and individually they were essential to the detailed research and production and final editing of the book. I also need to thank many individuals whose formal interviews, informal conversations and correspondence provided the ideas and much of the substance of the book. They range from officers and soldiers in the battalions I encountered in the field, Generals com- manding international forces, senior civil servants in Whitehall, British domiciled Muslims and officials from several non government organi- sations. Some are named and some wished to remain anonymous. I wish to thank them all for the precious time that they gave me, for their hospitality in some wild places and for their inspiring ideas. vii INTRODUCTION I joined 6th Gurkha Rifles in November 1964. To a newcomer they were a dauntingly close community, just a few British officers and several hundred men who had been through two campaigns together. They had enjoyed a tremendous continuity of experience, and no Gur- kha soldier ever wanted to leave before he was pensionable. On parade or mounting the quarter guard in their long, starched shorts and dark puttees every rifleman wore the campaign ribbons for the Malaya Emergency and North Borneo, signifying years of active service. In 1964 our regiment was quintessentially a counter-insurgent force of the post-colonial era. Gurkha battalions seldom left the Far Eastern Land Forces Command and over a period of a decade they learned their tactics and survival skills in the forests of Southeast Asia. By the 1960s the practicalities of countering insurgency had infused every regiment. The Gurkha way of doing things ran through our battalions from top to bottom, through each rifle company and the logistic sup- port platoons, it was imbued in the rig and colour of our vehicles, even the food we ate and the time it took to cook it. Counter-insurgency cropped up everywhere, in every discussion, in every set of orders and in the personality of each unit. Although the campaigns in Malaya and North Borneo were differ- ent, the Maoist adversary in both cases followed a tough, labour-in- tensive approach towards the organisation and conduct of their insurgency. Their tactics required them to move over long distances through the rainforest to meet and subvert their target populations. Our response reflected the Maoist imperative: we understood the importance of gaining popular support and securing a foothold in sympathetic communities. In Malaysia, we saw ourselves restoring a 1 2 THE INSURGENT ARCHIPELAGO monopoly of violence into the hands of the government and during the long tropical evenings we theorised about the phase we had reached in the Maoist interpretation of people’s war. Our tactics also reflected a political process: the campaign was politically led, and each week our commanding officer flew in to district headquarters to attend the Security Executive Committee meeting, chaired by our Malaysian district officer, his civil administrators and the local police. Their efforts were essentially political and our job was to win and then maintain a level of security that allowed them to restore their writ and win the support of the population. Twenty years later I left the army and became a research academic. By the early 1990s the UN Security Council had begun to deploy international forces in quick succession to complex emergencies in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. For most NATO and former Warsaw Pact armies, peacekeeping now took priority and learning the tech- niques of peace support dominated their training programmes. During that chaotic decade my research took me to many international opera- tions where my status as a UN researcher and my contacts with former colleagues in the British Army, who were by now commanding their own battalions and brigades, gave me exceptional access. In 1996, after the Dayton Agreement had been signed, 60,000 NATO troops were engaged on what was described as a peace support mission to guarantee the political settlement in former Yugoslavia. By this time many British and US junior commanders had had time to reflect on the Bosnian operation and in particular on their own part in the restoration process. Although in those days I did not see myself as being on a journey through the evolutionary stages of insurgency, I was amazed to hear from the British battalions a well as the divi- sional staff, a conviction that what they were doing was in effect restoring a monopoly of violence, and that the techniques that had been most successful in this respect were the same counter-insurgent procedures that had been used in the past but which had officially been set aside in favour of peacekeeping. Up to 1996 very few doctrine writers or conflict analysts had con- vincingly linked the counter-insurgent experience of Southeast Asia with Northern Ireland and the peace support operations in the Bal- kans and sub-Saharan Africa. So it was extraordinary to now be faced INTRODUCTION 3 with this connection, which was a spontaneous reaction made with the irresistible conviction of soldiers at the forward edge of the opera- tion. Their casual assertions seemed to challenge fashionable thinking that these operations had evolved from the foundations of peacekeep- ing. If these professionals on the ground were right, and their job was indeed to restore a monopoly of violence, then this raised some inter- esting questions. Were these so-called peace support operations in fact better explained by an evolutionary understanding of insurgency? Was it right to go on thinking of insurgency as irrelevant to complex humanitarian emergencies, as an inert technique, something that was immutable and was therefore only useful to a few particularly disaf- fected and underdeveloped societies? The evidence of the practitioners at the frontlines of 1990s emergencies was that the art of insurgency was something more animated and versatile, something that evolved and adapted itself with the societies from which it arose and therefore in its most modern form hard to associate with its previous manifesta- tions. Instead of dismissing insurgency as a static concept, should we not have understood it as something that was rapidly evolving and could be utilised in any society, even post-industrial societies such as the NATO states? And if this was a possibility, instead of constantly putting aside the knowledge that we had gained about insurgency in favour of developing new and fashionable doctrines for peace-build- ing, peace support, countering super-terrorism and so forth, was it not more sensible to husband our existing knowledge, to build on it and be more alive to the notion that insurgent energy could take on many forms and arise in any society? After the events of 11 September 2001, these constantly unasked questions about the centrality of insurgency in the context of the twen- ty-first century took on greater significance. The US-led coalitions to Afghanistan and Iraq had been cobbled together under the emotional pressure of 9/11 and NATO partners had largely accepted the opera- tional premise of the US strategy for countering terrorism. But disap- pointingly the US strategy writers had described the adversary as a unique terrorist organisation and once again the word “insurgency” was notably missing from the discussion. Just as the complex emer- gencies had been explained as unique, so too were al-Qaeda and its franchised off-shoots. The techniques of the globalised terrorists were 4 THE INSURGENT ARCHIPELAGO portrayed as historically disembodied, a unique development that could only be defeated by an equally unique, historically disembodied counter strategy, in this case a Global War on Terror—a one-off phe- nomenon calling for a one-off response.
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