Managing Revolution: Cold War Counterinsurgency and Liberal Governance Author: Peter Berard Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:108101 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2018 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Managing Revolution: Cold War Counterinsurgency and Liberal Governance Peter John Berard A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Boston College Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences Graduate School March 2018 © Copyright 2018 Peter John Berard MANAGING REVOLUTION: COLD WAR COUNTERINSURGENCY AND LIBERAL GOVERNANCE Peter Berard Advisor: Seth Jacobs, PhD Counterinsurgency doctrine, as an intellectual project, began as a response on the part of liberal world powers to the dual crises of decolonization and the Cold War. Unlike earlier meanss of suppressing rebellions, counterinsurgency sought not to quash, but to channel the revolutionary energies of decolonization into a liberal, developmentalist direction. Counterinsurgency would simultaneously defeat communists and build a new and better society. As early efforts at developmentalist counterinsurgency failed in Vietnam in the early 1960s, the counterinsurgent’s methods and goals changed. The CORDS Project, starting in 1967, replaced the emphasis on building a new society with altering present societies in such a way as to prioritize surveillance and the removal of subversive elements. From its inception, the political visions that counterinsurgency seeks to implement have shifted alongside – and at times prefigured – changes in liberal governance more broadly. TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................... ii Dedication ............................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................... iv Introduction: Counterinsurgency as a Project ........... Error! Bookmark not defined. 1. Threads of "Classical" Counterinsurgency: Late Imperial France and Britain Error! Bookmark not defined.1 2. Creating a Counterinsurgent Culture ......................................................................... 62 3. Vietnam and the Emergence of the American Counterinsurgency Project…100 4. The Politics of Surveillance and Assassination: CORDS and the Pivot to a New Foundation for Counterinsurgent Governance…………………………...……….145 Conclusion: Liberalism and the Governance of Turbulence………………………...190 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………………...………227 iii For my parents iii iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to my dissertation committee: Charlie Gallagher, Julian Bourg, and most of all my adviser, Seth Jacobs. All three of them have, probably, believed in me and this project more consistently than have I. I would also like to thank Kevin Kenney and the other members of my dissertation seminar – Christine Bertoglio, James Clifton, Craig Gallagher, Felix Jimenez, Janet Kay, Shannon Monaghan, and Chris Staysniak – for helping me sharpen my vision for this project. Material assistance was provided by the Manning-Gelfand Fellowship and the Moody Fellowship of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. I would like to thank the archivists at the RAND Corporation, the US National Archives- College Park, the National Security Archive, the US Army Center for Military History, the Dwight David Eisenhower Library, the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, and the Richard Milhous Nixon Presidential Library for their assistance. Friends and comrades too many to name assisted me through this whole process. My family deserves even more thanks, and above all, I need to thank my parents for material, intellectual, and emotional support. It is to them I have dedicated this work. iv iv iv 1 COUNTERINSURGENCY AS A PROJECT When I conceived of the idea of making counterinsurgency my dissertation topic, as a mere stripling first-year Master’s student in 2008, I seldom needed any extra definitional follow-up when I answered “I research counterinsurgency” when asked the inevitable question of what sort of history I study. Many people – particularly the kind of people a young grad student was likely to meet – knew the term. They heard it enough on the news recently. They could connect it to a face- the intellectual but reassuringly confident and steely-eyed general on their televisions or their New York Times feeds, David Petraeus. You could pick up the US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual, published a few years earlier, at any bookstore, if you were so inclined- and according to sales figures, many were. Another, subtly different indicator: it was not uncommon, in the summer or fall of 2008, to find copies of that same counterinsurgency manual on the tables of the sidewalk used booksellers, the best sources for books in New York and one of the primary good things about the city. Their presence there indicated that the booksellers, canny marketers all, thought they would sell- and, moreover, that copies of the manual were frequently sold off, donated, or simply thrown away by enough New Yorkers to wind up a frequently scavenged object. Since then, the proportion of the people to whom I give the canned spiel every humanities grad student has to have at the ready who do not require further explication of 1 2 the term “counterinsurgency” has steadily declined. These are generally educated people with some interest in politics and the world around them: students and teachers at various levels of higher education, activists and organizers. By the end of the Obama era, I had concluded that my attempts to scrye for understanding in the eyes of new acquaintances when I uttered the word “counterinsurgency” was too unreliable, and I would just go ahead and cram a brief definition of the term – “means for fighting insurgents, you know, guerrillas, like Vietnam or Iraq” – into my pre-canned spiel. Previously I had avoided doing so for fear of over-explaining and seeming patronizing- what if someone got annoyed by my presumption that they needed the word “counterinsurgency” defined for them? This fear has not realized itself, in part because people are generally more generous and forgiving of graduate students than graduate students generally are to themselves, and in part because the term is not the touchstone it was for a brief moment at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Both in my definitions of it to people that I meet and in most of the literature surrounding it, counterinsurgency is defined negatively, on two different axes. It is the negative of “conventional war,” that is, wars defined by open battles between uniformed opponents. It is also the counter to insurgency, that is, uprisings against some established state of affairs, be it a long-standing governing arrangement or a recently-established military occupation. This is how the US military chooses to understand counterinsurgency, as a generic term for fighting guerrillas and insurgents. A substantial number of scholars and analysts, both supporters and critics of the US military, use it in much the same way, a means of describing a given task and the ways of accomplishing it. 2 3 Thus defined, counterinsurgency has been around as long as there has been war, and indeed, arguably longer than “conventional” war defined as set-piece battles between uniformed armies. Counterinsurgency as a term only begins to appear in the late 1940s, and became a common phrase in American defense discourse about a decade later. Military writers often view other terms for the same range of tasks – counter-guerrilla, small wars, “Indian fighting,” etc. – as more or less meaning the same thing as “counterinsurgency,” broadly-defined. Some recommend perusing the US Marine Corps manual on “Small Wars” from 1935 or British Army colonel C.E. Callwell’s 1896 volume Small Wars: Their Principles and Purpose to gain counterinsurgency insight. However, counterinsurgency as a term also means something more specific than any means of fighting guerrillas. The word has a history, and that is the history of a doctrine, a living intellectual tradition. A google ngram with the terms “small wars” and “counterinsurgency” show that references to counterinsurgency in English-language books published in a given year began to outpace references to “small wars” in 1962, and skyrocket ahead after, with a number of dramatic dips and soars. This was more than a shift in terminology. Counterinsurgency congealed as a doctrine in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and entailed a reimagining of the political basis of military problems that are as old as the first empires. Historians are right to point to the similarities between “small wars” and colonial interventions more generally and counterinsurgency. At their most basic, the scenarios – stronger powers occupying significantly poorer and less militarily powerful countries (or else local hegemons occupying poorer and restive portions of their own states or empires) – tend to be the same. So, too, tend to be the problems facing the occupiers: attacks by 3 4 forces arising from the occupied population, employing guerrilla