University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 12-2009 Why Foreign Counterinsurgency Campaigns Fail Donald Frederick Butler University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Butler, Donald Frederick, "Why Foreign Counterinsurgency Campaigns Fail. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2009. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/569 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Donald Frederick Butler entitled "Why Foreign Counterinsurgency Campaigns Fail." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Political Science. Brandon Prins, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: John Scheb, David Brulé, David Folz, James Klett Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Donald Frederick Butler entitled “Why Foreign Counterinsurgency Campaigns Fail.” I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Political Science. Brandon Prins, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: John Scheb___________________ David Brulé___________________ David Folz ___________________ James Klett___________________ Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges____________ Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records) Why Foreign Counterinsurgency Campaigns Fail A DISSERTATION Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Donald Frederick Butler December 2009 ABSTRACT Why have foreign counterinsurgency operations had such low success rates since 1945? While operations of this type succeeded at the rate of 85.71% during the period of 1816-1945, they declined by 56.30 percentage points to just 29.49% during period of 1945-1997 (Sarkees, 2000: 123-144). This occurred even though foreign powers were often fighting in the same territories where they had previously been overwhelmingly victorious. I argue that military defeats suffered by European states during the Second World War convinced the peoples of the developing world that colonial control could be successfully challenged. As guerrilla struggles emerged in post-war Asia and Africa, colonial powers conducting counterinsurgency operations in those regions were constrained by a revised international order in which the existing multi-polar world had been replaced by a nuclear-armed, bi-polar East-West confrontation that offered the possibility of real-time, system-wide deadly responses to provocations. The United Nations Charter also offered support for territorial self-determination in Articles 1, 55, 73, and 76 (United Nations Charter, 1945, Articles 1, 55, and 73); support that was heightened by the growing number of former colonial states within the United Nations membership. This broad political and military support for native rule legitimated the existence and heightened the resolve of post-war nationalism (Westad, 1992), making nationalistic insurgencies virtually impossible to truly defeat, regardless of the counterinsurgency strategy employed. To further evaluate these arguments, I developed hypotheses that advance the propositions that (a) counterinsurgency campaigns facing significant United Nations ii opposition will fail more often than those which do not, (b) insurgencies which receive broad support from great powers will be more likely to succeed than those which do not, and (c) the employment of either of the two primary counterinsurgency strategies will not be significant in success or failure of counterinsurgency efforts. Those hypotheses were then tested by briefly comparing information across the 17 case studies contained in the Correlates of War (COW) Extra-State Dataset for the period of 1945-1997 (see Appendix I), and then evaluated in depth through four case studies drawn from that dataset. The results were compelling, and offer significant support for all three hypotheses. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION……………..…………………………………………………………………1 CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW……………….……………………….…………….15 A. Introduction………………..………………………………..………….…………15 B. The Challenges of Counterinsurgency…….…………….……………….….17 C. The Impact of Foreign Control or Influence……………………………..….34 D. Motivations for Insurgencies Confronting Foreign Occupation…..…….47 E. The Impact of Great Power/United Nations/Political Bloc Intervention..58 F. Summary…………………………………………………………………………...62 CHAPTER II: THEORY AND STRATEGY……………………………………………..….64 A. Introduction……………………………………………………………………….64 B. Theories of Insurgency…………..………………………………………….....66 C. Strategies of Counterinsurgency………………..………………………..….72 D. General Failure of Foreign Counterinsurgency Measures Since 1945..80 E. Methodology for Hypotheses Testing…………………………………..……85 F. Summary…………………………………………………………………………...86 CHAPTER III: SUMMARY OF EVIDENCE ACROSS 17 INSURGENCIES….………..88 A. Introduction……………………………………………………………………….88 B. Operationalization of Concepts………………………………………………..88 C. General Indications Regarding Insurgency Evaluations………………….90 D. Selection of Case Studies……………………………………………….…...…97 E. Summary………………………………………………………………………......98 iv CHAPTER IV: CASE STUDIES…………………………….…………………..…………100 A. Introduction………………………………………………...……………………100 B. South Africa, and Defeat in Namibia (1966-1988)………….…………..…106 C. Morocco, and defeat in Western Sahara (1975-1983)……….…………...123 D. China, and Victory in Tibet (1950-1951, through 1974)…………..………141 E. The United Kingdom, and Victory in Malaya (1948-1960)….…………....152 F. Summary………………………………………………………………………….167 CHAPTER V: CONCLUSIONS……………………………………………………………170 A. Introduction…………………………………………………………………...…170 B. Results of These Four Case Studies……………………………..…………175 C. Additional Evidence Across the Remaining 13 Cases…………………..181 D. Potential for Further Research……………………………………………….186 SECECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………...………189 APPENDICES…………………………………………..……………………………………235 VITA……………………………..………………………………………………………….....243 v INTRODUCTION Background Between 1945 and 1999, about 3.3 million battle deaths occurred during the course of 25 interstate wars around the globe. During that same period, however, roughly 16.2 million people died during the course of approximately 127 civil wars (13 of which were colonial conflicts); a death rate nearly five times that of the interstate wars (Fearon and Laitin, 2003: 75-77). The causes of such vicious conflicts have been the subject of extensive academic research during the past 60 years, as governments have struggled to formulate appropriate responses to outbreaks of civil violence within their own frontiers. Prior to 1945, counterinsurgency operations conducted by either indigenous governments or foreign intervening powers were nearly always successful in quelling native insurrections. While indigenous governments have continued to find success in these undertakings during the post-1945 time period, advanced industrial powers, be they European, Eurasian, or American, have lost most of their campaigns, even when the political stakes for losing were high (see Appendices I and II). This is proven beyond doubt through an examination of the COW Extra-State Dataset, which determines the intervening power to have been successful in only five of the 17 campaigns conducted during that time period (or 29.41%), while the insurgency achieved victory on twelve occasions (or 70.58%) (Sarkees, 2000: 123-144). What factors have emerged to deny the world‟s most advanced countries the ability to assert their political will while still allowing native governments – most of which exist in the developing Third World – to crush their adversaries in the majority of cases? 1 It is not overstating the issue to write that Western governments have historically misunderstood the basic, essential elements of counterinsurgency. While the United Kingdom‟s Malayan campaign of 1948-1960 is now often cited as a model of counterinsurgency strategy, it stumbled during its initial four years as the British Army sought to fight Marxist insurgents much as it had fought conventional forces in Europe less than three years earlier. During the 1946-1954 French campaign in Indochina, French forces powers sought to utilize conventional warfare methods far more suitable to countering the Soviets in Central Europe than to reducing a local insurgency in Southeast Asia. In 1960s Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, Commander, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), tried to apply concepts he learned in conventional warfare campaigns in the Second World War and Korea while essentially