Counterinsurgency, Now and Forever

Counterinsurgency, Now and Forever “We weren’t on the wrong side. We were the wrong side.” Daniel Ellsberg, “Hearts and Minds,” 1974. “I am an American fighting man, and I have no idea what the hell I’m shooting at. Or why.” Christian Bauman, The Ice Beneath You. 2002 “So you have a country that wants us out of there, and we’ve become the enemy. We are the target.” Representative John Murtha, PBS Newshour, November 17, 2005. “Over there, when we would do a patrol and have a car approach us and we fired warning shots, that’s a thrill, that’s power. Over there, everybody knew we were there. We were the king of the road, and they either respected or hated us for it. And now you’re back here, and you ain’t king of nothing.” Ron Radaker, Alpha Company, 112th Regiment, Pennsylvania National Guard1 The United States has had a long history of fighting small, dirty wars, though most Americans prefer to focus on the good war it fought in the middle of the last century, World War II. The suppression of the insurgency in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century was soon forgotten; pacification and counterinsurgency in the Korean War, was rarely reported on at the time, and not much discussed by Americans historians thereafter; covert and overt subversion of governments in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa were accomplished largely through the use of local military forces.2 Thus, the ambiguities of the Vietnam War came as a surprise.3 The beginning, however one wishes to date it, was unproblematic for most Americans. Insofar as anyone noticed, the U.S. had come to the aid of an ally struggling against internal communist subversion and external communist aggression. Military advisers were dispatched, counterinsurgent Special Forces units equipped, trained, named and honored in song and 2 film and, for a number of years public anxieties focused on the menace 90 miles offshore. As Vietnam rose to public consciousness, there was an uneasiness about what exactly the U.S. was doing there. In a television documentary made a year before combat troops were officially dispatched to Vietnam, reporters worried that “in trying to kill a handful of Viet Cong in a village, why we’ve made at least a hundred recruits by indiscriminate bombing or strafing.”4 The point was made again in March 1965, when a CBS reporter, Morley Safer, witnessed the torching of the village of Cam Ne. “The day’s operation, burned down 150 houses, wounded three women, killed one baby, wounded one marine and netted [pointing to them] these four prisoners. Four old men who could not answer questions put to them in English. Four old men who had no idea what an I.D. card was.” Safer assured his audience that the U.S. could win a military victory in Vietnam – in 1965 few doubted, but, he went on, “to a Vietnamese peasant whose home is a – means a lifetime of backbreaking labor – it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side.”5 Convincing peasants that the U.S. was on their side was one aspect of counterinsurgency, and counterinsurgency greatly interested President Kennedy and his advisers. Proud of their knowledge of how the enemy operated – not necessarily the Vietnamese, but any enemy – they quoted Mao: the guerrilla is a fish swimming in the ocean of the people. Dry up the ocean and the problem is solved. No one paused for very long over the metaphor: what, after all, would it mean to dry up the ocean? Over the course of the long war, there were many approaches to counterinsurgency: the strategic hamlet program (emptying villages into guarded encampments on the British colonial model in Malaya); poisoning the rice crop in areas 3 in which the guerrillas were known to operate so as deny them food and transform farmers into refugees unable to plant new crops; eliminating, through assassination, the “infrastructure,” – local village level cadres; saturation bombing and the generation of more refugees; creating small, skilled Special Forces units which could move through the jungle as silent and deadly as the guerrillas themselves; designated free-fire zones in which anything living was presumed hostile; training village level troops for self-defense; “clear and hold” or the “oil-spot” strategy – establishing security and legitimacy one village at a time and slowly expanding the area of control; winning hearts and minds through country-wide land reform, rural medical clinics, rural education.6 However contradictory, many of these approaches were employed simultaneously, though the more ambitious country-wide reform programs were only initiated in the 9th or 10th year of the war. In 1967, counterinsurgency programs were brought together under one unified command a move strongly urged on the Bush administration by military and civilian devotees of counterinsurgency. CORDS, Civilian Operations and Revolutionary development Support, was initially run by Robert “Blowtorch Bob” Komer, a man who cherished his reputation for volatility. Komer believed wholeheartedly in the importance of combining political and military warfare on the model of successful guerrillas everywhere. In the idiom of the 21st century, the U.S. had to learn not just to fight asymmetric wars, but to fight them as if it were the weaker party. (This fantasy was played out after the Vietnam War in Rambo and other Hollywood movies in which the Americans fought as poorly armed guerrillas against Vietnamese with immense firepower at their command.) 4 Komer’s goal was to contest the NLF for control in every village and hamlet in South Vietnam through a flexible mix of welfare and security projects under the supervision of a revolutionary development team that would remain in place for up to six months. In addition, a vastly expanded number of trained and well-equipped rural paramilitary forces, drawn from the villages themselves, would provide overall security. Komer also insisted that deep intelligence would be necessary to root out the village level cadre upon whose efforts the insurgency rested. Thus, in 1967, the Phoenix (Phung Hoang) program developed out of earlier counter-terrorist projects run by the CIA. Mixed Vietnamese and American teams were set a quota of basic level NLF cadre to be “neutralized” each month – and they delivered. The numbers were impressive: from 1968 to mid-1971, 28,000 VCI (Viet Cong infrastructure) were captured, 20,000 were killed, and an additional 17,000 defected. Torture, corruption, extortion marked the program from the outset, and it was never very clear exactly who was being killed. Nevertheless, Komer was delighted. The figures on Hamlet Evaluation showed that the number of secure villages had improved markedly. At a Saigon dinner party, Komer told reporters “he had assured the President that the war would not be an election issue in 1968.”7 And then came Tet. Throughout the war, the counterinsurgency experts were convinced that military security had to be established before any meaningful effort to win the allegiance of the population could take place. Rooting out the “VCI infrastructure” was a part of that effort. Obviously, there was a risk that establishing military security might involve alienating the population whose hearts and minds were waiting to be won; war is a risky business. 5 Later, long after the war was lost, some analysts insisted that had the U.S. fought a proper counterinsurgency war, rather than the war of attrition General Westmoreland pursued, it could have won.8 Others argued that it had, in fact, fought such a war and won – only to be robbed of victory by Congress. As David Elliott explains elsewhere in this volume, these arguments deal with “the troubling Vietnam experience by historical revisionism, turning failure into remembered success.” Vietnam is the negative example for almost everything connected to American war-making, and this for pro- and anti-war people alike. On the other hand, many analysts consider counterinsurgency in El Salvador, the positive example. There, it is said, an insurgency was defeated by a U.S. trained and equipped indigenous force with the help and support of a strictly limited number of American advisers. In El Salvador, the lessons of counterinsurgency, or what one of its students and practitioners has called “total war at the grass roots level,” had at last been mastered. Not firepower but local knowledge and civic action was necessary; a combination of the political and military any revolutionary movement might envy.9 But the insurgency in El Salvador was not defeated; and the government did not win. Unlike Iraq, the insurgency in El Salvador was class-based. Unlike Vietnam, where the Saigon government refused to negotiate with the NLF to the bitter end, when the Salvadoran government realized it could not crush the insurgency outright, it negotiated its way out. According to Elisabeth Jean Wood’s analysis of the Salvadoran settlement, “Once unyielding elites…conceded democracy because popular insurgency, although containable militarily, could not be ended, and the persisting mobilization eventually made compromise preferable to continued resistance.” 10 In effect, a legitimate regime was constructed through negotiations between a coherent insurgency and a reasonably 6 unified elite, negotiations in which the government as well as the insurgents made key concessions in return for peace. Nothing resembling this process appears likely in Iraq where the insurgency has no known central leadership and such elite unity as exists as been steadily eroded by sectarian violence. At the time of this writing, as the increasing violence of heavily armed police and militia units approximates open civil war in Iraq, the embrace of El Salvador as a model has virtually disappeared from the press.11 But in 2005, the El Salvador model was hailed as the solution to Iraq’s counterinsurgency problems.

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