The Economist of 27 October has an interesting article summarising latest military thinking on the changes in practice required to defeat insurgency. The implication is that insurgencies in general cannot be defeated except through extreme restraint with uncertain results (mastered by the British in Malaysia and, more controversially, Northern Ireland) or through extreme brutality. 

The Economist names the Syrian suppression of 1982 as a model of brutality, but the real type-models are Nazi operations that were never finally assessed because the regime was defeated in a conventional war. Most commentators have assumed that the methods of the Wehrmacht and the SS, operating without restraint, would have suppressed all meaningful resistance - depressing though that thought may be. 

Israel, whose tenderness is not legendary, learnt some techniques from the Warsaw Ghetto experience, at least according to an old but interesting article by Stephen Graham in the January/February 2003 Edition of New Left Review [Subscription Only]. This refers to the Jenin episode as deliberate 'urbicide'. What precisely went on in Fallujah not long afterwards is unknown but subsequent military memoirs suggest that Graham may have been right that "military planners are matter-of-fact throughout the world". 

What seems to have happened is that Israeli adaptations of German urban warfare techniques were conveyed to the Pentagon for use in Iraq but resulted in a problem that had been unpredicted because the political situations of Israel and the US are so very different. 

Israel, backed democratically by its own people, can undertake 'collective punishments' (like denying fuel to 1.4m Palestinians in Gaza this week) for reasons of defensive security and can freely engage in 'bulldozer' techniques. The extension of similar techniques to an operation in Iraq, widely regarded as 'offensive', on a bigger canvas, thousands of miles from the 'heimat' and under the scrutiny of the global media and with many allies to keep on board, was simply untenable.  

It is not just that these techniques may not work technically (in fact, they probably would if the leash was entirely taken off the military), but that, as with the uncovering of Abu Ghraib, the methodologies involved cannot be kept secret to populations that have not yet been trained into accepting brutality as normal and necessary. Liberal strategies cannot easily make use of national-socialist techniques. Kidnapping, torture, collective punishment, random executions, death squads and indiscriminate bombing may only do the trick if they remain secret or become acceptable. 

NATO is now in trouble in Afghanistan partly because its strategists have been far too ready to let civilians die en route to defeating the enemy. One unnamed British Officer, sick of the war, has already and anonymously told the Press this weekend that he knows that innocent civilians are still getting killed. In 1944, this was treated callously by all sides on the lines of the later phrase that "s**t happens". Today, we find this sort of thing abhorrent and Israel and the US have both been sharply diminished in the eyes of the world as a result.

So, if US military thinkers are shifting direction faster than their political bosses, it is not because they have become nicer. Political warfare has had to become embedded in military thought because of experience. The 'hawk' model for the military ("anything is permissible in the cause of freedom") has gone the way of indiscriminate use of air power. It may seize territory but it represents a damn fool way of trying to hold on to it.

The assessment now is that we are into ‘fourth generation’ warfare in which loose networks infiltrate to destroy the political will of the other side – in essence, this is political warfare as we have been analyzing it for our clients for some time. This was the lesson of the Algerian revolt which was won by its insurgency precisely at the moment of greatest military success for the French because of a collapse of political will in the home country.  

The Economist article provides a lengthy and well worth reading account of this rising ideology of war as politics by other means. Military schools are now trying to come to terms with new techniques and to bring along an American political class that lags behind their thinking. The military are now far more ‘liberal’ in terms of the theory of capacity-building and political warfare than those older generation 'hawk' American politicians who were raised on cold war absolutes and the debate around Vietnam.

There is a diplomatic aspect to all this. Americans should try to understand that, while the British Government is committed to a transtlantic war on terror, the British public are at best cynical and indifferent and, at worst, are already keen to get out of the obligations made by the previous Prime Minister in 2001. 

Few European politicians, outside Sarkozy's office, are keen to extend existing obligations. Most are fighting a permanent rearguard action against complete withdrawal so that US conduct in the field becomes a critical issue in sustaining a legislative consensus for support. The Governments of Italy, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands sustain engagement only through the constant draining of valuable domestic political capital. Supporting America risks votes.

This situation almost certainly underpins the reason why both UK and US military leaders are insisting that commitment to the war on ‘terror’ must be seen in terms of ‘decades’ rather than of any quick fix. The military are deeply concerned that the Western political class seems not to understand what is required under new conditions. Opponents of the West now believe that all they have to do is to keep the US pouring resources into the war and this will undermine their economy and society from within. If Americans themselves are not convinced by the rightness of the cause (and certain methods of warfare raise such doubts), then eventually the system, so they think, will implode. 

However, we have to be cautious about British media praising British methods derived from the process of decolonization. These are often compared to the much more violent and troubled experience of France. France adopted more conventional and brutal methods and was chased out of its two key imperial zones (Indo-China and North Africa) under humiliating circumstances.

British methods had the virtue of not leaving a wasteland and a lasting resentment. They also left behind trading partners and the surprising survival of some liberal values through the Commonwealth but, by any conventional assessment, they were still withdrawals. Britain gave up power to drag out the period of its influence. Close reading of the Northern Irish situation also indicates no victory, only an uneasy truce between nationalist ideologies and the preservation of a weaker Union.

The logic of the current insurgency and the new ideology of counter-terrorism still remains the eventual withdrawal from direct hard power involvement in those remaining zones, such as the Middle East, that the West  took for granted were to remain within its post-imperial sphere of influence.

www.tppr.co.uk