Frederick Kagan: Force Wielded with Diplomacy Is Vital in Defeating Insurgencies
[Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar in defense and security studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and the co-author of While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today (2000). His new study, Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy, will be released later this year.]
Some will argue that the United States today is in a more complex situation than that faced by 18th- and 19th-century leaders. The terrorist threat is more akin to an insurgency in the Muslim world than it is to traditional power politics. Insurgency is, indeed, a special case of warfare. Unlike a conventional military struggle, which the great theorist of strategy Karl von Clausewitz aptly characterized as a duel, insurgency is a struggle between two or more groups for the support of the large mass of an undecided population. In such struggles, the counterinsurgent generally suffers more by resorting to force than the insurgent does. The role of any government, after all, is to ensure civil order and peace, and to protect the lives and well-being of its citizens. When the government takes up weapons against rebels, it places all of that in jeopardy, and the population is usually quick to resent it.
Still, there have been successful counterinsurgencies, even when governments used dramatically more force than the United States is ever likely to contemplate exercising in the Muslim world. One example is the Boer War (1899–1902), in which the British army suppressed an insurgency by Dutch settlers in South Africa only after burning farms and penning the bulk of the population, including many women and children, in barbed wire–encircled concentration camps. The hostility created by this conflict, the last in a series of Anglo-Boer wars over the course of decades, was enormous. As one historian of the period notes, “Far from destroying Afrikaner nationalism, Chamberlain and Milner, Roberts and Kitchener, were the greatest recruiting agents it ever had.”
If modern critics of the use of force are correct, Britain’s actions should have fueled endless Anglo-Boer hostility and a permanent insurgency. Instead, they led to the rapid restoration of relations with South Africa, which served as Britain’s loyal ally during World War I, sending thousands of soldiers to fight alongside their former enemies. Why did this transformation occur? Britain’s military victory was critical. The harsh tactics the British used broke the back of the rebellion and served as an effective deterrent against future Boer attempts to fight them. At the same time, the British government offered moderate terms of surrender—so moderate that some critics in Britain said it “lost the peace.” The Treaty of Vereeniging of 1902, modified substantially in 1907, left the Boers very much in charge in South Africa, although under overall British suzerainty.
A perhaps even more apt example comes from the end of World War II. In Germany and Japan, the American occupiers were far from welcomed, and it is not hard to understand why. Even some official U.S. military histories acknowledge the triumphant GIs’ extensive looting and mistreatment of the local populations in Germany. But the sheer scale of the U.S. military victories in Germany and Japan helped prevent the development of significant insurrections or opposition movements. Neither the Gerúmans nor the Japanúese were willing to risk further destruction of their society.
The nature of the peace settlement, how-ever, promoted increasingly close relations between victor and vanúquished. As the Marshall Plan was implemented in Gerúmany and U.S. reconstruction efforts bore fruit in Japan, and as the United States and its allies worked to rebuild the German and Japanúese polities along stable demúocratic lines, hostility toward America evaporated much more rapúidly than anyone had a right to expect. Of course, the growth of the Soviet threat played a crucial role, since it made the Amerúican ocúcupation, even at its worst, seem more attractive than the Soviet alternative. And as the nature of the U.S. military presence shifted to protection against an exúterúnal threat, and Amerúican economic and political aid continued to flow, the occupation came to be seen as a good thing by the majority of the German and Japanese populations.
Today, those who are most reluctant to consider the use of force under any condition except in response to direct attack pin most of their hopes on the United Nations and other international organizations. In these forums, they believe, states should be able to peacefully resolve even their deepest differences. But history shows rather conclusively that the same principles that govern the affairs of nations also govern those of international organizations.
In 1923, for example, Benito Mussolini seized the Greek island of Corfu and demanded an exorbitant “reparation” from Athens after several Italian officials were assassinated in Greece. No evidence then or since has proven that Greeks were involved in the killings, and it is at least as likely that Mussolini’s own agents were the culprits. The Greeks turned to the newly formed League of Nations.
Britain initially supported the Greeks’ request, but it was virtually alone among the major powers. Prime Minister Stanley Baldúwin’s government had to choose: Forcing the issue into the League’s purúview would create a serious risk of war with Italy; giving in to Musúsoúlini would destroy the League as an effective force in the post–Great War world order.
Baldwin found the task too daunting. Britain was war weary, and its forces were overextended and weakened by budget cuts (although it is clear in retrospect that the Italian navy could not have resisted the Royal Navy). In the end, the Greeks paid an indemnity they should not have owed, Mussolini abandoned an island he should never have occupied, and the case was taken away from the League of Nations. The precedent was thereby established for the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, to which the League made no response, and for the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, to which the League also had no meaningful reaction. The emasculation of the League in 1923 destroyed its credibility and virtually ensured its irrelevance in the major crises that lay ahead.
By contrast, the first Bush administration reacted to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 in a manner designed not merely to resist Saddam Hussein’s aggression but to strengthen the United Nations and prepare it for a central role in keeping the peace in the “new world order” after the Cold War. President George H. W. Bush quickly decided that he would use military force to reverse the Iraqi action. This was the critical decision. Although the task looked difficult at the time—Iraq had the fourth-largest military in the world, and early American casualty projections were as high as 50,000—the president believed that he had to act to prevent the immediate unraveling of the international order and to forestall legitimation of the principle that powerful states could use force to prevail in territorial disputes with their weaker neighbors.
Bush began a massive diplomatic effort to gain allies for the United States, win over world public opinion, and, above all, acquire clear and strong sanction from the UN for the operation to liberate Kuwait. The UN was galvanized by Bush’s efforts. The discovery after the war that Saddam Hussein had been maintaining a vast weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program that had been virtually unknown to the principal international monitoring agencies led to a complete overhaul of those agencies, particularly the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Under its new director, Hans Blix, the IAEA and UNSCOM, the UN agency set up to oversee the destruction of Iraq’s WMD program, pursued an increasingly successful effort in Iraq, supported periodically by the threat and use of U.S. airpower.
By the late 1990s, however, a growing American reluctance to use that power allowed the Iraqi dictator to eject UN inspectors. Saddam then began mothballing his WMD programs but was able to persuade the world that he still had them. The inspections effort in Iraq had been effective only when supported by the threat and occasional use of American military force. ...
Though the use of force may stir anger and resentment in an enemy population and damage a state’s position in the world community, history suggests that both the animosity and the damage may be more fleeting than many suppose, and that their scale and duration may depend on many elements other than the mere fact that force was used. By far the most important element is the acceptability of the peace conditions imposed by the victor after the struggle. If the victor can devise terms that most of its foes and the rest of the international community can accept, then the animosity is likely to fade quickly. And if acceptable terms are coupled with continued military power, then the prospects for a lasting and stable peace are excellent.
Read entire article at Wilson Quarterly
Some will argue that the United States today is in a more complex situation than that faced by 18th- and 19th-century leaders. The terrorist threat is more akin to an insurgency in the Muslim world than it is to traditional power politics. Insurgency is, indeed, a special case of warfare. Unlike a conventional military struggle, which the great theorist of strategy Karl von Clausewitz aptly characterized as a duel, insurgency is a struggle between two or more groups for the support of the large mass of an undecided population. In such struggles, the counterinsurgent generally suffers more by resorting to force than the insurgent does. The role of any government, after all, is to ensure civil order and peace, and to protect the lives and well-being of its citizens. When the government takes up weapons against rebels, it places all of that in jeopardy, and the population is usually quick to resent it.
Still, there have been successful counterinsurgencies, even when governments used dramatically more force than the United States is ever likely to contemplate exercising in the Muslim world. One example is the Boer War (1899–1902), in which the British army suppressed an insurgency by Dutch settlers in South Africa only after burning farms and penning the bulk of the population, including many women and children, in barbed wire–encircled concentration camps. The hostility created by this conflict, the last in a series of Anglo-Boer wars over the course of decades, was enormous. As one historian of the period notes, “Far from destroying Afrikaner nationalism, Chamberlain and Milner, Roberts and Kitchener, were the greatest recruiting agents it ever had.”
If modern critics of the use of force are correct, Britain’s actions should have fueled endless Anglo-Boer hostility and a permanent insurgency. Instead, they led to the rapid restoration of relations with South Africa, which served as Britain’s loyal ally during World War I, sending thousands of soldiers to fight alongside their former enemies. Why did this transformation occur? Britain’s military victory was critical. The harsh tactics the British used broke the back of the rebellion and served as an effective deterrent against future Boer attempts to fight them. At the same time, the British government offered moderate terms of surrender—so moderate that some critics in Britain said it “lost the peace.” The Treaty of Vereeniging of 1902, modified substantially in 1907, left the Boers very much in charge in South Africa, although under overall British suzerainty.
A perhaps even more apt example comes from the end of World War II. In Germany and Japan, the American occupiers were far from welcomed, and it is not hard to understand why. Even some official U.S. military histories acknowledge the triumphant GIs’ extensive looting and mistreatment of the local populations in Germany. But the sheer scale of the U.S. military victories in Germany and Japan helped prevent the development of significant insurrections or opposition movements. Neither the Gerúmans nor the Japanúese were willing to risk further destruction of their society.
The nature of the peace settlement, how-ever, promoted increasingly close relations between victor and vanúquished. As the Marshall Plan was implemented in Gerúmany and U.S. reconstruction efforts bore fruit in Japan, and as the United States and its allies worked to rebuild the German and Japanúese polities along stable demúocratic lines, hostility toward America evaporated much more rapúidly than anyone had a right to expect. Of course, the growth of the Soviet threat played a crucial role, since it made the Amerúican ocúcupation, even at its worst, seem more attractive than the Soviet alternative. And as the nature of the U.S. military presence shifted to protection against an exúterúnal threat, and Amerúican economic and political aid continued to flow, the occupation came to be seen as a good thing by the majority of the German and Japanese populations.
Today, those who are most reluctant to consider the use of force under any condition except in response to direct attack pin most of their hopes on the United Nations and other international organizations. In these forums, they believe, states should be able to peacefully resolve even their deepest differences. But history shows rather conclusively that the same principles that govern the affairs of nations also govern those of international organizations.
In 1923, for example, Benito Mussolini seized the Greek island of Corfu and demanded an exorbitant “reparation” from Athens after several Italian officials were assassinated in Greece. No evidence then or since has proven that Greeks were involved in the killings, and it is at least as likely that Mussolini’s own agents were the culprits. The Greeks turned to the newly formed League of Nations.
Britain initially supported the Greeks’ request, but it was virtually alone among the major powers. Prime Minister Stanley Baldúwin’s government had to choose: Forcing the issue into the League’s purúview would create a serious risk of war with Italy; giving in to Musúsoúlini would destroy the League as an effective force in the post–Great War world order.
Baldwin found the task too daunting. Britain was war weary, and its forces were overextended and weakened by budget cuts (although it is clear in retrospect that the Italian navy could not have resisted the Royal Navy). In the end, the Greeks paid an indemnity they should not have owed, Mussolini abandoned an island he should never have occupied, and the case was taken away from the League of Nations. The precedent was thereby established for the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, to which the League made no response, and for the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, to which the League also had no meaningful reaction. The emasculation of the League in 1923 destroyed its credibility and virtually ensured its irrelevance in the major crises that lay ahead.
By contrast, the first Bush administration reacted to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 in a manner designed not merely to resist Saddam Hussein’s aggression but to strengthen the United Nations and prepare it for a central role in keeping the peace in the “new world order” after the Cold War. President George H. W. Bush quickly decided that he would use military force to reverse the Iraqi action. This was the critical decision. Although the task looked difficult at the time—Iraq had the fourth-largest military in the world, and early American casualty projections were as high as 50,000—the president believed that he had to act to prevent the immediate unraveling of the international order and to forestall legitimation of the principle that powerful states could use force to prevail in territorial disputes with their weaker neighbors.
Bush began a massive diplomatic effort to gain allies for the United States, win over world public opinion, and, above all, acquire clear and strong sanction from the UN for the operation to liberate Kuwait. The UN was galvanized by Bush’s efforts. The discovery after the war that Saddam Hussein had been maintaining a vast weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program that had been virtually unknown to the principal international monitoring agencies led to a complete overhaul of those agencies, particularly the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Under its new director, Hans Blix, the IAEA and UNSCOM, the UN agency set up to oversee the destruction of Iraq’s WMD program, pursued an increasingly successful effort in Iraq, supported periodically by the threat and use of U.S. airpower.
By the late 1990s, however, a growing American reluctance to use that power allowed the Iraqi dictator to eject UN inspectors. Saddam then began mothballing his WMD programs but was able to persuade the world that he still had them. The inspections effort in Iraq had been effective only when supported by the threat and occasional use of American military force. ...
Though the use of force may stir anger and resentment in an enemy population and damage a state’s position in the world community, history suggests that both the animosity and the damage may be more fleeting than many suppose, and that their scale and duration may depend on many elements other than the mere fact that force was used. By far the most important element is the acceptability of the peace conditions imposed by the victor after the struggle. If the victor can devise terms that most of its foes and the rest of the international community can accept, then the animosity is likely to fade quickly. And if acceptable terms are coupled with continued military power, then the prospects for a lasting and stable peace are excellent.