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Counter-insurgency - or COIN to use the currently fashionable acronym -
poses a unique set of challenges to any government which finds its authority
coming under challenge from an Insurgent group. It requires a set of skills that
are not intrinsic either to professional armed forces or police and which have to be
deployed in a context requiring an all-of-government approach to security which is
equally alien to many of the civilian officials required to implement it. As General
David Petraeus observed in his introduction to the revised US Army Counter-
Insurgency Manual, counter-insurgencies normally begin poorly. Governments find
themselves unsighted against an enemy which Initially enjoys all the advantages
of asymmetry and their normal first response is to over-react. It is also important
to remember that, in contrast to conventional military engagements, counterinsurgency
is not about winning or losing. Rather It is about buying time and
space to enable governments to take whatever political, social and economic
measures may be necessary to address the causes fuelling insurgency. In the
case of the insurgencies examined by military historian Professor David French in
his latest volume, the solution normally came in the form of accelerated progress
towards political independence.
Professor French undertakes a detailed and widely-sourced examination of the
politically-motivated violence afflicting the British Empire between 1945 and 1967,
including a number of situations not normally considered to be insurgencies, such
as the Gold Coast and British Guiana. His basic thesis is that a misreading of
the history of these conflicts led the British Armed Forces to develop a counter-insurgency doctrine which was fundamentally flawed insofar as it put winning
"hearts and minds" at the centre of its strategy whereas in practice British strategy
relied primarily on coercion. Professor French cites examples such as the forcible
population resettlements which took place in Malaya and the highlands of Kenya
as well as other security measures - detentions without trial, house searches -
that were untargeted and impacted adversely on the population as a whole in ways
that could only alienate rather than win round. Such measures were justified by
a British practice of avoiding declarations of martial law whilst implementing local
legislation which had a comparable effect.
Professor French has many criticisms of the British approach to counterinsurgency,
some justified and some still in evidence today. Among these is the
inability - or unwillingness - of colonial administrations to implement lessons
learnt elsewhere; and the degree to which frequent roulements of military
personnel militated against the consistent implementation of a single strategy -
a problem much in evidence in Southern Afghanistan over the past six years.
Some of his judgements are however less well-founded or based on a tendency
to judge a very different if recent past by the standards of the present. British
colonial administrations - by design - sat lightly on those they governed. But to
characterise such administrations as "fragile states" makes assumptions about the
role and functions of the state that are very contemporary and bear little relation
to then-pertaining realities. Similarly, provisions such as the European and UN
Conventions on Human Rights had come into being following the horrors visited
on European populations during World War II and were no doubt interpreted and
applied against that backcloth; they have since undergone much refinement and
re-interpretation as expectations have changed. That said, Professor French
gives the British a relatively clean bill of health when it comes to "dirty wars",
concluding that extra-judicial killings and systematic torture were not part of a
British approach. Individual excesses did however occur and were dealt with
though not always in ways that would command contemporary acceptance.
There are two areas where Professor French's treatment fails to do the British
full justice. The first is in the realm of intelligence. It is true that almost all the
insurgencies with which colonial administrations had to deal began with a poor
intelligence picture and that in some cases this did not improve enough to make a
real difference But in most cases the intelligence picture did undergo significant
improvement and there were some notable achievements which go unmentioned
in this book such as the success of the Penang Special Branch In getting astride
the Malayan Communist Party's external communications via Sumatra. The
other is the way in which insurgents were characterised as thugs and criminals
rather than as people with a legitimate political agenda. It is true that insurgents
were so categorised and no doubt many rank-and-file soldiers and police, not
to mention settlers in places like Kenya, genuinely saw them in that light. But
part of that approach was no doubt motivational - soldiers need to believe they
are fighting an enemy - and part political. Throughout the thirty-plus years of the Northern Ireland insurgency, successive British administrations referred to
the Provisional IRA as terrorists, denying them legitimacy - until the point when
political negotiations began in earnest. In COIN, as in so much else, timing and
sequencing is everything.
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