Counterinsurgency Campaign Research Articles

Mosaic; counter-insurgency approaches and the war against the Islamic state in Mozambique

ABSTRACT Following the defeat in Afghanistan there have been several discussions over the failure of western and western allied counter-insurgency strategies. These discussions often assume that winning a counter-insurgency is dependent on choosing the right strategy to win, and ideal type strategies are often sketched up to provide possible alternatives. However, in practice, counter-insurgency often becomes a process of arranging and organizing various goals, capacities, and organizational legacies. This article analyzes the counter insurgency in Mozambique and finds that it was formed by economic interests and organizational legacies, though it was not an entirely rational activity to win a war. On the ground practices have been the result of several approaches creating a dynamic counter-insurgency assemblage that transcends ideal type counter-insurgency strategies. The article suggests that this might be the cases for many counter insurgency campaigns.

Multilateral counterinsurgency in East Africa

ABSTRACT Multilateral organizations rarely conduct counterinsurgency campaigns. But most contemporary cases have occurred in Africa. This article analyzes how several multilateral organizations conducted counterinsurgency in the east African theaters of south-central Somalia, northern Mozambique, and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. These multilateral counterinsurgency operations displayed considerable variation in the geographic extent of their operations, their mandated tasks, the size and duration of the mission, as well as their accomplishments. However, they were all heavily influenced by six common attributes that constrained their prospects for success, and which taken together make counterinsurgency a daunting task for even the most effective multilateral organizations.

Critical Analysis of the Nepali Army’s Counter Insurgency Campaign Against Maoist Insurgency in Nepal

Nepal witnessed an insurgency within its territory for a decade from 1996 to 2006. Nepali army, the national armed force, along with other security forces, conducted the counter-insurgency campaign within the broader campaign of the Nepalese government. This paper examines the growth of Maoist insurgency in Nepal, the government's initial response, and finally the army's campaign against the insurgents. Using the information presented in academic and government literature as well as the experience gained by the researcher himself, it concludes that the army was successful in tactical battles against the Maoists but could not gain complete victory at the strategic level. The paper also examines the challenges faced by the army during the campaign, and the wider concepts coming out from the overall critical analysis of the campaign.

How peace saves lives: Evidence from Colombia

The victimization of civilians and combatants during internal conflicts causes large socioeconomic costs. Unfortunately, it is not clear whether peace negotiations can significantly reduce this burden. One key reason is the lingering presence of antipersonnel landmines, which are hidden underground and remain active for decades. Looking at the recent experience of Colombia, we quantify the number of lives saved by the reduction of landmine accidents and study the institutional conditions under which peace agreements can significantly reduce landmine victimization. Our findings highlight the importance of: reduced counterinsurgency campaigns, post-conflict information sharing, comprehensive humanitarian mine clearance, and mine risk management campaigns.

Introduction: Ethics and the War against Ukraine

Now in its third year, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine remains at the very top of the international security agenda. This conflict has largely refocused the West's attention away from the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaigns that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In February 2022, German chancellor Olaf Scholz went so far as to declare that the invasion signaled a zeitenwende, or “dawn of a new era.”1 Russia's aggression and the threat of having to fight a peer or near-peer competitor raises difficult questions, many of which are ethical in nature. The essays gathered in this roundtable seek to provide answers to some of those questions. They are the result of a workshop I organized for the King's College London Centre for Military Ethics in October 2023. One of my ambitions for this workshop was to put leading academics working on the ethics of war into discussion with military practitioners, making sure to include Ukrainian voices. I was very fortunate to succeed in these objectives, and I am convinced that the published essays have benefited enormously from our conversations.

From ‘Butcher and Bolt’ to ‘Bugsplat’: Race, Counterinsurgency, and International Politics

Beginning in the early 2000s, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan revived interest among security studies scholars in counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare. Yet most studies of COIN in mainstream security studies have not explored the role of race, despite the fact that the principles of COIN warfare were developed during the colonial period when racialized visions dominated world politics. We argue that mainstream security scholars tend to overlook race for two interconnected reasons: first, they treat race as an emotional and interpersonal phenomenon, and second, they assume that racial hostility will manifest in intense and indiscriminate violence. We argue instead that race should be understood as a particular kind of social ontology, one that places human communities into socially reductionist hierarchies based on assumed bio-cultural traits. We then examine how different kinds of racial ontologies were used in the colonial period to develop different kinds of COIN doctrines, whether punitive or paternalistic in character. We demonstrate how these different racialized COIN frameworks informed state practices on the battlefield through a comparative illustration of two COIN campaigns: Britain on the “North-West frontier” of India in the late nineteenth century and the United States along the “Af-Pak border” in the early twenty-first century.

Winning a Battle while Losing the War: An Assessment of Afghan-led, US-Supported Counterinsurgency in Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan, 2019–2020

There is an extensive literature on counterinsurgency strategy, its various campaigns as they were pursued in Afghanistan and the global war on terror that anchored the rationale behind them. But nearly all of this discourse has been steered by international experts and practitioners. The field lacks firsthand accounts and analysis from senior Afghan officials and military professionals. This account, which explores the Afghan government-led counterinsurgency campaign in Nangarhar province from February 2019 to July 2020, seeks to narrow that literature gap and to shed light on broader challenges and shortcomings facing the wider counterinsurgency campaign of United States intervention across Afghanistan for 20 years, which eventually ended up with recapturing of power by the Taliban in August 2021.

Beyond Collateral Damage: The Politics of Civilian Victimization in a Civil War

Abstract Under what conditions do states pursue counterinsurgency measures with little disregard for civilian life? This article argues that the states have an incentive to engage in group-selective violence involving disproportionate force when facing a local population sympathetic to an armed insurgent organization. Such a military strategy allows the state to punish the local population while claiming that civilian casualties are an unintended consequence of its counterinsurgency campaign. Using a nuanced measurement of civilian victimization that transcendences the dichotomous distinction between intentional and unintentional killings, this study focuses on the Kurdish conflict in Turkey. The empirical analyses, based on an original violent events dataset, demonstrate that the Turkish state’s counterinsurgency campaign involves group-selective violence characterized by disproportionate force that aims to neutralize domestic and international reactions, punishes dissident political mobilization, and brandishes the government’s nationalist credentials to the majority population.

U.S. COUNTERINSURGENCY EFFORTS AGAINST THE “TALIBAN” IN AFGHANISTAN: POLITICAL ANALYSIS AND ASSESSMENT

The U.S. fought its history’s longest war to defeat the “Taliban” insurgency, one strategy for doing so involved winning the “hearts and minds” of Afghans. However, the U.S it failed in its stated objectives. The United State could have done more to try to defeat the insurgency and counter terrorist groups in Afghanistan as well as to achieve state building and peace building objectives if they could have convinced the region, especially Pakistan to cooperate towards these aims Afghan problem. The poor governance, vast corruption, lack of regional cohesion in defeating “Taliban’s” insurgency especially Pakistan’s frequent negative interference in Afghanistan and lack of legitimacy of the Afghan Government has undermined the United States counterinsurgency efforts in past two decades in Afghanistan. To elaborate on the failure of the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign, it is important to understand the essence of theory and practice. D.Galula’s theory of “counterinsurgency” is a mixture of military, political and social actions under the resilient control of a single authority. This observation leads us to one of the critical hypotheses of this research which is that by ignoring Indigenous government– as one the most significant precondition for winning counterinsurgency – resulted in the return of the “Taliban” insurgency and prolongation of the Afghan conflict. Using the interventionist theory, this paper briefly analyses the cause and consequences of the U.S. counterinsurgency efforts and its peace and state-building failure in Afghanistan.

The Illusion of Neutralism: The Indigenous Third Force and the Filipino Republic from the Late 1940s to the 1950s

Abstract It often has been an illusion that Filipinos lack indigeneity due to the ties with the United States since 1898. Lost in these mists were the indigenous agendas that lay underneath the official narratives. The article presents a background and then examines the administration of Elpidio Quirino, president of the Philippines from 1948 to 1953, particularly his neutralist Pacific Pact initiative and the failed use of military force against the Huks. It concludes with a discussion of the rise of Ramón Magsaysay. It then examines Magsaysay, Philippine president from 1953 to 1957, beginning as defense secretary, support from the United States, the Magsaysay myth, his counterinsurgency campaign against the Huks, his election as president, international leadership, and legacies after his death. The study will show how the top-down policies of Quirino reliant on military force gave way to the unifying, reformist, inclusive, and inspirational leadership of Magsaysay, which became a kind of third force apart from the oligarchy and the Communists.

Hunters and Gatherers: The Evolution of Strike and Intelligence Functions in Special Operations Forces

The rapid expansion of Special Operations Forces (SOF) since the beginning of the twenty-first century is largely seen as a response to the necessity to fight the post–11 September 2001 counterterrorism wars. Strike and intelligence, previously studied as distinct functions for military forces, have been increasingly intertwined in contemporary SOF operations. This study examines the evolution of the strike and intelligence functions of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and allied SOF in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaigns from 2004 to 2017. The coevolution of strike and intelligence functions in SOF operations provides unique insight into the processes of battlefield and doctrinal adaptation in counterterrorism campaigns. Opportunities for further research include links between emerging doctrine and practice in targeting enemy networks.

Settler colonial counterinsurgency: Indigenous resistance and the more-than-state policing of #NoDAPL

In 2016, the US-based private military contractor TigerSwan was denied a license to operate in North Dakota. Nonetheless, it coordinated a counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign employing war-on-terror tactics, brutalizing Indigenous and allied water protectors associated with the Indigenous-led movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) on Standing Rock Lakota territory. This article takes COIN as an analytic to show that US settler colonialism is a multilateral, internally conflicted, and anxious mode of power. The settler state both depends upon and disavows anti-Indigenous and anti-Black violence enacted by rogue civilian individuals and organizations, a phenomenon here termed ‘more-than-state policing’. The repression of #NoDAPL was not solely a boomerang by-product of the global war on terror but rather exposes an established infrastructure of settler colonial COIN intrinsic to US normal politics, in which Indigenous resistance and sovereignty are constructed as metastasizing, viral threats to settler colonial legitimacy. As modern COIN warfare has evolved from four centuries of North American settler colonial invasion and governance, settler colonial studies are key to grasping 21st-century topics of war, imperialism, securitization, resource extraction, and climate justice.

John Scott Reed. The US Volunteers in the Southern Philippines: Counterinsurgency, Pacification, and Collaboration, 1899–1901.

As stated by the author, the purpose of this book is to direct historians’ attention to the achievements of the United States Volunteers (USV) in the country’s “single most successful counterinsurgency campaign” outside the Western Hemisphere (xi). John Scott Reed sets out to narrate a story of a force he argues was driven by strong sense of patriotic duty, of men who held “a high standard of personal behavior” and did not resort to excessive violence (195). These volunteers were “stoically indifferent to wound, hardship, and illness,” achieving a magnificent victory while fighting for the righteous cause (197). In short, Reed tells a story of American heroes. Reed is clearly rooting for the military force he writes about. His eyes are clearly set on rebuking some of the recent scholarship, by Paul Kramer and others, that has stressed excessive violence at the heart of the US colonial project on the islands. Due to Reed’s premise and approach, readers might find his analysis troubling, as did this reviewer.

Relationship between Coup-proofing and Counterinsurgency

Theories of coup-proofng and counterinsurgency have received increased attention in recent years.1 However, minimal research has been conducted to determine if a causal relationship exists between the two theories. Therefore, this dissertation endeavors to broaden both theories by drawing insights into how coup-proofng measures impact strategic approaches and operational efcacy in counterinsurgency campaigns. To accomplish this task, this dissertation analyzes the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its counterinsurgency campaign in the province of Sistan va Baluchestan. This case tests the hypothesis that coup proofing has caused Iran to adopt a coercive-repressive approach to counterinsurgency, and diminished its operational performance. Following a case study analysis and conclusions regarding the hypothesis, I further outline these fndings and discuss their applicability to other cases. I also place my research within the context of broader coup-proofng and counterinsurgency theory, linking it to ongoing debates in each feld. Though the conclusions drawn are in the context of Iran, the case provides a jumping-of point for further research.

Fighting for Time: Rhodesia’s Military and Zimbabwe’s Independence by Charles D. Melson

<i>Fighting for Time: Rhodesia’s Military and Zimbabwe’s Independence</i> by Charles D. Melson

Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA by Michael Graziano

Reviewed by: Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA by Michael Graziano Eva Payne Michael Graziano, Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021) Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors examines the madcap and mundane ways that the US intelligence community sought to harness the power of religion to shape geopolitics. The book uses religious studies as both methodology and subject matter. Graziano frames the intelligence community much like a religious one—a group of people united by ideology and practices. He seeks to understand the worldview that shaped his actors' actions, much as scholars of religion do. But Graziano also focuses on why his historical actors thought that religion was the way to understand the people whom they wanted to control in the interest of US national security. The book traces the development of the "religious approach" to intelligence, a paradigm for understanding religions that paralleled the study of religion in the academy. While the book examines the faith that intelligence agents brought to their work, Graziano is more interested in how the religious approach shaped who the US intelligence community considered to be allies or enemies, how it attempted to sway nations to the side of the US and away from communism, and how it sold the subsequent conflicts to Americans at home. Organized chronologically, the chapters detail the shifting relationship between religion and US foreign intelligence organizations from WWII to the Iran hostage crisis. Chapter one shows how the founders of what would become [End Page 110] the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—particularly Catholic William J. Donovan—brought a vision of American religious exceptionalism to US intelligence work from its inception. For Donovan, "religion was everywhere, free, and individual: a natural ally in war and diplomacy" (15), and the US was the place where religion had reached its apotheosis as a force for freedom. By developing an intelligence-sharing relationship between the Vatican and OSS, Donovan demonstrated to powerful Protestants that tolerating Catholicism was in the interest of national security, setting the stage for the post-War vision of the US as a bastion of religious pluralism. Chapter two tracks the growth of OSS-Catholic cooperation with Operation Pilgrim's Progress, through which the Catholic International Press shared on-the-ground intelligence from across Europe with the OSS. Chapter three surveys the US intelligence community's use of the religious approach to constrain Japanese imperialism in Asia. Intelligence officers saw Shinto and Buddhism as a means of understanding the "Japanese mind," while also stressing that those religions were incompatible with the Islam practiced by many in South Asia. They worked to convince Muslims to ally with the US and resist the Japanese by framing Islam and Christianity as siblings. Although President Truman dissolved the OSS in 1945, chapter four demonstrates that the religious approach lived on in the bureaucracies that superseded it as the intelligence community worked to fortify religion around the world. If the US was the land of religious freedom and pluralism, the logic went, then religious people everywhere would naturally ally with the US against communism. Chapter five details how the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) capitalized on the discourse of a "Tri-Faith America" to muster support for the Vietnam War at home and abroad. Catholic physician Thomas Dooley launched a propaganda campaign to develop American sympathy for Vietnamese Catholics, which in turn reaffirmed the place of Catholics in American life, allowing the CIA to project the image of American religious pluralism back out to the world. Chapter six traces the CIA's move from a tri-faith model to the "World Religions Paradigm," mirroring a shift in the academy. As the US launched counterinsurgency campaigns in the Philippines and Vietnam, the CIA sought to understand "Orientals" by understanding practices such as divination and soothsaying, which they believed to be central to Asian religions. Chapter seven explains how the religious approach made US intelligence officials unable to see the coming of the Iranian Revolution. The CIA understood religion and politics as fundamentally separate, and religion to be essentially anti-communist and pro-US. They thus attributed...

Counterinsurgency and The rule of law in Afghanistan

ABSTRACT A major aspect of the United States’ war efforts in Afghanistan over the past two decades has been the waging of a counterinsurgency campaign. This article analyzes the extent to which the United States and other Western intervening nations developed and implemented rule of law support missions as a component of the overarching counterinsurgency mission. This article evaluates the successes and failures of the rule of law missions, analyzing the lessons learned from two decades of conflict to provide a foundation for the policymakers and strategic planners who will be tasked with executing counterinsurgency campaigns in the future. The article focuses in particular on the social, political, and cultural factors of the Afghan people that impacted the viability of the Western counterinsurgency and rule of law missions.

Technologies of Emergency: Cyprus at the Intersection of Decolonisation and the Cold War

This article analyses ‘technologies of emergency’ in colonial counterinsurgency campaigns, framed around the case of Cyprus. In the 1950s, the repeated use of the state of emergency created a continuum, connecting British colonies on three different continents in a single administrative network. Lessons learned in one location were applied in the next, causing the state of emergency to evolve into a blueprint for post-war counterinsurgency in colonial settings. We contend that the toolkit of emergency technologies was not limited to legal measures, arguing instead for a more capacious category. By examining the place of Cyprus in this network and the effect of this broader ‘toolkit’ on the ground, this article views the Cyprus Emergency as one of multiple decolonisation wars in the Cold War era. In doing so, it highlights the coloniality of the island, an aspect of Cypriot history which is often overlooked in favour of more regional frameworks.

‘To Cleanse the Countryside We Must First Cleanse Hearts’: The Culture of Rural Pacification in Japanese-occupied China

ABSTRACT Contributing to a growing literature on the transnational history of ‘collaborationism’ under wartime occupation, this paper examines ‘Rural Pacification’ – the counterinsurgency campaigns that were prosecuted from 1941 to 1943 in Japanese-occupied China – from the perspective of culture. In this paper, I argue that, despite being initiated as a military project, the ‘political work’ of Rural Pacification, and particularly the use of cultural production to spread government ideas to rural communities in the Lower Yangtze Delta, marked a crucial part of these campaigns. Rural Pacification was not purely about the eradication of communist resistance in China, but also about ‘cleansing hearts’.

Neither peace nor democracy: the role of siege and population control in the Syrian regime’s coercive counterinsurgency campaign

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of siege warfare and population control in the coercive counterinsurgency strategy used by the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad to effectively crush the revolution that began in 2011. We extend the coercive counterinsurgency framework offered by Monica Duffy Toft and Yuri Zhukov to analyze the Syrian regime’s use of the twin tactical pillars of siege warfare and population control. We focus on how these two types of denial – military and political – proved essential to the regime’s military victory.