Jungle of Snakes Read online

  JUNGLE OF SNAKES

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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  JUNGLE OF

  SNAKES

  A CENTURY OF COUNTERINSURGENCY

  WARFARE FROM THE PHILIPPINES TO IRAQ

  JAMES R. ARNOLD

  Copyright © 2009 by James R. Arnold

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Published by Bloomsbury Press, New York

  All papers used by Bloomsbury Press are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing pro cesses conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR.

  Arnold, James R.

  Jungle of snakes : a century of counterinsurgency warfare from the Philippines to Iraq / James R. Arnold.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN: 978-1-60819-180-2

  1. Counterinsurgency—History—20th century. 2. Military history, Modern—20th century. 3. Counterinsurgency—United States—History—20th century.

  4. Counterinsurgency—Great Britain—History—20th century.

  5. Counterinsurgency—France—History—20th century. 6. United States—History, Military—20th century. 7. Great Britain—History, Military—20th century. 8. France—History, Military—20th century. I. Title.

  U241.A765 2009

  355.02'180904—dc22

  2008054018

  First U.S. Edition 2009

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by Westchester Book Group

  Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

  To the American soldier

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part One: The Philippine Insurrection

  1. An American Victory Yields a Guerrilla War

  2. Chastising the Insurrectos

  3. The War Is Won Again

  4. The Policy of Destruction

  5. Why the Americans Won

  Part Two: The War in Algeria

  6. Terror on All Saints’ Day

  7. Terror Without Limits

  8. The Question of Morality

  9. The Enclosed Hunting Preserve

  10. The Sense of Betrayal

  Part Three: The Malayan Emergency

  11. Crisis in Malaya

  12. Personality and Vision

  13. A Modern Cromwell

  14. Victory in Malaya

  Part Four: The Vietnam War

  15. In Search of a New Enemy

  16. Pacification, Marine Corps Style

  17. Progress and Setback

  18. The Army’s Other War

  19. Lessons from a Lost War

  Conclusion: Reflections on a War Without End

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Maps

  Capture of Manila, August 13, 1898

  Philippines

  Luzon Military Departments

  Philippines Showing Batangas and Balangiga

  Algeria Showing Aurès Massif and Kabylie

  Algeria Showing Philippeville

  The Challe Offensive, 1959–1960

  The Federation of Malaya, 1948

  South Vietnam Showing the Central Highlands

  South Vietnam Showing Corps Boundaries

  South Vietnam Showing Hau Nghia

  Introduction

  THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL IN 1989 and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union signaled the end of the Cold War. A new dawn gave promise that a more peaceful era was at hand. Citizens of the United States anticipated that for them at least, the scourge of war was no more. The emergence of a fresh set of conflicts dashed this promise. In the words of a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, James Woolsey, “It is as if we were struggling with a large dragon for 45 years, killed it, and then found ourselves in a jungle full of poisonous snakes.”1 The snakes he referred to are insurgents, guerrillas, and terrorists.

  Insurgents are people who forcibly strive to overthrow constituted authority. One’s view of them depends on where one’s loyalties lie. America proudly celebrates its patriots of 1776. By any definition, from George Washington down to the humblest Continental private shivering in his camp at Valley Forge, they were insurgents. They rebelled against established British authority and unlawfully formed fighting units to violently resist British government controls. The British were, conversely, the counterinsurgents, fighting to restore order.

  While some of the fighting in the War of In dependence was a formal clash of armies on recognizable battlefields, the American rebels were opposing the full might of a great empire and often avoided conventional warfare. It was what would today be called an “asymmetric conflict,” where the weaker force resorts to whatever tactics work, including many that appall the counterinsurgents. American leaders included men such as Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, whose guerrilla approach to war helped defeat the British invasion of the southern colonies. And the American rebels freely employed terror—whether the tarring and feathering of a British tax collector or the hanging of a backwoods loyalist leader—to advance their cause. In the end, because their victory gave birth to our nation, they are remembered as Founding Fathers rather than treasonous insurgents.

  While insurgents and counterinsurgents look at the same set of facts differently, there is general agreement that today, as in the past, Woolsey’s “jungle full of poisonous snakes” can present a lethal threat to established order. September 11, 2001, brought that threat into shocking public view.

  The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon caused American political leaders to commit the nation’s armed forces to a global war on terror. Pursuing terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States invaded, displaced the existing regimes, and took on the job of stabilizing the newly occupied territory. What had begun as a hunt for small bands of violent, ruthless men became a counterinsurgency, seeking to impose order in places most U.S. citizens had never heard of. Concerned citizens learned a new vocabulary. In place of intercontinental ballistic missiles, mutually assured destruction, and the Fulda Gap, they heard about roadside bombs, jihad, and a Baghdad slum called Sadr City.

  Like the American public, the U.S. military had to learn, or in some cases relearn, what appeared to be a new way of war. When deliberating about how to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, insurgents in Iraq, or a seemingly omnipresent Al Qaeda wherever it can be found, some military thinkers returned to the lessons of history. From the campaigns of Spanish insurgents against Napoleon—the era that gave the world the term guerrilla, or “small war”—to the Communist insurgencies in Vietnam and the triumph of Afghan rebels against the Soviets, they found numerous well-known examples of skillfully waged insurgencie
s. These conflicts along with a host of less well-remembered episodes demonstrate that insurgents, guerrillas, and terrorists enjoy many advantages in their struggles to overthrow a government or evict foreign occupiers. However, they are not predestined to win.

  A successful counterinsurgency requires a deft blend of military and political policies. Formulating this blend is a supremely daunting challenge. Both the insurgents and the counterinsurgents compete for the support of the civilian population. Mao Tse-tung’s classic formulation, that to survive guerrillas must be like fish swimming in a sheltering sea of popular support, appropriately focuses attention on the salient importance of this competition. Likewise, the classic counterinsurgency formulation describes this competition as the battle for “hearts and minds.”

  History shows that if insurgents build, maintain, and eventually expand a network of support within the general population, they will triumph. For a counterinsurgency to win, it must also gain civilian support. Such support is critical in order to obtain timely intelligence that allows the counterinsurgency power to separate the insurgents from the general population. It may seem simplistic to say that government forces cannot defeat guerrillas unless they can find them, except that history records that this task is painfully difficult.

  Given that civilian support is critical to ultimate victory, insurgents work to prevent civilians from assisting the government by employing intimidation tactics ranging from threats and extortion to kidnappings and assassinations. Insurgent terror eliminates government supporters and silences the mass of neutrals.

  A government will not receive civilian support against the insurgents unless it can provide physical security for the population. However, a government seldom has enough military strength to garrison every vulnerable place. It must therefore enlist local self-defense forces in the form of police and militia. Able recruits for those forces will not be forthcoming if the recruits perceive that government service puts their lives and their families at excessive risk.

  The conundrum for a counterinsurgency power is as follows: it will not obtain civilian support unless it can provide physical security; it is very hard to provide that security without civilian support. This conundrum brings politics to the forefront in two arenas: the internal politics of the government that the insurgents are seeking to topple and the home politics of the counterinsurgent power.

  A government confronting an internal insurgency is usually a weak government in crisis. To undermine popular support for the insurgents, the government must address civil grievances and make meaningful reforms. However, weak governments by definition have a precarious hold on power. They usually depend on support from the internal security forces, the military, government bureaucrats, and perhaps a business elite. If such a government responds to civil grievances by offering to share power with the disenfranchised, it risks losing the support of its core backers. Reform measures are equally fraught with peril for a weak government. Weak governments provide supporters with rewards to ensure their continuing support. These rewards are often official licenses to exploit the unrest by some form of corruption. Reform, on the other hand, requires an elimination of corruption and an emphasis on efficient performance. Changes in the social, political, and economic status quo will always be resisted, which is a large part of the reason that few tasks are as difficult as nation building in the midst of a violent insurgency.

  Meanwhile, the home government of the counterinsurgent power that is trying to prop up a foreign government under attack has to address its own set of political issues. The people ask their leaders—with public voice in a democracy, with muted tones elsewhere—why sacrifice on foreign soil is necessary. How those leaders answer is as important as how well their soldiers conduct the fight.

  JUNGLE OF SNAKES describes four counterinsurgency wars. In two cases, the United States in the Philippines and Great Britain in Malaya, a major power defeated an insurgency. In the other two cases, France in Algeria and the United States in Vietnam, the insurgents won.

  In 1898 the United States declared war on Spain. The ensuing “Splendid Little War” brought the Philippines under American control by right of conquest. However, when President William McKinley decided to retain control of the islands for the indefinite future, Filipino nationalists violently resisted.

  McKinley had little understanding of the country to where he was committing U.S. troops. His administration and its military advisers grossly underestimated the number of troops required to achieve the objective. Thereafter, they underestimated the depth of Filipino resistance to the American occupation. To undermine that resistance, administration policy tried simultaneously to impose a civil government and defeat an insurgency. At first, the American policy relied upon a variety of social and economic measures designed to persuade would-be insurgents that they could enjoy a better life if they laid down their weapons and accepted the American version of civil government. When these policies failed, the United States adopted sterner measures.

  Thereafter, several times senior military men claimed the war all but won, only to reverse course when a new round of violence exploded. Meanwhile, an influential chorus of American intellectuals including Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), William James, Samuel Gompers, and Andrew Carnegie formed a movement to oppose the war. As time passed with inconclusive military results and as reports of military misconduct, abuse, and torture gained currency, the American public began to turn against the war. The New York Times pronounced:

  The American people are plainly tired of the Philippine War. The administration must be aware that the case of its enemies is not weakened nor the confidence of its friends augmented by the daily reading about all this cost and killing. To kill rebellion by inches and trust to patience and slow time to bring back peace and contentment is not a humane or wise policy.2

  Yet in spite of fighting in an alien environment far from home against an insurgency partially fueled by nationalist sentiment and hatred of foreigners, the United States did win.

  In 1948 Great Britain faced a Communist insurgency in Malaya. The insurgents depended on terrorism to cow the civilian population and to drive out the British. London insurance firms would not cover British-owned Malayan businesses against losses incurred during a civil war. Accordingly, British authorities proclaimed the insurrection an “Emergency” instead of a rebellion or war, and set in train a counterinsurgency. As was the case with the United States’ response to guerrilla warfare in the Philippines, the British initial reaction was sluggish and off target. Yet, like the United States, Great Britain managed to recover and defeat the insurgents. The victory is recognized as the outstanding example of a successful counterinsurgency campaign. The British stressed the importance of operating within the rule of law. They emphasized that a successful counterinsurgency had to rely on an honest and competent civil service. Above all, the British recognized the centrality of gaining the loyalty and commitment of the civilian population.

  The 1954 war in Algeria pitted France against Muslim nationalists directed by the Front of National Liberation (FLN). The FLN objective was the restoration of a sovereign Algerian state. It advocated social democracy within an Islamic framework. To accomplish its goals, the FLN promoted armed struggle against France’s colonial occupation. A majority of French politicians of all stripes believed that Algeria was a fundamental part of France. They committed France’s armed might to retaining possession. After much trial and error, the French military developed a successful strategy. A combination of fortified barriers and population regrouping shifted the war’s military momentum decisively in favor of the French. The senior French general in Algeria proclaimed, “The military phrase of the rebellion is terminated in the interior.” For one last agonizing time, French military leaders believed that the army’s blood sacrifices had brought victory. This belief would heighten their sense of betrayal when Charles de Gaulle concluded that France had to abandon Algeria because the war was being irretrievably lost politically both on th
e international front and within France itself.

  When American ground forces entered Vietnam in 1965 they confronted a nationalist-inspired Communist insurgency. Whereas the Communists understood local needs and attitudes, the South Vietnamese government did not. It was weak, disorga nized, corrupt, aloof from its own people, and unable to perform the routine tasks of governing. The American commander, General William C. Westmoreland, described the formidable challenge: “Vietnam is involved in two simultaneous and very difficult tasks, nation building and fighting a vicious and well-organized enemy.” He ruefully added that if South Vietnam could do either alone, the task would be simplified, but instead “it’s got to do both at once.”3

  As was the case in the Philippines, Malaya, and Algeria, in Vietnam trial and error led to a counterinsurgency approach that might have led to victory. But it came too late. The American public demanded an end, even if it meant something far short of victory. In spite of heroic sacrifice, victory in Vietnam had proved beyond American capacity.