Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [14]
A Doctrine Emerges
The plains wars produced no written doctrine or theory of pacification, but British officers, facing similar tasks at the end of the nineteenth century in the African, Indian, and Southeast Asian domains of the Crown, did write about their methods. As John A. Nagl lays out in his classic Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, the British officers, far away from their government, were often unable to receive instruction. Thus, they had to apply themselves to the study and development of new tactics.
The first classic in this genre was The Defensive Duffers Drift by Major General Sir Ernest Swinton. A strange little volume, Duffers Drift describes Swinton’s experience as a young captain leading a British company in the Boer War. The book is arranged as a five-part dreamscape of interconnected and repeating nightmares. In each, the Boers trick and attack Swinton in new and more devious ways. Each nightmare is followed by a list of lessons, which grow more ruthless with each repetition of the cycle.14 Realizing that he is fighting not only guerrillas but a whole people, Swinton concludes, “There are no flanks, no rear, or, to put it otherwise, it is front all round.”15 From this he concludes, never trust the locals; detain them, burn their farms, and starve them out, the women and children included. Attack their social fabric, for that is what the guerillas depend on.
Later works include Charles Caldwell’s Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice and Charles Gwyn’s Imperial Policing. Both helped establish core features of counterinsurgency doctrine—minimal use of force, civilian and military coordination, development of proxy forces—but they lack the trippy, laudanum-laced quality of Duffers Drift.
Banana Wars
For American forces, small-war tactics matured considerably with the rise of the so-called banana wars. Between the late 1890s and the late 1930s, US military forces intervened in Chile, Haiti, Hawaii, Nicaragua, China, Panama, the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and many other places. All of these conflicts were more or less irregular and asymmetrical and entailed controlling the civilian population rather than annihilating a conventional force.
The order of the day was measured violence, small-unit tactics, mobility, cultural and psychological warfare, and the modern methods of administration, regulation, and surveillance. Detainees, often civilians, were concentrated in camps; checkpoints and official identification documents controlled civilian movement. At times these campaigns involved destroying the enemy’s means of sustenance; burning whole villages was routine practice. Hungry civilians then became dependent on the food handouts, or “modern” economic-development programs, of the occupiers, and the areas of the guerrilla operations were effectively depopulated.16
Central to victory was the creation and training of local auxiliary forces. When the Marines pulled out, they wanted to count on the local constabulary, guardia civil, or gendarmerie to repress any reformist politicians, trade unionists, nationalists, or socialists who might seek to upset the existing order by taxing foreign business and redistributing wealth.17
This use of ethnic minorities to divide and conquer has been dubbed “ethnoliberation opportunism” by anthropologist Philippe Bourgeois. It occurs again and again in small wars—examples include the CIA’s use of mountain tribes in Laos during the Vietnam War; the arming of mujahideen mercenaries against the Soviets during the Afghan jihad of the 1980s; and now the development of Shia death squads and the Sunni based Safwa militia in Iraq.18 Cultivating these proxies almost always means cultivating criminals and fanatics. Their names from the Cold War include Brooklyn Rivera in Nicaragua, Joseph Savimbi in Angola, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan. These useful sociopaths