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Essay-Review

Beyond Sticks and Carrots:

Local Agency in Counterinsurgency

Roel Frakking

The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945–1967

David French

New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. x � 283 pp.

Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgency

Laleh Khalili

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. xiii � 347 pp.

Counterinsurgency—in theory and practice—has made a stunning comeback after itshigh point from the wars of liberation in the 1950s to the dying embers of the Iberianempires in the 1970s. While their wounds were still fresh, those episodes, whose mostinfamous cases include the wars of national liberation in Indonesia (1945–50), Malaya(1948–60), Kenya (1952–60), and Algeria (1954–62), were the subject of research thattraced the contours of decolonization’s ‘‘dirty wars.’’ Much of the older research dealtwith regions as a whole, or with politico-diplomatic bargaining between the colonialpowers involved and their opponents, the national liberation movements.1 Morerecently, a new generation of scholars has added to the ever-growing body of counter-insurgency literature, which has brought the violent nature of this particular mode ofwarfare to the fore.2

What has generated this intense interest in this topic? To begin with, many of thetroops participating in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Mali today represent the samepowers that resisted decolonization in the past: Great Britain, the Netherlands, France,and the United States. Everywhere we read how these states struggle to cope with anenemy whose motivations, choices, and actions are largely incomprehensible tocivilian and military policymakers. Military establishments seem to have forgottenhow to contain insurgents, despite extensive experience in doing so. This loss ofcontrol—to surge, or not to surge; to negotiate with the Taliban, or not—has drivenanalysts to history. The imperative to understand led to the reprinting of classic coun-terinsurgency manuals, written by officers such as Robert Thompson and RogerTrinquier, who recorded the lessons learned of the one or more counterinsurgencyoperations in which they had participated—at least as they perceived them.3 However,the different temporal and global contexts of today’s campaigns necessitated thecreative adaptation of these ‘‘lessons.’’ Hence the rise of the soldier-scholar. Respected

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392 Humanity Winter 2014

members of various military establishments, such as Thomas X. Hammes, John A.Nagl, Robert Cassidy, and David J. Kilcullen, have made their academic careers rein-terpreting classic counterinsurgency campaigns, manuals, and doctrines to explainhow they relate to the different dimensions of modern-day low-intensity conflict.

Furthermore, today’s overseas military operations have rekindled interest in howstates wage these wars. The modern battlefield has become transparent to an unprece-dented extent. Wary and discriminating eyes—both in the territory where theoperations are taking place and in the troops’ country of origin—monitor soldiers’actions. If individual soldiers can be held accountable for their behavior, so cangovernments in whose name violence is meted out. Now more than ever, transgres-sions and violent excess are deemed unacceptable. When in Al Muthanna, the Iraqiprovince where the Dutch Battle Group tried to keep the peace between 2003 and2005, a Dutch sergeant major ‘‘killed an Iraqi looter’’ after firing ‘‘what was believedto be’’ a warning shot, the attorney general in the Netherlands who reviewed his caseconcluded that Dutch forces were ‘‘not part of the occupation force,’’ and that use offorce had to be curbed.4 Similarly, the British Supreme Court ruled that domestic andEuropean human rights law was applicable to British troops ‘‘serving in battle.’’ Rela-tives who felt that their government should be held responsible for their loved one’sdeath during military service—for example, for allowing ‘‘travelling in lightlyarmoured vehicles’’ through areas rife with improvised explosive devices—are nowable take their cases to court.5

Simultaneously, questions have arisen about what these overseas conflicts meanfor the functioning of the international community. In particular, the willingness ofthe United States to defend its interests overseas aggressively has sparked an importantdebate on its role as a world power, or even as an empire.6 According to many scholars,the invasion of Iraq has laid bare that the United States possesses ‘‘a global hegemonywhose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by themost awesome military power the world has ever known.’’7 G. John Ikenberry hasasserted that the United States has turned the ‘‘Westphalian image on its head,’’ as it‘‘possesses a near-monopoly on the use of force internationally; on the domestic level,meanwhile, the institutions and behaviors of states are increasingly open toglobal—that is, American—scrutiny.’’8

It is not only current conflict situations that make us question overseas powerprojection. Memories reach much farther back. The violent suppression of uprisingsagainst colonial rule in the past is haunting governments today. The British authoritieshave been forced to settle with thousands of former Kenyan detainees, suspected tobe participants in the Mau Mau uprising during the 1950s, who were incarcerated andseverely tortured.9 Aside from financial compensation, the government has (ratherweakly) expressed ‘‘regret’’ and a self-proclaimed willingness to learn from its past asan ‘‘enduring feature of [British] democracy.’’10

The British government compounded its guilt by covering up its colonial violence.When one lawyer started research into torture during Mau Mau in 2006, the Foreignand Commonwealth Office denied the existence of some damning evidenceconcerning state-condoned torture in the former British Empire. However, thegovernment was finally made to disclose what is now referred to as the ‘‘migrated

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archive’’ (named after the fact that the secretary of state for the colonies in 1961ordered the downscaling colonial governments to send those documents ‘‘they did notwant to hand over to the newly independent governments’’) stored at HanslopePark.11 David Anderson, well known for his research into the violent decolonizationof Kenya, has stated that the migrated archive files ‘‘may lead ‘to a significant revisionof the history of British decolonisation.’ ’’12 The newly disclosed archives have putthese old colonial wars on the front page of the British newspapers.

The British state was not the only one to have to face its inglorious colonial past.Dutch newspapers have also been filled with stories about the country’s own fadingempire. On December 9, 1947, Dutch soldiers entered the Javanese village ofRawagedeh (now Balongsari) in search of a wanted freedom fighter. Getting noresponse from the villagers, the soldiers massacred between 430 (Indonesian estimate)and 150 (Dutch estimate) men. More than six decades—including three years of legalbattles—later, ten surviving widows finally won their case against the Dutchgovernment, which then pledged 180,000 in compensation. The state tried to cast theevent in the best light, apologizing and declaring that the gesture ‘‘had the broadsupport of the Dutch people.’’13 In another episode, two former soldiers appealed forrehabilitation for their imprisonment after refusing to serve in Indonesia in the late1940s. According to their attorney, rehabilitation would be eminently fair: the‘‘military judge [who then reviewed the duo’s case] was unfamiliar with the systematicviolence the Dutch soldiers were then applying.’’ The limits of redress were revealedwhen the High Court declined to ‘‘redo the process’’ since ‘‘no new facts have cometo light since.’’14

This, then, is the context for the perspectives David French proposes in The BritishWay in Counter-Insurgency, 1945–1967 and Laleh Khalili offers in Time in the Shadows:Confinement in Counterinsurgency. A common theme in both works is the recklessviolence of historical counterinsurgencies. According to French and Khalili, liberaldemocracies fighting overseas will stop at nothing to attain their goals, and optionsother than coercive methods have always been spurned. Brute force prevails in theend.

But does it? Is the picture as bleak as Khalili and French have painted it? In thisessay, I will show that there are good reasons to think that there is more to wagingcounterinsurgency warfare than just brute force, and that any analysis of counterin-surgent force projection that omits other, nonviolent measures misses importantdimensions that affect the failure or success of counterinsurgency.

The argument will unfold as follows. First, I will reconstruct and then assess howKhalili and French have come to conclude that what French calls ‘‘wholesalerepression’’ is considered a primary tool in counterinsurgency operations (French, 7).Then, by recalling the interactions between authorities and indigenous agency inKenya and the Netherlands East Indies, I will show that colonial powers did not useviolence alone in persuading certain members of the population to side with them.Nonviolent measures were very much part of countering any insurgency campaign. Inother words, no counterinsurgency effort can be successfully attempted by coercionalone: coercion and incentives are two sides of the same coin and should be regardedand applied as such. Finally, I will complicate French’s and Khalili’s assumption that

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the canon of lessons learned based on past counterinsurgencies has negatively influ-enced the waging of modern counterinsurgency. French’s argument that a modern-day yet faulty belief in a measured application of force was due to the strong influenceof the Malayan Emergency blueprint may be true. The same might be said of Khalili’s,whose single-minded focus on internment and torture as a way to engage the popu-lation persuasively shows that liberal democracies will go to great lengths to attaincertain strategic goals. At the same time, however, British, Dutch, and American forcesin Iraq and Afghanistan were able to adapt and employ methods that were neitherspecific to the Malayan Emergency nor restricted to violence as a means of achievingstability. It is this latter aspect—deploying and codifying novel approaches in currentexperiences—that allows a balanced picture of the relation between the past andpresent of counterinsurgency.

Counterinsurgency’s History and Historiography

Counterinsurgency as a practice can be traced back to those eighteenth-century warsin which small groups of opponents attacked much larger armies, and, through obfus-cation and cunning, wore them down.15 As colonial expansion took off, these warsbecame more common, and a great number of names were attached to them, such as‘‘small war’’ and, later, ‘‘low-intensity conflict.’’16 ‘‘Dirty wars,’’ a major element forFrench and Khalili alike, are perhaps a subcategory of small wars. Dirty warfare stemsfrom la sale guerre, waged in French Indochina (1945–54) and Algeria (1954–62), andis understood to refer to warfare that is characterized by far-reaching brutality andwidespread disregard for humane values, although a proper definition is hard to find‘‘both in academic scholarship and elsewhere.’’17 ‘‘Small war’’ as a term became lessapplicable, as it could no longer fully cover the range of operations—‘‘unconventionalwarfare; civil affairs; psychological operations; humanitarian assistance,’’ and soon—that armies undertook: ‘‘counterinsurgency’’ now counts as the preferred termthat does.18 Counterinsurgencies are those operations that contain or destroy thosegroups deploying ‘‘subversion and violence to seize, nullify, or challenge politicalcontrol’’ of a given territory. Political in nature, these operations depend on instru-ments other than military or paramilitary force alone: ‘‘[economic], psychological andcivic actions’’ are all important.19

Broadly speaking, there are three schools of thought in today’s field of counterin-surgency research. The first has been the dominant paradigm for some thirty years.However, by placing too much emphasis on minimum force and the efficacy of hearts-and-minds programs, it has sanitized counterinsurgency’s less palatable practices. Atits apogee stood Richard Stubbs’s famous study, Hearts and Minds in GuerrillaWarfare: The Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960 (1989). Stubbs’s treatment of the Britishresettlement campaign in Malaya underlines why eschewing the violent aspects ofsmall wars distorts our understanding of them. To Stubbs, the Malayan ‘‘NewVillages,’’ where Chinese communities were made to live in order to isolate them fromthe insurgents, represented an important tier of a structural program designed forwinning the hearts and minds of the Chinese communities—the insurgents’ primeresource pool for recruits, food, and intelligence. These villages were places wheretheir inhabitants, in due course, could enjoy ‘‘supplies of clean water, [education in

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proper] schools, community centers, basic medical care, [and] some agriculturalland.’’20

Since Stubbs, however, this benevolent image of counterinsurgency has rightlybeen challenged. Besides French and Khalili, a new generation of scholars, amongthem Moritz Feichtinger, Stephan Malinowski, and Christian Gerlach, has strippedaway the thin veneer of euphemism. Modern research has dramatically recast thepurpose of the New Villages and resettlement programs elsewhere, such as in Algeriaor Rhodesia. Formerly cast as protective enclaves, resettlement areas are now seen asspaces in which entire communities were violently corralled and profoundly altered tobecome compliant citizens.21 The New Villages resembled camps complete withbarbed wire that facilitated government control over a population that was eyed withgreat suspicion (French, 119–21; Khalili, 178–79).

The third option for reading the facts is, not surprisingly, a more balanced view,which takes both strands—coercion-driven and incentive-based policies and prac-tices—together into one narrative. This balanced view is the most sensible. Accordingto the long-time scholar of the Malayan Emergency Karl Hack, the second, revisionistschool of thought has placed too much weight on coercive measures; French andKhalili fall into this particular category. So strong is this reinterpretation that the fieldis now ‘‘in danger of focusing on the trees more than the wood . . . and of down-playing the way different blends of the same ingredients (especially coercive andpersuasive) were used in successive phases.’’22 In addition, violence was not utilized inequal measures throughout any conflict. The fact that in Malaya, different areas wereat different times declared ‘‘white areas’’—where the insurgents had been sufficientlydefeated to permit the recission of emergency regulations—seems to bear out Hack’sassumptions. A balanced approach is sensible, as counterinsurgency warfare wasperceived to combine political and military means, where a ‘‘credible promise for amodern and better future [became] a weapon.’’23 Separating ‘‘coercion’’ from ‘‘heartsand minds’’ leads to ‘‘false dichotomies,’’ some authors warn.24

The balancing of carrots and sticks is also insufficient, however. The ultimatepurpose here, more than simply broadening the scope beyond the mere violence soprevalent in French’s and Khalili’s arguments, is to bring one important and oftenoverlooked element into the framework of analysis. This element is the role of localagency: local communities within the contested space that are willing to side with thecounterinsurgents. They were of vital importance for the establishment and mainte-nance of colonial rule. Colonial authorities had to offer them incentives to work intheir civil and military services; otherwise the colonial project could not function.25

For indigenous elites, this was a chance to enter the path to modernity; serving in thecolonial ranks was a way to advance socially, to become part of a ‘‘new elite.’’26 Indig-enous forces did most of the fighting for the colonial authorities, especially in thedecolonization wars in which (European) manpower shortages became an acuteproblem, and liberation movements enjoyed popular support. For this reason alone,it was counterproductive for colonial authorities to rely solely on brute force: even themost military-minded approach will have to deal with civil grievances and offerinducement.

Studies not taking local communities into account tell half the story. Bringing the

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will, wishes, and actions of local communities into the discussion will enhance ourunderstanding of the wars of decolonization and counterinsurgency beyond what thefield—as it broadly stands today—will allow. After all, it was the local communitieswho were the recipients and objects of the state’s power. Focusing on the colonialstate alone can obscure this fact.

Liberal Regimes Losing Their Way?

Both French and Khalili dramatically but unsurprisingly document that counterinsur-gencies are sordid affairs. French’s account, firmly rooted in archival research, does sothrough taking on the received wisdom, passed down for decades, about the successfulBritish approach to counterinsurgency. Like no other campaign, the Emergency(1948–60, thus called so as to downplay the fact that it was a proper war) has solidifiedthe belief in a specifically British and basically benevolent mode of fighting smallwars.27 By separating insurgents from their support bases and effecting far-reachingunity of action that forced civil and military authorities to liaison closely, the Britishwere able to fatally undermine the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and theMalayan Races Liberation Army’s attempts to draw the support of the Chinesecommunities. They did so, or so conventional wisdom has it, by strictly adhering toa minimum deployment of physical force.28

French fulminates against this sanitizing interpretation of the Malayan Emergencyand the weight that has been given to broader British counterinsurgency traditions.He succeeds by deploying a methodology not found in many other like-mindedstudies. First, his study’s scope is grand, covering Palestine, Malaya, the Canal Zone,Kenya, British Guiana, Cyprus, Oman, Nyasaland, Borneo, and Aden, in addition toa brief treatment of the Gold Coast riots in 1948. Second, The British Way offers awelcome thematic organization of the material that compares all insurgencies simulta-neously, taking the reader through such themes as the structure of the colonial state,the threats aligned against it, and the legal context that determined the breadth ofBritish counterinsurgent action.

French’s structuring of the material makes more sense than previous analyses thathave also encapsulated multiple British counterinsurgencies in one volume but havedone so in decompartmentalized fashion. Examples that come to mind are CharlesTownsend’s Britain’s Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century (1986)and John Newsinger’s British Counterinsurgency: From Palestine to Northern Ireland(2002). Whereas these works dealt with each campaign in chronological order, Frenchtakes on all insurgencies simultaneously, allowing him to place the conflicts into awider violent context instead of simply telling the story of particular campaignsthrough the lens of a military historian, as if the policies, methods, and practicesbehind them had little in common or did not belong to the broader context of anempire in decline.

Unfortunately, French’s dual goal of challenging the so-called Malaya blueprintand the minimal force myth means that, despite its grand scale, the study primarilyfocuses on Malaya and Kenya. This focus allows him to successfully prosecute hisargument that the British way in counterinsurgency was driven by violent coercion,rather than by winning hearts and minds. The latter was far less important than the

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(British) counterinsurgency canon would have us believe. Through his many archivalsources and ample use of oral history, we discover that instead of patience and well-balanced application of force, British counterinsurgency was marked by forcefuldisplacement of entire communities, destruction of property, cruel food-denialprograms, and the use of exemplary violence to terrorize the population. Engaging thepopulation was not ‘‘the prize’’ but merely ‘‘good public relations’’ for the British.French asserts that ‘‘it helped to disguise the sometimes unpalatable reality from boththe British public and the wider international community of what [the British] werereally doing on the ground’’ (French, 251).29

Laleh Khalili’s interpretation of counterinsurgencies echoes French’s finding thatviolence and coercion lie at the heart of dealing with anticolonial national wars ofliberation, but also with more recent insurgencies. Taking a genealogical historicalperspective as her starting point, Khalili shows how, across more than a century ofirregular warfare waged in a wide selection of geographical spaces, little has changedin the way Western powers have behaved toward peoples they did not know muchabout, still less cared to understand. Based on doctrines, reminiscent of colonial times,that placed little value on human security and rights, counterinsurgency warfarespawned camps, detention centers, rendition, and widespread torture, which are stillthe nefarious tools of choice for liberal democracies involved in such efforts on foreignsoil. Violent transgressions, from this perspective, were never about liberal democracies‘‘losing their way’’ but rather were structurally applied to subjugate riotous popula-tions (7).

France, Great Britain, Israel, and the United States, the latter two primary focalpoints in Time in the Shadows, have shunned little in the way of violent practices.They have stretched the limits of law, if necessary, and to such a degree in overseaswars that practically anything was justifiable. Insurgencies, revolts, or revolutions havebeen systematically stripped of their political meaning, legitimacy, and justification,reducing ‘‘political conflicts . . . into technical problems to be solved’’ in brutal fashionby the counterinsurgents (Khalili, 5). As a result, those participating in these conflictscould be treated as invading powers saw fit. Perhaps the need to do so was onlyenhanced, from a Western perspective, as insurgencies became increasingly elusive anddifficult to contain as they made effective use of progressive globalization trends.

Khalili has a clear agenda, which she does not attempt to hide. She has sought tochallenge the core proposition of today’s foremost experts—among them DavidPetraeus, David Kilcullen, and John Nagl—that counterinsurgency warfare isconcerned with ‘‘securing’’ and ‘‘protecting’’ the population (5). In fact, she counters,counterinsurgencies are not wars among the people to protect them against the violentwhims of the insurgents. Rather, counterinsurgents wage war against the people,monitoring, displacing, and forcefully reeducating them. Such war is characterized byfar-reaching experiments in social engineering whereby ‘‘worlds [are] invaded,occupied, and controlled’’ (7). Instruments and practices ostensibly designed to offerhumanitarian aid to people, writes Khalili, are ultimately used to provide the militarywith ‘‘plausible deniability’’ and to facilitate the ‘‘[diffusion and broadening of] tech-niques of control, and [the spreading of] culpability to the greatest number of people’’(184–85).

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Time in the Shadow’s greatest provocation, however, lies in the fact that Khalili’sharrowing collection of evidence forces us to recognize that the horrors of Guan-tánamo and other detention centers are no aberration of history. Instead, they have arich pedigree. Khalili holds up a mirror in which we can clearly see that humanitarianprinciples to which liberal regimes are committed at home have meant little when thesame regimes have deployed troops overseas. Seen from this vantage point, counterin-surgency is never waged to liberate a population from oppression; moderncounterinsurgencies aim at a ‘‘reclamation of indirect rule’’ in order to violently install‘‘proxy regimes.’’ According to Khalili, however, such attempts at state-building willcome to naught. They only serve to undermine the very status quo liberal democraciestry to redress, for ‘‘the proxy regime will never be as competent, well functioning,honest, trustworthy, or humane as their overlords desire’’ (248).

An outstanding feature of the picture of unrelenting coercion with which bothauthors present us is their discussion of the close relationship between law andviolence. It is within this discussion that their attempts to see beyond uncriticalfawning over some of the supposedly more humane characteristics of counterinsur-gency shine through. French asks whether or not the British fought ‘‘dirty wars,’’defining them as conflicts in which ‘‘some members of the security forces operatedoutside the confines of the law.’’ This is a tough question to answer, for, as Frenchargues, British authorities allowed for the stretching of the law ‘‘and setting asideaccepted human rights safeguards.’’ Although ‘‘they did create an atmosphere withinwhich . . . some elements of the security forces [could] operate in ways contrary tothe norms laid down in international law,’’ security personnel nonetheless stayedwithin the boundaries of British law (French, 173).30 This last point strongly resonatesthroughout Khalili’s argument, although she is far less squeamish in posing andanswering moral questions than French. For example, she lays the blame for counter-insurgent violence at the door of those policymakers who willfully created a chasmbetween what transpired in the detention centers and those humanitarian valuesespoused ‘‘by powerful states that profess adherence to liberal rights’’ (Khalili, 240).To Khalili, the weight of her evidence—which focuses on how liberal regimes placemore value on intelligence-gathering and unaccountability than on human rights—proves beyond doubt that the broadening of the law’s scope deliberately precluded itsproper application. This resulted in vast judicial flexibility, greatly reducing account-ability for individuals and giving shape, meaning, and function to spaces in whichpractitioners of actual extrajudicial violence were allowed, even incited, to develop andhone their violent skills, safely protected by the law their own governments couldsubvert as they saw fit (78–79). Transgressions into territories outside the lawwere—and are being—hidden inside the law.

Both authors have shown us that the canon of counterinsurgency doctrine formedin the 1960s needs to be assessed with some caution, especially since ‘‘the 1960s theo-rists cast a long shadow.’’31 A measured application of force, to them, hardly existed.For all that, however, Time in the Shadows and The British Way in Counter-Insurgencydo not add much to the ongoing debates on counterinsurgency warfare. EspeciallyFrench’s basic position, that British counterinsurgency was not free from a strongreliance on violence, is not particularly novel. In fact, different authors came to this

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very conclusion some time ago, having no qualms with calling British anti-guerrillawars ‘‘dirty.’’32 French himself seems reluctant to take his argument that far. Despitehis definition of what he considers ‘‘dirty’’ warfare, he does not clearly determinewhether the British truly engaged in it, nor does he go into much detail about theactual violence that could indicate as much. Furthermore, it is well established withrespect to the counterinsurgencies that French analyzes that the British were slow todevelop a functioning strategy while ‘‘stagnancy, mismanagement and confusion’’reigned. In Malaya, the British authorities needed two years to develop ‘‘a cohesivecivil-military strategy.’’ Until that point, violence was a preferred alternative. The earlyyears of the ‘‘Troubles’’ in Northern Ireland—a case not included in The BritishWay—‘‘were marked by displays of indiscriminate force and an inability to domes-ticate the response.’’33 Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon has gone so far as to proclaimthat—although his narrative does not bear this out very clearly—‘‘policy developed bythe [British] government was in fact one carefully calculated to allow decolonizationto occur on British terms.’’34 Already in 2007, Bruno Reis concluded that ‘‘alongsidethe failure to practise minimum force in the British small wars of decolonization, . . .there is an unnoticed, but, in fact, total absence of the principle of minimum forcefrom official British military guidelines . . . until as late as the early 1970s.’’35

The United States’ brutal approach to antiguerrilla warfare—an important themein Time in the Shadows in the form of incarceration—shares Britain’s distasteful,violent record.36 More than a decade ago, Michael McClintock argued that Americancounterinsurgency experts in the 1980s imagined the American way of warfare to beincompatible with the realities of ‘‘low-intensity conflict,’’ with its underhandedmethods, such as terror and ambushes. The solution to this conundrum was found inthe fact that America’s military forces were taught to act in kind. Moral and ethicalrestraints should be left behind in favor of counterterror, assassination, and the use ofproxy death squads.37 Khalili is not the only researcher to notice the discrepancybetween liberal values and unlawful practices. In 2006, Anthony Dworkin asked whyinternational law has failed to control American actions abroad. Did it constitute a‘‘gap in the law,’’ to be closed with ‘‘additional legislation,’’ or did American policy-makers simply circumvent the law, Dworkin wondered. He found that the UnitedStates could continue its global war on terror through terror of its own, because ofthe ‘‘conflicting views on the meaning of the law.’’ This conclusion lies rather close tothe idea on which Time in the Shadows draws, namely, that the confines of law can bestretched.38

Khalili is very quick to lump together different violent military practices under theumbrella of ‘‘counterinsurgency.’’ With her treatment of the Israeli-built wall thatseparates Palestinians not only from Israeli communities but also from their pasturesand fellow Palestinians, Khalili seems to suggest that walls have been used exclusivelyfor ‘‘offensive measures,’’ for ‘‘incarcerating populations and providing a point ofcontact to engage guerrillas’’ (185). Her denial that physical barriers have had anydefensive functions leads her to interpret evidence too one-dimensionally; it has beenestablished elsewhere that similar man-made boundaries have, in fact, had defensivepurposes. The Morice Line in Algeria, which Khalili mentions, was not constructedfor driving insurgents against it; rather, its purpose was to seal off the border with

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Tunisia.39 Khalili is also quick to spot coercive meddling by counterinsurgents. Whileit is true that in Malaya, British authorities brought Chinese squatters together in thefenced-in ‘‘New Villages,’’ many New Villagers proved willing to serve in the so-calledHome Guard. Many did not wish to support the MCP; joining the Home Guard wasone way for Chinese communities to protect themselves. As one former Home Guardcommander, Sdr Lu Yal You, relates, it was the insurgents who forced them to takeup arms, not necessarily the British. When villagers refused to join the communists,they were ‘‘labelled as ‘traitors’ ’’ and attacked.40

Khalili barely takes into account how her own narrative ties in with GiorgioAgamben’s theory that the extrajudicial construction of lawful practices creates thestate of exception, a concept she refrains from mentioning. Khalili reminds us thatstates have interpreted international (and later, humanitarian) law rather liberally: asDirk Moses has stated, it gave them ‘‘the license for colonial expansion and terroristicviolence against those . . . who opposed them.’’41 But since Khalili bypasses anyaccount of the state of exception in which otherwise applicable rules are not appliedto designated enemies of the state, we get little feel of how such a process works, andwhy the United States can do what it does. The state of exception, put simply, allowssovereign authorities to place unwanted, rebellious members of society outside the lawin order to lawfully prosecute them. Or, as Agamben has it, the state of exception‘‘[creates] a zone in which application [of the norm] is suspended, but the law[,] assuch, remains in force.’’42 Had Khalili engaged more with this concept, the ‘‘genea-logical’’ approach she herself has chosen would have been grounded moreconvincingly in an explanatory theory; as written, Time in the Shadows seems moreabout morality (6).

Khalili simply disagrees with Agamben’s ‘‘notion of legally indistinguishable zonesof inclusion and exclusion’’ and ‘‘slightly [modifies] Nasser Hussain’s analysis of theemergency in a colonial setting’’ without fully explaining how (and why) she does so(67). Instead, she states that ‘‘ostensibly lawless places’’ are created by casting one bodyof law aside and ‘‘adopting another,’’ or, in extreme cases, that ‘‘legal procedures’’ arereplaced by ‘‘administrative procedures’’ (67, emphasis original). In the end, however,she still—confirming Agamben—suggests that despite the existence of places where,on account of the ubiquitous violent transgressions perpetrated there, law has seemedabsent, law has been very much applicable to detention sites such as GuantánamoBay; it has simply been modified to ‘‘make the detainees as inaccessible, unap-proachable, and [for their legal counsel] indefensible as possible.’’ In the process,detainees have been held somewhere ‘‘in the liminal zone between criminal law andthe collation of customs and treaties that make the corpus of the international laws ofwar’’ (78). Basically, Khalili says, counterinsurgents can repeatedly change the law toaccommodate their wishes with impunity. When opportune, the law does apply todetainees; when the situation does not call for the application of law, it is subverted.This mechanism, however, clearly sounds like Agamben’s portrayal of the state ofexception. To him, it has legally indistinguishable zones of inclusion and exclusion,when he argues that ‘‘the state of exception is neither external nor internal to thejuridical order [in which] inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur

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with each other.’’43 Khalili’s belief that lawmakers differentiate between various sets oflaws, then, seems superfluous; all sets are part of the same system of law. Or, asHussain argues, ‘‘Today, most emergency laws are neither temporary nor categoricallydistinct from a larger set of state practices.’’ Rather, the state of exception is not trulyexceptional any longer.44 Ultimately, then, Khalili does not dismiss Agamben and CarlSchmitt; she has only dismissed Carl Schmitt’s conception of ‘‘imperial spaces asplaces where the law does apply’’ (67).

Time in the Shadows never questions what purposes torture might have, or whetherit produces results. Khalili is satisfied with her findings that liberal democraciesconduct widespread torture. In a rather cool narrative—due to the distasteful subjectmatter—Darius Rejali has addressed these thorny issues. He concludes that ‘‘torture[with its many concomitant problems] may also be better than sitting on one’shands.’’45 Rejali has recognized ‘‘specific conditions where torture may work,’’ forexample ‘‘when organizations remain coherent and well integrated, have highly profes-sional interrogators available [and] receive intelligence from multiple independentsources.’’ Torture, then, works best when it is least needed, under ‘‘peacetime,nonemergency conditions.’’46 Such circumstances did not exist during counterinsur-gency campaigns. After applying his insights to the French campaign in Algeria, Rejalifinds that torture ‘‘was the clumsiest method for gathering intelligence.’’ By admissionof former interrogators, information freely and spontaneously given by the populationproved much more effective—probably because no torture was used to get simply anyintelligence from them.47 This conclusion has important implications for the use oftorture, but what they are in today’s most notorious interrogation centers, such asGuantánamo, Khalili does not say.

More important than all of these blind spots, however, is that French and Khalilihave overturned the balance. Their singular focus on violence comes as a logicalreaction to a specific school within the field that claims that counterinsurgency can bewaged through a carefully measured application of ‘‘hearts and minds’’ approacheswith a minimum of coercion and force. In so reacting, French and Khalili themselveshave discounted other, less violent practices. The next section will show that thehistorical record is best served by a balanced interpretation.

‘‘The Need to Remove the Source of Resistance is Growing’’: The Force of Local Agency

In two very violent episodes of insurgency in Kenya and the Netherlands East Indies,even those who placed great trust in exemplary violence had to be sensible to localgrievances and issues. As one veteran scholar on British counterinsurgency has it, theBritish ‘‘succeeded only in those campaigns in which they could make genuine conces-sions to disaffected people.’’ Even in Kenya, now considered the most violentinsurgency in the long decolonization of the British Empire, ‘‘the British ended theemergency by rejecting white minority rule and granting the colony independence.’’48

When we bring a modicum of local agency back into the narrative—which Frenchand, to a lesser extent, Khalili have not done—it is obvious that the authorities behindany counterinsurgency effort have had to induce local agents to partake in the battleagainst insurgents.49 Taking local agency into account exposes this most important

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fact. It also suggests that a colonial offer and local acceptance of incentives supple-mented more forceful efforts in combating insurgency. Force alone cannot accountfor these mutual agreements, admittedly partial though they were.

Along with British forces, Kenyan ‘‘loyalists’’ played their part in combating theMau Mau. To begin with, the British courted their support by promising themprofitable positions once the time to rebuild Kenya had dawned. Home Guardmembers were given rewards, including ‘‘payment of school fees for loyalistchildren.’’50 However, the Mau Mau war was not only about winning the right toself-determination or remuneration. It was as much about addressing anxieties withinKenya’s Kikuyu communities. Tensions had arisen between those who wanted toattain ‘‘self-mastery’’ through traditional means, meaning to ‘‘labour virtuously’’ inorder to obtain land and freedom, and those who found their path to adulthoodblocked by the British presence and therefore turned to unconventional, violentmethods. It was often this divide that decided whether Kenyans turned to the Britishfor protection or to the Mau Mau.51

Although some security personnel had been press-ganged into serving and becameheavily implicated in violent British counterinsurgency operations, others allowedthemselves to be recruited to attain the tools to exact revenge for past wrongdoings,or to seek protection from Mau Mau sympathizers. ‘‘Opposition to Mau Mau wasnot solely imposed by colonial masters, but also [by] an intellectual position embeddedin local culture and social relations,’’ David Branch observes. Put differently, ‘‘theMau Mau war was no simple dispute between colonizer and colonized.’’52 What theloyalists in Kenya proved was that siding with the colonial forces could be advanta-geous. Counterinsurgency warfare is very much about who attains the power todetermine the future of the state, and while this power lay with the colonial state andnot with its challengers, forming an alliance with the agents of that state seemed apathway to accessing a modicum of its power.

In Indonesia, where after the surrender of the Japanese in 1945 the returning Dutchcolonial authorities had to contend with the self-proclaimed Republic of Indonesiaand its military and irregular forces, a similar process of alliance formation was atwork. This phenomenon seemed to work regardless of the fact that the Dutch coun-terinsurgency campaign between 1945 and 1950 was very violent in nature, and thatthe military authorities insisted fiercely on deciding the conflict through armed pacifi-cation. Winning hearts and minds did not constitute an important tool—when theDutch commander, Lieutenant General Simon Spoor, explained that ‘‘the need toremove the source of resistance is growing,’’ it is this exclusive recourse to arms thathe intended to justify.53

Dutch military authorities in Indonesia demanded too much priority for them-selves in coming to grips with the insurgency. As the conflict wore on, they usurpedmandates reserved for civilian authorities.54 Proper coordination between police, themilitary, and the civil administration proved elusive.55 Lack of discipline led to theshooting of prisoners out of hand, beatings, and torture.56 The attorney general inIndonesia even started collecting newspaper clippings, as the many prisoners beingshot while allegedly trying to escape worried him.57 Two military actions (euphemisti-cally called ‘‘police actions’’ to denote a limited, internal conflict), undertaken to cow

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the Republic into submission, fatally undermined any international support the Dutchhoped to utilize against their opponents, immeasurably strengthening the Republic’sresolve.58

Against this background, it is almost ironic that the Dutch authorities found twocommunities willing to side with them: the Sundanese and the Chinese. TheSundanese leaders, representing more than eight million people, wished to restore theWest Javanese Sunda Lands to their former glory and to have their own state withinIndonesia. They felt gravely threatened by their Javanese neighbors and the Republicof Indonesia.59 To safeguard the distinct Sundanese culture and identity, they workedto win Dutch support for their cause, and they enjoyed great success in this pursuitsoon after 1945. The Dutch, for their part, did not lend the Sundanese support onideological grounds. They merely used the Pasundan State—sanctioned in May1947—to undermine the Republic’s standing in West Java and to draw the Sundaneseinto collaboration with the colonial administration and its security forces.60 In duecourse, the Pasundan State proved such a powerful beacon for self-determination thatby June 1949 some 1,400 Sundanese members of Republican army units had desertedto Dutch-sponsored security forces.61

A second group lending support to the Dutch civil and military authorities inIndonesia between 1945 and 1950 comprised the members of the various Chinesecommunities across Java and Sumatra.62 During the Japanese occupation of Indonesiaand thereafter, the Chinese population—according to a 1930s census, the Chineseaccounted for 1,233,214 out of a total population of 60,727,233—had become suspectin the eyes of many Indonesians and the Republic itself.63 Massive loss of Chinese lifeensued.64 Voicing fears that they would become targets of forces allied with theRepublic and have their possessions destroyed, the Chinese pled for protection, andthe Dutch provided it.65 The military allowed the more militant Chinese to formChinese security forces, known as the Pao An Tui, to protect Chinese possessions andrefugee camps.66 Though the military authorities were averse to creating ‘‘a foreignarmy,’’ the buildup of PAT units progressed quickly. In parts of West Java some 1,800Chinese were safeguarding their communities in twenty-three different localities atthe end of November 1947. Some four months later, 5,000 were reported.67

The examples from Kenya and Indonesia show that colonial authorities coulddisplay coercive and incentive-offering behavior simultaneously, even in the chaotic,violent circumstances found in Kenya and Indonesia. Additionally, in order not toalienate the population, the Dutch and British authorities tried hard to moderate thecolonial forces’ violent conduct.68 Despite all of this, however, it is hard to determinewhere, exactly, the truth lies. Even if coercion and incentives are analyzed in ameasured fashion, the proper balance achieved from locale to locale is extremelydifficult to judge and subject to dispute. Judging from the literature, it almost seemsthat it is up to the individual researcher where he or she places emphasis. Indeed,counterinsurgency sometimes took violent transgressions by military forces seriously,both in the field and in detention camps; on the other hand, the gap between theseoften rhetorical calls for moderation and even criminalization and the situation on theground seemed unbridgeable.69 Further, while it is true that counterinsurgents have atleast pretended to address some of the grievances of the population, we must not

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forget that the rhetoric of ‘‘civilizing’’ was particularly hollow—and that coercion hasnever been far away.

Applying the Past to the Present?

In the introduction to The British Way, French warns against inferring lessons frompast campaigns. In his view, it is dangerous: in 2007, British troops in Helmanddiscovered to their dismay that 1950s methods deployed in Malaya and othercampaigns proved useless. A faulty body of knowledge combined with institutionalamnesia, says French, has led to doctrines and practices that do not correspond to thehistorical record, even when actors intend to revive the past (7). Positing the doubleconclusion that policymakers ‘‘should be wary of trying to extrapolate easy ‘lessonsfrom history’ ’’ because these supposed lessons, obscured by historical distance, do notreflect ‘‘what the security forces and the colonial governments had actually done,’’French ultimately finds that ‘‘misleading history has contributed to producing amisleading doctrine’’ (255). To Khalili, this argument seems too neat. She finds nodisconnect or tension between past and present counterinsurgency practices. Formercolonial powers have simply perfected their methods of coercion and torture. Thepast, on this view, continues in altered and updated form. Counterinsurgency hasbecome more efficient in its denial of basic human rights to forcefully export a falsemodernity. Counterinsurgents have deliberately made use of the fact that, as JulianBourg puts it, ‘‘the ‘liberal counter-religion’ of international law and humanitarianism. . . had become empty formalism.’’70

How can these two diametrically opposed conclusions—historical disconnectversus continuity—be reconciled? In an attempt to square French’s and Khalili’sfindings, I will try to discover common ground and offer a different assessment of theintersection of past and present. In my view, counterinsurgency today is bestconceived neither as the direct legacy of historical practices—the blunt application offorce that, courtesy of Western military Orientalism, tramples on humanitarian prin-ciples—nor simply as a revision of this legacy. Rather, fueled by the influence of(groups of ) individuals and circumstance, a trend is discernible within some militaryestablishments, one of paying attention to less kinetically based intelligence-gatheringmethods and to the importance of engaging with local populations, in order to accesslocal intelligence and to encourage them to provide for their own security. Policy-makers and militaries are able to devise approaches as a reaction to facts on the ground.However, in doing so, they also tend to glance back on history for past approaches.Evidence cited below shows that it should not be ruled out a priori that lessons frompast counterinsurgencies can be of aid, despite the fact that armies are incapable oftapping past lessons to apply them directly to today’s battlefields. The point to makehere, then, is that, although no battlefield is the same, there will be certain continu-ities. French himself concedes that ‘‘the British recognized . . . that to make peacethey eventually had to talk to their enemies,’’ as well as that ‘‘too much can also bemade of the apparently contrasting aims of mid-twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century insurgents’’ (252–53).

Again, the reason for interpreting past and present practices in a more balancedway—incorporating coercion and incentives both—lies with the imperative of nuance.

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When facts are interpreted from a perspective dominated by a theoretical recourse toviolence, as in French and Khalili, they will easily lead to the conclusion that historicalpractices will always produce undesired effects in today’s counterinsurgency efforts,whether these practices are revived unthinkingly or modified upon reflection. I argue,instead, that lessons from the past are not always useless or dangerous. Some tenets ofthe past are applicable today as long as practitioners realize one thing: that thechanging nature of conflict necessitates a translation of said lessons.

This translation is a must, as differences between past and present do exist—though French is certainly right that many of today’s insurgents have much incommon with their anticolonial predecessors on the basis of their fight againstWestern penetration (253). Yet the perceived enemies and the means at their disposalhave radically changed nonetheless. It is important to realize that much of what makesthe Malayan Emergency so attractive for emulation today applies less firmly. Thethreat of ‘‘classic’’ insurgency violence, aimed at the overthrow of unwanted, illegit-imate governments, is no longer always the insurgents’ goal. Several Iraqi groups seek‘‘to paralyze and fragment the state, rather than to gain control of its apparatus andgovern.’’71 Furthermore, the internal threats that insurgents pose are nowcompounded by what Bard O’Neill calls ‘‘transnational terrorism.’’ Insurgent groupshave inserted themselves into an emerging global environment. ‘‘For a group like AlQaida, the world at large is a battlefield,’’ O’Neill remarks.72 Through ‘‘dispersedorganizational approaches, employing information age technology and exploiting thefreedom of transnational movement introduced by globalization,’’ writes anotherscholar, organizations like Al Qaida can ‘‘attack strategic targets asymmetrically insome of the most powerful states.’’73

Inside contested territories, insurgents have also altered their tactics, completelydisregarding their and others’ lives, going so far as to subvert the strict letter of Islamiclaw—in this case, concerning death through suicidal ‘‘martyrdom operations.’’74 Thecomposition of insurgent groups has mutated, too. In Iraq, for example, Sunnis arefighting against Shiite domination, ‘‘former regime elements’’ have joined the fightagainst foreign occupation, while ‘‘n]tionalism, honor, revenge and pride’’ animate allantigovernment, anti-Coalition forces.75 The same can be said of Afghanistan, wherevarious tribes, (Pakistan-sponsored) factions of Taliban, and government and NATOforces are all fighting in the name of ideology, religion, security, and control.76 Inshort, anyone wishing to determine opponents’ goals and ideologies is now confrontedwith myriad different factors.

Globalization of information technologies works in two directions, as transna-tional insurgent networks today draw massive international support by issuing aworldwide call to arms. In colonial times, only Algeria’s Front de Libération National(FLN) and, to a lesser extent, the Republic of Indonesia were able to capture andutilize changing international realities.77 Like the FLN, transnational insurgents orterrorist organizations are able to mobilize international support. The Sahrawi PopularLiberation Front, fighting for a separate state in the Western Sahara against Moroccosince 1975, has received weapons and supplies from Algeria, Libya, and North Korea.78

Radical Islamist groups appeal to millions of potential recruits, giving them a hitherto

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unseen ability to regenerate in the face of adversity.79 ‘‘Cyber-mobilization or ‘elec-tronic levée en masse,’ ’’ notes David Kilcullen, ‘‘is a major new factor.’’80 In moremundane terms, policymakers have become aware of possible benefits that accruewhen they offer sanctuary to insurgents driven from neighboring states. ‘‘Warrior-refugees’’ can be a convenient tool to pursue regional, limited geopolitical goals.81 TheWest has sometimes unwittingly assisted these potentially dangerous refugee groups,because its relief organizations turn a structural blind eye to the political dimensionsof many regional refugee crises.82

However, all these differences do not make one broad historical lesson less appli-cable today: to grapple with insurgency and aggrieved populations, both nonviolentand more coercive methods are being simultaneously injected into the space to becontrolled. While the traditional difficulties of ‘‘alien’’ cultures and unusual tacticshave been supplemented by a changed battlefield and the globalized consequences ofaction, today’s militaries have—just as in the past—attempted to adapt and also findnon-or less violent solutions to these problems. Even as they have done so principallyon the basis of ad hoc thinking, there is a growing trend of recently learned lessonsbeing codified, which are altering inherited practices significantly. Contrary to theview of French, who seems to want to dismiss past practices (especially when ourinterpretations of them are ill-informed), but also to Khalili’s—both authors find thesepractices too violent, distorting today’s practices—operations centered on the popu-lation do lead back to past experiences.

Some ten years before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a 930–strong Australian battlegroup entered the city of Baidoa, Somalia. It took over the city and its environs fromthe U.S. Marines to safeguard the population against warlords, as part of the UnitedNations mission there. The Australians quickly discarded the Marines’ heavy-handedapproach, favoring the creation of ‘‘a secure environment in Baidoa for the conductof humanitarian operations by the aid organizations.’’ This entailed providing actualprotection for aid convoys and frequent patrolling. The Australians understood howto insert themselves into the Somali communities, making sure to appear nonthreat-ening. The reason for their relatively easy adaptation to these alien environments, onecommentator avers, was a ‘‘counterinsurgency reflex’’ at work: ‘‘Counterinsurgencyoperations in Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam provided a continuum of experience forthe Australian Army’’ (which had seen service in all these theaters).83

In Iraq, despite the dominant view that U.S. forces applied maximum force every-where and willfully withdrew from cities, leaving entire communities exposed, someindividuals intuitively adapted. Then-major general Petraeus, for example, urged hisofficers to ‘‘use emergency relief funds . . . to work on recovery projects.’’ Othersstudied how small American towns in Texas organized communal governance andlocal services before going to Iraq.84 Through the 2001 Bonn Agreement, the interna-tional community ‘‘laid out an ambitious agenda’’ for reform in Afghanistan.85 Itpledged to deploy so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in each ofAfghanistan’s thirty-four provinces. Instead of focusing on military needs alone, PRTsare relatively small military units, each ‘‘fielding 50–100 personnel,’’ designed to assistin reestablishing governance, combating corruption, delivering humanitarian aid, and

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‘‘[completing construction] projects in contested areas.’’ Recent studies suggest thatPRTs have actually positively influenced the population’s sense of safety and security.86

Intelligence-gathering practices have evolved, too. Khalili is right to emphaticallylink the need for actionable intelligence to torture, but it is also true that ‘‘the Bushadministration derived apparently modest amounts of intelligence for major politicalheadaches,’’ and for embarrassments such as Guantánamo Bay and illegal renditions.87

Intelligence-gathering need not be violent. Dutch troops in Al Muthanna quicklyreverted to operating ‘‘close to the population, on foot and in open vehicles, wearingno helmets or sunglasses, pointing their guns down,’’ and interacting with Iraqiswherever they met them.88 Dutch civil-military teams helped install town councils totentatively plant seeds that, dovetailing with other community-centered programs,could grow to help stabilize their area of operation. But, over and above this narrowmilitary aim, they also aimed at a form of local capacity-building.89 American troopsdiscovered the advantages of so-called Key Leader Engagement (KLE). KLE wasdesigned to foster close relationships with leading elements of various communitiespresent in Iraq. By engaging them and their followers, military and civil authoritieshoped to garner ‘‘force acceptance’’—a population’s tolerance for the presence offoreign troops—and promote reconciliation between them, different insurgent groups,and the Iraqi government (local and central).90

More important from a military perspective was that KLE allowed troops to collectdata in a bottom-up fashion, generating intelligence that ‘‘both informs and isinformed.’’ This meant that up-to-date information on social, economic, and politicalissues among the population directly flowed into operatives’ hands. Also, informationgathered this way assisted in differentiating and engaging with ‘‘individuals and orga-nizations in the insurgent/armed group population [that] were potentiallyreconcilable, and those who were irreconcilable.’’91 With this knowledge, further stabi-lization endeavors could be undertaken. Another development in combatingglobalized terrorist networks demands the marriage of nonlethal and lethal action. Asthe Internet allows diffuse insurgent groups to exchange valuable intelligence fromand between places ‘‘denied’’ to their opponents, intelligence-gathering must try tobreach these areas, extract the information, and triangulate it with ‘‘detailedknowledge of physical, human, cultural and informational [terrains]’’ to increase ‘‘situ-ational awareness.’’92 Ultimately, both KLE and electronic intelligence-gatheringshould translate into more focused force projection on the ground.

Obviously, we should be careful to accept the efficacy of population-centricprograms at face value. Endeavors such as KLE have not proven to work irrefutablyand consistently; nor should their results be overstated. It would be equally naive tobelieve that nonviolent engagement will supersede more violent methods. After all,counterinsurgency is warfare. What the above-noted examples do show, however, is a(partial and limited) willingness to discover and implement initiatives that might,under favorable circumstances, breed more understanding between military troopsand the populations among whom they operate.

The search for friendly elements as intelligence sources, the engagement in collabo-ration, and work toward stabilization echo programs deployed in the Vietnam War(1959–75), such as the Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS)

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initiatives.93 From 1965 onward, another program, called Combined Action Platoons(CAPs), consisted of fourteen–man Marine rifle squads operating with ‘‘35–man Viet-namese Popular Force’’ platoons. Without the deployment of local security forces toprovide security for themselves and their communities, ‘‘the peasant in [Vietnam’s]rural areas . . . is reluctant to overtly support any program,’’ stated the 1970 MarineCorps Historical Reference Pamphlet. To have locally assisted pacification evolve andtake hold, it was therefore planned to have no fewer than seventy-four CAPs at theend of 1966 to address local security issues.94 Due to the perceived successes of theVietnam CAPs program, it has recently been—adjusted to today’s realities—redeployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.95 The resurgence of local capacity-buildingprograms and different approaches to intelligence-collecting shows that whilerummaging through the military toolboxes of the past may not yield much in the wayof results when we look for and see instruments of violence, a search for more compre-hensive, multipurpose tools—combining coercion, incentives, and local agency—mayproduce useful examples from the past. Of course, one must remember to dissociatethese tools from any militarily or culturally dogmatic interpretations.96

Recent experiences are slowly finding their way into analyses by those who, froman appropriate distance and with some hindsight, can interpret them. David Kilcullen,for example, has written extensively on how lessons drawn from modern conflictshould be translated into new sets of best practices.97 Other researchers have startedto ask almost impertinent questions based on evidence collated during population-centric warfare in Iraq. Targeting conventional wisdom—that good governance willwin over the population—Fitzsimmons has asked whether striving for good gover-nance is actually effective in the presence of ‘‘major ethno-religious cleavages.’’Perhaps, he asks, identity should prevail: legitimacy of government cannot be attainedon the basis of how leaders govern; who is in charge may prove paramount. Theperson who provides safety has a more powerful claim to legitimacy than those whoaim for effective administration.98

Conclusion

Both French’s and Khalili’s books are admirable contributions to the historiographyand to our general understanding of counterinsurgency warfare. Together, they holdup a mirror to the more uncomfortable aspects of the long process of decolonizationbetween 1945 and 1975, highlighting the willful blindness to torture and illegalconfinement. For all our talk about the ‘‘responsibility to protect,’’ the globalizationof humanitarian beliefs, and the legally constrained application of military force aspart of upholding these values, in this respect liberal democracies have not changedsince the colonial era.

French has convincingly argued that the British had no qualms about ruthlesslystamping out any insurgency that threatened to undermine their status as colonialrulers. British forces, hand in glove with civilian policymakers who wanted to seeinsurgent organizations cut off at the root, applied force first. This aim translated intofood-denial programs, detention, collective punishments, and forced demographicredistribution of communities into enclosures very similar to camps. Genuine regardfor the population’s economic, political, and social concerns did not truly figure into

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the British way of counterinsurgency. Khalili touches a raw nerve with her conclusionthat, when it is deemed necessary in the name of geopolitical security aims, liberalregimes are willing to embark on military adventures beyond their own borders. Theyhave done so with little preparation, intent to stop at nothing in order to invadeterritories they know little about. Counterinsurgency operations, according to bothauthors, are much more driven by the need to violently overcome implacable enemies,favorably reshape contested spaces, and mold populations into pliable subjects. Lawsstanding between states and their desired goals were simply subverted to create spacesin which counterinsurgent forces could perform whatever exemplary violence ortorture they wished with impunity. Violence became a means in and of itself.‘‘Winning hearts and minds,’’ that noble relic from ‘‘classical’’ counterinsurgency lore,has lost its meaning and was not much practiced to begin with. To think otherwisewould be naive—and from a military perspective, dangerous.

The real merit of these two books is to show that an overbearing, violent approachwill most certainly result in dirty warfare. This insight notwithstanding, The BritishWay in Counter-Insurgency and Time in the Shadows place too much interpretiveweight on forceful, coercive, and outright violent counterinsurgency methods. Sidingfirmly with a relatively recent current in counterinsurgency research that favors sucha focus, French and Khalili have obscured the functionality of different tools thatcounterinsurgents have applied, and are still applying today. I have shown that, withthe examples of the Australians, the PRTs, and Petraeus, some soldiers and policy-makers understand the need for approaches other than violence. The radically changednature of today’s opponents and battlefield, both tangibly and intangibly, hascompelled counterinsurgency forces to incorporate old practices alongside new ones,because simply ‘‘pacifying’’ or detaining all suspects within a given territory cannotsubstitute for the fact that populations’ grievances and wishes have to beengaged—now on a global scale. However, a cautionary note must be inserted at thisjuncture: the positive developments sketched here should not be overestimated. Forevery ‘‘enlightened’’ individual, there is another who refuses to contemplate anythingother than the projection of force. For every insurgent who might be swayed toreconcile, another might answer the clarion call of martyrdom. And, perhaps mostimportant, no two counterinsurgencies are the same.

Without pretense of exhaustive coverage, I have argued that counterinsurgencystudies must take the agency of local communities into account, transcending—butnever neglecting—a narrower interpretation that places the blame for violent trans-gressions at the door of the (colonial) states engaged in counterinsurgency warfare.Only analyzing local wishes and goals, such as security, safety, and participation inpolitical and military processes, alongside the interests and practices of states can revealthat even in those counterinsurgency operations in which the state has displayed itsmost violent inclinations—in Kenya, Indonesia, and Iraq—communities could befound to engage in various projects as long as their interests dovetailed with those ofthe counterinsurgents. This particular line of inquiry, in view of the success of recentapproaches likewise focusing on local agency within larger conflicts, better capturesthe intricacies of counterinsurgency warfare.99

More important, this approach fits current realities on the ground. Not for

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nothing is more and more effort being directed to empowering local communities asthe United States winds down its presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is these commu-nities that, after a decade of foreign imposition, are now considered the crucial factor:‘‘The more local government and security forces are seen as proxies or subordinatesof the United States, the more difficult it will be for them to establish legitimacy.’’100

N O T E S

I would like to thank A. Dirk Moses for his advice and editing throughout the writing of this

essay, as well as Samuel Moyn for his valuable contributions and editing.

1. Richard Clutterbuck, Riot and Revolution in Malaya and Singapore, 1945–1963 (London:

Faber and Faber, 1973); Milton Osborne, Region of Revolt: Focus on Southeast Asia (Harmonds-

worth: Penguin, 1971); George McTurnan Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 1952).

2. Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War and

Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Jeremy Sarkin, Germany’s

Genocide of the Herero: Kaiser Wilhelm II, his General, his Settlers, his Soldiers (Woodridge: James

Currey, 2011); Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence: University Press

of Kansas, 2000).

3. Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: The Lessons of Malaya and Vietnam

(1966; repr., St. Petersburg, FL: Hailer Publishing, 2005); Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A

French View of Counterinsurgency, trans. Daniel Lee (1964; repr., Westport, CT: Praeger Security

International, 2006); David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (1964; repr.,

Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006); and Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1956–1958

(1963; repr., Santa Monica: RAND Corp., 2006).

4. Thijs Brocades Zaalberg and Arthur ten Cate, ‘‘A Gentle Occupation: Unravelling the

Dutch Approach in Iraq, 2003–2005,’’ Small Wars & Insurgencies 23, no. 1 (2012): 125–26.

5. Nadim Baba, ‘‘UK Troops’ Families Can Sue over Iraq Deaths,’’ Al Jazeera, June 19, 2013.

6. Benjamin Barber, Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy (New York: Norton, 2003);

Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).

7. Michael Ignatieff, ‘‘The American Empire: The Burden,’’ New York Times Magazine,

January 5, 2003.

8. G. John Ikenberry, ‘‘Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order,’’ Foreign

Affairs 83, no. 2 (2004): 146.

9. Ian Cobain and Jessica Hatcher, ‘‘Kenyan Mau Mau Victims in Talks with UK

Government over Legal Settlement,’’ Guardian, May 5, 2013; Caroline Elkins, ‘‘Alchemy of

Evidence: Mau Mau, the British Empire, and the High Court of Justice,’’ Journal of Imperial and

Commonwealth History 35, no. 5 (2011): 731–48.

10. Ian Cobain, ‘‘Kenya: UK Expresses Regret over Abuse as Mau Mau Promised Payout,’’

Guardian, June 6, 2013.

11. Anthony Badger, ‘‘Historians, a Legacy of Suspicion and the ‘Migrated Archives,’ ’’ Small

Wars & Insurgencies 23, nos. 4–5 (2012): 799–800; David Anderson, ‘‘Mau Mau in the High Court

and the ‘Lost’ British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle?’’ Journal of

Imperial and Commonwealth History 35, no. 5 (2011): 699–716; Madeleine Bunting, ‘‘The Endgames

of Our Empire Never Quite Finished—Just Look at Bahrain,’’ Guardian, April 17, 2011.

12. Badger, ‘‘Historians,’’ 803, 805.

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13. Anne Barrowclough, ‘‘Dutch Apologise for Java Massacre 64 Years Ago,’’ Times, December

9, 2011. See also Bart Luttikhuis and A. Dirk Moses, ‘‘Mass Violence and the End of the Dutch

Colonial Empire in Indonesia,’’ Journal of Genocide Research 14, nos. 3–4 (2012): 257–76.

14. N.A., ‘‘Straf Indië-Weigeraars niet Herzien,’’ Nederlandse Publieke Omroep, accessed

June 25, 2013, http://nos.nl/artikel/522251–straf-indieweigeraars-niet-herzien.html.

15. Roger Beaumont, ‘‘Small Wars: Definitions and Dimensions,’’ Annals of the American

Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 541 (September 1995): 21–22.

16. Ibid., 22–23.

17. M. L. R. Smith and Sophie Roberts, ‘‘War in the Grey: Exploring the Concept of Dirty

War,’’ Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 31, no. 5 (2008): 377–78.

18. Beaumont, ‘‘Small Wars,’’ 22.

19. Sean Kay and Sahar Khan, ‘‘NATO Counter-Insurgency: Strategic Liability or Tactical

Asset?’’ Contemporary Security Policy 28, no. 1 (2007): 163; Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, U.S.

Government Counterinsurgency Guide (January 2009), 6, accessed July 4, 2013, http://www.state

.gov/documents/organization/119629.pdf.

20. Richard Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency 1948–1960

(Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990); Harry Miller, Menace in Malaya (London: Harrap,

1954), 257.

21. Moritz Feichtinger and Stephan Malinowksi, ‘‘Transformative Invasions: Western Post-9/

11 Counterinsurgency and the Lessons of Colonialism,’’ trans. Chase Richards, Humanity 3, no. 1

(2012): 40; Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century

World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 177–234.

22. Karl Hack, ‘‘ ‘Everyone Lived in Fear’: Malaya and the British Way of Counterinsur-

gency,’’ Small Wars & Insurgencies 23, nos. 4–5 (2012): 673–74; Octavian Manea, ‘‘Setting the

Record Straight on Malayan Counterinsurgency Strategy: Interview with Karl Hack,’’ Small Wars

Journal, February 11, 2013, accessed June 20, 2013,http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/setting-the-

record-straight-on-malay an-counterinsurgency-strategy.

23. Stephan Malinowski, ‘‘Modernisierungskriege: Militärische Gewalt und koloniale

Modernisierung im Algerienkrieg (1954–1962),’’ Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 48 (2008): 214.

24. Kelly Greenhill and Paul Staniland, ‘‘Ten Ways to Lose at Counterinsurgency,’’ Civil

Wars 9, no. 4 (2007): 404.

25. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2005), 23.

26. Stefanie Michels, Schwarze deutsche Kolonialsoldaten: Mehrdeutige Repräsentationsräume

und früher Kosmopolitismus in Afrika (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009), 147; Marie Fels, Good Men and

True: The Aboriginal Police of the Port Phillip District, 1837–1853 (Melbourne: Melbourne University

Press, 1988), 87.

27. In addition, calling it an ‘‘emergency’’ served insurance-related purposes: insurance

covered damage to property rioters in a civil disturbance, but not in a civil war. Noel Barber, The

War of the Running Dogs: How Malaya Defeated the Communist Guerrillas, 1948–1960 (1971; repr.,

London: Cassell, 2004), [11]. In addition, by not calling it a war, police and intelligence services

could be provided with exceptional powers. Sir Michael Howard, ‘‘Mistake to Declare This a

‘War,’ ’’ Royal United Services Institute Journal 146, no. 6 (2001): 1.

28. Stubbs, Hearts and Minds; Miller, Menace.

29. This conclusion harmonizes with Susan L. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British

PAGE 411


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Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency, 1944–1960 (London: Leicester University

Press, 1995), 260–61.

30. David French, ‘‘Nasty Not Nice: British Counter-Insurgency Doctrine and Practice,

1945–1967,’’ Small Wars & Insurgencies 23, nos. 4–5 (2012): 754.

31. David Kilcullen, ‘‘Counterinsurgency Redux,’’ Survival 48, no. 4 (2006): 111–12.

32. John Newsinger, British Counter-Insurgency: From Palestine to Northern Ireland (Basing-

stoke: Palgrave, 2002); Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya

(London: Jonathan Cape, 2005); David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in

Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2009); Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight

of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Bruno C.

Reis and Pedro A. Oliveira, ‘‘Cutting Heads or Winning Hearts: Late Colonial Portuguese Coun-

terinsurgency and the Wiriyamu Massacre of 1972,’’ Civil Wars 14, no. 1 (2012): 80–103.

33. Andrew Mumford, The Counter-Insurgency Myth: The British Experience of Irregular

Warfare (London: Routledge, 2012), 148; Rod Thornton, ‘‘Getting It Wrong: The Crucial Mistakes

Made in the Early Stages of the British Army’s Deployment to Northern Ireland (August 1969 to

March 1972),’’ Journal of Strategic Studies 30, no. 1 (2007): 73–107.

34. Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame: Britain’s Dirty Wars and the End of Empire

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2 (emphasis added); Grob-Fitzgibbon, ‘‘Further

Thoughts on the Imperial Endgame and Britain’s Dirty Wars,’’ Journal of Imperial and Common-

wealth History 40, no. 3 (2012): 503.

35. Bruno C. Reis, ‘‘The Myth of British Minimum Force in Counterinsurgency Campaigns

during Decolonization (1945–1970),’’ Journal of Strategic Studies 34, no. 2 (2011): 246 (emphasis

original).

36. See, for example, Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence:

University Press of Kansas, 2000).

37. Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counter-Insurgency,

and Counter-Terrorism, 1940–1990 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 421–40.

38. Anthony Dworkin, ‘‘The Laws of War in the Age of Asymmetric Conflict,’’ in The Barba-

rization of Warfare, ed. George Kassimeris (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 221.

39. Charles Shrader, The First Helicopter War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1978), 206–9.

40. Ir Fong Tian Yong, Ivy Tan, and Christina Seah, ‘‘Home Guards of Bukit Tinggi,’’

Guardian [Malaysia] 4 (August 2007): 12, accessed February 2, 2013, http://www.mca.org.my/

Chinese/Guardian%20pdf/GUARDIAN%20AUG.pdf.

41. A. Dirk Moses, ‘‘Besatzung, Kolonialherrschaft und Widerstand: Das Völkerrecht und die

Legitimierung von Terror,’’ Peripherie 116, no. 29 (2009): 401.

42. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2005), 31.

43. Ibid., 23.

44. Nasser Hussain, ‘‘Beyond Norm and Exception: Guantánamo,’’ Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4

(2007): 735.

45. Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007),

460.

46. Ibid., 478.

47. Ibid., 488.

48. Thomas R. Mockaitis, n.t., Journal of British Studies 52, no. 1 (2013): 266.

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49. A point also made by David Anderson, ‘‘Surrogates of the State: Collaboration and

Atrocity in Kenya’s Mau Mau War,’’ in Barbarization of Warfare, ed. Kassimeris, 160.

50. Daniel Branch, ‘‘The Enemy Within: Loyalists and the War against Mau Mau in Kenya,’’

Journal of African History 48, no. 2 (2007): 301–2.

51. Ibid., 293–97.

52. Ibid., 293–94.

53. Notulen van de bespreking gehouden ten huize van de legercommandant op 16 aug. 1947, in

Officiële bescheiden betreffende de Nederlands-Indonesische betrekkingen, 1945–1950, pt. 10 (hereafter

NIB x), ed. Simon L. van der Wal et al. (’s-Gravenhage: Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis,

1971), 51.

54. J. A. A. van Doorn and W. J. Hendrix, Ontsporing van geweld: Over het Nederlands Indisch/

Indonesisch conflict (Rotterdam: Universitaire Pers Rotterdam, 1970), 77–96.

55. Kolonel H. J. de Vries aan Z. E. de Legercommandant, October 26, 1948, Nr. 1011/DCO

500.03/Geheim/Zeer veel spoed, National Archives, The Hague, De Algemene Secretarie van de

Nederlands-Indische Regering en de daarbij gedeponeerde archieven, 1942–1950, entry number

2.10.14, inventory number 3463.

56. See, for example, National Archives, The Hague, Ministry of Defense: Archives of the

Armed Forces in Dutch-Indonesia, entry number 2.13.132, inventory numbers 1314 and 1334.

57. National Archives, The Hague, Procureur-Generaal bij het Hooggerechtshof van Neder-

lands-Indië, 1945–1950, entry number 2.10.17, inventory number 57.

58. Thijs Brocades Zaalberg, ‘‘Countering Insurgent-Terrorism: Why NATO Chose the

Wrong Historical Foundation for CIMIC,’’ Small Wars & Insurgencies 17, no. 4 (2006): 409.

59. The Resident-HTB van Priangan M. Klaassen, December 27, 1946, no number, NL-

HaNA, Alg. Secretarie, 2.10.14, 2417.

60. The Resident-HTB van Priangan M. Klaassen, December 27, 1946, NL-HaNA, Alg.

Secretarie 2.10.14, 2417; [Netherlands Forces Intelligence Service], publicatie over ‘‘de Sundanese

onafhankelijkheidsbeweging,’’ May 13, 1947, NIB 8, 628.

61. De Gedelegeerde van de Hoge Vertegenwoordiger van de Kroon in Indonesië, voor

Pasundan, Dr. R. W. van Diffelen, June 15, 1949, F 106, NL-HaNA, Alg. Secretarie, 2.10.14, 3620.

62. Because the archival sources’ indiscriminate use of ‘‘the Chinese’’ allows me no way to

differentiate between different Chinese communities and their (and individual members’) choices,

I am forced here to refer to ‘‘the Chinese’’ as well.

63. Nederlands Interdisciplinair Demografisch Instituut, De demografische geschiedenis van

Indische Nederlanders (The Hague: NIDI, 2002), 25; Mary Heidhues, ‘‘Anti-Chinese Violence

during the Indonesian Revolution, 1945–49,’’ Journal of Genocide Research 14, nos. 3–4 (2012):

382–83; De Procureur-Generaal Mr. H. W. Felderhof aan Van Mook, April 1, 1948, Nr. 1727/x/g

3, Agno: 519/V.I.D./R.II, NL-HaNA, Alg. Secretarie, 2.10.14, 2770.

64. ‘‘Appreciatierapport nr. 2 over de periode 26 Januari t/m1 Februari 1949,’’ van legercom-

mandant (Spoor) aan gecommitteerde van de C.M.I. bij het kabinet van de minister van overzeese

gebiedsdelen (Kiès), NIB 17, 351.

65. De Hoofdcommissaris van Politie ter Beschikking van den Recomba, W. G. Eybergen,

aan de Officier van Justitie dtk de Recomba in Noord-Sumatra, October 30, 1947, no number,

Geheim, Eigenhandig, NL-HaNA, Defense/Armed Forces 2.13.132, 1340.

66. Het Hoofd Juridische Zaken KNIL, Mr. B. Tijmstra aan alle Militaire Gezaghebbenden,

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September 12, 1947, No. 813/IC, Verordening Militair Gezag No. 516, NL-HaNA, Defense/Armed

Forces, 2.13.132, 303.

67. Notulen van de bespreking gehouden ten huize van den Legercommandant, September

19, 1947, NL-HaNA, Defense/Armed Forces, 2.13.132, 392; Verbindings-officier met Pao An Tui,

Kapitein J. B. Schotman, aan Centraal Comité Pao An Tui, November 29, 1947, Nr.: 3514/01.04.15/

68, NL-HaNA, Defense/Armed Forces, 2.13.132, 303, Sterkten Pao An Tui in West-Java; Memo

van Thio Thiam Tjong, Adviseur in Algemeenen Dienst, aan Dir. Kabinet, April 24, 1948, NL-

HaNA, Alg. Secretarie, 2.10.14, 2768.

68. R. Budding, Beheersing van geweld: Het optreden van de Nederlandse landstrijdkrachten in

Indonesië, 1945–1949 (Amsterdam: de Bataafse Leeuw, 1996), 35–46; Huw Bennett, ‘‘The British

Army and Controlling Barbarization during the Kenya Emergency,’’ in Warrior’s Dishonour:

Barbarity, Morality and Torture in Modern Warfare, ed. George Kassimeris (Aldershot: Ashgate,

2006), 79.

69. Ibid.

70. Julian Bourg, ‘‘Terrorism as Human Sacrifice,’’ Humanity 1, no. 1 (2010): 142.

71. Kilcullen, ‘‘Counterinsurgency Redux,’’ 115.

72. Bard E. O’Neill, Insurgency and Terrorism: From Revolution to Apocalypse (Washington,

DC: Potomac Books, 2005), 34.

73. Robert Cassidy, Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and

Irregular War (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006), 2.

74. David Hirst, Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East (London:

Faber and Faber, 2010), 196.

75. Ahmed S. Hashim, Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq (London: Hurst: 2006),

59–124.

76. See, for example, Ahmed Rashid, Decent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan,

Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Penguin, 2008), 24–33, 199, 349–55.

77. Mumford, Counter-Insurgency Myth, 46, 67; Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution:

Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2002), 279; Zaalberg, ‘‘Countering Insurgent-Terrorism,’’ 409.

78. Geoffrey Jensen, War and Insurgency in the Western Sahara (Carlisle Barracks, PA: USAWS

Press, 2012), 34–35.

79. Kumar Ramakrishna, Radical Pathways: Understanding Muslim Radicalization in Indonesia

(Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2009), 16–17, 33.

80. Kilcullen ‘‘Counterinsurgency Redux,’’ 113.

81. Idean Salehyan, Rebels without Borders: Transnational Insurgencies in World Politics (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 41, 44; Sarah Lischer, Dangerous Sanctuaries: Refugee Camps,

Civil War, and the Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005),

54–55.

82. Ibid., 141.

83. Thijs Brocades Zaalberg, Soldiers and Civil Power: Supporting or Substituting Civil Aut

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