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Anatomy of a surrogate: historical precedents andimplications for contemporary counter-insurgency andcounter-terrorismGeraint Hughes a & Christian Tripodi aa Defence Studies Department , Joint Services Command and Staff College, DefenceAcademy of the United KingdomPublished online: 08 Apr 2009.
To cite this article: Geraint Hughes & Christian Tripodi (2009) Anatomy of a surrogate: historical precedents andimplications for contemporary counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 20:1, 1-35, DOI:10.1080/09592310802571552
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Anatomy of a surrogate: historical precedents and implicationsfor contemporary counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism
Geraint Hughes and Christian Tripodi*
Defence Studies Department, Joint Services Command and Staff College, DefenceAcademy of the United Kingdom
This article examines the ways and means in which states employ irregular andindigenous personnel in a counter-insurgency (COIN) or counter-terrorist (CT)campaign, in the historical and contemporary context. The authors clarify theterminology surrounding this neglected area of COIN/CT theory, and identifyfour types of indigenous assistance – individual actors (trackers, interpreters,informers and agents); home guards and militias; counter-gangs; and pseudo-gangs. This article concludes that while the use of such indigenous irregulars hasits advantages for the state and its armed/security forces (particularly as far asintelligence, local knowledge and undermining the insurgent’s cause isconcerned), it can also have serious practical and ethical implications for aCOIN/CT campaign, and can have unexpected and unwelcome consequencesincluding violations of laws of armed conflict, the undermining of governmentalauthority and the prospects of endemic internal strife and state collapse.
Keywords: counter-insurgency; counter-terrorism; laws of armed conflict;state stability; militias; counter/pseudo-gangs
The course of the Iraqi insurgency since the Anglo-American invasion of
March–April 2003 defies easy explanation, but even by its convoluted char-
acteristics the ‘al-Anbar Awakening’ (al-Sahwah) of early 2007 was an astounding
event. Al-Anbar province was the epicentre of Sunni Arab resistance to the US-led
Coalition and the post-Baathist Iraqi government, and its cities (including Fallujah,
Ramadi, Haditha and Tall Afar) were effectively ungovernable. By August 2006
US Marine Corps (USMC) intelligence sources feared that Al-Anbar was on the
verge of a total insurgent takeover. However, the Sunni Arab insurgents were
already split between nationalists, ex-Baathists and tribal forces on the one hand,
and the Islamists of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and its affiliates within the ‘Islamic
State of Iraq’ movement, and clashes between insurgent groups were reported
throughout 2006. AQI’s enemies subsequently formed the backbone of the
‘Awakening’ movement, and their decision to align with the Coalition and the Iraqi
government of Nuri al-Maliki – combined with the ‘surge’ of 30,000 extra US
ISSN 0959-2318 print/ISSN 1743-9558 online
q 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09592310802571552
http://www.informaworld.com
*Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
Small Wars & Insurgencies
Vol. 20, No. 1, March 2009, 1–35
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troops ordered to Iraq from February 2007 – has contributed to a decrease in both
insurgent violence and sectarian (Shia–Sunni) killings in al-Anbar and Baghdad,
and a relative improvement in the security situation.
However, the enlistment of ex-insurgents by the US military poses several
questions. For example, how do these groups envisage their role in Iraq’s future?
Will the creation and support of heavily armed and well-organised Sunni militias
threaten Iraq’s internal stability, particularly in the aftermath of a US withdrawal
from that country? What do such developments mean for any prospect of
national unity?1
The ‘al-Anbar Awakening’ has its precedent, as the history of counter-
insurgency (COIN) offers numerous examples where the government side (whether
indigenous or supported by foreign colonial or occupying power) has enlisted local
support to fight terrorists and guerrillas. Often, this support comes from former
insurgents who have been ‘turned’ (changed sides and rallied to the government),
and have been persuaded to fight their former comrades. The Sunni tribes of the
Al-Anbar Awakening provide an example of what this article terms ‘surrogates’;
irregular indigenous forces utilised by a government and its state security forces
(SSF) for the benefit of a COIN or counter-terrorism (CT) strategy.
This article explores the issue of surrogates and aims to bring greater clarity to
a concept obscured by myth, misunderstanding and confusing terminology. It will
distinguish between the various categories of surrogate actors and groups available
to a government and its SSF in their COIN and CT strategies and provide
definitions for surrogates and how they can be employed. For the purposes of this
article, COIN is defined as the coordinated political and military response of a
government and its external supporters to an organised campaign of subversion and
paramilitary action waged against the former by an indigenous armed opposition.
CT involves both the defensive measures a state undertakes to protect its citizens
from terrorist attacks and offensive measures taken to target and neutralise a
terrorist group – these can range from penetration of the latter by intelligence
and police services to more controversial measures such as assassination or
‘targeted killings’.2
The contemporary relevance of this subject is evident. In the context of the
‘Long War’ and current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is highly likely that
American, British and allied governments and armed forces will remain involved
in multilateral intervention operations in failed or weak states for the foreseeable
future. These intervention operations combine the challenges of nation-building
with those posed by internal conflict, civil war and insurgency, and the military
forces employed will have to fight the ‘three block war’.3 Given that British and
American forces are limited in numbers, and operate under a doctrine which
stresses the need to engage local support, and to minimise the civilian
population’s backing for insurgents, it is useful to analyse past precedents where
the counter-insurgent side has employed local surrogates. The authors will
demonstrate that while indigenous surrogate actors and forces have political and
military utility, they also present ethical, political and practical issues that must
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be borne in mind for academics, policy-makers and professional military officers
involved in contemporary conflicts.
Ultimately, this article will argue that surrogates contribute to a COIN or CT
campaign with the provision of intelligence on an insurgency and the society
from which it has emerged. They also enable the government to minimise
military casualties and can – if combined with an amnesty programme – provide
a possible route for conflict termination and reconciliation between a state and its
irregular foes. However, the use of surrogates also presents problems related to
discipline, accountability, reliability, differing agendas and, finally, the potential
for an internal conflict to deteriorate into near anarchy.
Terminology, methodology and historical precedents
Throughout recorded history imperial powers have consistently inducted
conquered peoples within their own armies, as was the case, to highlight some
examples, with the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Janissaries, the recruitment of
Indian and Gurkha soldiers into the armies of the British Raj and of North African
soldiers into French overseas forces. As far as surrogate forces are concerned, the
American Revolution (1775–1783) and the US Civil War (1861–1865) both
featured pro-British and pro-Union irregulars fighting Patriot and Confederate
guerrillas, while during the Indian wars of the late nineteenth century native
auxiliaries and scouts were employed by the US Army in its wars against the
Navajo and Apache tribes.4
This practice was revived in the turn-of-the-twentieth century Philippines
War, as the US Army raised the irregular Philippines Constabulary to fight
Filipino rebels between 1899 and 1902; scouts recruited from the Macabebe
tribe helped the Americans capture the insurgent leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, in
March 1901.5 A decade later the British established irregular Baluchi and
Pathan militias to police the North-West Frontier of British India.6 The British
colonial authorities raised irregular units to fight dacoit rebels in Burma
(1930–1932), and during the Arab Revolt in Palestine (1936–1939) a British
Army artillery captain, Orde Wingate, created the Special Night Squads
(SNS), counter-terrorist teams recruited principally from the Jewish
population.7
In order to impose a conceptual framework on a rather convoluted subject, the
authors draw a distinction between ‘surrogates’ and ‘proxies’. The latter includes
third parties employed by a state in any external conflict where the employment
of its own forces may be deemed undesirable, (for example, US support to the
Hmong mountain people in Laos during the Vietnam War, or its external
assistance to the Mujahidin in Afghanistan during the 1980s). This article does
not examine cases where irregular forces are used in inter-state warfare alongside
military formations (such as anti-Axis partisans in World War II or the French-
led GCMA formations that fought Viet Minh regular forces in Indochina), or
examples involving sub-state groups and state failure, such as the Mai-Mai
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militia which fought anti-Kinshasa rebels and their Ugandan and Rwandan
backers in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (1998–2003).8
Instead, this article will concentrate on those third parties involved in COIN
or CT campaigns who, although not formally part of the SSF, are nonetheless
intimately involved on the government’s side. Such parties may occasionally be
used beyond state borders in cases where insurgents or terrorists maintain an
external sanctuary (as was the case with the Selous Scouts in Rhodesia), but are
primarily utilised in an internal war between a government and armed, irregular
opposition, be they defined as rebels, guerrillas, insurgents, bandits or terrorists.
Although there are numerous examples of surrogates being employed in imperial
policing and colonial campaigns of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
the authors will focus mainly on examples drawn from the post-1945 period, as
these are both better documented and are also more likely to be relevant to the
contemporary security environment.
For the purposes of this article, the ‘government’ or ‘counter-insurgent’ side
includes the legitimately constituted authority of a given state (and the armed and
security forces it commands), and its external backers. With some of the
historical examples discussed here the government was that of a colonial power,
with authority being exercised from a metropolitan capital (for example, London
with Malaya and Kenya, Paris with Algeria, and Lisbon with Angola and
Mozambique). In other cases the government side was backed by an external
power for reasons related to Cold War competition (as was the case with US
support for the South Vietnamese regime).
The majority of the examples cited here refer to the period from the end of
World War II to the current ‘War on Terror’, first because these case studies are
open to the most detailed scrutiny, and second because there are similarities
between current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and examples related to anti-
colonial insurgencies and terrorist campaigns of the late twentieth century. These
include the challenges an external power faces when waging a COIN conflict in a
third country; the political, socio-economic, cultural and (often) religious
differences separating the counter-insurgent side from the indigenous population;
the importance of the ‘narrative’ employed by an insurgent or terrorist group
(e.g., the claim by a ‘national liberation movement’ that it is fighting a
‘puppet regime’ and its ‘imperialist’ backers); and (as far as Western powers are
concerned) the difficulties of reconciling a COIN/CT campaign with respect for
legality and democratic norms.
Surrogates can be sub-divided into actors – individuals who assist the SSF in
specific roles, such as informants, interpreters and trackers – and forces – such as
home guards, militias, counter-gangs and pseudo-gangs. A home guard is
recruited from the local populace to provide static defence of villages, hamlets
and neighbourhoods, freeing regular army and police units for COIN or CT tasks.
Militias are larger, may be formed independently by indigenous tribal/ethnic
leaders and tend to possess greater mobility, numbers and strength than home
guard units. They are aligned with the government, but are not formally part of its
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SSF. Counter-gangs are smaller groups, usually operating between the size of a
section/squad and a platoon in an infantry unit, that is between 8 and 30 personnel.
They are mobile, lightly armed groups, often consisting of former insurgents who
have switched sides to join the government. These groups are configured and
organised (with, potentially, a degree of SSF assistance and training) to fight
insurgents and terrorists on the counter-insurgent/government’s terms. The last
category, the pseudo-gang, is a complex concept that often lends itself to
misinterpretation either as a counter-gang or death squad. For the purposes of this
article, a pseudo-gang is a government sponsored group which either passes itself
off as a terrorist/insurgent unit in a long term deception role, or a supposedly
independent group which proclaims independence from government control but
which nonetheless targets terrorists and insurgents on the behest of state
authorities, much as the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberacion (GAL) did against
ETA and its political wing, Herri Batasuna, in Spain during the 1980s.9 It is
worth noting that SSF have employed clandestine units in COIN/CT – the British
Army in particular has an established tradition of employing plain-clothes squads
in conflicts such as Aden and Northern Ireland–but this article will concern itself
only with those groups/units that operate outside the formal structure of a regular
military or police force, and which employ indigenous personnel.10
The terms ‘counter-gang’ and ‘pseudo-gang’ originate from the experience of
the (then) Major Frank Kitson, a British Army officer who during the 1950s Mau
Mau insurgency in Kenya raised a band of ex-insurgents in order to track, capture
and sometimes kill guerrillas. The ‘counter’ and ‘pseudo’ labels were
inadvertently conflated by Kitson but the authors argue that the difference lies
in composition and ethos; counter gangs may or may not briefly pose as
insurgents prior to confronting their adversaries, pseudo-gangs adopt the cover of
terrorists or insurgents during a sustained period of time. Paul Melshen argues
that the key difference between pseudo-operations and death squad activity is that
the former is directed at armed insurgents and terrorists, while the latter operate
outside both domestic and international law, and target either a government’s
civilian opponents (such as dissidents, trade unionists and human rights activists)
or a different sectarian or ethnic group (as shown by the actions of Shia militias in
Iraq since 2003).11 While Melshen argues that pseudo-operations focus on
generating human intelligence (HUMINT) on an insurgency or terrorist campaign,
the authors argue that pseudo-gangs can during their operations commit acts which
are illegal according to international law or the laws of armed conflict. Examples of
such behaviour may be the execution of suspected and unarmed adversaries
(actions which are closer to that of a death squad), ‘false-flag’ operations intended to
provoke discord and infighting within insurgent and terrorist movements, and
atrocities against civilians which can be blamed upon genuine insurgents.
There is very little literature on surrogate warfare in COIN/CT, and few
scholars have approached the subject of pseudo and counter-gangs.12 While
there are useful memoirs on covert COIN and CT activity, scholars need to be
wary of bogus accounts or recollections by ‘Walter Mitty’-type fantasists.13
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The absence of hard evidence also leads to abstract ‘cui bono’ theorising, and
it is important to discern the difference between fact and propaganda,
especially in cases where genuine ‘third force’ elements emerge, such as the
Loyalists in Northern Ireland. The picture is also confused by the lack of
verifiable facts. In eastern Turkey, Kurdish sources claim that attacks
attributed by Ankara to the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) insurgents are in
fact carried out by SSF in order to discredit the PKK and give the Turkish
Army the excuse to invade northern Iraq. During the Algerian Civil War
(1991–2002) the government was accused of staging horrific atrocities which
were then blamed upon the Islamist insurgent groups, the Armed Islamic
Group (GIA) and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC).14
Whether SSF were implicated in both these cases (or tacitly complicit) is
almost impossible to verify.
Another issue is the reticence of both insurgents/terrorists and
government/SSF officials to discuss the subject. The latter will not wish to
compromise operational security, the former find it hard to acknowledge that
people from a community they claim to represent have sided with ‘colonial
oppressors’ or ‘crusaders’ (as Al-Qaeda terms Western interventionists).15
During the EOKA insurgency in Cyprus (1955–1959), the British employed
‘Q Patrols’ on CT operations. EOKA’s commander, the then Colonel George
Grivas, asserted that these were comprised of Turkish ‘gangsters’. In fact, they
were recruited from the Greek Cypriot community (both loyalists and ex-
EOKA). Grivas was simply unable to admit that his compatriots could turn
against his movement, or have any effect against his organisation.16 Last, of
course, governments and SSF will use surrogates because they are deniable.
With reference to pseudo-operations especially, their raison d’etre is that they
may be denied by official sources. As Kevin O’Brien notes, pseudo-operations
are inherently covert. A government adopting these methods in a COIN
campaign may be involved in illegal or extra-legal operations (such as
carrying out bogus attacks), so there is a requirement for ‘plausible deniability’
which will allow government and SSF officials to conceal their role in
authorising such activity. Despite some exceptions – such as the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission in South Africa investigating the former Apartheid
regime’s use of such groups and the Spanish judiciary’s investigation of GAL
in the 1990s – it is therefore hard to gain firm evidence on pseudo-operations,
particularly if they are conducted by non-democratic governments.17
Surrogate actors: trackers, interpreters, agents and informants
Surrogate actors have traditionally included trackers and scouts (such as the Iban
tribesmen employed by the British Army during the Malayan Communist
insurgency of 1948–1960 and the Borneo ‘Confrontation’ with Indonesia of
1962–1966), although in an era of global positioning systems, satellites and
unmanned aerial vehicles their utility has arguably diminished.
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The importance of interpreters remains indisputable; in the colonial
campaigns of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries European imperial powers
could rely on a body of military and civilian officials, with years of service among
the indigenous population, who were familiar with their language and cultural
traditions. By contrast there is a shortage of Arabic, Pashtu and Dari speakers
among Coalition and NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan respectively, and
unless Western forces wage a COIN/CT campaign on their own soil (for example,
Northern Ireland) or in a country where their language is the lingua franca, then
there will be a continued need for interpreters at the tactical level, notably in
assisting patrols and debriefing local civilians. However, interpreters often put
themselves and their families at risk of reprisal, as is shown by the plight of Iraqis
who served with the British Army in south-eastern Iraq from 2003 to 2007.
Several former interpreters have been murdered by militiamen in Basra, and the
UK government’s unwillingness to offer the remainder and their dependents
asylum in Britain is not only morally reprehensible, but it offers little incentive
for other nationalities to offer their own services to the British Army in any future
intervention operations.18
Interpreters might facilitate interaction between SSF and the local
community, but the former also need informers (civilians prepared to offer
information) and agents (spies within insurgent and terrorist movements) in order
to win the HUMINT war against their adversaries. Intelligence is particularly
time-sensitive in COIN/CT, and there is often a tension between the acquiring
short-term information (for example, on the location of a safe-house or the target
of a planned insurgent/terrorist attack) and the long-term accumulation of
information on an insurgency (on its command structure and the identity of its
cadres). While police and Special Branch (SB) units tend to concentrate on the
latter, military commanders usually focus on the former. However, the key lies in
the way in which information is generated. During Algeria’s campaign for
independence (1954–1962) the French made considerable use of informers, but
their methods were brutal, and were generally aimed at terminating members of
the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) rather than building influence within
their organisation.19 Detainees – whether FLN or not – were also tortured, which
not only contributed to local resentment but outraged international and
metropolitan opinion, thereby undermining the legitimacy of the French cause.20
More recently, the Abu Ghraib scandal which broke to the world in April 2004
provides a perfect example of how a culture of torture and maltreatment for the
purpose of gaining information can backfire severely upon SSF.21
It is therefore better for the counter-insurgent to generate information given
voluntarily where possible, and the historical suggests that profound ethnic,
cultural, linguistic or religious differences between the counter-insurgent and the
population do not preclude the employment and effective recruitment of
informants. The Americans and South Vietnamese authorities had no shortage of
informers or ‘turned’ guerrillas (under the Chieu Hoi (‘open arms’) amnesty
programme) offering information on the Viet Cong infrastructure between 1967
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and 1972. Despite the accumulated grievances and bitterness that have poisoned
Arab–Jewish relations since the Palestinian mandate, the Israeli domestic
security service (Shin Bet) has penetrated Palestinian society through its
informants.22 In Northern Ireland the Republican movement was potentially
comparable to the present Mahdi Army in Iraq or the Afghan ‘Tier 1’ (hardcore)
Taliban in so far that recruits were drawn from similarly confined social strata.
IRA men ‘[grew] up together in the same areas, drank and socialized with each
other from an early age and intermarried within other republican families’ to the
extent that it was impossible for either the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) or
MI5 to insert their own undercover operatives into tight knit republican
communities. Yet from what appeared to be an impenetrable enclave of Northern
Ireland society, the British were able to recruit significant numbers of terrorists as
agents, some achieving elevated positions within the Republican and Loyalist
movements. Over time, they comprised a most effective weapon in the
intelligence war against the Provisional IRA in particular, constraining the
latter’s operations. The extent of SSF penetration of the Republican movement is
striking, and has been highlighted in recent months by revelations that Denis
Donaldson and Roy McShane, the former a senior Sinn Fein administrative
adviser, the latter an IRA volunteer and personal driver for Sinn Fein leader Gerry
Adams, were both long-serving agents for MI5.23
Informers and agents offer their services for a variety of motives; bribery
and other financial incentives, a response to the threat of conviction and
imprisonment (either against one’s self or for family members), or jealousy and
resentment. Some informants may want pre-emptive revenge against the
terrorists and guerrillas whose identities they betray, others might expect that
cooperation with the SSF gives them a ‘valued’ status. In addition, insurgent
group threats to execute ‘traitors’ can encourage informers and agents to
continue working for the SSF once ensnared.24 Alternatively, some individuals
may be motivated by disgust at the atrocities committed by their comrades in the
name of their cause, particularly if they feel that an insurgent movement has
been corrupted, or if its adherents are simply employing violence for violence’s
sake. For example, the British Army’s undercover Force Research Unit (FRU)
was able to recruit a female Sinn Fein activist who was repelled by the lynching
of two British corporals at a Republican funeral in March 1988. Others may act
out of personal or family obligation. The former Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) officer Robert Baer, who served in Beirut during the 1980s, observed that
in the Middle East ‘[you] don’t recruit individuals; you recruit families, clans
and tribes’, and he recalled that Lebanese militiamen and Palestinian terrorists
would talk to him because he had performed a personal favour for a brother or a
cousin. Baer’s comments may be a generalisation as far as Arab society is
concerned, but they are a reminder of how complicated the motives of agents
and informers can be.25
Whatever their motives, informers and agents can have an impact on
insurgencies far out of proportion to their numbers. Consequently, the hint
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of collaboration is often enough to condemn an uncommitted civilian to
retribution at the hands of insurgents or terrorists. The experience of Iraq or
Afghanistan would suggest that if a Western soldier stops to talk to a local, he
may easily arouse suspicions that leads to the latter’s murder. Insurgencies are
also prone to faction-fighting and often even a hint of betrayal is enough to
encourage purges and internal bloodletting.26 During the 1957 ‘Battle of Algiers’
informers working for the French planted incriminating documents, spread false
rumours of treachery and generally created discord and mistrust within the FLN.
This generated a ‘frenzy of throat cutting and disembowelment’ that crippled the
insurgency throughout Algeria.27
The use of informers and agents can provide the SSF with a significant
advantage in CT, demonstrated not only in Northern Ireland but also in the Indian
police campaign against Sikh terrorism in Punjab province (1984–1993). In the
latter case, the terrorists’ links with local mafias enabled the Police SB to
infiltrate their foes – first by recruiting criminal informers, and then subsequently
by ‘turning’ captured terrorists.28 Yet pitfalls exist when utilising informers and
agents. False tip-offs may be offered to embroil the army and police in local
ethnic or tribal feuds, or as disinformation intended to either confuse the SSF or
lure their personnel into traps or ambushes. Informers and agents may also
become double agents, and might try to restore their bona fides with insurgents
for the sake of self-preservation or due to belated remorse for betraying the cause.
In 1972, British military intelligence operations in Belfast were betrayed by a
‘Fred’, an IRA man turned agent who was seeking to return to the Republican
fold. His information led to the killing of an undercover soldier and a political
scandal. Informers and agents also depend upon their physical environment. They
have a greater chance of maintaining their anonymity in an urban area than in a
rural environment where the local populace is more close-knit. In Northern
Ireland, the isolated and rural Republican community in South Armagh proved
largely impervious to British and RUC intelligence-gathering. In COIN/CT
scenarios where there is a clear ethnic or racial distinction between Western
forces and the local population, the challenges of penetrating rural communities
are multiplied.29
Agent recruitment also poses moral problems best expressed by one of John
le Carre’s characters – ‘Terrorist organisations don’t carry passengers . . .They
don’t have secretaries, typists, code clerks, or any of the people who would
normally make natural agents without being in the front line.’30 For the sake of
self-preservation, agents within a terrorist group cannot cease participation in
planning and executing attacks. Neither can they reveal every piece of
information on his or her group to the authorities. Intelligence services therefore
face the ethically charged scenario of utilising sources guilty of murder and other
criminal offences, who have to remain active if they are to avoid exposure and
execution by their comrades. This moral dilemma was highlighted by the case of
Brian Nelson, a Loyalist terrorist within the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF – the
military wing of the Ulster Defence Association, or UDA), who became the
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group’s chief of intelligence. Nelson was revealed to be a British Army agent
after he was arrested in January 1990, and was implicated in the murder of Gerard
Sloane (23 September 1988) and the solicitor Pat Finucane (12 February 1989).
It has been asserted that Nelson’s handlers led him away from killing innocent
civilians towards suspected IRA and other Republican terrorists, but they did not
always act upon the information he provided (as was the case with Sloane).
Yet FRU veterans are adamant that Nelson provided information that preserved
the lives of many innocent people. It is evident that in order to maintain a
long-term source in a terrorist group, the intelligence services had to make moral
compromises in order to keep their asset alive. However, as far as Northern Irish
Catholics were concerned, the Nelson case was simply further proof that the
British establishment was colluding with the Loyalists.31
The effective cultivation of informants also demands a trustworthy and
effective police force, an obvious prerequisite for both COIN and CT. By virtue
of their permanence, it is the police who can generally develop the strongest links
with the local community, the greatest understanding of the figures within and
their ability to identify potential informers is unparalleled. It is for this reason that
police officers – and in particular SB personnel – are often priority targets for an
insurgent assassination campaign. This was demonstrated in Aden in 1965 when
the National Liberation Front (NLF) decimated Arab officers in the British-run
SB. One consequence of such an insurgent onslaught is that the local
constabulary can be weakened and corrupted. The British had problems with the
police in Palestine and Cyprus. In both cases local policemen (Arabs and Jews in
Palestine, Greeks in Cyprus) became agents for the insurgency – either through
intimidation or solidarity with their ethnic kin. In Aden, the problem of police
loyalty was compounded by the assassination campaign against the SB. This
contributed to a general collapse in police morale and penetration by the NLF,
which ultimately led to the mutiny on 20 June 1967, during which 20 British
soldiers were killed.32
British experience shows that a weak and unreliable constabulary undermines
the government’s COIN strategy, and current operations in Afghanistan and Iraq
show that insurgent penetration (along with institutional corruption) are prevalent
in both states’ police forces.33 The informer is no longer primarily the preserve of
the counter-insurgent; it is far more likely that he or she is a tool of the insurgent.
Home guards and militias
When governments fight terrorist groups with limited numbers (such as the
Provisional IRA or EOKA), there is no real requirement to raise indigenous
auxiliaries, as regular military and police have the manpower needed for CT
operations. Yet in wider insurgencies the government is often compelled to raise
substantial surrogate forces from the populace. From Indochina and the
Philippines in the late nineteenth century, through Indochina, Malaya, Algeria,
Vietnam, Thailand, Afghanistan and other COIN campaigns during the twentieth
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century, state authorities have sought to mobilise the wider population against the
intimidation and exactions posed by the insurgent. ‘Counter-mobilisation’ (to use
John McCuen’s phrase) has usually occurred in conjunction with efforts at
population control, which in previous campaigns has involved the physical
relocation of thousands of civilians within protected zones (for example, the
concentration camps during the South African War (1899–1902), ‘New Villages’
in Malaya, or ‘Strategic Hamlets’ in South Vietnam during the early 1960s).34
Relocation is highly controversial in the current political climate. During US
military operations to clear insurgents from Fallujah in November 2004, up to
300,000 of its citizens were housed by American and Iraqi SSF in refugee camps;
they were only released after being subjected to biometric identification measures.
Such measures of population control were minimal compared to previous COIN
campaigns, yet they were still condemned by anti-war activists as an example of
collective punishment.35
Nonetheless, the government’s objective is to secure control over the
populace and minimise the insurgent’s ability to either establish a support
network amongst civilians, or to intimidate them into supporting the insurgency’s
goals. These measures often involve raising domestic irregular forces to
complement regular SSF. As Kitson notes, COIN is labour-intensive, and the
recruitment of auxiliaries is often essential to enable an overstretched army and
police to focus on offensive operations against the insurgents.36 Home guards
provide static defence of communities, while militias are more mobile forces
which operate alongside SSF or – in states with weak governments – as a
substitute for them. Militias may opt to remain semi-independent of the
government side because of their tribal or ethnic character, particularly in
countries where clan independence is a social characteristic, or where minorities
exist alongside a political structure dominated by a particular ethnic or sectarian
group. The former is evident in Afghanistan – both during the Soviet occupation
and the current conflict – while the latter can be seen in Iraq with the militia Shia
groups, and in South Vietnam, where the Montagnard tribes of the Central
Highlands fought in the Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDGs) formed
by American SF personnel. While the Montagnards proved loyal to the US
soldiers who trained and led them, they were deeply hostile towards lowland
Vietnamese authorities who had traditionally treated them with racial
contempt.37 As noted below, militias can also be formed from ex-insurgents
who have changed sides.
The home guard concept has deep historical roots. Just to go back to the early
1890s the French, under Colonel (posthumous Marshal) Joseph Gallieni, armed
villagers against marauding brigands in Tonkin province. In the 1900s, the
US-led Philippine Constabulary, fighting rebels on the island of Cebu, withdrew
the local population into small towns, configured them for effective defence and
staffed them with volunteer forces designed to act as auxiliaries to the
Constabulary’s efforts. During the late 1940s and early 1950s in Indochina
and Malaya, indigenous self-defence organisations featured prominently.38
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In Algeria the French raised Harkis, lightly armed irregulars recruited to provide
security in local villages and towns throughout Algeria. These were
supplemented by Groupes d’Auto-Defence (GAD), self-defence communities
armed and trained by French forces and tasked again with providing local
security. Likewise, during the Mau Mau insurgency Kikuyu chiefs loyal to the
British authorities raised home guard (KHG) units from late 1952 onwards, with
25,600 under arms by March 1954. The KHG played an important role, alongside
British population control measures, of forcing Mau Mau gangs into the Aberdare
mountains and other wilderness areas.39 From the early 1970s to 1983 Thailand’s
government and military raised nearly 2.5 million ‘village scouts’ to defeat the
Thai Communist Party (CPT), which consisted of up to 13,000 activists.
In each of these cases, the counter-insurgent side succeeded in separating the
insurgent from the civil population it was trying to control.40 In contemporary
intra-state conflicts in Africa the Rwandan government is reported to have raised
a self-defence militia to counter Hutu raids from the DRC, and while in Ethiopia
and Chad home guards have been set up to fight (respectively) insurgents in the
Ogaden and Janjaweed raiders from neighbouring Sudan.41
In contrast, the Rhodesian government was slow to organise popular defence
units during its own struggle against the insurgency of the Zimbabwean African
National Union (ZANU) and the Zimbabwean African People’s Union (ZAPU),
from 1967 to 1978, being unwilling for racist reasons to arm black civilians. As a
consequence, ZANU’s military wing (the Zimbabwean African National
Liberation Army, or ZANLA) was able to infiltrate the Shona population and
establish its own support network without significant interference.
In South Vietnam the Self Defense Corps (SDC) set up under Ngo Dinh Diem
was poorly trained and no match for the Viet Cong.42 Its successor, the Popular
Forces (PF) proved to be more effective; adult males preferred service in the PF
to the regular Army (ARVN) because it enabled them to serve close to their
homes. Between 1967 and 1972 recruitment for South Vietnamese auxiliaries
swelled from 418,000 to 680,000. In conjunction, the US Marine Corps organised
Combined Action Platoons (CAP), in which teams of 14 Marines would live in
hamlets, training and fighting alongside indigenous units of 38 men. For around
4% of military expenditure, home guard forces in South Vietnam accounted for
around 30% of VC and North Vietnamese Army (PAVN) losses. However,
without US military support the PF and other irregular forces were helpless in the
face of the North Vietnamese onslaught which conquered the South in 1975.43
Home guard forces do sometimes emerge autonomously, in the absence of
significant government protection. This has been shown in Iraq, in the shape of
the Diyala Rescue Council, and also in Peru, where during the 1980s the Indian
population established self-defence groups to protect themselves from Sendero
Luminoso atrocities.44
However, in other cases home guards are not voluntary formations. In Kenya,
KHG membership was almost mandatory for Kikuyu males – adult males who
were unwilling to enlist were often treated by the police, loyalist chiefs and the
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KHG as Mau Mau sympathisers. Indeed, Anderson shows that chiefs used the
KHG for abuses against the civil population, including extortion, torture and
murder. Anderson’s verdict – that the British military and police in Kenya used
the KHG as a means of terrorising the Kikuyu while disclaiming responsibility –
is difficult to dispute, and it offers an important moral example to avoid. From an
ethical perspective, a democratic state can employ home guards to reinforce
regular troops and police, but these formations should be protected and integrated
within the SSF structure. They should not be used as either bait for insurgent
attacks, or as a means of perpetuating a cycle of atrocity and counter-atrocity in
which the laws of armed conflict (LOAC) are systematically violated.45
Militias are usually larger and more powerful than isolated home guard units,
and as they are often directed by parochial religious, ethnic or clan loyalties
rather than ties to the government, their use may prove problematic. These can
consist of guerrilla groups co-opted to fight an insurgency, notably the Serbian
Chetnik formations that assisted the Axis against the Partisans in wartime
Yugoslavia (1941–1945), and UNITA, which sided with the Portuguese against
the rival MPLA during the latter phase of the war of decolonisation in Angola
(1961–1975).46 During their war with the Vietminh (1946–1954) the French
established an alliance of convenience with two syncretistic religious sects – the
Cao Ðai and Hoa Ha’o – and the Binh Xuyen organised crime syndicate during
the late 1940s. All three groups had private armies, and exercised considerable
influence in southern Vietnam. In Algeria the French attempted to organise
militias either consisting of defectors from the FLN, or its political rivals. They
also played on ethnic tensions between the Arab and Berber (or Kabyle)
populations, exploiting rifts and tensions within the FLN and encouraging vicious
internecine feuds which hampered the insurgency.47 Other examples of militias
include the Sri Lankan government’s use of a group led by a renegade Tamil
Tiger, ‘Colonel Karuna’, against the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Elam, and with
the current conflict in Chechnya, where the Russian Federal authorities have
ex-insurgents nicknamed the Kadyrovsty (after the puppet President, Ramzan
Kadyrov) fighting local guerrillas.48
Militias are not always an effective tool of COIN, as was demonstrated in
Rhodesia in 1978 when Rhodesian SSF attempted to establish an auxiliary force
to bolster moderate nationalists, incorporating 8000 loyal to Bishop Abel
Muzorewa’s United African National Council (UANC) and 2000 from Reverend
Ndabaningi Sithole’s dissident faction of ZANU. However, Sithole and
Muzorewa had little appeal within the wider nationalist movement, and their
much-vaunted auxiliaries were an undermanned, ill-disciplined rabble.49 In other
cases, militia forces that serve as useful proxies in major warfare are a liability in
COIN. The Northern Alliance and other Afghan militias may have helped the
US-led coalition overthrow the Taliban in November/December 2001, but were
utterly unable to trap and eliminate its leadership or that of Al-Qaeda in the winter
of 2001 and early 2002. The Afghan Ministry of Defence incorporated the
militias into the AMF (Afghan Military Forces), but elements of the AMF were
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incorporated on an ad hoc basis by the US-led coalition into the ASF (Afghan
Security Forces). Paid directly by the US and beyond Afghan government
control, the ASF were unable to deal with the resurgence of Taliban activity in
southern Afghanistan after 2002.50
The effort spent training the AMF and ASF would have been better employed
on building up the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Police (ANP), and this case
highlights the dangers of relying on militias as an alternative, rather than a
complement, to regular SSF.
In Colombia during the 1990s, the inability of the army and police to confront
the self-styled Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the
Popular Liberation Army (ELN) insurgents led to the emergence of indigenous
paramilitary forces, subsequently known as the United Self-Defence Forces
(Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC). Having initially emerged in a
security vacuum, the AUC subsequently became employed as a substitute for the
Colombian Army and Police, leading to collusion between the authorities and
paramilitary leaders. This has recently caused a political scandal for the
government of President Alvaro Uribe (who cooperated with the paramilitaries as
governor of Antioquia province from 1995–1997).51
During the civil war in Sierra Leone (1991–2001) the government was forced
to rely on Civil Defence Force (CDF) fighters – including groups of kamajors, or
traditional hunters – in its war against the Revolutionary United Front (RUF).
CDF/kamajor units were better in combat than the ill-trained and unreliable
Sierra Leonean Army, but their employment contributed to disaffection within the
military leading to the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council coup of May 1997.52
In other cases, militias have effectively evolved as organised criminal groups.
In the Western theatre of the US Civil War, pro-Union formations such as the
Kansas Jayhawkers were as notorious for their pillaging as they were for their
brutality towards civilians and captured Confederate guerrillas. In Chechnya a
century and half later, the Kadyrovtsy have clashed with rival groups loyal to Alu
Alkhanov, Kadyrov’s predecessor, and have also confronted Russian federal
troops. Human rights activists argue that many Kadyrovtsy and other Chechen
collaborators are not disillusioned ex-rebels who have rallied to Kadyrov in the
interests of peace and national reconciliation – as the Russian government
claims – but are generally either felons or desperadoes prosecuting (or seeking
escape from) blood feuds and other clan vendettas. Indeed, pro-Russian units
such as the Vostok (‘East’) Battalion are as notorious for their criminal acts
against Chechen civilians as they are for their role in the anti-separatist war.53
With regard to the economic dimension, the actions of militias can be even more
damning. Insurgencies often lead not only to the disintegration of state authority,
but also opportunities for insurgents to engage in economic exploitation –
the looting of natural resources, smuggling, and organised criminal activity.
In these cases, militia groups nominally fighting on the government side can also
seek their own share of the spoils, causing further damage to the state’s integrity.
Afghanistan and Colombia have seen narcotics production assume huge importance
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for insurgents and pro-government forces.54 In southern Iraq, Shia militias have
fought to gain control over the busy port city of Basra, while in Northern Ireland, the
IRA and Loyalist groups became involved in drug running and protection rackets.
The key problem here is that both insurgents/terrorists and their opponents can
develop a vested interest in sustaining the conflict that enriches their movements,
thereby undermining efforts at conflict termination, or contributing to post-war
criminal activity (as is evident in Northern Ireland following the 1998 Good Friday
agreement).55
Governments raising, arming or interacting with militias also have the
problem of guaranteeing the latter’s loyalty.
In Algeria in 1956 the French military armed an indigenous force in the Kabyle
mountains –‘Force K’ – without realising that it was a pro-FLN formation. Force K
subsequently defected to join the Army of National Liberation (ALN), after
murdering several loyalist Algerians.
In Iraq the pro-government Jahsh militia, recruited in the 1960s to fight the
Kurdish insurgency, were among the first to revolt in the Kurdish rebellion of
March 1991– although given the savage repression the Baathist regime inflicted
on the Kurds during Operation Al-Anfal (1987–1991), the mutiny of the Jahsh
was hardly an astonishing breach of trust.56
During the latter phases of Communist rule in Afghanistan, the regime of
Mohamed Najibullah became increasingly dependent on militias such as the
Uzbek Jawzjani to fight the Mujahidin. Given the increasing decrepitude of the
Afghan regular forces and the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1988–1989,
Najibullah had little choice but to employ militias, but the latter’s loyalty was
bought, not earned. Once the Communist government ran out of money the
militias deserted to the Mujahidin, thereby helping to precipitate Najibullah’s fall
in April 1992.57
Ultimately, of course, the co-option of militias by the counter-insurgent may
be a result of circumstance rather than choice. In southern Iraq in 2004, an
overstretched British Army was obliged by the security vacuum and its own
limited numbers not only to accept the existence of Shia militias, but to actively
employ them within the new Iraqi SSF. The recruitment of militiamen from the
Badr Corps, Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, and the Fodila (‘Virtue’) Party into
the Basra Police, however, merely created a partisan and corrupt constabulary
that became involved in political infighting between rival factions, as well as
mafia-style activity and attacks on Coalition forces.58
Two other ethical issues present themselves when employing militias and
home guards as surrogates.
First, there is the cost that these individuals and their families may face if the
insurgency is victorious. Following the FLN’s victory in Algeria, uncounted
thousands of Muslim Harkis were massacred by ALN soldiers, while the more
fortunate loyalist Algerians fled to a life of second-class existence in France.59
A second issue is that breaches of legality and LOAC are almost inevitable
when using unregulated surrogates. In Sierra Leone the Freetown government
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was dependent on kamajor and other CDF assets, while the British Army used
kamajor assistance to locate seven of its men held hostage by the ‘West Side
Boys’ in August–September 2000. However, the kamajors were also accused by
the International Criminal Court of ‘cannibalism, child soldiery, rape and
amputation against civilians whom they considered to be RUF sympathisers’.60
Although the head of the CDF, Chief Sam Hinga Norman, was indicted by the
United Nations he was regarding by many of his compatriots as a hero, with the
excesses of the kamajors generally excused as a justified response to far more
extensive RUF war crimes.61 This highlights the gulf between the theoretical
ethical and legal standards of the international community, and the pitiless nature
of the war in Sierra Leone, but it also shows another potential pitfall to the
employment of militias – that their suppression of insurgents and their
sympathisers can become a source of social grievance and a barrier to
reconciliation in the aftermath of a civil conflict. For example, Lisbon’s efforts to
form a national unity government in Angola in 1975 were undermined in part by
the MPLA’s hatred of UNITA arising from the latter’s collaboration with the
Portuguese military.62
Militias have also been used in state directed campaigns of ethnic cleansing
and genocide, examples of which include the Interahamwe in Rwanda in 1994,
Serb paramilitaries in Kosovo in 1998–1999, and the Janjaweed in Darfur since
February 2003.63 In these cases, the enduring legacy is often the polarisation of
relations between the victimised ethnic/national group and its former persecutors,
with consequences that contribute to lasting instability and the potential for
future violence.
Counter-gangs
The concept of the counter and pseudo-gang is easily conflated. Yet with regard
to the former, the ‘original’ model employed by Wingate in Palestine in the 1930s
has its parallels in post-war history. During the Malayan Emergency the British
used captured Communist insurgents to track down their former comrades in the
jungle. In Kenya, the failure of the Army to clear Mau Mau gangs from the
heavily forested and mountainous Aberdare region led the Kenyan SB to recruit
‘counter-gangs’ in late 1953. One British Army officer, Frank Kitson, raised his
own group which included ex-Mau Mau insurgents who had been ‘turned’. The
image of white officers applying face paint to infiltrate Mau Mau groups bears
little resemblance to the historical record – Kitson freely acknowledged that
most of the gang’s patrols were conducted exclusively by Kikuyu personnel,
loyalists and ex-insurgents alike. The ‘pseudo’ label has been applied to
Kitson’s group – and other similar gangs – because its members were dressed
and armed like Mau Mau in order to locate and make contact with insurgents.
However, in contrast with the pseudo-gang examples discussed below this was a
short-term tactical ploy to develop HUMINT on, and to subsequently neutralise,
insurgents. However, while Kitson’s methods concentrated on taking prisoners
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and gathering intelligence, other counter-gangs – whether Army or SB – adopted
a more aggressive approach aimed at wiping out Mau Mau groups. This was
either a product of entrenched loathing towards an enemy they saw as barbaric, or
because surviving insurgents were less willing to surrender to the SSF as
the campaign progressed. By 1957, British counter-gang activity in the Aberdare
district had become focused on the physical elimination of Mau Mau remnants.64
The 1950s counter-gang concept can also be seen with the ‘Q Patrols’ in
Cyprus – four- to six-man teams of Greek Cypriots masquerading as EOKA, who
identified civilian sympathisers and terrorists for arrest by the police and Army.
During the British-directed COIN campaign in Dhofar (Western Oman) between
1970 and 1975, SAS soldiers attached to the British Army Training Team (BATT)
raised irregular units of local tribesmen ( firqat forces) to recover the province for
the Sultan from Popular Front control. In the latter stages of the Vietnam War the
Americans directed counter-guerrillas from the Provincial Reconnaissance Units
(PRU) against the Viet Cong – some of the former were from the thousands of
ex-VC who had ‘rallied’ to the Saigon government’s side as part of Chieu Hoi.
During their African colonial wars (1961–1974) the Portuguese employed their
own counter-gangs alongside regular army units, such as the Trupos Especiais
(1200 former insurgents used in the Angolan enclave of Cabinda), the ex-guerrilla
Grupos Especiais who fought in Angola and Mozambique, and the flechas
(‘arrows’), recruited by the Portuguese security police (PIDE) from the Bushmen
of Eastern Angola.65
Counter-gangs have a clear appeal for governments and armies fighting
insurgencies. In comparison to large-scale military sweeps they offer a relatively
precise and discreet means of finding and defeating guerrilla groups (particularly
in rural or wilderness environments) as well as a more discriminate means of
killing insurgents than artillery or air strikes. ‘Turned’ insurgents also offer an
invaluable source of intelligence on their former comrades. In Oman, the Popular
Front’s efforts to provoke a nationwide insurgency beyond Dhofar were thwarted
in early December 1972 when a senior commissar was arrested in Muscat, having
been identified by two ex-rebels serving in a government firqa.
As is the case with informers, captured terrorists and insurgents can be
‘turned’ for a variety of reasons. Some have only a superficial attachment to their
‘cause’, and are ready to abandon it. Dhofari ex-insurgents who joined the firqat
forces from mid-1970 onwards did so principally because they resented the
Marxist-Leninist ideology the Popular Front had adopted, and were prepared to
desert to the Omani government if it fulfilled its promises of economic
development and social reform.66 In other cases, notably the counter-gangs in
Kenya, the choice was defection or execution (the British hanged 1070 Mau Mau
suspects between 1952 and 1956).
A further challenge is ensuring that news of a ‘turned’ insurgent’s capture
does not become public knowledge, thereby compromising his or her ability to
serve in a counter-gang. Sometimes, captives are unwilling to change sides, as
was evident with Jewish insurgents in Palestine and the NLF in Aden. In both
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cases, the British Army used undercover teams of its own soldiers, who were too
conspicuous to blend in effectively with the civilian populace. For both counter
and pseudo-gangs, indigenous personnel are more likely to remain inconspicuous
and pass themselves off convincingly as insurgents.67
Counter-gangs of former insurgents may well operate alongside regular
forces with a degree of friction and mistrust. The firqat forces in Dhofar were
regarded by British officers attached to the Omani Army as potential turncoats –
having betrayed the insurgency’s cause without apparent compunction, would
ex-guerrillas revert to their original allegiance in the future? In general, however,
the firqats stayed loyal to the Sultan, and they provided valuable tactical
intelligence. They also had the advantage of cultural knowledge and
understanding of the Dhofari nomads, a trait which the flechas in Angola also
possessed.68 The firqat forces also provided clear proof of the sincerity of the
government’s promises of an amnesty, demonstrating its intention to foster
national reconciliation, and its fighters could also appeal to former comrades and
relatives within the Popular Front to change sides. One BATT veteran stresses
that insurgent defectors to the firqats (known as Surrendered Enemy Personnel, or
SEPs) were treated like prodigal sons by their fellow tribesmen, and that this
further cemented their conversion to the government’s cause. Official figures
show that 797 SEPs defected between 1970 and 1974, compared to 404 guerrillas
killed in action (out of an estimated 2000 insurgents in mid-1970). However,
appeals to defect only went so far; 850 insurgents kept fighting in Dhofar until
December 1975.
Counter-gang methods also vary in the success with which they are applied.
Kitson’s attempt to employ Kenya-style concepts with the ‘Freds’ and the MRF
foundered essentially because the IRA’s organisation, command structure and
security were far more efficient than those of the amateurish and less
sophisticated Mau Mau. Some counter-gangs may end up being formally
incorporated within a state’s SSF, with variable results. Attempts to involve the
firqat forces in SAF offensives against Popular Front strongholds in western
Dhofar were less successful, because its tribesmen had neither the training nor the
inclination to fight in a conventional manner.69
Again, a key challenge with counter-gangs is their adherence to rules of
engagement and LOAC. Kitson stressed that ‘special operations’ were ‘[just] as
much part of the government’s programme as any of its measures and the
government must be prepared to take responsibility for them’. However, the use
of ‘turned’ insurgents may contribute to a brutal fratricidal struggle between
‘turncoats’ and ‘true believers’ far removed from the ideal of a legally shaped
COIN campaign. Major Edgar O’Ballance notes that Malayan guerrillas who
surrendered to the British Army or colonial authorities cooperated because they
needed ‘to kill off all the Communists who . . . knew of their defection or capture,
before this news could be spread around to the Traitor Killing Squads, which
might extract retribution from relatives’. Self-preservation also explains the fact
that very few ex-Mau Mau took the opportunity to desert to government service,
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knowing full well that they would face a hideous death if caught by their former
comrades in arms.70
Some other ethical dangers of using counter (and pseudo) gangs were
illustrated in the Namibian insurgency (1966–1989) with the South African
Koevoet (‘crowbar’), engaged alongside the South African Defence Force
(SADF) and Police against the South-West African People’s Organisation
(SWAPO). Strictly speaking, Koevoet was not a counter-gang, but a regular SSF
unit fully integrated with the South-West African Police (SWAPOL). However,
90% of personnel were black – either loyalist Namibians or ex-insurgents.
The basic idea for Koevoet was to target and eliminate members of SWAPO’s
military wing (the Peoples’ Liberation Army of Namibia, or PLAN).71
The savagery which characterised Koevoet operations can be attributed largely
to the fact that its ex-guerrillas could expect little mercy if captured by the PLAN.
Although very effective in hunting down and destroying insurgents – killing
3861 PLAN in return for 153 of its own dead – Koevoet’s brutality was
acknowledged by SWAPOL and SADF commanders. Koevoet was disbanded
in 1989, but subsequently it provided the inspiration for South African
pseudo-operations against the ANC.72
Pseudo-gangs
The dangers of employing counter-gangs are amplified in pseudo-operations.
Documented examples of the latter are naturally difficult to identify, although for
the purposes of this article the first identified use of a pseudo-gang in COIN was
‘Force X’, established by the Philippine Constabulary during the Hukbalahap
(Huk) insurgency of 1946–1955. Disguised as Communist rebels and including
ex-rebels in their ranks, their actions included the infiltration of Huk groups,
assassinations and other ‘dirty tricks’ (including the planting of doctored
ammunition which would maim or kill Huk guerrillas on use).73
The Soviet MGB (as the KGB was then known) used bogus insurgents in the
Baltic States and western Ukraine in the late 1940s–early 1950s. Yuri Zhukov
states that ‘MGB forces, dressed as UPA [Ukrainian nationalist] insurgents,
conducted raids on villages and subjected “suspected Soviet collaborators” to
torture, rape and executions’. Similar attacks appear to have been conducted in
Lithuania in order to discredit nationalist guerrillas fighting the re-establishment
of Soviet authority.74 A refinement of this technique involved the creation of two
fake MGB groups in Latvia in 1951, known as Maxis and Roberts, which
established contact with emigre agents sent by the British intelligence service,
SIS, and betrayed them to the Soviet authorities.
In Afghanistan during the 1980s the KGB and KHAD (its Afghan
counterpart) used both pseudo-Mujahidin groups and ‘black propaganda’ to
encourage internecine violence between resistance factions.75 The Soviets did
not need to worry about legislative or media scrutiny in any of these cases, and
certainly had no qualms about inflicting civilian casualties. It is likely that other
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non-democratic regimes might likewise opt to use pseudo-operations as part of
their strategy of defeating internal rebellions.
Rhodesia remains the best documented example of pseudo-operations, with
the Rhodesian Special Branch (RSB) establishing its first pseudo-group of black
African officers in January 1973. For the Rhodesians, the resort to pseudo-
operations was the consequence of failure – throughout the early 1970s ZANLA
penetrated the tribal areas of eastern Rhodesia and gradually annihilated the
RSB’s informant network. The government’s unwillingness to arm a black militia
had – as noted above – left much of the native African populace open to
recruitment or intimidation by ZANLA. The Selous Scouts, commanded by
Lieutenant-Colonel Ron Reid-Daly, therefore established fake ZANLA units to
infiltrate the insurgency and to identify its support network. The Scouts
incorporated black soldiers from the Rhodesian African Rifles (RAR) and some
whites from the Rhodesian Special Air Service (RSAS), but they also ‘turned’
captured insurgents in a manner similar to that of the British in Malaya and
Kenya. By the end of the war, the Scouts had a total of 1500 troops, 800 of which
were former guerrillas. RAR troops and ex-insurgents were crucial to Scout
operations, as these were the only soldiers who could infiltrate villages and pass
themselves off as ZANLA.76
After Zimbabwe’s independence in April 1980 a substantial number of
ex-Rhodesian soldiers joined the South African SSF, so it is perhaps not
surprising that the Apartheid regime also carried out pseudo-operations.
The South African Police created a group known as C10 (or Vlakplaas) in 1979
which recruited black ‘askaris’, including former members of the ANC’s military
wing, Mkhonto we Sizwe (MK, ‘Tip of the Spear’). Vlakplaas kidnapped and
murdered ANC cadres and other anti-Apartheid activists. One of its more
notorious officers, Eugene de Kock, was an ex-Koevoet member who applied this
group’s approach to COIN/CT to his work. Both Vlakplaas and its military
counterpart, the Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB), were a law unto themselves,
the carte blanche given to them was evident not only in the horrific nature of their
killings, but also in their involvement in organised criminal activity. Vlakplaas
was formally disbanded by President F. W. de Klerk in 1990, but its officers were
involved in the covert arming and training of Zulu Inkatha cadres during its civil
war against the ANC in black townships from 1990 to 1994.77
Pseudo-operations do have inherent practical as well as ethical flaws.
Adopting a fake insurgent identity imposes intense psychological pressure on a
pseudo-operator. The Maxis and Roberts groups operated in a country where the
Soviet military and security police presence was almost ubiquitous, but even their
members found their experiences nerve-wracking, and were in almost constant
fear of exposure and retaliation by genuine Latvian guerrillas. An additional
problem involves how to exploit the intelligence gathered by pseudo-teams
without compromising their identity. Furthermore, pseudo-groups may be easily
identifiable to the local population and insurgents. In western Ukraine, bogus
UPA insurgents were often recognised by civilians because they spoke Russified
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Ukrainian rather than the regional dialect. In Rhodesia’s case the Selous Scouts
found it difficult to infiltrate ZIPRA. Unlike ZANLA, which followed a
Maoist-style approach to guerrilla warfare, ZIPRA was trained by Warsaw Pact
instructors for conventional warfare, and its army was too disciplined and
hierarchical for pseudo-operators to infiltrate its ranks without attracting
suspicion.78 A further constraint (common to counter-gangs and other undercover
operations) is how to prevent accidental clashes between pseudo-gangs and
regular military units.79
With both counter and pseudo-gangs, as with other special operations,
co-ordination between various SSF agencies can also be affected by inter-service
rivalries. In the Rhodesian case the Selous Scouts established a good working
relationship with the RSB, but clashed continually with the army hierarchy and
the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO). While Reid-Daly accused the CIO
of providing poor intelligence and of being obsessed with operational security,
the CIO’s head Ken Flower was scathing in his assessment of the Scouts, stating
that his endorsement of their creation ‘proved to be the worst mistake I made
in the conduct of the war’. Flower’s comments reflected the changing nature of
the Selous Scouts from 1973 to 1979. Having initially concentrated on long-term
infiltration and intelligence-gathering, they subsequently began hunting down
and killing insurgents in the bush, carrying out attacks on white-owned farms,
distributing poisoned clothes and uniforms to insurgent recruits. They also
spearheaded punitive raids into Mozambique, Zambia and Botswana (safe havens
for ZANLA and ZIPRA) and, allegedly, contaminating water supplies in
Mozambique with biological agents, which lead to the deaths of hundreds of
civilians by cholera and anthrax in 1979–1980.80 Flower described the Scouts as
‘glamour boys’ and ‘vainglorious extroverts’ supplemented by ‘a few psychopathic
killers’. Yet it can be argued that the discrediting of the Scouts was as much to do
with the inherent nature of its mission as the actions committed by its soldiers. These
involved provoking armed clashes between ZANLA and ZIPRA, spreading false
accusations of collaboration which lead to ‘contact’ agents being liquidated.
Furthermore, while the ‘attacks’ on white formers were arranged to avoid civilian
casualties, they also encouraged ZANLA groups to redouble their own activities
against the SSF and civilians (white and black), with more lethal consequences.81
This section has discussed pseudo-operations conducted by a totalitarian state
(the USSR) and two racial oligarchies (Rhodesia and pre-1994 South Africa), but
there is at least one recorded case of a democratic government employing a
pseudo-gang. Between 1983 and 1986 the GAL killed 27 people in both Spain
and France, mainly ETA terrorists and Herri Batasuna activists, but they also
killed 9 innocent civilians with no connection to Basque separatism. Although the
GAL portrayed itself as an independent force retaliating against ETA terrorist
attacks it was created by officials within the Guardia Civil and the governing
Socialist Party (PSOE). When the Spanish judiciary started to investigate the
GAL a decade after its campaign the ensuing scandal ruined the Premiership of
Felipe Gonzalez, and led to the conviction of three senior officials in 1998 and
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2000. Although the GAL campaign forced the French government to cooperate
with Spain against ETA, it also simply reinforced the Basque nationalist
perception of Spanish oppression, and enabled ETA to claim that nothing had
changed in Madrid since Franco’s death.82
Ultimately, pseudo-operations characterise a narrow-minded approach to
COIN/CT; emphasising the short-term punishment of insurgents, terrorists and
their supporters, rather than a long-term focus on conflict termination and
pacification. Even in Ukraine during the late 1940s, Soviet officials condemned
MGB pseudo-gangs for ‘undermining the authority of Soviet law and
unquestionably harming socialist development in western regions of Ukraine’.
When governments wilfully violate the rule of law through pseudo-operations,
they fulfil the insurgent’s task of discrediting and undermining the legality of
state authorities as far as both domestic and international opinion are concerned.
Moreover, pseudo-operations can worsen rifts within fragile societies, exacerba-
ting the deterioration of security and civil order which occurs in an insurgency.
Black-on-black violence between Inkatha and the ANC in the Transvaal during
the early 1990s led to thousands of deaths, and produced no discernible benefit for
its instigators. In the case of Afghanistan KGB and KHAD pseudo-operations
fuelled intra-Mujahidin fighting, and contributed to the internecine feuds within
the Afghan resistance which led to civil war and state collapse after 1992.83
Conclusions
The success or failure of any COIN/CT strategy depends upon a variety of
factors; these include the political will of the government to prevail, the
development of the insurgency itself (whether or not it can generate sufficient
popular support or momentum to challenge state authority), the extent of external
support for the government or the insurgency, international opinion regarding the
legitimacy of the government side and its opposition, and the quality of SSF
training and intelligence. As far as Western COIN theory is concerned, it is
commonly agreed that success depends on the mobilisation of local support for
the government against the insurgency, and in all the historical and current case
studies discussed above a common feature involves the counter-insurgent’s
attempts to enlist indigenous participation, either from surrogate actors or from
an array of irregular auxiliaries.84
With regard to actors (interpreters, trackers, informers and agents), these are
common to COIN and CT campaigns, although they can be as effective when
employed by insurgents against government forces – as shown by examples
where local police and security forces have become infiltrated. The former Mahdi
Army commander in Basra has indeed boasted that he used these means to gain
intelligence on British Army operations.85 Informers and agents have to be
monitored by military intelligence and SB to ensure that they neither reconcile
themselves with their former comrades, or wilfully provide false information to
the SSF in order to either discredit the government side (through accidental
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arrests or the killing of innocents that can be exploited for insurgent propaganda)
or to settle personal or clan vendettas.
As for home guards and militias, the former formed part of a successful COIN
campaign in the Philippines, Kenya, Peru and Thailand, but the opposite was the
case in Algeria and Vietnam.
Of all the four surrogates described, it is politically, strategically and ethically
dangerous for a democratic state to employ pseudo-gangs (as defined in this
article), although scholars should be aware that authoritarian or totalitarian
regimes may continue to be attracted by their deniability, and their potential for
both terrorising civilians and for discrediting insurgent enemies. While
pseudo-gangs may have ‘succeeded’ in Ukraine and the Baltic States, they
failed in Afghanistan, South Africa and Rhodesia. Pseudo-operations also gained
the Spanish state minimal if any advantage against ETA, which has in fact been
effectively contained by conventional policing and the existing legal framework.
Counter-gangs ‘succeeded’ in Malaya, Kenya and Oman but essentially failed in
Cyprus, the Portuguese wars and Vietnam.
The authors argue that counter-gangs should only be employed for the
generation and dissemination of HUMINT. They must be strictly controlled by SSF,
accountable, and disciplined, preventing any mutation into a pseudo-gang or death
squad. Ideally, a counter-gang should consist of both local irregulars and special
forces or police personnel (whether indigenous or foreign), although for tactical
reasons – and in cases where troops or police from an interventionist state cannot
blend in with the civilian populace – the former may be the mainstay of undercover
operations. Nonetheless, their activities must be strictly controlled; a possible means
of managing ‘turned’ terrorists or insurgents would be for their SSF employers to
threaten the withdrawal of amnesty terms if they either changed sides, or if they
committed criminal acts (such as theft from, the rape or murder of civilians, or the
execution or torture of prisoners) which bring the government side into disrepute.
Both contemporary operations and the historical case studies examined in this
article highlight the following issues for policy-makers and military
commanders, emphasising the potential problems they can pose for any
government or coalition of powers involved in COIN/CT. These issues outlined
below should not be treated in isolation as they are inter-linked:
Reliability – There is no guarantee that surrogate forces (especially those
drawn from ex-insurgents) will not resume hostilities against the government and
SSF at a time of their own choosing. There is indeed anecdotal evidence that
Sunni ex-rebels in Iraq may turn against the Maliki government and the Coalition
once they have settled scores with AQI.86 Insurgents and militias can also
penetrate SSF and compromise their loyalty, as shown with the police, interior
ministry forces and even the post-Baathist army in Iraq.87 The implications of a
compromised police force can be seen with the abortive Iraqi Army offensive into
Basra in March 2008, during which at least 1000 members of the security forces
defected to al-Sadr’s side. Although subsequent operations seem to have curtailed
Mahdi Army militia activity in Iraq’s second city, the government’s efforts
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to reassert its authority (with American and British assistance) will clearly face
ongoing challenges in Basra and across the Shia South.88
In a different environment, the Janajweed formations raised by the Sudanese
government have proved to be increasingly truculent, and Khartoum has tried to
bribe these militias with arms and money to retain their loyalty. The Sudanese
regime may regret its decision to raise surrogate forces in Darfur.89
Practicality – Surrogate forces (whether militia, home guard, counter- or
pseudo-gangs) may end up in accidental clashes with regular army and police
units, and there are reports that ‘Awakening’ formations in al-Anbar have
suffered casualties from confrontations with the US military.90 Such incidents
may undermine cooperation between regular SSF and indigenous surrogates.
Another potential hazard has been highlighted in Afghanistan, with the uneasy
cooperation not only between Hamid Karzai’s government and Western allies, but
also between NATO contingents. While the Kabul regime recognises the need to
engage Pashtun Taliban commanders in southern Afghanistan, its officials are
intensely suspicious of covert contacts between the British military and potential
Taliban defectors, claiming that these are designed to weaken Karzai’s authority.
On the other hand, both Afghan and British efforts at ‘turning’ insurgents clash with
the US military’s emphasis on defeating the Afghan insurgents through military
force.91 Methods of enlisting local support are not necessarily transferable. For
example, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of North-West
Pakistan it is almost impossible to raise an Awakening-type force amongst the local
clans to fight the Pakistani Taliban and Al-Qaeda, because the latter are also leading
a social revolution against the discredited authority of the tribal chiefs, or maliks.
The latter therefore lack the power to challenge the militants who have effectively
taken over control of the FATA.92
Factionalism – Surrogate forces such as militias may also be as prone to
splits and internal feuding as insurgent groups – as demonstrated by the fallout
between Sunni Arab nationalists and AQI, and the problems Moqtada al-Sadr has
in exerting authority over disparate groups within the Mahdi Army.93 Surrogate
forces may themselves be torn apart by leadership disputes, factional fighting and
squabbles over resources and the spoils of war, and this could lead to in-fighting
which draws in SSF. There is evidence of friction between tribal groups in the
al-Anbar militias, while in Chechnya Kadyrov’s rivalry with the Yamadaev clan
led to clashes between pro-Russian Chechen loyalist forces in April 2008.94
Morality and ethics – The employment of surrogates in a COIN campaign
may simply empower local warlords, bandits and mafia-style criminal groups
who can use their status as government allies to reinforce territorial control
and exploit the civil populace, discrediting the legitimate authority of the
government. This was evident not only with the AUC in Colombia, but
the AMF/ANF in Afghanistan in 2001–2002, both of which combined counter-
insurgent activity with drug production and trafficking. Furthermore, in both
Afghanistan and Iraq British and American commanders have had to make moral
compromises with former adversaries. The current governor of Helmand
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province is an ex-Taliban commander, while the police chief in Fallujah is an
ex-Sunni insurgent and former Baath loyalist. Both men have a record of
atrocities and a questionable approach to human rights, but both are also clearly
indispensable to their Western partners in their given environments.95
In states whose societies are divided by ethnic, racial, tribal or confessional
strife, the use of surrogates from one particular social group in a COIN/CT
campaign can exacerbate internal tensions and encourage civil war. One of the
main grievances of Sunni Arabs in Iraq is that they feel disenfranchised and
vulnerable to Shias and Kurds empowered by the Coalition. There is therefore no
guarantee that a future upsurge of sectarian attacks will not lead to Shia–Sunni
violence, therefore undermining Coalition efforts to enlist the Sunni tribes
against AQI. Even if the ‘Awakening’ remains both cohesive and loyal to the
government, its methods of fighting AQI insurgents may fall well short of the
standards of LOAC expected by US or British troops – one leading sheikh has
already publicly expressed the view that ‘[two] months are all we need to
eliminate (Al-Qaeda), God willing, but without “human rights”’.96
It is also important to remember that in a COIN/CT campaign – particularly
one where the insurgency has substantial numbers and arms at its disposal – the
government and SSF have a duty to protect surrogates. Informers, militiamen,
home guards, turned insurgents (and their families) are more vulnerable to enemy
attack than regular soldiers or police, local or foreign. In South Vietnam in the
early 1960s it was the SDC and other pro-government irregulars – rather than the
ARVN and its US advisers – who were more susceptible to Viet Cong attacks.
Furthermore, if the government side loses the campaign then its indigenous
supporters are open to retribution as savage as that faced by the harkis and their
dependents when the French left Algeria in 1962.
Government authority – Max Weber stresses that one of the key features of a
government is that it exercises a monopoly on control and legitimate violence,97
but this can be weakened by a surrogate strategy. In Pakistan, the Islamabad
government’s efforts to persuade Pathan tribesmen (the ethnic kin of the Afghan
Pashtun) in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) to turn against Islamist
militants has simply turned the tribal areas of Waziristan into a no-go area for the
Pakistani Army and Police, with potentially dangerous consequences for
the state’s stability.98
In Iraq, Saddam Hussein had to make his own compromises with Sunni tribes
during the 1990s, but unlike Maliki he had sufficient power at his disposal to crush
the sheikhs if they challenged his authority. While Saddam was estimated as having
400,000 troops and as many security force personnel under his command in 2002, his
successor has at most half that number of soldiers and police. There is therefore a
chance that the current government may effectively cede control of much of the
Sunni tribal areas as the price for defeating AQI in al-Anbar and elsewhere.99
Future stability – It is crucial that surrogate forces should not be raised and
utilised in a political vacuum, and that there should be a process of conflict
termination and resolution which involves turned insurgents and terrorists, and
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their support base within the local population. At its easiest, in Oman in the
1970s, this involved promising Dhofari tribesmen who rallied to the government
a share of the oil revenue for internal development. In Iraq’s case the
reconciliation process is complicated not only by disputes over the financial
rewards and ownership of oil fields (such as the Kirkuk field in the North), but by
the internecine strife pitting Shia against Sunni, and Arab against Kurd, since 2003.
Iraq’s politicians also have to deal with the legacy of Baathist ‘divide and rule’,
and Saddam’s habit of exploiting sectarian, ethnic and tribal divisions in order to
bolster his regime. Even if residual suspicion between the ‘Awakening’ groups and
the Shia exile parties which hold sway under Maliki can be overcome, there are other
potential sources of destabilisation.100 For example, the Kurdish Regional
Government will not tolerate the presence of ‘Awakening’ militias in Kirkuk and
Mosul, possession of which are disputed between Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen.101
The US-led Coalition also has the tricky task of addressing Arab demands for an end
to the occupation, and the withdrawal of foreign troops, and faces the tough
challenge of both encouraging a fragile peace between Iraq’s divided communities,
while appeasing nationalist sentiment directed at the departure of Western forces.
In this respect, the competing demands, political objectives and economic interests
of Iraq’s factions show that the use of surrogates in COIN/CT is no panacea, and that
indigenous forces must be utilised with care, lest their creation and employment lead
to endemic fratricidal strife and the threat of state collapse.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr Huw Bennett, Dr Warren Chin, Dr Jonathan Hill,Ms Jessica Lincoln, Mr Bill Park and Mr Chris Tuck of the Defence Studies Department(DSD). King’s College London, for their assistance on case studies related to this article.Thanks are also due to Dr Alex Marshall of the School of Historical Studies, University ofGlasgow, for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this work. Dr NathalieWlodarczyk kindly provided a copy of her PhD thesis on the Kamajors in Sierra Leone.The analysis, opinions and conclusions expressed or implied in this article are those of theauthors and do not necessarily represent the views of the JSCSC, the Defence Academy,the Ministry of Defence (MOD) or any other UK government agency.
Notes
1. Long, ‘The Anbar Awakening’, 67–94.2. The COIN definition is taken from FM3-24, Counterinsurgency (Washington, DC:
Department of the Army, 2006) and AFM1/10, Counter Insurgency Operations(London: MoD, 2001). Charles Townshend distinguishes between anti-terrorism(defensive measures) and counter-terrorism (offensive measures), in Terrorism:A Brief Introduction, 114–139, but the authors prefer to treat these two aspects aspart of one strategy.
3. Krulak,‘The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block War’: 18–22.4. Tierney, Chasing Ghosts: Unconventional Warfare in American History, 36, 39, 53,
91–95.5. Cassidy, ‘The Long Small War: Indigenous Forces for Counterinsurgency’, 47–62;
Tierney, Chasing Ghosts, 128–129, 137–139.
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6. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, 85–86; Trench, The Frontier Scouts.7. Anglim, ‘Orde Wingate and the Special Night Squads: A Feasible Policy for
Counter-terrorism?, 28–41.8. See Warner, Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America’s Clandestine War in
Laos; Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden,from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001; Turner, The Congo Wars: Conflict,Myth and Reality.
9. Woodworth, Dirty War, Clean Hands. ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy.10. Walker, Aden Insurgency. The Savage War in South Arabia, 184–185, 190–191;
Urban, Big Boy’s Rules: The Secret Struggle against the IRA.11. Kitson, Gangs and Counter-Gangs. This was General Sir Frank Kitson’s first book.
Col. Paul Melshen (USMC Reserve), ‘Pseudo Operations: The Use by British andAmerican Forces of Deception in Counter-Insurgencies’, 10–11, 351–360;Hubbard, ‘Plague and Paradox: Militias in Iraq’, 345–362.
12. Cline, Pseudo Operations, passim; Melshen, ‘Pseudo Operations’, passim. See alsoMelshen, ‘Pseudo Ops: Defeating Insurgents from Within’, 98–101. PaddyWoodworth comments on the lack of academic attention to pseudo and counter-gangs in his review of Beckett’s Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies,in Survival, 43, no. 4 (Winter 2001):157–158.
13. See Moyar, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counter-terrorism in Vietnam, 91–96, 214–218, 225, 353–354.
14. ‘Turkey reluctantly prepares for attack on Kurds’, The Independent on Sunday,28 October 2007; Cline, Pseudo Operations, 14; ‘Police role in Algerian killingsexposed’, The Observer, 11 January 1998.
15. Urban, Big Boy’s Rules, 101; ‘Al Qaeda leaders admit: “We are in crisis. There’spanic and fear”’, The Times, 11 February 2008; ‘Bin Laden says mistakes made inIraq’, Jane’s Terrorism & Security Monitor–Asia, 6 November 2007, 1–3.
16. Grivas, Guerrilla Warfare and EOKA’s Struggle (London: Longman 1964), 42;Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence,574–578.
17. O’Brien, ‘Special Forces for Counter-Revolutionary Warfare: The South AfricanCase’, 79– 80.
18. FM3-24, section C21; Tripodi, ‘Peacemaking through Bribes or Cultural Empathy?The Political Officer and Britain’s Strategy towards the North-West Frontier’;‘Outrage over betrayal of Iraqi interpreters’, The Times, 7 August 2007.
19. Chin, ‘Examining the Application of British Counterinsurgency Doctrine by theAmerican Army in Iraq’, 4; Bennett, ‘The Other Side of the COIN: Minimum andExemplary Force in British Army Counterinsurgency in Kenya’, 638–639.
20. Trinquier, Modern Warfare. See also General Paul Aussaresses’ highlycontroversial 2006 memoir The Battle of the Casbah.
21. On Abu Ghraib and other abuse cases, see Ricks, Fiasco: The American MilitaryAdventure in Iraq, 270–282, 290–297.
22. Moyar, Phoenix, 64–68; Peretz, Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising, 90–91; ‘Infor-mer in pay of Israel unbowed by brother’s bloody fate’, The Guardian, 4 August 2004.
23. See Toolis, Rebel Hearts: Journeys Within the IRA’s Soul, 195; Taylor, Brits: TheWar against the IRA, 270–277; Urban, Big Boys’ Rules, 227–237. ‘The leader, hisdriver and the driver’s handler: Chauffeur recruited as MI5 agent’, The Guardian,9 February 2008.
24. Moyar, Phoenix, 70–5. Although proclaiming amnesties for those whocollaborated with the British and the RUC, the IRA usually executed so-called‘touts’. See Collins (with McGovern) Killing Rage, 200–204, 216–218.
25. For a memoir by an FRU veteran, see Lewis, Fishers of Men; Baer, See No Evil, 104.
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26. Conversation with US Special Forces officer, 19 December 2007; Freedman,The Transformation of Strategic Affairs, 90–91.
27. Alexander and Keiger, ‘France and the Algerian War: Strategy, Operations andDiplomacy’, 6–7.
28. Mahadevan, ‘Counter Terrorism in the Indian Punjab: Assessing the ‘Cat’ System’,19–54.
29. Taylor, Brits, 128–37; Urban, Big Boys’ Rules, 36–37, 101. See Harnden,‘Bandit Country’: The IRA and South Armagh.
30. The quote comes from ‘Kurtz’, a Mossad officer in le Carre, The Little DrummerGirl, 250. Although a work of fiction, it illustrates some of the issues raised inthis paper.
31. Taylor, Brits, 288–94; John Ware, ‘Time to come clean over the army’s role in the“Dirty War”’, New Statesman, 24 April 1998, 15–17.
32. Anderson and Killingray, Policing and Decolonization: Nationalism, Politics andthe Police, 1917–65, 208; Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency: From Palestineto Northern Ireland, 121; Walker, Aden Insurgency, 141–145, 245, 254–255.
33. Hodes and Sedra, The Search for Security in Post-Taliban Afghanistan, 72–73;Hashim, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq, 132–133.
34. McCuen, The Art of Counter-revolutionary War, 107; Joes, Resisting Rebellion.The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency, 105–121.
35. Downes, ‘Draining the Sea by Filling the Graves: Investigating the Effectiveness ofIndiscriminate Violence as a Counterinsurgency Strategy’, 420–444; Herring andRangwala, Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and its Legacy, 180–181.
36. Greenhill and Staniland, ‘Ten Ways to Lose a Counterinsurgency’, 402–419;Kitson, Bunch of Five, 294–295.
37. Maley, The Afghanistan Wars, 13–15, 170–171; Rubin, The Fragmentation ofAfghanistan, 158–161; Ives, US Special Forces and Counterinsurgency in Vietnam.
38. Porch, ‘Bugeaud, Gallieni, Lyautey: The Development of French ColonialWarfare’, 380–392; McCuen, Counter-Revolutionary War, 107–111; Joes,Resisting Rebellion, 109–110.
39. Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, 254–255. Anderson,Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire, 240–241.
40. Marks, ‘Thailand; Anatomy of a Counterinsurgency’, 35–52. See also, by the sameauthor, Maoist Insurgency Since Vietnam, 68–69.
41. ‘Kagame under siege’, Africa Confidential (AC), 42/13, 29 June 2001; ‘Sudan targetsCentral Africa’, AC, 47/24, 1 December 2006; ‘Warriors by proxy’, AC, 48/13,22 June 2007; ‘The Ogaden’s Trickling Sands’, AC, 48/19, 21 September 2007.
42. Cilliers, Counter-Insurgency in Rhodesia, 203–204; Kaiser, American Tragedy,152; Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam,183–184, 308.
43. Moyar, Phoenix, passim; Joes, Resisting Rebellion, 114–116; Gilbert, ‘The Cost ofLosing the “Other War” in Vietnam’, in ibid. (ed.), Why the North Won the VietnamWar, 177, 195, fn.81.
44. ‘Iraqi villagers battle to hold off Al-Qaeda’, Sunday Times, 23 December 2007;Marks, Maoist Insurgency, 279–280.
45. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 124–127, 241–243. See also Anderson,‘Surrogates of the State: Collaboration and Atrocity in Kenya’s Mau Mau War’,in Kassimeris, The Barbarisation of Warfare, 159–174.
46. Williams, Patriots and Partisans; Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 239–241.47. Dalloz, The War in Indochina, 1945–54, 109–111; Horne, Savage War, 223,
387–397; Faivre, ‘La Bataille en Guerre Revolutionnaire. Algerie 1954–1962’, 212.
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48. ‘Death of a Tiger’, The Economist, 10 November 2007; ‘In the front line of Putin’ssecret war’, Daily Telegraph, 27 March 2007; ‘The warlord and the spook’,The Economist, 31 May 2007.
49. Reid-Daly, Pamwe Chete: The Legend of the Selous Scouts, 354–359; Cilliers,Counter-Insurgency, 204–215.
50. Biddle, ‘Allies, Airpower and Modern Warfare: The Afghan Model in Afghanistanand Iraq’, 161–176; Giustozzi, ‘Auxiliary Force or National Army? Afghanistan’s“ANA” and the Counter-Insurgency effort, 2002–2006’, 45–67.
51. Joes, Resisting Rebellion, 32, 118–120; Evans, ‘Documents implicate ColombianGovernment in Chiquita Terror Scandal’, National Security Archives ElectronicBriefing Book, No. 17, http://www.gwu.edu/,nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB217/index.htm.
52. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies, 248; Gberie, A Dirty War in West Africa: The RUFand the Destruction of Sierra Leone, 14–15, 83–86.
53. Tierney, Chasing Ghosts, 62–70; Vatchagaev, ‘The Increasingly Deadly Strugglefor Power between Kadyrov and Alkhanov’, Chechnya Weekly, 7/37 (28 September2006), online at http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid¼2372587; Anna Politkovskaya, ‘Karatel’nii Sgovor’ (‘A Punitive Agreement’),Novaya Gazeta, 28 September 2006.
54. ‘Between peace and justice’, The Economist, 21 July 2005; ‘The perils of“parapolitics”’, The Economist, 22 March 2007; Rushby, ‘The opium warlords’,116–122; Wright, ‘The changing structure of the Afghan opium trade’, 6–14.
55. First Report of the Independent Monitoring Commission, 20 April 2004, 29–33,online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/20_04_04_imcreport.pdf;Knights, ‘Increased factional fighting pulls Basra towards chaos’, 38–43.
56. Horne, Savage War, 255–257. Tripp, A History of Iraq, 163, 234, 256.57. Marshall, ‘Managing Withdrawal: Afghanistan as the Forgotten Example in
Attempting Conflict Resolution and State-Building’, 68–89.58. ICG Middle East Report No. 67, Where is Iraq heading? Lessons from Basra
(25 June 2007), 14–17; ‘Short of kit, short of support: how the Army failed inBasra’, The Times, 18 March 2008.
59. American reporter Bernard Fall (1926–67) makes this point in his introduction toTrinquier, Modern War, viii; Horne, Savage War, 538.
60. Lewis, Operation Certain Death, 302, 402–403. See also Wlodarczyk, ‘Magic andWar: The Role of Ritual and Traditional Belief in the Kamajor Civil DefenceForces in Sierra Leone and Beyond’.
61. Hoffman, ‘The Meaning of a Militia: Understanding the Civil Defence Forces ofSierra Leone’, 639–662; ‘Courting disaster’, Africa Confidential 47/8, 14 April2006; ‘Hinga’s death hits home’, Africa Confidential 48/5, 2 March 2007.
62. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 253–254.63. On Rwanda see Gen. Romeo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil. Judah, Kosovo:
War and Revenge, 245–249; ‘Glittering towers in a war zone’, The Economist,9 December 2006.
64. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 29–65, 135–139; Connor, Ghost Force: The Secret Historyof the SAS, 150, 164; Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 257–269, 284–290.
65. Melshen, Pseudo Operations, 122–132; Moyar, Phoenix, 108–110, 166–169.Cann, Counterinsurgency in Africa: The Portuguese Way of War, 1961–1974,96–102.
66. Moyar, Phoenix, 294–295, 371; Kitson, Gangs, 121. Maj.-Gen. T. Creasey(Commander SAF) to Sultan Qaboos bin Said, 4 January 1973, DEFE11/759, TheNational Archives of the United Kingdom (TNAUK). Jeapes, SAS Secret War, 38.
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67. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 284–286; Jones, SAS: The First Secret Wars,72–84; Melshen, ‘Pseudo Ops’, 99.
68. McCann, Counterinsurgency, 102, 232; Connor, Ghost Force: The Secret Historyof the SAS, 164; Jeapes, Secret War, 39; LM/MO2/210/76, Minute by Col. W.J.Read, 30 January 1974, DEFE24/573, TNAUK.
69. Jeapes, Secret War, 39. Minute by H. Blanks (UK Ministry of Defence), 3 June1974, DEFE11/737, TNAUK; de la Billiere, Looking for Trouble, 267–268.
70. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 298; O’Ballance, Malaya: The Communist Insurgent War,1948–1960, 126. Heather, ‘Intelligence and Counter-Insurgency in Kenya,1952–56’, 77.
71. Dale, ‘A Comparative Reconsideration of the Namibian Bush War, 1966–89’, 201.John W. Turner, Continent Ablaze: The Insurgency Wars in Africa 1960 to thePresent, 39, 77–78.
72. Sanders, Apartheid’s Friends. The Rise and Fall of South Africa’s Secret Service,203–204.
73. Cline, ‘Pseudo operations’, 1–2;. Valeriano and Bohannan, Counter-GuerrillaOperations: The Philippines Experience, 143–145.
74. Zhukov, ‘Examining the Authoritarian Model of Counter-Insurgency: The SovietCampaign Against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army’, 449, 454; Dorril, MI6: FiftyYears of Special Operations, 278.
75. Bower, The Red Web, 148–153, 183–185, 222–223; Andrew and VasiliMitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World, 418–419.
76. Cilliers, Counter-Insurgency, 118–124. See also Reid-Daly, Pamwe Chete, anearlier version of which was published as Selous Scouts: Top Secret War. London:Galago, 1982.
77. O’Brien, ‘The Use of Assassination as a Tool of State Policy: South Africa’sCounter-Revolutionary Strategy 1979–92 (Part II), 107–142; Sanders, Apartheid’sFriends, 151, 198–219, 255–279.
78. Zhukov, ‘Authoritarian Model’, 454; Bower, Red Web, 190, 196–197; Cilliers,Counter-Insurgency, 126; Turner, Continent Ablaze, 28.
79. Connor, Ghost Force, 129–130; Cline, Pseudo Operations, 5; Reid-Daly, PamweChete, 23–24.
80. Flower, Serving Secretly, 124, 137. Sanders, Apartheid’s Friends, 325–326;Gould, ‘South Africa’s chemical and biological warfare programme 1981–1995’,35–42.
81. Reid-Daly, Pamwe Chete, passim; Flower, Serving Secretly, 124–125; Cilliers,Counter-Insurgency, 124–131; Cline, Pseudo Operations, 16.
82. Woodworth, Dirty War, 44–46, 91, 94–96, 134, 177–187, 382–399, 423–424.83. Zhukov, ‘Authoritarian Model’, 454; O’Brien, ‘Assassination’, 138; Andrew and
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Cassidy, ‘Long Small War’, 47–48.85. ‘We will spill British blood, warns Sheikh Ahmad Fartusi’, The Sunday Times,
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313–314; Hashim, Insurgency, 299–307.88. ‘Iraqi police in Basra are switching sides’, The Times, 28 March 2008; ‘What a
difference a month makes . . . ’, The Times, 25 April 2008.89. Sudan: Meet the Janjaweed, documentary broadcast on Channel 4 (UK),
1930–2000, 14 March 2008.
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90. ‘Sunni deaths threaten US alliance with sheikhs’, Sunday Telegraph, 18 November2007.
91. ‘Britain in secret talks with the Taliban’, Daily Telegraph, 27 December 2007; ‘In thedark’, The Economist, 1 February 2008; ‘Afghan Leader criticises US on Conduct ofWar’, New York Times, 26 April 2008.
92. ‘Right at the Edge’, New York Times Magazine, 7 September 2008; ‘A wild frontier’,The Economist, 19 September 2008.
93. ‘The final battle for Basra is near, says Iraqi general’, The Independent,20 March 2008; Knights, ‘Rebel with a pause – Sadr under pressure as truce isrenewed’, 14–18.
94. ‘America’s allies in Iraq under pressure as civil war breaks out amongst Sunni’,The Independent, 19 April 2008. ‘Le president Ramzan Kadyrov tente d’eliminer sesrivaux’, Le Monde, 18 April 2008; ‘Rival on run after standoff with Chechenpresident’, The Times, 27 April 2008.
95. ‘In Fallujah, Peace Through Brute Strength’, Washington Post, 24 March 2008.Gray, ‘Understanding the Taliban’, 24–27.
96. Long, ‘Anbar’, 85. Excerpt from interview with Sheikh Ali Hatem Suleiman(Al-Anbar Salvation Council) on Al-Arabiya television, 1 February 2008, online athttp://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1677.htm.
97. Weber, Politics as a Vocation. See also Aron, Main Currents in SociologicalThought Vol. II, 187, 233–237, 240.
98. ‘The Taliban blowback’, The Observer, 16 April 2008; ‘Militants taunt Pakistanforces’, 21 April 2008, online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7071098.stm. Synovitz, ‘Pakistan: Peace Deal Between Islamabad, Pro-TalibanMilitants Rankles US’, RFE/RL 24 April 2008, online at http://rferl.org.
99. Anderson and Stansfield, The Future of Iraq: Dictatorship, Democracy or Division?,112, 130. Synnott, Bad Days in Basra. My Time as Britain’s Man in Southern Iraq,93–94. Long, ‘Anbar’, 81–88.
100. The future loyalty of the Sunnis cannot be taken for granted. See Interview withSheik Ali Hatem on Al-Jazeera television, 23 July 2007, online at http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1547.htm.
101. ‘Une alliance politique entre chiites et sunnites irakiens contraire les ambitionsterritoriales et petrolieres kurdes’, Le Monde, 15 January 2008; ‘Un ! prince @contre Al-Qaida’, Le Monde, 15 February 2008.
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