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Critical War Theory (orig. published in Policy Review Feb-March 2012)

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/106651

February 1, 2012
policy review » no. 171 » books
Critical War Theory
by Ann Marlowe
Ann Marlowe on Between War and Peace: How America Ends Its Wars edited by Matthew Moten

Matthew Moten, ed. Between War and Peace: How America Ends Its Wars. Free Press. 371 Pages. $27.99.

Looking at war only from the soldier’s perspective, says Roger Spiller in the keynote essay in this collection, would be like a physician viewing an illness only from the patient’s point of view. Unpacking the metaphor leads in several interesting directions. There’s Plato’s propensity to have Socrates use the physician as an example. There’s the notion of war as an illness, soldiers as patients, and critics as doctors. And there is the direction Spiller takes the thought: to argue that war today is limited war, a kind the soldier does not like to fight, a kind that seems like “playing with his life.” But Spiller summarizes, “The soldier’s perspective might serve him well, but that is not to say it advances our knowledge of war equally well.”

It is rare — and somewhat perilous — in military circles for a theorist to say that the soldier’s viewpoint is not the one that counts. And Spiller — one of the founders of the Combat Studies Institute of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College — is writing here on behalf of the Army.

Between War and Peace is a project of tradoc, the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, and was commissioned by then-tradoc Chief General Martin E. Dempsey, and edited by a West Point professor, Colonel Matthew Moten. tradoc recruits and trains American soldiers, so it is fair to infer that Between War and Peace, published January 2011by the Free Press, represents at least a range of approved military opinion. And as Spiller’s essay suggests, the collection trembles most interestingly on the edge of the abyss of postmodernism. (First they came for the artists; then they came for the English professors, and now, they’ve come for military theorists.)

Each of the fifteen chapters here is worth reading, offering an unexpected light on wars we think we know. But many of the contributors — and especially Spiller and Andrew Bacevich, who wrote the final essay — go much further. They raise issues about the discipline of military history itself, and of military strategy, and what we can know as we practice these disciplines. None of the writers disappears down a conceptual rabbit hole (though I was worried for Bacevich sometimes) but each of the authors stirs up doubts and disturbing questions.

It should come as no surprise that there is ambiguity even in the aim of the collection. The ostensible topic is “war termination,” and you are forgiven for not knowing quite what that is. Spiller notes that in the last twenty years only two articles on “war termination” have been published in the professional military journals. The phrase itself appeared during the First World War — a conflict notable for feeling interminable to the combatants.

What is “war termination”? The study of how wars end, shorn of many of the assumptions of past generations, and even of their vocabulary:

Today you will search in vain for any definition of victory in American military doctrine. Exactly when the classical ideal of victory disappeared from official doctrine is an open question, but its absence invites the thought that at some time in the recent past, victory, which so long dominated military thought and practice, lost some of its official appeal.

Spiller argues that our wars have had more equivocal outcomes than most people realize. Or as one social networking site’s option for describing one’s personal life says, “it’s complicated.” And this, in a nutshell, is the message of Between War and Peace. This is not your father’s military history, even if the tradocwebsite insists, “Victory Starts Here!”

Given the current state of affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan, a cynic might think it a very convenient message indeed. Publish a book that amplifies the ambivalence of former wars, so that today’s wars appear as part of a continuum rather than unpleasantly novel failures or quasi-failures. But Between War and Peace (which confusingly shares a title with an unrelated 2004 collection of essays by Victor Davis Hanson) didn’t come into being that way. When commissioned in the summer of 2009 it was intended as a successor to an influential 1986 collection called America’s First Battles, a fine but very straightforward book without a pomo bone in its body.

In the preface to First Battles, the editors — a lieutenant colonel and a brigadier general — explained that the book was designed to test “the assumption that it makes a great deal of difference how the U.S. Army prepares in peacetime, mobilizes for war, fights its first battle, and subsequently adapts to the exigencies of combat.” The editors found “significant patterns” in the ten first battles described. And perhaps the Army was prescient; the years after the book’s publication had first battles enough — Panama in 1989, the Gulf War, and American interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

But Between War and Peace has plunged into much deeper waters than First Battles. Indeed Colonel Moten’s preface never mentions the earlier book. He explained by email, “We started the project with afb in mind, but I quickly decided to downplay the connection for a number of reasons. We don’t have an agreement with the afb authors to make such a pairing. We didn’t want to be artificially bound by a certain format. Finally, we have produced a book that is quite different from afb, and I felt that it should stand on its own.”

Between War and Peace stands on its own, and possibly alone. General Dempsey says in his foreword that the book is “ a wholly original and important contribution to military history and theory,” and he is correct. This might be the first official publication of the American Army where the chilly wind of postmodern uncertainty is not only acknowledged, but embraced. The cultural context is just a bit different. General Dempsey was interviewed on the marathon meetings held by tradocto write the Army’s new doctrine. He quoted Mark Twain rather than Lacan, but nevertheless sounded pretty literary: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

It’s easy to divine many of the Army’s preoccupations and its likely worries about the future from this volume. Many of the people involved with Between War and Peace are central to the Army’s intellectual life. Dempsey is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, a Ph.D. in history at tradoc, also involved with developing this volume, is working for his mentor General David Petraeus in Kabul. Contributor Con Crane, a West Point classmate of Petraeus, Director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute at the Army War College, was the lead author of the Army’s 2006 Counterinsurgency Field Manual, commonly known as Petraeus’s coinmanual.

There’s a uniformity of structure to most of the essays that suggests a strong editorial hand, and as we shall see, certain themes run through the collection. But there is by no means a uniformity of opinion. Like any wise old bureaucracy, the Army hedges its bets — or, perhaps, keeps its friends close and its enemies closer. Several of the essayists are known to be sharply critical of the way we have fought our recent wars. One of the most controversial contributors, Colonel Gian Gentile, writes here on the Vietnam War, but he has become famous even outside the military for his outspoken criticism of the Army’s embrace of counterinsurgency. Andrew Bacevich, a retired colonel, is also known as a fierce opponent of our involvements in Iraq (where he lost an officer son) and Afghanistan.

Moten teasingly writes in his introduction that his team “agreed to try to avoid analyzing the problems of the past through the lens of current concerns,” but adds that the reader “is under no such obligation.” Many contributors offer surprisingly harsh and sometimes revisionist views of American strategies. Brian McAllister Linn suggestively describes American commanders in the Philippine War of 1898–1902as “focusing on winning the battle and ignoring the consequences. Fixated on tactics and operations they gave little thought to how this might achieve the nation’s strategic objectives.”
Several contributors find that what happens in an occupation, or afterwards, turns the war’s ostensible results on their head. The Seminole War’s hero was not the U.S. colonel who finished the war — but Seminole chief Osceola.

One pervasive theme is the frequency with which American troops have undertaken occupation duties, including governance. When Joseph Dawson discusses General Winfield Scott’s administration of a prostrate Mexico in the fall of 1847, he mentions “the truism that there are seldom enough troops available during postwar occupations” and describes, without editorializing, Scott’s sensible and thorough efforts to keep order.

Theodore Wilson writes of the American occupation of Germany as poorly planned, attacking the “myth of Germany as the model for military occupations.” He states that a map of security incidents in January 1946 “could easily be confused with a U.S. Central Command map of Iraq in 2006.” German recidivist Werewolf insurgents killed “between 3,000 and 5,000” Allied and German citizens in the months following May 1945.

Several contributors find that what happens in an occupation, or afterwards, turns the war’s ostensible results on their head. The Seminole War’s hero turned out not to be the U.S. colonel who finished the war — but Seminole chief Osceola, whose fame lives on in many place names today. Joseph Glatthaar argues that “Southern whites lost the [Civil] war but won much of the peace.” Peter Maslowski takes the idea of a “300 Year War” against Native Americans from an unnamed Chinese general speaking at the Command and General Staff College. The War of 1812, says Wayne Lee, helped “cement the myth of American exceptionalism and . . . an imagined virtuous invincibility.” This although American efforts were often startlingly inept. And Spiller suggests that historians of the future will see World Wars I and II as a single conflict, inevitable because of the “less-than-complete victory sealed by the Treaty of Versailles.”

A second theme is the American Army’s curious reluctance to develop doctrine for irregular warfare. It was always supposed to be the exception, though it looks from this collection as though it were the rule. Two of the essays deal with the Indian wars, one with the Mexican War (in the aftermath of which General Scott governed Mexico), one with the Philippine War, one with Vietnam, and one with the aftermath of the first Gulf War. That’s five wars with considerable irregular or insurgent elements out of fourteen in all. We fought some of these irregular wars — in the Philippines in 1902, the Mexican War, some of the Indian wars — wisely, if not according to today’s laws of war. Yet no one thought to analyze our rather extensive experience for future use. And there’s hardly a greater intellectual sin among the military than failing to register “lessons learned.”

A third theme is the superiority of professional to amateur (in the time period of the book, mainly militia) soldiers and the gradual progress of the American Army from a barely unified group of militias under Washington to a fully professional, cohesive force. There’s rarely a good word to be found here about militias, which were favored by the Founding Fathers because of their fear of standing armies. We read how amateurs refuse battle, rape and plunder, and simply don’t fight well. On first glance, this isn’t a current issue. Maybe it’s ammunition stored for future disputes contrasting conscription versus today’s volunteer force. The Army’s preference for professionals — in my view, a mistake — has had far-reaching and sometimes debatable consequences. For instance, although Afghanistan had a tradition of military conscription, after 2001the U.S. set up the Afghan Army as a volunteer force. Ever since, we’ve struggled against attrition, while American boys die doing a job that is arguably the task of Afghan boys.

Gentile told me that Spiller, the author of many books, has had a “huge influence on the Army’s intellectual life” since the early 1980s. So it is well worth looking at Spiller’s six “general propositions about the history of American war termination and its implications for the conduct of modern limited war”:

Wars are defined by their limitations, with “absolute” and “total” war and “total” victory “theoretical abstractions”;
Their original aims are constantly revised;
The aims of all sides “gradually converge toward an agreement to stop fighting”;
This convergence is not only the result of what happens on the battlefield;
The conduct of war is increasingly public; and
Rather than looking at “decisive” battles, we should look at “terminal” battles, those which influence how a war ends.

Spiller cautions that these propositions may seem counterintuitive to soldiers, who are trained to use overwhelming force to eliminate a threat. Perhaps numbers three and six are the most paradoxical.

The third proposition presents war as a conversation, like a symphony in which opposed themes are brought to resolution. (I also think of psychoanalysis, but that is probably a bridge too far.) Yet Spiller also harks back to the founder of Western military theory, quoting Clausewitz on war as “a continuous interactionof opposites.” It’s usually a good bet that no matter how paradoxical a proposition a military theorist raises, Clausewitz got to it first.

The sixth point is a bit confusing, but worth pursuing. “Any side can fight a decisive campaign or even a succession of them and still be defeated.”

By contrast a terminal campaign may exercise an influence over the outcome of a war neither side intends, not does it derive from military action alone. A terminal campaign is strategically important; it plays a role in educating both sides about how much — or how little — their efforts can accomplish.

For example, Spiller says Gettysburg was arguably a decisive battle, but the Civil War still continued for two years. The results “were not sufficient to convince hundreds of thousands of soldiers and the governments that commanded them to stop fighting.” The Tet Offensive, on the other hand, occurred seven years before the Vietnam War’s last battle, but “exercised the greatest influence over how the war would end.”

The “endings” discussed in the book are not just of particular wars but of what Spiller terms, quoting the late military historian Russell Weigley, “the history of usable combat.” Weigley wrote that back in 1973, but Spiller argues that “the age of modern limited war” began with the Korean War — which ended in an armistice, peace still not having been declared.

Today, Spiller argues, a war “must be more precisely attuned to the limited objectives for which it is being fought — limited objectives that must be precisely defined as well.” This gets at a paradox obvious not only to American war-fighters but to the Afghan villagers who are the supposed prize in our counterinsurgency. How can it be that the U.S. has such military might yet cannot defeat the ragtag insurgent bands? It’s a question of deciding what our objectives are — and that is something that grows harder and harder the more sophisticated a society is. As the philosopher Stanley Cavell has argued, one of the key problems of modern art is figuring out what satisfies us. It may be that the same is true of modern war.

Spiller writes, “The immense military power of the United States is no guarantee that it can seize and sustain the strategic and operational initiative, and steering a war toward a desirable end is no small task even in the most favorable circumstances.”

And so we come to Bacevich’s brilliant but maddening final essay, on the First and Second Gulf Wars. He sums up the problem as well as anyone: “The Anglo-American invasion of 2003transformed Iraq from a crumbling dictatorship into a failed state.” Why, he asks, has our involvement in Iraq “proven to be so interminable?” Because our policymakers first “misconstrued the problem” and then “devised inappropriate solutions,” which in turn “exacerbated actual problems to which Washington has remained steadfastly oblivious.”

You don’t need to agree with Bacevich — I don’t follow him all the way — to admire the clarity of his vision and the logic of his reasoning. And you don’t have to disagree with Bacevich to be frustrated by the elliptical nature of his essay and his unwillingness to admit into his discourse the possibility that he could be wrong.

Bacevich argues that two assumptions have governed American policy in the Persian Gulf. The first is that stability consists in “fostering a balance of power congenial to the United States.” But the U.S. has tried to manage that balance, and to change the nature of Gulf states. Still, it has always assumed that the Middle East, like other parts of the world, “consists of a more or less fixed number of legitimate states governed by more or less legitimate governments.” The second assumption is that American activism reduces conflict and advances American interests. “Bluntly, the phrase balance of powerwas a code word for hegemony.”

These two assumptions are false, Bacevich argues. Our exertions “have served not to reduce but to enflame the sources of conflict.” The Islamic world is different, he says, in ways that made our application of methods that worked elsewhere “not only irrelevant but even counterproductive.” In words that could not be more relevant as I write, Bacevich notes the “refusal of the West to allow the people of the Islamic world to determine their own fate in their own way.”

I am less in accord with his next sentence: “And that refusal contributed mightily to the rise of violent anti-Western Islamism.” The “Arab awakening” taking place now suggests that many Muslims know that the conversation they need to have is among themselves, not with us. These countries too are crossing the divide into the dizzying postmodern world of uncertain, fractured perceptions, and unknown desires. The Islamism of twenty years from now is unlikely to look like today’s. For one thing, Islamists — and Muslims in general — are less likely to know what they want, what would satisfy them. Victory may prove as elusive a concept for them as for us.
Ann Marlowe, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, blogs for World Affairs. Her biography of David Galula is available as a free download at http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute. army.mil/pubs/.

Posted in Perspectival Culture and COIN, US military and COIN | No Comments »

Afghan Noir: review of Michael Hastings’ “The Operators” in The Daily

Monday, January 9th, 2012

http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/01/08/010812-opinions-books-hastings-marlowe-1-3/

Opinion: Afghan noir

Atmospherics stand in for solid reporting on America’s effort to stop the insurgency

By Ann Marlowe Sunday, January 8, 2012

“The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan”
by Michael Hastings
Blue Rider Press, $14.99

Selfishly, I wish “The Operators” were a better book. Though we come from different places in the political spectrum, Michael Hastings shares many of my views on Afghanistan and has the notoriety to bring them to a wide audience.

Was the surge a mistake, increasing levels of violence? Yes. Has the American effort to train the Afghan army and police been an unbelievably expensive boondoggle? Check. Did the American military’s toleration of thugs like Ahmed Wali Karzai and Border Police Gen. Raziq help fuel the insurgency? Yes. Was former commanding Gen. David Petraeus more concerned with managing perceptions than reality? Check. Was his predecessor Stanley McChrystal an amoral mediocrity in way over his head? We agree there too.

Furthermore, Hastings has the guts to let the chips fall where they may — as he did in the June 2010 Rolling Stone profile of then-commanding general McChrystal that quickly led to his firing.

But “The Operators” is a mess. Someone came up with the bad idea of having Hastings interlard an expanded version of the McChrystal material with a potted history of the Obama administration’s deliberations on the Afghan war. This was made worse by putting the McChrystal sections in the past tense and the history in the present tense — a stale device often advocated by bad editors to bring “immediacy” to dull narratives. The end result is likely to confuse anyone whose bread and butter isn’t Afghan policy — and even they won’t learn anything here.

It would be reasonable to buy “The Operators” for more of the juicy details that made Hastings’s Rolling Stone piece so compelling. Though there’s a lot more verbiage in this 379-page book — Hastings says he taped 20-plus hours of interviews with McChrystal and his team — the nuggets are lacking. Hastings gives us details we don’t need — how the computers were set up in a command post in a hotel, a meeting with a terribly boring hotel hooker-spy, even that he was third off the plane landing in Kabul — in place of those that might have enlivened his characters. As in the Rolling Stone profile, McChrystal himself remains a shadowy figure, as the legendary special-forces operator doubtless intended.

The book’s silly subtitle — “The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan” — isn’t Hastings’s fault. But anyone who is really interested in the Obama White House debate on the war will have read Bob Woodward’s “Obama’s War,” and Hastings’ two dozen or so interviews don’t offer any new insights. Hastings strings together others’ reporting — and seems to take it all as gospel, even after correctly condemning the mainstream media’s uncritical acceptance of the military’s views — for want of having logged much time in Afghanistan himself. He might have interviewed the very knowledgeable experts at the Afghanistan Analysts Network and International Crisis Group instead.

Ironically, Hastings is guilty of the same disdain for the facts as the war boosters he justly skewers. Where they wave away statistical measures that suggest more U.S. troops cause more violence, Hastings would rather write off the whole Afghan war as a bad trip than try to explain why some tactics work and some don’t, why some parts of Afghanistan are doing well and others are horrific.

Hastings’ tone edges unhelpfully toward the hysterical when he discusses Afghanistan — he repeatedly mentions his security detail, which will only make experienced visitors smirk, and he speaks of his last trip in the fall of 2009 as one of “extreme violence.” Witnessing the aftermath of a suicide attack on an American base and being present in Kabul when a suicide attack occurs on the Ministry of Culture isn’t actually so extraordinary for a month in a war zone. “Extreme violence” is more rhetoric than accurate observation.

Hastings doesn’t specify the American base where the suicide bombing took place, but he should. It was in a district in Khost Province; I recognized the name of an officer he mentions, because I was embedded in the same district around the same time. Nor does he explain the specific reasons this suicide bombing took place — mainly because the commanders of the 101st Airborne and of the Khost Provincial Reconstruction Team made bad decisions and undid much of the good work of their predecessors. They mismanaged tribal politics, and despite some very brave Afghan leaders who died for their pains, Khost has never really recovered.

Hastings also makes confidence-diminishing mistakes. The January 2008 Taliban assault on the Serena Hotel he discusses killed six people, not two, as he claims, and he seems not to know that one was an American, Thor Hesla. This assault, also, didn’t just happen because Afghanistan is a randomly dangerous place. It may have occurred because the Norwegian Foreign Ministry was stupid enough to publish the fact that their foreign minister was staying there. WikiLeaks even suggests that the International Security Assistance Force knew months in advance that plans for an attack were in the works.

Hastings spent a short embed at what he — and no one else — calls “the Kandahar Airfield.” But he somehow messes up his description of the most famous landmark at KAF (as everyone else refers to the base). The Boardwalk isn’t a “pavilion” but a huge, four-sided wooden deck surrounded on its perimeter by stores and restaurants. McChrystal ticked off a lot of soldiers by threatening to close the fast food outlets on the boardwalk — something worth exploring because it suggests an indifference to the needs and pleasures of the lower enlisted ranks. For the reporter who ended the general’s career, Hastings hasn’t dug very deep on McChrystal. I heard that he was just as callous in Iraq, where he wanted to remove TVs from the dining facilities at U.S. bases — never mind that for those without computers or Internet access, TV was the only way for them to get the news. And since we may not have seen the last of McChrystal in the public world — he waltzed right into a Yale teaching job and corporate board memberships — it would be fair to look harder.

This could have been a much better book. Hastings can write, he’s smart and he’s not afraid to stick his neck out. But there is no substitute for spending time on the ground and getting the facts. Hastings advances various good explanations for the press’s failure to “write honestly about people in power,” but he forgets one: They’re lazy. If you’re going to call the military on their facts, you have to know the material better than they do. Most journalists would rather hang out with each other than immerse themselves in whatever country they’re supposed to be covering. Hastings seems to know better than this. But he would rather cloak the war in hipster noir than detail what went wrong. Like American commanders in Afghanistan, he is punching below his weight.

Posted in Afghanistan, Perspectival Culture and COIN, US military and COIN | No Comments »

Native Son: How could David Galula have so misunderstood the Berbers?

Friday, January 6th, 2012

Native Son

http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/87345/native-son/

A Tunisia-born Jew and French officer who fought the Berbers in Algeria pioneered the counterinsurgency warfare still used in Iraq and Afghanistan

By Ann Marlowe|January 5, 2012 7:00 AM

David Galula, a Tunisia-born Jew and French military officer who has been dead more than 40 years, was the greatest single influence on American counterinsurgency practice in Iraq and Afghanistan after Gen. David Petraeus. The idea that winning the population’s loyalty, not winning territory, is the key to quelling an insurgency has roots dating back 200 years to the Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz, but Galula was the conduit through which the U.S. Army learned it. The notion of active patrolling of hostile cities, of dispersing U.S. forces in small groups rather than stationing them on large bases, the insistence on getting to know the local culture—all these are Galula’s ideas.

His precepts, developed from his two years as a company commander in Algeria between 1956 and 1958, became American doctrine through two books. The authors of the U.S. Army counterinsurgency field manual [1] FM 3-24, of whom the most famous is Petraeus, cite one: “Of the many books that were influential in the writing of Field Manual 3-24, perhaps none was as important as David Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare.” But Galula’s other book [2], Pacification in Algeria, written for the RAND Corporation in 1962 and classified until 2005, is the more useful book for the soldier and the more interesting for the military historian.

Pacification gives a nearly week-by-week account of how Galula implemented his theories in a tiny, mountainous area of Algeria’s Kabyle region. The Kabyle is 100 percent Berber, to use the old word—or Amazigh, to use the word Berbers call themselves—and it was a hotbed of the insurgency. Galula admits that the two officers who followed him in command were both quickly killed by the insurgents. Yet he suggests that his ideas were taken up by French generals and resulted in tactical successes in the Algerian war. Of course, France lost that war, but in Pacification Galula emphasizes, correctly, that the Algerian revolutionaries had largely been defeated when Charles de Gaulle decided for political reasons to give Algeria its independence. Given Galula’s importance in recent years, it was only a matter of time before someone would try to revisit the historical record and assess his actual achievements.

Galula in Algeria [3], by Grégor Mathias, takes a deep dive in the French military archives to examine, almost day by day and village by village, what Galula accomplished and how his area fared after he left. (It is such a deep dive that only military historians will want to join in.) Unfortunately, the book is marred by what may have been unclear syntax in the French original, which I haven’t seen, and a sloppy translation. The reader’s confidence is undermined by small errors throughout (“it was to Galula to conduct counterpropaganda,” reads one). In the crucial “Conclusions” chapter, there are sentences that make no sense: “The main criticisms of Galula’s tactics, having never been compared against the archival record and are more focused on the simplicity of its methods with respect to other, more elaborate French counterinsurgency doctrine thinkers.”

Sadly, Mathias is also cavalier with extrapolations from material I know well. He frequently cites a magazine article I published on Galula and my biographical study [4] of Galula for the Army War College, but he loosely interprets and re-transmits the details. To take one case, where I wrote that Galula “apparently met” Samuel Griffith, a translator of Mao: Mathias has “Galula knew Griffith well.” This does not inspire confidence in his use of other sources.

As to the larger points—Was Galula effective? Did he report his results accurately?—Mathias finds that Galula was just as likely to gloss over his failures and trumpet successes as most of the rest of us. He also convincingly suggests that despite some military successes and an impressive decrease in violence, Galula never eradicated the political substructure of the insurgency in his area.

I would suggest that Galula’s inconclusive results stem from an obvious error that the French officer made that neither I nor Mathias noticed. I understand it now because I recently spent a lot of time among Berbers in Libya, where tensions with the Arab majority are similar to those in Algeria. Put simply, the Kabyles don’t like the Arabs very much—and the best way to get them to go over to the French side might have been to capitalize on the ethnic, religious, and linguistic tension between the two groups.

Galula, along with every French commander in Algeria I’ve read about, missed the elephant in the room: If the French had been able to drive a wedge between the roughly 30 percent of Algerians who are Berbers and the Arab majority, they might have stopped the insurgency in its tracks. The potential of this idea is confirmed by the fact that the newly independent Algeria quickly set about oppressing its Kabyle citizens. One of the first acts of the new Algerian government was eliminating Berber studies at Algiers University in 1962. It was forbidden to name children traditional Tamazight names, and the Berber radio station was limited to four hours of broadcasting daily. In a country 30 percent Berber, the study of the Berber language was banned [5] at the national university.

While the Kabyle produced a disproportional number of revolutionary leaders—and casualties—many were marginalized or slain by the Arabs in the 1960s. Meanwhile, the Algerian government built mosques throughout the Kabyle in towns that had never had them, including some that were and are Christian. This campaign was so unpopular that some Kabyle separatist leaders, like the exiled Ferhat Mehenni, openly support [6] recognizing Israel.

Continue reading: Born and bred in North Africa [7]

The “Berber Spring” of 1980, which culminated in a bloody government crackdown, was the point of no return for the Kabyle. In 1994 and ’95, 10 million Kabyles kept their children out of school to protest the Arab-only curriculum. Since 1981, autonomy or even independence for the Kabyle has been a popular, if not successful, cause.

There are at least three obvious points of tension between North African Berbers/Amazigh and Arabs. The first is over the historical fact of the Arab conquest. Every Berber I have met has told me that Amazigh were the original inhabitants of North Africa and that all of that land was once theirs. As one Libyan Amazigh told me, “I’m tired of hearing about the Palestinians and how the Jews took their land. What about how the Arabs took our land?”

There is also the fact that the official language of all the North African countries is Arabic—yet in Morocco 60 percent of the population are Tamazight or Berber-speaking, in Algeria 30 percent, and in Libya perhaps 10 percent. In most of North Africa, the Arabophone majority has suppressed or (in the case of Qaddafi’s Libya) outright prohibited the use of Tamazight, a language that is estimated to be anywhere from 2,200 to 3,000 years old; its tiffinagh script has more than 30 letters, differing somewhat from region to region, and some of them look like ancient Greek.

The third clear point of conflict is religious. Many Amazigh are at pains to distinguish between their moderate Islam and the intolerance sometimes found among their Arab neighbors. This Galula recognized [8] in Pacification:

Of all the people of North Africa, they are the least influenced by Islam. They do observe the main religious rites such as the annual month-long fast, but not in a rigid way. The local Moslem priest has little moral or temporal authority.

Almost all Berbers will readily acknowledge that their ancestors were either Christian or Jewish before they became Muslim. Galula hints at this in a footnote, “St. Augustin was a Kabyle. Kabylia was Christianized before the Arab invasion.”

The French should have pressed hard on all three points of tension. They should have told the Berbers that they would be trampled in a new, professedly Arab and Muslim state, as in fact happened. They should have encouraged identity politics to alarm the Arab Algerians. They should have told the Berbers that the Arabs were fundamentalists and told the Arabs that the Berbers were secularists, both of which are exaggerations with a strong kernel of truth. (Even today the Kabyles accuse [9] the Algerian military dictatorship of covertly supporting jihadi groups within the country while simultaneously telling the West that dictatorship is necessary to keep a lid on al-Qaida.)

Furthermore, Galula had an advantage over most of the other French field commanders in having been born and bred in North Africa. How could he have ignored the ethnic composition of the country in which he was fighting a fierce and protracted counterinsurgency campaign? In part, I would chalk it up to the tendency of French governments to downplay regional differences, to standardize language, and to cultivate a national, secular identity. France had fought a centuries-long battle to eradicate the use of regional dialects—a battle won only around the time of World War I.

Galula himself was not primed to value minority cultures or encourage cultural balkanization. He was an assimilated Jew whose family had embraced the possibilities of metropolitan France and its dominant secular culture. And he grew up in a time of growing anti-Semitism, when Judaism was best kept quiet. What is particularly ironic, and sad, is that Galula was also more or less a Berber himself by ancestry, a fact that he also did his best to efface.

***

David Galula was born in Sfax, Tunisia, to a Jewish family that claimed to be original to North Africa. One of Galula’s paternal first cousins, Magda Galula, told me that the family was from a town called Galula near the Libyan border, whose residents converted to Judaism 2,000 years ago. In other words, the Galulas were Berbers, or possibly a mix of Roman and Berber blood. They could have been nothing else if they were indigenous to North Africa.

But the Galula family had begun their emergence from centuries of traditional life in David’s grandfather’s time. Galula’s grandfather had been the doyen of the Jewish community of Sfax, and while his family spoke Judeo-Arabic rather than French at home, he sent his sons to French lycées, rather than the traditional Jewish schools common at the time. Galula’s father went out of his way to register David as a French citizen in 1924, when he was 5.

During Galula’s adolescence, anti-Semitism gained force in North Africa as in Europe. It was a time to keep one’s Judaism discreet. There were anti-Jewish riots in Sfax in 1932 and a pogrom that killed 23 Jews in Constantine, Algeria, in 1934. Galula went to the small, insular French military academy at Saint-Cyr, half of whose cadets were themselves the sons of officers, not exactly a philo-Semitic group just a generation after Dreyfus. Shortly after he graduated in 1939 all Jews were expelled from the French officer corps by the Vichy government. Later, Galula ignored his mother’s plan to arrange a marriage with a rich, attractive Jewish girl and married a Christian American he fell in love with while they were both working in China.

Re-reading Pacification in Algeria with Berber identity in mind, Galula’s willful blindness leaps out:

The Kabyles are aborigines belonging to the same Berber stock as the Schleuhs in Morocco.

They have their own language, quite different from Arabic, but it is only a spoken one, for they never developed a writing system.

How could Galula not know that the Berbers had a written language? His home town of Sfax is the nearest big city to Djerba, which is Berber, and to the Libyan coast inhabited by Berbers. (There was of course no “Libya” when Galula was a child.) Galula spent his teenage years in Morocco, a majority Berber country that has been the first to encourage a revival of the written language. Galula repeatedly refers to the Kabyles as illiterate: It is possible that the Kabyles he met had lost their ancient script, but it is also possible that they were literate in Tamazight—the written language Galula seemed to think didn’t exist.

Galula’s attitude toward the Kabyle whose loyalty he was trying to win was ambivalent: contempt leavened with grudging admiration for some features of the culture:

In spite of some intermarriage with Arabs, they have generally retained their distinct physical and intellectual features. Kabyles have a primitive yet definite talent for organizing, which puts them far above the Arabs in this respect. They have also an amazing sense of dialectic, which often put to shame some of my young officers when they thought they could press a fuzzy propaganda line on the villagers.

Perhaps, like the minority group Galula was a part of—the Jews—the Kabyles had had plenty of practice in arguing for their dignity and their rights. But perhaps because Galula was not given to emphasizing his Jewishness, he did not get the Kabyles’ passionate sense of their own identity.

The French blindness to Kabyle identity was tragic. It is arguable that the Algerian revolution worked out badly for all of Algeria, but still more so for the Kabyle. Meanwhile, Galula spun a brilliant theory that resonates with military strategists to this day—yet he ignored obvious facts about his particular area of operations that he was uniquely equipped to exploit, had he been open to seeing them plain. The lesson of Galula and the French in the Kabyle may be: Whatever a leader or a nation tries hardest to suppress in itself is likely to rise up and defeat it. It is too soon to diagnose the parallel issues for the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they are surely there.

Posted in Music and Cultural Criticism, Perspectival Culture and COIN, The Arab Revolt, Islam, Iraq War, War on Terror, US military and COIN | No Comments »

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