(Ivan Arreguin-Toft) How The Weak Win Wars A Theo
(Ivan Arreguin-Toft) How The Weak Win Wars A Theo
(Ivan Arreguin-Toft) How The Weak Win Wars A Theo
How do the weak win wars? The likelihood of victory and defeat in asymmetric conflicts depends on the interaction of the strategies weak and strong actors use. Using statistical and in-depth historical analyses of conflicts spanning two hundred years, Ivan Arregun-Toft shows that, independent of regime type and weapons technology, the interaction of similar strategic approaches favors strong actors, while opposite strategic approaches favor the weak. This new approach to understanding asymmetric conflicts allows us to makes sense of how the United States was able to win its war in Afghanistan (2002) in a few months, while the Soviet Union lost after a decade of brutal war (19791989). Arregun-Tofts strategic interaction theory has implications not only for international relations theory, but for policymakers grappling with interstate and civil wars, as well as terrorism. is Fellow in the International Security Program, at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He has authored numerous conference papers and his articles have appeared in International Security and the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. He is a veteran of the US Army where he served in Augsburg, Germany as a military intelligence analyst from 1985 to 1987.
I VA N A R R E G U I N - T O F T
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Steve Smith (Managing editor) Thomas Biersteker A.J.R. Groom Louis Pauly Phil Cerny Michael Cox Kimberley Hutchings Michael Mastanduno Richard Higgott Ngaire Woods
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Steve Lamy
Cambridge Studies in International Relations is a joint initiative of Cambridge University Press and the British International Studies Association (BISA). The series will include a wide range of material, from undergraduate textbooks and surveys to research-based monographs and collaborative volumes. The aim of the series is to publish the best new scholarship in International Studies from Europe, North America and the rest of the world.
100 Michael C. Williams The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations 99 Ivan Arregun-Toft How the Weak Win Wars A theory of asymmetric conflict 98 Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall (eds.) Power in Global Governance 97 Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach Remapping Global Politics Historys revenge and future shock 96 Christian Reus-Smit (ed.) The Politics of International Law 95 Barry Buzan From International to World Society? English School theory and the social structure of globalisation 94 K. J. Holsti Taming the Sovereigns Institutional change in international politics 93 Bruce Cronin Institutions for the Common Good International protection regimes in international society 92 Paul Keal European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples The moral backwardness of international society 91 Barry Buzan and Ole Wver Regions and Powers The structure of international security 90 A. Claire Cutler Private Power and Global Authority Transnational merchant law in the global political economy Series list continued after index
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The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521548694 # Ivan Arregun-Toft 2005 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2005 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arregun-Toft, Ivan. How the weak win wars: a theory of asymmetric conflict / Ivan Arregun-Toft. p. cm. (Cambridge studies in international relations; 99) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521-83976-9 ISBN 0-521-54869-1 (pbk.) 1. Asymmetric warfare Case studies. 2. Military history, Modern Case studies. I. Title. II. Series. U163.A776 2005 355.42 dc 22 2004058131
ISBN-13 978-0-521-83976-1 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-83976-9 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-54869-4 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-54869-1 paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
To Monica
Epigraph
Contents
List of figures Preface Acknowledgments List of abbreviations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Introduction Explaining asymmetric conflict outcomes Russia in the Caucasus: the Murid War, 18301859 Britain in Orange Free State and Transvaal: the South African War, 18991902 Italy in Ethiopia: the Italo-Ethiopian War, 19351940 The United States in Vietnam: the Vietnam War, 19651973 The USSR in Afghanistan: the Afghan Civil War, 19791989 Conclusion Appendix References Index
ix
Figures
1 Percentage of asymmetric conflict victories by type of actor, 18002003 page 3 2 Percentage of conflict victories by type of actor over time 4 3 Expected effects of strategic interaction on conflict outcomes 39 4 Strategic interaction and asymmetric conflict outcomes, 18002003 45 5 Strategic interaction and conflict outcomes when weak actor received no external support 46
Preface
This is a book about power, and how common understandings about power can lead to disaster. The term asymmetric conflict is meant to bracket the broad topic of inquiry in the fewest words and syllables yet it suffers from a whiff of academic conceit and ivory tower detachment. The real topic at hand is naked brutality. In war the primary recipients of this brutality should be soldiers. They are trained to supply it, within limits; and they expect to be injured or killed by other soldiers in the course of their duties. But nowadays wars brutality is less and less often restricted to soldiers (some would say it is a myth that it ever was). It is perhaps an unintended consequence of the attempt to use the Geneva Conventions (and subsequent instruments of international humanitarian law) to protect infants, the injured, the sick, the mentally ill, the crippled, small children, women who do not bear arms, and the elderly, that it is precisely these human beings, and not soldiers, who have increasingly become targets of knives, rifle butts, flame, and flying metal. They are targets because desperate men find it useful to shelter behind and among them, while their enemies lack either the will or the ability to strike them without also striking say, the nine-year-old girl huddled nearby. In asymmetric conflicts those in which one side is possessed of overwhelming power with respect to its adversary this is especially true. It is true because the weak are desperate. It is true also because the strong cannot abide the offense of resistance: if power demands obedience then resistance to overwhelming power supplies proof of evil or madness; and neither the evil nor the mad need be treated as fellow human beings.
xi
Preface
The real brutality of war is missing from most social science analyses of war. It is missing because we are ignorant: most of us have never directly experienced the horror whose analysis has become our lifes work. It is missing because it is necessary: to get close to the reality of our subject would be intolerable, unbearable. And some cruelties cannot be described. There are simply no words in any language capable of bearing the weight of their experience. Finally, the brutality of war is missing from most social science analyses because it is useful: it allows us to detect patterns and make generalizations that may someday persuade others to alter how conflicts are resolved to end those ongoing and to prevent them from escalating to violence alltogether. It is in this spirit I offer this analysis, flaws and all.
xii
Acknowledgments
I have read many of these acknowledgments sections over the years. They almost always strike me as alternately maudlin and boring. Mine will be no different. I was trained at the University of Chicago in the last decade of the twentieth century. It was a challenging process. One might call it benign neglect; intended designed even to enable me to recognize, frame, and answer good questions with little help beyond my own resources. To two of my mentors then, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, I owe thanks for my intellectual self-sufficiency. Like an Army Ranger I can now be dropped solo into an academic wilderness and I will always find my way, survive, and fulfill my mission. But the ability to work alone has not altered my inclination to work with others, nor in any way dulled my love of teaching. I owe thanks to more colleagues at the University of Chicago than I can list here. But for good conversations, penetrating criticism, and unstinting support I especially want to thank Ann Davies, Sharon Morris, Jordan Seng, David Michel, Kim Germain, Brett Klopp, Andy Kydd, Susan Liebell, John McCormick, Jen Mitzen, David Edelstein, and Paul Kapur. Thanks to Daniel Verdier, Charles Lipson, and especially Charles Glaser, for insightful criticism on early versions of this work, for their help in training me by example, and for their support. I also owe thanks to three men who in my view count as towering intellectuals: Peter Digeser, Bernard Manin, and Lloyd Rudolph. Without their patient efforts and generosity Id never have learned to be circumspect about what it is I think I know. For friendship and support vital to this intellectual enterprise I owe a special debt of gratitude to Tom Reisz, Ty (and Lynn) Aponte, Queta
xiii
Acknowledgments
(and Ron) Bauer, and Marvin Zonis. Each in his or her own way helped to make me a better man. Here at Harvards Kennedy School of Government I have been blessed also with outstanding criticism and support. Id especially like to thank Steve Miller, Sean Lynn-Jones, John Garofano, Arman Grigorian, and Rose McDermott. I also owe thanks to Andrew Mack, without whose originality, keen criticism, advice, and support this book would never have been possible. Thanks also to the Institute for the Study of World Politics and Smith Richardson Foundation for generous support. Finally, I owe a debt to my families. My father Alfredo I thank for reminding me that I do what I do because its who I am, rather than because I have expectations of social science as a career. My mother JoAnne I thank for her absolute love of ideas, as well as, of course, her faith in me come what may. My stepmom Susie, and my sisters, Kristine and Lesley, I thank for the inspiring passion with which they live their lives. My uncle Paul I thank for his patience, and unflagging support over these many years. My in-laws I thank for putting up with me; and for forgiving me (now and then) for not having chosen to become a lawyer. Above all else and always I thank the three dearest to me in this world, without whom even a life as rich as mine has been would not have been much worth living: my wife Monica, my son Samuel, and my daughter Ingrid Anne.
xiv
Abbreviations
ARVN COIN DMZ DRA DRV FLN GVN GWS KLA NATO NVA SAM VC
Army of Vietnam Counterinsurgency demilitarized zone Democratic Republic of Afghanistan Democratic Republic of Vietnam Front de Liberation Nationale Government of Vietnam guerrilla warfare strategy Kosovo Liberation Army North Atlantic Treaty Organization North Vietnamese Army surface-to-air missile Viet Cong
xv
Introduction
And there went out a champion out of the camp of the Philistines, named Goliath . . . And all the men of Israel, when they saw the man, fled from him, and were sore afraid . . . And David said to Saul, Let no mans heart fail because of him; thy servant will go and fight with this Philistine . . . And Saul armed David with his armour, and he put an helmet of brass upon his head; also he armed him with a coat of mail. And David girded his sword upon his armour . . . And David said unto Saul, I cannot go with these; for I have not proved them. And David put them off him. And he took his staff in his hand, and chose him five smooth stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherds bag . . . and his sling was in his hand: and he drew near to the Philistine. . . . And the Philistine said to David, Come to me, and I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air, and to the beasts of the field. And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead . . . and he fell upon his face to the earth. So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone . . . I. Samuel 17
Why do the strong lose to the weak? Because we expect strong actors1 to defeat weak actors in contests ranging from wars and fist fights to business competitions
1 Actors in this context mean states or coalitions of states, although the same dynamics would apply to governments fighting against rebels or rival national or ethnic groups in civil wars. Conflicts in this analysis mean wars (1000 battle deaths per year), although again, similar dynamics may apply in conflicts which are not wars, such as terrorism, trade wars, and labor disputes. Because this analysis focuses on explaining asymmetric conflicts I exclude those few wars in which the ratio of forces changed dramatically (toward symmetry) between the start and end of a conflict.
and sports contests, the fact that the strong sometimes lose is puzzling.2
Relative power and realist international relations theory: the strong do as they will . . .
As far back as Thucydides description of the wars between Athens and Sparta, the link between power and conflict outcomes has been the root principle of realist international relations theory.3 More power means winning wars, and less power means losing them. And defeat in war means death or slavery. This is not the same thing as saying that either international relations scholars, or political and military elites, imagine that raw material power is the only thing that explains who wins or loses a battle, campaign, or war. Many things ranging from resolve, technology, strategy, luck, leadership, and even heroism or cowardice can lead to unexpected outcomes. But power is useful. It is useful both because in the real world enough of it can overwhelm deficiencies in the other categories, and because in the theoretical world it is quantifiable, measurable, and comparable in a way that luck or leadership, for example, are not. If it is true that power matters most, then in very asymmetric conflicts conflicts between actors with wide disparities in power the strong
Power is one of the trickier concepts in international relations theory. Here I follow a long tradition by introducing a quantifiable proxy for power which is an admittedly imperfect one. By strong, for instance, I mean an actor whose relative material power exceeds that of its adversary or adversaries by large ratio (see below). Weak and strong then only have meaning in a particular dyadic context: Italy in 1935 is weak compared to the Soviet Union, but strong compared to Ethiopia. By material power, I mean the product of a given states population and armed forces. Other quantifiable proxies for state power have been proposed and used over the years; including iron and steel production, gross national product (GNP), and so on. However, no single measure appears to be sufficient on its own; and GNP, perhaps on balance the most useful, suffers because these data were not kept prior to the 1920s. For a review and analysis of the literature on empirical and quantifiable measures of relative power, see Nutter, (1994: 2949). On the empirical measurement of power in asymmetric conflicts in particular, see Paul (1994: 22). 3 My use of the term realist IR theory throughout this essay refers to a simple version of realist theory that has two key tenets: (1) there is no authority above states capable of regulating state interactions, and (2) all states have some capacity to harm other states. As a result, states seek to increase their relative power by various means, including buying or manufacturing armaments, and forming alliances. Power in this view is expected to have a number of positive consequences for states that acquire it: it can deter other states from attack, cow them into concessions, or defeat them in wars. For a cogent summary of realist IR theory, see Mearsheimer (2001: chapters 13). On the limits of power in relation to objectives, see Waltz (1979: 188192).
2
Introduction
100 80 60 40 20 0 strong actors 71.5 weak actors 28.5
18002003, n = 200
should always win.4 Indeed, a review of all asymmetric wars fought since 1800 supports this claim, as seen in Figure 1. Again, strong and weak only have meaning in particular conflict dyads; though as noted above these may include individual actors or coalitions of actors. Moreover, in this analysis Ive sharpened the puzzle by making the strong much stronger than the weak. A literally asymmetric conflict, for example, only requires a slight disparity say, 1.1:1. But in this analysis the aim is to test competing explanations against the assertion that relative power matters most. For this reason the disparity in power is raised to 10:1, and then adjusted to account for the fact that strong actors great powers and superpowers in particular often have other security commitments that constrain the application of all their resources to a single conflict.5 That said, since 1816 strong actors have won more than twice as many asymmetric conflicts as weak actors. On the other hand, since in this analysis strong actors outpower weak actors by a large margin, it remains puzzling that strong actors have lost such fights as often as they have. What explains these unexpected outcomes? A number of answers seem plausible besides bad luck. Perhaps the strong actors lost because they were squeamish in some way. Perhaps
4 As Mearsheimer puts it, There are definite limits to the utility of measuring force levels. After all, even a cursory study of military history would show that it is impossible to explain the outcome of many important military campaigns by simply comparing the number of forces on each side. Nevertheless, it is clear that if one side has an overwhelming advantage in forces, the glaring asymmetry is very likely to portend a decisive victory (Mearsheimer, 1983: 168). See also Mack (1975: 107). 5 Power in this analysis is represented as the halved product of a strong actors armed forces and population at the start of a conflict versus the simple product of the weak actors armed forces and population. Data for this survey come primarily from Small and Singer (1983), and from the 1992 revision of that data set. Additional data are from Laqueur (1976); and from Ellis (1995). For a comprehensive list of the cases used in the statistical analysis, see Appendix.
65.1 20.5
11.8 180049, n = 34
185099, n = 78
190049, n = 43
195099, n = 43
authoritarian strong actors win asymmetric conflicts but democratic strong actors lose them. Perhaps they were irresolute, or poorly led. Perhaps weak actors had come into possession of sophisticated military technology of some sort,6 and this tilted the balance enough that strong actors lost interest in victory when the costs of conflict and occupation suddenly exceeded the expected benefits. Thinking more about it, and since these explanations seem to resonate more or less with different historical periods, it would be useful to know whether the distribution of outcomes is consistent over time. It isnt. If the total record of asymmetric conflicts since 1816 is divided into discrete time periods, a striking trend emerges: strong actors have been losing asymmetric conflicts more and more over time (see Figure 2). From 1800 until 1849, strong actors won 88.2 percent of all asymmetric conflicts. That proportion dropped slightly to 79.5 percent in the next fifty-year period. But starting in 1900, the number of asymmetric conflicts won by strong actors began to fall off significantly, down to 65.1 percent through 1949. By the last fifty-year period 1950 to 1999 strong actors won only 48.8 percent of all asymmetric conflicts.7 Here then are two puzzles represented graphically. On the one hand, realist international relations theory leads us to expect that in a twoactor conflict, the larger the ratio of forces favors one actor the more quickly and decisively that actor will win; and this is supported in
6 In this analysis, technology is presented as a power multiplier or divider, not an increment of power itself. Power is captured crudely but sufficiently by the multiplication of population and armed forces. This leads to some distortions e.g., nuclear weapons and maritime vs. continental power distinctions do matter but the impact of these distortions is marginal on the overall analysis. 7 The colonial wars that distinguish this period are arguably a special case. But, if so, they must be special in a way that overcomes the expected effects of relative power (i.e. they still challenge realist IR theorys primacy of power pillar). The overall trend is the same whether the data are divided into fifty-, ten-, or five-year periods. The four-fold division represented here is valuable analytically because it represents more data per period, and because it presents the trend more clearly. Cases from the period 20002010 (Afghanistan 2002, and Iraq 2003) were not included because the period has not yet lasted five years.
Introduction
Figure 1. On the other hand, strong states have lost nearly 30 percent of all conflicts in which they out-powered their adversaries by a factor of at least 5:1. In addition, as shown in Figure 2, strong states have been losing such fights more and more often over time. What explains this trend? A good way to begin is to think about what was different in the early nineteenth century that may have favored strong actors so dramatically as compared to strong actors at the end of the twentieth century. Again, a number of plausible explanations come to mind. Perhaps early strong actors won because of their technological advantages: artillery, firearms, and blue-water navies must have been tremendous force multipliers. Perhaps the strong actor defeats concentrated in the last period were due to the rise of national self-determination as a norm of interstate politics? Nationalist resistance to European rule might have made conquest and occupation too costly. We might also observe that after World War I and especially World War II, the number of authoritarian strong actors declined. And, after 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and ceased to be an authoritarian actor in interstate politics. If authoritarian strong actors fight asymmetric conflicts better than democratic strong actors, perhaps the nature of the actor explains the trend. This speculation points to an important utility of the trend observation independent of the fact that until recently it remained unidentified: an ideal theory of asymmetric conflict outcomes should be able to account for both the fact of strong actor failure and the trend toward increasing strong actor failure over time. Explanations of the trend which dont plausibly explain strong actor failure will be less persuasive than those which can. Also, accounts of strong actor failure inconsistent with the trend will be less persuasive than those which can explain both. In sum, the problem with our international relations-theory-informed expectations is that they appear to be only partly right, and only in aggregate. When the aggregate data are divided into discrete time periods, the expected correlation between power and victory becomes significantly less useful as a guide to policy.
conflict,8 and with the exception of my own work and Macks, none has advanced a general explanation of asymmetric conflict outcomes (Arregun-Toft, 2001). In this book I argue that although relative power matters, the interaction of the strategies actors use matters more than how much power they have at the start of their conflict. This strategic interaction thesis may seem intuitively plausible to readers, but before its explanatory power can be evaluated competing explanations must be introduced and explored. As noted above, a good way to think about these explanations is in terms of how well they explain both the outcome and the trend puzzles. This section offers four competing explanations of strong actor failure in asymmetric conflicts and the trend toward increasing strong actor failure. Some, such as the arms diffusion explanation or democratic social squeamishness argument, are strongest when explaining the trend, but offer equivocal explanations of why strong actors lose. Others, such as Macks interest asymmetry argument, are good at explaining strong actor failure, but cannot account for the trend. A sound general theory of asymmetric conflict outcomes should be able to explain the fact of strong actor failure in a way consistent with the observed trend, and vice versa. What follows is an introduction to these competing explanations.9 In Chapter 2, the logic of each explanation
8 Chief among those Mack cites are Katzenbach (1962: 1121); and Taber (1965). More recently, T. V. Paul devoted a book to the question of why the weak start wars against the strong. Pauls threshold of analysis for asymmetry was a power ratio of 1:2, where power was measured in traditional that is to say, material terms. On Pauls definition of asymmetry, see Paul (1994: 20). 9 These three hardly exhaust the possibilities, but they offer the strongest general explanations of both unexpected outcomes and the trend. Three additional explanations worthy of note are (1) social structure; (2) the rise of nationalism; and (3) Cold War bipolarity. The social structure argument links key aspects of a given societys social structure to the military effectiveness of the forces it is capable of fielding. In this view, the reason states such as the United States and USSR lost their respective fights against the North Vietnamese and mujahideen is because their societies were not as efficient at producing effective militaries as were the North Vietnamese and mujahideen. On the importance of social structure, see Rosen (1995: 531). The rise of nationalism argument is that the post-World War II period in particular was an era in which nations came to see self-determination as a necessity which could not be put off because the structural changes forced on them by colonial powers had begun to irreparably destroy their social fabric. The logic of this argument is that nationalists are more stubborn and more willing to risk death in pursuit of autonomy than people motivated by other concerns. See, e.g., Wolf (1973); and Anderson (1991: 910, 36). The Cold War bipolarity argument is that the USSR and United States intervened more often in order to counter the perceived interests of the other superpower. Each justified these interventions by means of domino logic,
Introduction
will be reduced to testable propositions which will later be compared in the historical case studies some formally and some informally against those derived from my own explanation.
by threatening to execute them for cowardice, where cowardice is defined as any hesitation to engage the enemy regardless of objective circumstances. Third, authoritarian soldiers may not be constrained by the laws of war regarding noncombatants such as prisoners of war and civilians in combat zones. Instead of having to provide captured enemy soldiers with food and medical services, for example, an authoritarian regimes soldiers may be ordered to murder them, thus conserving resources. Finally, lack of responsibility to a cost-bearing public may allow authoritarian regimes to sustain higher combat casualties in pursuit of military objectives than can democratic regimes. If an axiomatically just cause, just conduct, fearless soldiers, disregard for the laws of war, and casualty insensitivity make authoritarian regimes more effective in battle than democratic regimes, then the trend toward increasing strong actor failure would have to be explained by the fact of decreasing participation in asymmetric conflicts by authoritarian strong actors. This seems intuitively persuasive: the progressive dissolution of authoritarian states after 1918 (Austria-Hungary, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire), 1945 (the Third Reich, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan) and 1991 (the Soviet Union) implies fewer authoritarian strong actors involved in asymmetric conflicts.
Introduction
their governments wars unjust, when theres no way to know, a priori, whether this is likely. Moreover, even assuming total resource mobilization, the tight control of information necessary to achieve that efficiency may impose severe limitations on the total amount of resources available to mobilize in the first place: the command economies typical of authoritarian regimes are notorious for being inefficient. This is the unifying theme of a number of recent comparisons of authoritarian and democratic regimes at war. According to this very sound logic, democratic states will, all other things being equal, be relatively more effective at fighting and winning wars than authoritarian states.12 The use of extreme coercive measures to motivate soldiers is also logically suspect. Regimes resorting to these methods may achieve a tactical advantage in rare circumstances, but such a system can only motivate soldiers to take actions they know to be excessively costly or futile. To soldiers as yet uncommitted, this would signal that their leaders care nothing for their lives, and thus ultimately decrease their combat effectiveness. Such soldiers may desert at any opportunity, and cease to function without the threat of harsh reprisals. They may even resort to murdering their commanders. The systematic harm of noncombatants a strategy referred to here as barbarism also has drawbacks. For one thing, it is technically quite difficult to murder prisoners or noncombatants without ones opponents finding out about it. Once they do, they fight harder, avoiding surrender at all costs (they also often start reprisals in kind). Another problem is that sustained resort to barbarism ruins soldiers for conventional missions:13 Here Richard Rhodes records the complaint by Eastern Territories Commander Johannes Blaskowitz of excesses by Heinrich Himmlers Einsatzgruppen in Poland in a memo to the German High Command:
It is wholly misguided to slaughter a few ten thousand Jews and Poles as is happening at the moment; for this will neither destroy the idea of
12 See Lake (1992); Reiter and Stam (1998: 259); and Reiter and Stam (2002). On the contrary argument that regime type doesnt matter much, see Desch (2002). 13 See, e.g., Stanislas Andreski, who argues that Latin America has had few interstate wars because its states have soldiers who specialize in domestic oppression (torture, murder, rape, and so on) (Andreski, 1968). The logic is the same: soldiers used for barbarism will become ineffective as regular combat soldiers, putting states who face threats from other states regular soldiers at increased risk. This logic is supported by a study of military disintegration by Bruce Watson. Watson argues that when, for example, a platoon of the US Army 20th Infantry Division under the command of Lieutenant William Calley murdered civilians in the village of My Lai in 1968, they were not acting as soldiers, but as a mob. See Watson (1997: 151).
This is why authoritarian regimes who resort to this strategy almost invariably develop special forces or para militaries to do the work. Even within the Einsatzgruppen, Himmler worried that certain practices (e.g., the unauthorized murder of Jews by SS units tasked with other functions) would damage discipline and hence, mission effectiveness (Rhodes, 2002: 187). Finally, the ratio of acceptable combat casualties to the value of military objectives should logically depend on the relative populations of the combatants, not their regime types: a small authoritarian regime could not win by selling its soldiers lives cheaply for objectives that in any other regime type would matter little. On the evidence side, the nature-of-actor argument is difficult to support in its general form, because authoritarian regimes dont win wars more often than democratic regimes. This would appear to limit the power of this explanation to account for unexpected asymmetric conflict outcomes. On balance then, although the nature-of-actor argument may offer important insights into key causes of strong actor failure, by itself it is unlikely to stand as a sound general explanation of why strong actors lose asymmetric conflicts.
Arms diffusion
A second explanation for strong actor failure begins by observing the trend that accelerated after World War II. During the war, Allied and Axis powers struggled to defeat each other in the developing world. Throughout Asia and Africa, in particular, both sides shipped, stored, and distributed relatively sophisticated small arms and ammunition, including semi-automatic rifles, portable mortars, hand grenades, and machine guns. After the war, these arms remained in the developing world, along with a considerable number of indigenous soldiers expert in their effective use.14 When colonial powers returned to their former
14 Examples include the Hukbalahap in the Philippines and the Malayan communists in Malaya. For an account of the Hukbalahap insurgency in the Philippines from the insurgent perspective, see Pomeroy (1964). For an account of the Malayan Emergency and British responses to it, see Thompson (1966); Stubbs (1989); and Ramakrishna (2002).
10
Introduction
colonies after the war, they were often violently opposed by these better-trained and armed soldiers. The net effect was to increase the costs of conquest and occupation as compared to the expected benefits; and strong actors lost wars against weak actors because they failed to anticipate these higher costs. Thus, the logic of the arms diffusion argument is that weapons technology equals power, and as a result of this fact, weak actors were not as weak as anticipated. As Eliot Cohen puts it:
The enormous increase in the quality and quantity of arms in the hands of Third World nations, coupled with increased organizational competence in the handling of such weapons, renders many local conventional balances far more even than before. (Cohen, 1984: 162)
The empirical evidence appears to support this logic, because the sharp rise in strong actor failures in asymmetric conflicts correlates with the increase in small arms availability to developing countries following World War II.
For a recent and comprehensive treatment of the relationship between arms, arms transfers, and conflict outcomes, see Craft (1999: 9293), and especially p. 121. Craft briskly summarizes hypotheses on the proposed relationships between arms and outcomes, and undertakes a sophisticated statistical analysis of them. Craft concludes that Arms transfers that take place during a war do not predict war outcomes (winners, duration, or casualties) to commonly accepted statistical significance (Craft, 1999: 121).
11
South Korea into a vital US security interest. The logic was the same for the Soviet Union. Thus, even if the absolute costs of conquest, occupation, or stabilization of distant countries in the developing world were rising, so were the perceived benefits. There is no doubt that weapons technology can increase a militarys combat effectiveness. But logically, it could also decrease it. Many key military-technical innovations ranging from the machine gun to the tank decreased combat effectiveness until the proper mix of strategy and tactics for their effective use was established.16 This is why, in his remarks above, Cohen is careful to specify that organizational competence in the handling of such weapons is a key component of any expectation of increased military effectiveness. Moreover, there is no reason to assume that weapons systems that are highly integrated into the doctrine, training, tactics, and strategy of an industrial power can be assimilated into militaries working within different historical, geographical, or social contexts.17 One risk in particular is that the acquisition of unassimilated military technology may tempt a premature or inappropriate shift in strategy, with disastrous results.18 Finally, in Command of the Commons, Barry Posen shows that even the most efficient integration of doctrine, technology, and tactics may produce counterproductive specialization: the United States and the United States is not alone among advanced industrial powers in this regard is particularly good at leveraging firepower and maneuver
16 This may explain the striking empirical finding that increased availability of weapons to an actor increases its likelihood of defeat in war (Craft, 1999: 73). 17 Mearsheimer, for example, notes that his theory only applies to large-scale armored warfare, and hence only to states whose geography favors such warfare (there is no attempt to assess the distribution of such territory as a percentage of a total) (see Mearsheimer, 1983: 15). Thus, the same technology (and associated doctrine) which allows states to achieve decisive results in one geographical setting, may prove useless in another (on this point, see also Posen, 2003). Cultural factors may also constrain the adoption of non-indigenous technologies. Rosen notes that after World War II, Japanese businessmen attempted to duplicate the success of US industry by adopting a host of US business practices, only to abandon them due to cultural incompatibilities (see Rosen, 1995: 16). Finally, Chris Parker argues that not all weak states are equally successful at assimilating nonindigenous military technology. Insofar as assimilation and military effectiveness are the same thing (or at least covary), then anything which hampers assimilation should hinder effectiveness (Parker, 1999). 18 Usually, actors seek the technology to facilitate their adopted strategy. When the reverse occurs, disaster can result (see, e.g. Johnson, 1973: 50; and Karnow, 1983: 182, 610). Perhaps this centurys most famous philosopher of guerrilla warfare, Mao Tse-tung, warned against both premature escalation to conventional confrontation, and its opposite, something he came to call guerrillaism (staying on the strategic defensive too long) (see Hamilton, 1998: 28; and Paret and Shy, 1962: 35).
12
Introduction
advantages in open terrain, but less effective in closed, and, in particular, urban terrain (Posen, 2003). But even assuming that arms diffusion increased the absolute capabilities of armed forces in the developing world, it is hard to argue a relative increase over the advances maintained by industrial powers. Weak actors, for example, may have gained reliable compact automatic weapons, but strong actors gained combat helicopters, night vision, and better communications capability. In sum, arms diffusion offers an at best equivocal explanation of the trend toward increasing strong actor failures after World War II. It is particularly weak when relied upon to explain unexpected outcomes. By itself, then, arms diffusion will probably not constitute a sound general explanation of asymmetric conflict outcomes.
Interest asymmetry
A third explanation for strong actor failure in asymmetric conflicts is Andrew J. R. Macks. Macks explanation for how weak states win wars has three key elements: (1) relative power explains relative interests; (2) relative interests explain relative political vulnerability; and (3) relative vulnerability explains why strong actors lose. According to the logic of this argument, strong actors have a lower interest in a fights outcome because their survival is not at stake, whereas weak actors have a high interest in a fights outcome because their survival is at stake (Snyder and Diesing, 1977: 190; Mack, 1975: 181). Mack introduces the important concept of political vulnerability to describe the likelihood that an actors people (in democratic regimes) or competing elites (in authoritarian regimes) will force an actors leaders to halt the war short of achieving its initial objectives (Mack, 1975: 180182). A strong actors low interests imply high political vulnerability, and a weak actors high interests imply low political vulnerability. Mack argues that this political vulnerability explains why the strong lose to the weak (Mack, 1975: 194195): delays and reverses on the battlefield will eventually encourage war weary publics or greedy elites to force the strong actors leaders to abandon the fight. Macks argument therefore reduces to the claim that relative power explains strong actor defeat in asymmetric wars: power asymmetry determines interest asymmetry (high power equals low interest), which varies inversely with political vulnerability (low interest equals high vulnerability), which varies inversely with outcomes (high vulnerability equals low probability of victory). Interest
13
asymmetry is the key causal mechanism and Macks argument is in this sense an interest asymmetry thesis. Mack applies this logic to the case of US intervention in Vietnam, where it appears to provide a strong explanation of that wars unexpected outcome. According to Mack, the United States lost the war because it had less to lose than North Vietnam. Over time, the United States failed to coerce North Vietnam and was eventually forced by an angry and frustrated American public to withdraw short of achieving its main political objective: a viable, independent, noncommunist South Vietnam.
See, for example, Herring (1986: 70); and Karnow (1983: 169170, 377378, 399, 423). On Soviet calculations in Afghanistan, see Magnus and Naby (1998: 68, 122). For apt examples from the US intervention in Vietnam, see Herring (1986: 222). 21 Mack recognizes this weakness and suggests that guerrilla warfare strategy explains the longer duration of asymmetric conflicts (Mack, 1975: 195). But this argument suffers
20
19
14
Introduction
Third, if the interest asymmetry thesis is right there should be little or no variation over time in the distribution of asymmetric conflict outcomes when relative power is held constant. But, as shown in Figure 2, in which relative power is held constant, weak actors are increasingly winning asymmetric conflicts. In sum, Macks interest asymmetry thesis is not so much wrong as incomplete. It is weakest when explaining actor interests as a function of their relative power and strongest when explaining strong actor failure as a consequence of political vulnerability.
Merom adds that Essentially, what prevents modern democracies from winning small wars is disagreement between state and society over expedient and moral issues that concern human life and dignity, and Achieving a certain balance between . . . the readiness to bear the cost of a war and the readiness to exact a painful toll from others is a precondition for succeeding in war (Merom, 2003: 19). The argument reduces to the claim that, in small wars, insensitivity to friendly casualties and a willingness to maximize violence against an opponent are necessary for victory; and that modern democracies are
from two related problems: (1) weak actors do not always defend with guerrilla warfare (this limits the generality of Macks theory); and (2) some defenders using guerrilla warfare strategy are defeated quickly (this limits his theorys explanatory power).
15
structurally constrained in both categories. The particular relationship between society and the state makes democratic strong actors too squeamish to win small wars.
22 It also places too much causal weight for outcomes on the shoulders of strong actors. What if the claim by the weak that they are willing to resist to the death is more than simply propaganda? To the extent that such resolve most famously represented by the North Vietnamese during their fights with France and the United States in Indochina is
16
Introduction
the strong actor holds additional brutality in reserve, its conduct on the battlefield may still be described as restrained, and when the strong actor later abandons the field that restraint becomes the causal focus.23 There is something to this argument: my own research suggests that in the post-World War II period barbarism was a sound strategy for winning a small war yet losing the subsequent peace. But Merom seems to rule out the possibility that democratic strong states may hold brutality in reserve unused not because their societies constrain them but because they sense, rightly, that the utility of further brutality may be either marginal or even negative.24 Moreover, democratic states facing insurgencies have another option besides escalating brutality (barbarism) an option which historically has been both successful and rare: conciliation. Britain experienced success with this option in the Malayan Emergency of 1948, and the United States successfully supported Ramon Magsaysays reform efforts to overcome the Hukbalahap in the Philippines in 1952. A final problem with the democratic social squeamishness argument is that it is not well tested. Meroms analysis skillfully brings together political and game theory threads to explain what Mack, for example, assumes: democratic strong actors are politically vulnerable to setbacks on the battlefield. But Meroms analysis ignores the success and failure rates of authoritarian states states less constrained by (1) dependence of the state on society for military forces; (2) a general preference for measures short of war by society; or (3) by the ability of society, through
real, this places strong actors in the position of either having to resort to genocide, or withdrawing. It makes more sense in such cases to look at least as carefully at factors on the weaker side as on the stronger. 23 Merom is hardly alone here. A recent example focusing on the case of US intervention in Vietnam is C. Dale Watsons The Myth of Inevitable US Defeat in Vietnam, in which Watson argues that had the United States been less restrained it could have won (Walton, 2002: 5). The problem with this argument, and a weakness in Meroms, is that it deliberately ignores actor restraints that had nothing to do with societal pressure (e.g., lets do all we can without starting another world war). 24 This argument goes right back to the first of the modern-era small wars indeed, the war from which the term itself, guerrilla, originated. Napoleon Bonapartes forces in Spain were harassed and attacked at all turns by Spanish guerrillas from 1807 to 1814, and they responded to these attacks with extremely brutal reprisals, including torture, mass murder, rape, and wholesale property destruction. These only appeared to stimulate even further resistance, creating a spiral of reprisal that did not end until the French left Spain in 1814. So clear was the connection between barbarism and increased social resistance that before pursuing the French into France, Britains Wellington laid down the strictest restrictions on the conduct of his own troops in French towns (see Fremont-Barnes, 2003: 5358, 67, 90).
17
charismatic representatives, to alter the states foreign policy or military strategy. These problems aside, Meroms account of the political vulnerability of democratic small actors in small wars is both excellent and timely. It expands on Macks description of why and how democratic strong actors are politically vulnerable, and offers a useful explanation of why democratic states choose the strategies they do, and why they stick to failing strategies even after theyve received a clear indication that their strategy for victory is in fact failing.
Strategic interaction
My own explanation for weak actor success in asymmetric conflicts is more general. I argue that although relative power, the nature of the actor, arms diffusion, and interest asymmetry all matter, the best predictor of asymmetric conflict outcomes is strategic interaction. According to this thesis, the interaction of the strategies actors use during a conflict predicts the outcome of that conflict better than competing explanations. If we think of strategies as complex but discrete plans of action which include assumptions about the values of objectives, as well as tactical and leadership principles and rules of engagement, different interactions should yield systematically different outcomes independent of the relative power of the actors involved. In Chapter 2, I argue that for purposes of theory building the universe of real actor strategies blitzkrieg, attrition, defense in depth, guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and so on can be reduced to two ideal-type strategic approaches: direct and indirect. My central thesis is that when actors employ similar strategic approaches (directdirect or indirectindirect) relative power explains the outcome: strong actors will win quickly and decisively. When actors employ opposite strategic approaches (directindirect or indirectdirect), weak actors are much more likely to win, even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldnt. My explanation of strategic choice and the trend focuses on Kenneth Waltzs concept of state socialization: the idea that actors imitate the successful policies and strategies of other actors, while avoiding failed policies or strategies (Waltz, 1979: 127). I argue that socialization of this kind works in regions, and that after World War II the developed and developing world imitated diametrically different patterns of success. When these patterns came to interact systematically, as they did after World War II, weak actors won more often.
18
Introduction
faced the Soviets in the 1980s. And the US decision not to commit major combat forces prevented the Taliban from rallying religiously conservative Afghanis to the cause of ejecting non-Muslims from Afghanistan. The Taliban lost the war and decamped to Northwestern Pakistan, where today they strike at vulnerable US and government forces and wait and train to take control of Afghanistan once US-supported forces weaken there. Finally, the second US-led assault on Iraq in 2003 in key ways resembles the Boer War of 18991902. Like that war, the worlds pre-eminent military power engaged another army in a conventional campaign that, after a few setbacks, quickly ended in an overwhelming victory. But, also like the Boer War, the losers refused to surrender, and instead switched from a conventional to a guerrilla warfare defense strategy. The result has been increasing difficulty for US and Allied forces. These forces were never designed, trained, or equipped for extended occupation duties. They continue to suffer daily casualties from unseen enemies and may, as a result, be increasingly tempted to inflict reprisals on noncombatants. This book explains both the conditions under which the US can win such fights and why it will certainly lose its fight to build democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq so long as it pursues its current strategy (excessively militarized and with the wrong mix of armed forces). Second, although asymmetric conflicts are the most common type of conflict they are among the least studied by international relations scholars.25 If there are conflict dynamics unique to asymmetric conflicts, or if an analytical focus on asymmetric conflicts enables us to attain valuable insights into more symmetrical conflicts, then a general explanation of asymmetric conflict outcomes is not only desirable, but necessary, both to reduce the likelihood of unnecessary conflicts and to increase the likelihood of US success when relying on the force of arms to advance its political objectives.
25 See Paul (1994: 4); and Mack (1975: 176). My own survey of all wars from 1816 to the present reveals the following conflict type distribution: asymmetric conflicts = 52 (14 percent), probable asymmetric conflicts = 141 (37 percent), symmetric conflicts = 28 (7 percent), and missing data = 156 (41 percent). The total number of recorded wars since 1800 was 377. Probable asymmetric conflicts include Singer and Smalls extra-systemic wars (colonial wars numbered 300454). Missing data include most of Singer & Smalls civil wars (numbered 600982). If probable asymmetric conflicts are added to actual asymmetric conflicts, they comprise 51 percent of the distribution of all types of war since 1800. Even without adding probable asymmetric conflicts, however, actual asymmetric conflicts are twice as common as symmetrical conflicts.
20
Introduction
Third, the whole question of how the weak win is in itself fascinating. The contests between David and Goliath, Hannibal and Rome at Cannae, Henry V and the French aristocracy at Agincourt, Germanys blitzkrieg into the Soviet Union in June of 1941, and even the World Heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire, are remembered chiefly because their outcomes were so unexpected. More recently, weve witnessed the unexpected defeats of US elite forces in Somalia, Russian Federation forces in Chechnia, Israeli forces in Lebanon, and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Explaining how and why these unexpected outcomes happen is itself a worthwhile endeavor. It is an effort that can result in important additions to our understanding of power in international relations theory, as well as a guide to US policymakers struggling to respond to global terrorism. Finally, a theory of asymmetric conflict outcomes could help us understand how and why weak states respond to strong and strengthening states in the international system (Elman, 1995; Walt, 2002; Nye, 2004). Its an important question, because if the United States the worlds current pre-eminent power does not act wisely and with restraint, it could well provoke countervailing alliances that eventually overwhelm it or undo its previous economic, political, and military advantages. For all these reasons developing a theory of asymmetric conflict outcomes is vital.
contains multiple strategic interactions. Thus, although only five historical cases are examined, together they provide a total of sixteen tests of the strategic interaction thesis. Chapter 3 examines the fight between the Russian Empire and the Murids in the Caucasus from 1830 to 1859. The Russians won this twenty-nine-year conflict, which involved three distinct strategic interactions. Chapter 4 examines the war between the British Empire and the allied Boer republics of Orange Free State and Transvaal from 1899 to 1902. The British won this three-year war, which was the most costly of their entire colonial history. Chapter 5 examines the conflict between fascist Italy and Ethiopia from 1935 to 1940. The Italians used mustard gas in order to win this war against the vastly outgunned and outnumbered Ethiopians. Chapter 6 examines the fight between the Soviet Union and Afghan mujahideen from 1979 to 1989. The Soviets lost this brutal decade-long war which either killed or made refugees of fully half the Afghan civilian population; and they laid the foundation for the accession of one of the most conservative religious movements in history: the Taliban. Chapter 7 analyzes one of the most complex and important conflicts of the post-World War II era: US intervention in the Vietnamese Civil War. Chapter 8 contains a summary of the books arguments, its conclusions, and its relevance to international relations theory and foreign policy (in particular, US foreign policy).
22
Im a speed demon, Im a brain fighter, Im scientific, Im artistic, I plan my strategy. Hes a bull, Im a matador . . . Muhammad Ali, Zaire (1974) in Gast (1996) [T]aking practical account of the area we wished to deliver . . . I began idly to calculate how many square miles: sixty: eighty: one hundred: perhaps one hundred and forty thousand square miles. And how would the Turk defend all that? No doubt by a trench line across the bottom, if we came like an army with banners; but suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed. Our kingdoms lay in each mans mind; and as we wanted nothing material to live on, so we might offer nothing material to the killing. It seemed a regular soldier might be helpless without a target, owning only what he sat on, and subjugating only what, by order, he could poke his rifle at. T. E. Lawrence (1926)
Actors in a conflict of interests each come to that conflict with three things: (1) an estimate of the resources immediately available to fight with, relative to a potential adversarys; (2) a plan for the use of those resources in pursuit of a specified objective (strategy); and (3) an estimate of resources potentially available once the battle has been joined (again, relative to a potential adversarys). As observed in Chapter 1, the conventional wisdom regarding conflict outcomes is generally derived from comparisons of each actors standing armed forces, economic capacity, and population at the onset of hostilities. In general, the actor with the greatest amount of these resources is expected to win, and to win in proportion to its power advantage.
23
This conventional wisdom is a problem, however. First, relying on it for explanation leaves many conflict outcomes unexplained. Second, as an underlying assumption of policy it can have disastrous consequences. In this chapter, I show that in addition to knowledge of each actors available resources, explaining outcomes demands an estimate of the consequences of the interaction of each actors strategy. I argue that all actor strategies can be sorted into one of two main approaches direct and indirect and that asymmetric conflict outcomes depend on which of two ideal-type interaction patterns obtains. If strong and weak actors use a strategy representing the same strategic approach direct against direct, or indirect against indirect strong actors should win as the conventional wisdom suggests. If, however, strong and weak actors employ strategies representing opposite strategic approaches direct against indirect or indirect against direct weak actors are much more likely to win than the conventional wisdom allows for. This is the strategic interaction thesis.
strategies (which then alter the likelihood of victory or defeat). Third, and most importantly, the strategic interaction thesis explains why some asymmetric conflicts end quickly while others drag on.1
25
with legitimacy, especially when there is a gross mismatch in relative material power. In asymmetric conflicts, as in the Grenada example above, there is a strong expectation that any war will be over quickly. But some asymmetric wars drag on well beyond what was anticipated before the fight. If power implies victory, and a lot of power implies quick and decisive victory, what then explains why power causes quick and decisive victory sometimes but not others? My answer is strategy. The interaction of some strategies makes the way clear for power to determine the outcome, whereas the interaction of other strategies causes wars to be protracted, thus dramatically abridging powers expected effect on the outcome.
It is a weak argument, and Macks discussion previous to this comment supports the claim that on balance an actors regime type affects actor conduct, and hence, conflict outcomes. As noted in Chapter 1, there are good reasons to assume resource trade-offs notwithstanding that regime type affects conflict outcomes. But how exactly? I argue that authoritarian regimes have an advantage in a particular kind of war: a war in which the regimes opponents try an indirect defense strategy, such as terrorism, guerrilla warfare, or nonviolent resistance. In such a war, the costs and risks of employing the harshest measures are lower for authoritarian regimes, while the benefits which dont vary with regime type remain potentially high.3 Authoritarian regimes enjoy
I say potentially because although logically, indirect defense strategies can be more easily overcome by depredations against civilians and other noncombatants than conventional
3
27
two advantages over their democratic counterparts. First, authoritarian regimes have much more control over what information reaches their domestic audiences: wars can be made to seem both necessary and fairly fought. That same control over information can also obscure the true nature of the violence to international audiences. Moreover, when evidence of barbarism does reach an authoritarian regimes public (or interstate audience) it can be justified as limited reprisal for atrocities committed by an adversary. Second, even when domestic audiences become aware of barbarism, they are in no position to alter state policy or strategy. As Chapter 5 makes clear, Italys invasion of Ethiopia was aided by both advantages. In other kinds of war and other strategic interactions, however, there is little evidence to support the claim that authoritarian regimes fight better or win more often than democratic regimes. On the contrary, with the exception of long wars (Bennett and Stam, 1998), democratic states appear to win wars more often than authoritarian states (Reiter and Stam, 1998). Thus, as in this analysis, the proper question isnt do authoritarian regimes fight more effectively than democratic regimes, but rather, under what circumstances do authoritarian regimes fight more effectively than democratic ones?
defense strategies, the empirical support for barbarisms increased effectiveness is equivocal. For a fuller exposition of the counterproductive consequences of the use of barbarism in asymmetric conflicts, see Arregun-Toft, 2003.
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Meroms thesis takes this argument further still. The key causal relationship is between political will and costs. As Mack and others have pointed out, asymmetric conflicts are those in which, in general, the stronger actor will be both more able to absorb unexpected costs and at the same time, paradoxically, more sensitive to unexpectedly increased costs. This is because elites and, in democratic strong actors, publics, have an ex ante expectation of quick and decisive (i.e., low-cost) victory. A protracted war is already, therefore, an unexpectedly costly war. Again, the key puzzle is why dont all asymmetric wars end quickly?
Strategy
Strategy, as defined here, is an actors plan for using armed forces to achieve military or political goals.4 Strategies incorporate actors understandings (rarely explicit) about the relative values of these objectives.5 Strategy in this sense should be distinguished from two closely related terms: grand strategy and tactics. Grand strategy refers to the totality of an actors resources directed toward military, political, economic, or other objectives. Tactics refer to the art of fighting battles and of using the various arms of the military for example, infantry, armor, and artillery on
4 The meaning of strategy is both complicated and constantly evolving. Mearsheimer uses perhaps the simplest definition the plan of attack (see Mearsheimer, 1983: 2829). For a discussion of strategy and its evolution, see B. H. Liddell Hart (1967: 333346); and J. P. Charnay (1994: 768774). 5 This lack of explicitness is an important component of strategy because guessing wrong about how an adversary values its objectives can lead to unexpected outcomes. US strategy in Vietnam, for example, assumed that after sustaining a certain level of casualties, North Vietnam would no longer be willing to support the insurgency in the South. The search for this breaking point, and uncertainty over whether it would have any political utility, bitterly divided the Johnson administration. There may in fact have been a breaking point in Vietnam, but as US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara concluded in 1967, reaching that point would result in virtual genocide (Rosen, 1972: 167168; Mueller, 1980: 497519; Brown, 1980: 525529; and Karnow, 1983: 454, 596).
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terrain and in positions that are favorable to them.6 Grand strategy, strategy, and tactics all describe different points on a continuum of a given actors means toward a single end: compelling another to do its will. The following typology of ideal-type strategies is a useful starting point for analysis:
Offense strategies (strong actor): conventional attack barbarism Defense strategies (weak actor): conventional defense guerrilla warfare strategy (GWS)
Both actors have other strategic options besides those listed here. On the indirect side, for example, strong actors might choose a hearts and minds or conciliation strategy over barbarism. Weak actors might choose nonviolent resistance or terrorism instead of a GWS. Moreover, barbarism could be used defensively and GWS offensively (though in both cases they would count as representatives of an indirect strategic approach). In this analysis I assume (1) strong actors initiated the asymmetric conflict in question;7 and (2), these ideal-type strategies are war-winning rather than war-termination strategies.8
Conventional attack
Conventional attack means the use of armed forces to capture or destroy an adversarys armed forces, thereby gaining control of that opponents values (population, territory, cities, or vital industrial and communications centers).9 The goal is to win the war in a decisive
6 This definition is a paraphrase of one from the Littre Dictionary as quoted by Charnay (1994: 770). 7 Strong actors are often but not always the initiators in asymmetric conflicts. Paul counts twenty weak-actor-initiated conflicts from 394 BC to 1993 (Paul, 1993: 34), of which eleven are included here. 8 In eight asymmetric conflicts (4.1 percent) the outcome was effected by a war termination or conciliation strategy. Conciliation strategies include the use of bribes, offers of amnesty, power sharing, or political reforms, and do not require armed forces to implement. Examples of conflicts ended by a conciliation strategy include the Murid War (183059), the Third Seminole War (185558), the Malayan Emergency (194857), the BritishCypriot Conflict (195459), and the PhilippineMoro Conflict (197280). In the case of the Malayan Emergency, e.g., see Ramakrishna (2002). 9 The distinction between forces and values derives from the nuclear war strategy literature; as in counterforce (attacking the enemys forces) vs. countervalue (attacking the enemys cities and population) targeting.
30
engagement or a series of such engagements by destroying the adversarys physical capacity to resist. In the most common pattern of a conventional attack strategy an attackers forces advance to capture a defenders values or strategic assets say a capital city, industrial or communications center, or bridge or fort and the defender moves to thwart that effort. A battle or series of battles follows, sometimes marked by lulls lasting entire seasons, until one side admits defeat.
Barbarism
Barbarism is the deliberate or systematic harm of noncombatants (e.g., rape, murder, and torture) in pursuit of a military or political objective.10 Unlike other strategies, barbarism has been used to target both an adversarys will and its capacity to fight. In a strategic bombing campaign, for example, when will is the target the strong actor seeks to coerce its weaker opponent into changing its behavior by inflicting pain (destroying its values).11 In a counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign, when will is the target the strong actor may attempt to deter would-be insurgents by, for example, a policy of reprisals against noncombatants.12 But strong actors in a counterinsurgency can also target a weak actors physical capacity to sustain resistance by, for example, implementing a concentration camp policy.13 Historically, the most common forms of barbarism are the murder of noncombatants (e.g., prisoners of
10 See, for example, Walzer (2000: 151). Chemical and biological weapons have been traditionally included in this category because they are inherently indiscriminate. Deliberate destruction of a defenders natural environment (through deforestation, draining of swamps, etc.) is also a violation of the laws of war for the same reason (see Perry and Miles, 1999: 132135). 11 The classic work here is Schelling (1966: chs. 1 and 4; see also Pape, 1990: 103146; and Pape, 1996). In theory it is possible to use strategic air power to target an adversarys capacity to fight by using air forces to destroy or interdict supplies, demolish key communications points (railroad junctions, bridges, and airfields), or arms factories. If it were possible to do so without killing noncombatants this would count as a direct attack strategy. But in practice even taking into account advances in precision guided munitions strategic air power is a too blunt weapon, and noncombatants are killed out of proportion to the military necessity of destroying the targets. NATOs strategic air campaign in Kosovo in 1999 is a case in point (see, e.g., Independent International Commission on Kosovo, 2000: 9294; and Daalder and OHanlon, 2000). 12 Such reprisals typically include executing randomly selected civilians in retaliation for the killing of an occupying soldier (see, for example, Asprey, 1994: 108; and Arregun-Toft, 2003). 13 Insurgent intelligence and support networks depend on the participation of sympathetic noncombatants, and concentration camps disrupt these networks (see, for example, Hamilton, 1998: 59; and Krebs, 1992: 4142).
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war or civilians during combat operations); concentration camps;14 and since 1939, strategic bombing against targets of little or no military value.15
Conventional defense
Conventional defense is the use of armed forces to thwart an adversarys attempt to capture or destroy values, such as territory, population, and strategic resources. Like conventional attack strategies, these target an opponents armed forces. The aim is to damage an adversarys physical capacity to attack by destroying its advancing or proximate armed forces. Examples include most limited aims strategies,16 static defense, forward defense, defense in depth, and mobile defense.17
Guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare strategy (GWS) is the organization of a portion of a society for the purpose of imposing costs on an adversary using armed forces trained to avoid direct confrontations.18 These costs include the loss of soldiers, supplies, infrastructure, peace of mind and, most
14
The British used concentration camps as a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy during the South African War. Although not intended by the British, as many as 28,000 Boer women and children died in these camps more than the combined total of combatant casualties from both sides. On the use of concentration camps as a COIN strategy, see Ellis (1976: 111). On their use and consequences in the South African War, see De Wet (1902: 192193); Pakenham (1979: ch. 29 and 607608); and Krebs (1992). 15 The Allied bombing of Dresden is a common example (see Schaffer 1985: 9799). On the subject of strategic bombing as coercion against Nazi Germany more generally, see Pape (1996: 260262). In terms of Papes argument, strategic bombing that targets noncombatants would count as barbarism. When air power is used to target enemy forces, it would count as a conventional attack strategy. Attacks on infrastructure and industry are more problematic: noncombatants are not deliberate targets, but those who use this strategy know beforehand that noncombatants will be systematically killed in such attacks. 16 An example of a defensive limited aims strategy would be Japans attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. An example of an offensive use of limited aims strategy would be Egypts attack on Israel in October of 1973. 17 For full summary descriptions, see Mearsheimer (1983: 4850). 18 In Mao Tse-tungs revolutionary guerrilla warfare strategy, a GWS eventually evolves into a full conventional confrontation. In this analysis such an evolution would count as a shift in strategy from an indirect to a direct strategic approach. A related strategy is terrorism, which often has political objectives similar to GWS. The logic of most terrorism mirrors that of coercive strategic bombing. A largely urban phenomenon, terrorism generally seeks either to inflict pain on noncombatants so they will pressure their government to accede to the terrorists political demands, or to delegitimize a government as a means of replacing it. This implies that the strategy will be most effective when citizens have a say in government policies. On terrorism as an insurgency strategy, see Merari (1993). On suicide bombing as strategy, see Pape (2003).
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important, time.19 Although GWS primarily targets opposing armed forces and their support resources, its goal is to destroy not the capacity but will of the attacker.20 GWS requires two essential elements: (1) sanctuary (physical, e.g., swamps, mountains, thick forest, or jungle or political, e.g., poorly regulated border areas or border areas controlled by sympathetic states), and (2) a supportive population (to supply fighters with intelligence, supplies, and replacements). The method of GWS is well summarized by perhaps its most famous practitioner, Mao Tse-tung:
In guerrilla warfare, select the tactic of seeming to come from the east and attacking from the west; avoid the solid, attack the hollow; attack; withdraw; deliver a lighting blow, seek a lighting decision. When guerrillas engage a stronger enemy, they withdraw when he advances; harass him when he stops; strike him when he is weary; pursue him when he withdraws. In guerrilla strategy, the enemys rear, flanks, and other vulnerable spots are his vital points, and there he must be harassed, attacked, dispersed, exhausted, and annihilated. (Tse-tung, 1961: 46)
GWS is not a strategy for obtaining a quick defeat of opposing forces (Hamilton, 1998: 27). Moreover, because guerrillas cannot hold or defend particular areas (save isolated base areas), they do not provide security for their families while on operations or when demobilized to await new missions. GWS is therefore a strategy that requires placing key values (e.g., farms, family, religious or cultural sites, and towns) directly into the hands of the adversary. Logically then, important costs of adopting a GWS depend on the purpose and restraint of the adversary.21 When invading or occupying forces do not exercise restraint in the use of force, or when their political objective is the destruction rather than coercion of a weak actors people, GWS can become a prohibitively expensive defensive strategy.22
19 On this point especially, see Samuel Huntingtons remarks in Hoffmann et al. (1981: 7; see also Cohen, 1984: 157). 20 For general introductions to GWS, see Laqueur (1976); Ellis (1995); Asprey (1994); and Joes (1996). On Chinese and Cuban variations of GWS, see Tse-tung (1961); Katzenbach and Hanrahan (1955: 321340); Guevara (1961); and Debray (1968). 21 In March 1900 the British captured the first Boer capital, Bloemfontein. Surviving Boer commanders gathered to decide whether to surrender or keep fighting. They were closely divided, but tipping the balance in favor of continued guerrilla war was faith in British civility. The Boer found their faith unjustified (see De Wet, 1902: 192193). 22 The question of whether an indirect defense in particular, nonviolent resistance can be effective against a ruthless strong actor is taken up by Gene Sharp and others (see McCarthy and Sharp, 1997; Sharp, 2003). The case of Kosovo from 1998 to 1999 suggests
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Strategic interaction
Every strategy has an ideal counterstrategy. Actors able to predict an adversarys strategy in advance can therefore dramatically improve their chances of victory or at a minimum inflict unexpectedly high costs on an adversary by choosing and implementing that ideal counterstrategy. Mao, for example, argued that defeat is the invariable outcome where native forces fight with inferior weapons against modernized forces on the latters terms.23 Maos maxim suggests that when the weak fight the strong, the interaction of some strategies will favor the weak while others will favor the strong. Building on Maos insight, I argue that a universe of potential strategies and counterstrategies can be aggregated into two distinct ideal-type strategic approaches: direct and indirect.24 Direct strategic approaches e.g., conventional attack and defense target an adversarys armed forces with the aim of destroying or capturing that adversarys physical capacity to fight, thus making will irrelevant. They feature soldier-on-soldier contests along with codified rules as to their conduct and a shared conception of what counts as victory and defeat. Indirect strategic approaches e.g., barbarism and GWS most often aim to destroy an adversarys will to resist, thus making physical capacity irrelevant.25 Barbarism targets an adversarys will by murdering, torturing, or incarcerating noncombatants. GWS attacks an adversarys will by targeting enemy soldiers, though noncombatants may be targets as well. This constant-if-incremental loss of soldiers, supplies, and equipment, with little chance of a quick resolution, is aimed at the balance of political forces in the stronger actors homeland. Sameapproach interactions (indirectindirect or directdirect) imply defeat for weak actors because there is nothing to mediate or deflect a strong actors power advantage. Barring a battlefield miracle, these interactions should therefore be resolved in proportion to the force applied. By
that nonviolent resistance against an adversary bent on genocide will only prove effective when it provokes an armed external intervention (see, e.g., Independent International Commission on Kosovo, 2000). 23 Quoted in Mack (1975: 176, emphasis in original). 24 This reduction of strategies to two mutually exclusive approaches is well established in the strategic studies literature. See, for example, Corvisier and Childs (1994: 378); and Liddell Hart (1967: 197, 361364); see also, Galtung (1976). 25 For a similar definition see Pape (1990: 106107). If coercive power is the product of will and physical capacity, then either approach can win: reducing an opponents capacity to zero makes its willingness to fight irrelevant; and reducing its willingness to fight to zero makes its capacity irrelevant.
34
contrast, opposite-approach interactions (directindirect or indirect direct) imply victory for weak actors because the weak refuse to engage where the strong actor has a power advantage (i.e., on the latters terms).26 They therefore tend to be protracted, and time favors the weak.27 When strategic interaction causes an unexpected delay between the commitment of armed forces and the attainment of military or political objectives, strong actors tend to lose asymmetric conflicts for two reasons. First, although all combatants tend to have inflated expectations of victory (Blainey, 1988: 53), strong actors in asymmetric conflicts are particularly susceptible to this problem (see e.g., Mack, 1975: 181182; Herring, 1986: 144145). If power implies victory, then an overwhelming power advantage implies an overwhelming and rapid victory. As war against a Lilliputian opponent drags on, overestimates of success force political and military elites to either escalate the use of force to meet expectations (thus overtly increasing the costs of a conflict which were expected to be slight), lie, or look increasingly incompetent. Either way, for democratic strong actors, domestic pressure to end the conflict is likely to increase. The longer the war drags on the greater the chances the strong actor will simply abandon the war regardless of the military state of affairs on the ground. Second, strong actors anxious to avoid increasing costs such as declaring war, mobilizing reserves, raising taxes, or sustaining additional casualties may be tempted to use barbarism because they believe it to be a cost-saving strategy for victory.28 But in the postWorld War II era, barbarism is a difficult strategy to prosecute effectively. Barbarism that is effective militarily demands special forces, trained and equipped to accomplish their demanding mission. It demands, above all, thoroughness in its application. Even the Nazis found both demands beyond their capabilities in World War II.
26 In GWS, an attackers armed forces are physically avoided or only engaged on favorable terms. In a blockade or strategic bombing campaign against a direct defense in a limited war, the strong actors destructive power is deflected because such attacks invariably place the noncombatant population between attackers and political elites. 27 On the importance of conflict duration as a cost of conflict, see Mearsheimer (1983: 24); and Katzenbach and Hanrahan (1955: 324326). 28 Alexander Downes persuasively argues that both democratic and authoritarian states are likely to employ barbarism in these circumstances because they believe it is a cost-saving strategy (see Downes, 2003). My own research shows that barbarism rarely is effective militarily (it tends to be counterproductive) and is almost always counterproductive politically (see Arregun-Toft, 2003).
35
The result was a resistance backlash that dramatically increased the costs of Nazi occupation in the conquered territories they administered.29 But even when militarily effective barbarism is risky: for democratic strong actors it carries the possibility of domestic political discovery (and opposition30) and for actors of either regime type who are not nuclear powers, it carries the risk of external intervention.
36
By socialization, Waltz means that states imitate each others successes and avoid what they count as failures. Over time, this means actors will have a tendency to converge on the most successful integration of arms, doctrine, training, strategy, and tactics; where success is measured by what won the last big war. I argue that socialization works regionally, and that after World War II different patterns of success emerged in Europe and Asia. In Europe, success in war was measured by a states capacity to produce and deploy large mechanized and combined arms forces designed to destroy an adversarys armed forces on relatively open terrain; capturing its values without the need for costly battles of annihilation: a blitzkrieg. This model was imitated by the United States,32 its European allies, and the Soviet Union.33 In Asia, success was measured by the ability to sustain a protracted conflict against a technologically superior foe on relatively closed terrain: a GWS. Maos long fight for and eventual conquest of China was a model consciously imitated by Algerian rebels, the Vietminh, the Hukbalahap, Cuban insurgents, Malayan communists, and, to a large extent, Afghanistans mujahideen.34 The blitzkrieg model is a direct strategic approach; the guerrilla warfare model, an indirect one. When the two interacted systematically as they did with greater frequency following World War II the strong actor lost more often.35 The fact that in nearly 78 percent of asymmetric conflicts losing actors dont switch strategies suggests that actors on the verge of armed conflict or defeat are not entirely free to choose an ideal strategy. This is true for two reasons. First, forces, equipment, and training all closely integrated are not fungible. Each strategic approach will be facilitated by certain kinds of forces and technology and undermined by others. Moreover, the development and prosecution of an actors
See, e.g., Cohen (1984: 179) on this point. It is true that the major European colonial powers France and Britain each possessed large and specialized colonial militaries before World War II. In both World War I and World War II the colonial nature of these armies were sometimes cited as reasons why French and British land forces did so poorly in each war, especially in the early phases. But, following the war, during which Britain in particular attempted to socialize to the blitzkrieg standard, the ability of its troops to conduct counterinsurgency operations, while still greater than that of the United States and Soviet Union, was diminished compared to what it had been prior to World War II. 34 On Maos revolutionary guerrilla warfare as a template, see Katzenbach and Hanrahan (1955: 322); and Hamilton (1998: 18). 35 Nationalism proved necessary but not sufficient to account for the success of the GWS pattern against states possessed of blitzkrieg forces. Both GWS without nationalism and nationalism without a GWS will lose to a strong actors direct approach assault.
33 32
37
ideal strategy or counterstrategy may be blocked by entrenched organizational interests or traditions.36 Second, actors prioritize threats: if the United States and Soviet Union, for example, identified each other as the primary threat, and both calculated that the most likely area of direct confrontation would be the heart of Europe, then adopting integrated equipment, doctrines, and strategies favorable to winning that sort of war made sense. But the nature of threats can shift faster than an actor even one as technologically advanced as the United States can shift strategies. The inertia of decades of preparation to win one kind of war can become a crippling liability when faced with an entirely different kind of war in a different terrain and climate. This is why strong actors mostly European lost so many conflicts in Asia in the period following World War II. This is why the United States is currently doing so poorly in its war against terrorism (Arregun-Toft, 2002).
38
strong actor
weak actor
weak actor
strong actor
Figure 3. Expected effects of strategic interaction on conflict outcomes (expected winners in cells)
equipped forces, indirect defense strategies (such as terrorism, GWS, or nonviolent resistance) typically rely on forces difficult to distinguish from noncombatants when not in actual combat. As a result, an attackers forces tend to kill or injure noncombatants during operations, which tends to stimulate weak actor resistance.37 Most important, because indirect defense strategies sacrifice values for time (see Katzenbach and Hanrahan, 1955: 325326), they necessarily take longer to resolve so long as weak actors continue to have access to sanctuary and social support.38 In asymmetric conflicts, delay favors the weak. Hypothesis 2: When strong actors attack with a direct strategic approach and weak actors defend using an indirect approach, all other things being equal, weak actors should win.
39
(such as the V-1 and V-2 rockets of World War II), blockades and sieges were the primary means of coercing adversaries in this way. Today, strategic bombing campaigns39 and economic sanctions40 are the most common forms of indirect offense against direct defense when the attacker is the stronger actor.41 The logic of this interaction could go either way. On the one hand, and as imagined by such early air power theorists as Douhet and Mitchell, the threat of attacking an opponents population centers and industry skipping over entrenched standing armies rather than attacking them directly could by itself coerce that opponent into changing its behavior.42 It could also turn a defenders people against its own government, making it rational for them to force their leaders to capitulate and spare the citizens further injury. On the other hand, the injury and death of noncombatants in particular, children could increase resistance among citizens who might formerly have been opposed to the war or neutral. It might bring them closer to their government rather than alienating them. A defenders government might also disperse key resources more widely, protecting them from future destruction from the air. And, as Pape notes, modern nation states are adept at redistributing the burdens of blockades and economic sanctions away from defense assets (Pape, 1997: 93, 109). Overall, I expect strong actors to lose these interactions because they are (1) time-consuming; (2) tend toward barbarism;43 and (3), in the post-World
39 Robert Pape has shown that strategic bombing or punishment strategies rarely work (and they cannot work against indirect defense strategies, such as GWS) (see Pape, 1996: ch. 6; see also Clodfelter, 1989). If Pape is right and tactical air power is effective as a means to coerce an adversary, then tactical air support that accepts collateral damage should become more common; and human shield defense of, say, armored or transport columns, will become an increasingly common countermeasure. 40 See , e.g., Pape (1997: 90136). Pape undertakes an updated look at an old debate about the effectiveness of economic sanctions to advance noneconomic political objectives and concludes that such sanctions are likely to be effective only in rare circumstances. 41 When the attacker is the weaker actor, terrorism and insurgency are the most common forms of an indirect offense against a direct defense. I assume strong actors are the attackers because (a) I am building and testing a theory of asymmetric conflict outcomes, and (b) the strong attacking the weak is by far the most common pattern. 42 See Douhet (1921); and Mitchell (1925). On the effectiveness of strategic air power in the first Gulf War, see Press (2001). There remains a healthy debate about whether the 1999 air campaign against Slobodan Milosevics government counts as successful case of coercion by air power. For an argument against, see Daalder and OHanlon (2000). For an argument for air powers effectiveness, see Stigler (2003: 124157). 43 Strategic bombing campaigns usually start out with the intent to spare noncombatants often to the point of putting pilots and air crews at increased risk (e.g., by flying lower or
40
War II period of high nationalism, barbarism tends to be militarily and politically counterproductive (Arregun-Toft, 2003). Hypothesis 3: When a strong actor attacks with an indirect strategic approach against a weak actor defending with a direct approach, all other things being equal, the strong actor should lose.
41
Hypothesis 4: When strong actors employ barbarism to attack weak actors defending with a GWS, all other things being equal, strong actors should win. Each of the four interaction outcome hypotheses describes an interaction of either same-approach or opposite-approach strategic interactions. It follows that all four may be tested as a single hypothesis. Hypothesis 5: Strong actors are more likely to win same-approach interactions and lose opposite-approach interactions.
Alternative hypotheses
As noted in Chapter 1, there are three alternative explanations of both strong actor failure in asymmetric conflicts, and of the trend toward increasing failure over time. Each generates testable propositions. For example, the logic of the arms diffusion argument clearly implies that better arms for the weak actor make strong actor failure more likely. This in turn implies that arms themselves are an important component of power, and by extension, the conflicts in question were less asymmetric than they seemed (the weak were less weak when better armed). If true, the high diffusion of military technology to the developing world after World War II might account for the trend in strong actor failures as well. Hypothesis 6: The better armed a weak actor is, the more likely it is that a strong actor will lose an asymmetric conflict. The logic of the nature-of-actor argument also yields testable propositions: Hypothesis 7(a): Authoritarian strong actors win asymmetric wars more often than do democratic strong actors. Hypothesis 7(b): Authoritarian strong actors win asymmetric wars in which the weak actor uses an indirect strategy more often than do democratic strong actors. The interest asymmetry thesis provides an alternative explanation of asymmetric conflict outcomes in two senses. First, it holds that relative power explains relative political vulnerabilities (power and vulnerability vary directly), and second, it holds that regime type does not matter. It therefore yields two testable propositions: Hypothesis 8: Relative material power explains relative interests in the outcome of an asymmetric conflict.
social support prior to World War I. But following World War II the same methods tended to increase resistance, thus increasing the costs of conquest and especially occupation. Strong actors willing or able to follow barbarism through to its extremes (e.g., the French ` in Algeria under General Massu) could still win wars, but no longer could these methods win the peace.
42
Hypothesis 9: Authoritarian and democratic strong actors share roughly equal political vulnerability in a prolonged asymmetric conflict. Evaluations of hypotheses 5, 6, and 8 will be included in the concluding section of each historical case study. Hypotheses 7a, 7b, and 9 can only be evaluated across cases. Evaluations of these hypotheses will therefore appear in the overall conclusion to the book.
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being reduced to one of two interaction types (sameapproach or oppositeapproach).48 The key variable of analysis is strategic interaction (STRATINT) as compared to conflict outcome (OUTCOME). If strategic interaction causes change in conflict outcome, then a shift in the value of strategic interaction across the case universe should be matched by a corresponding shift in outcome. The STRATINT variable was coded 0 if the strategic interaction was same-approach (directdirect or indirectindirect), and 1 if it was opposite-approach (directindirect or indirectdirect). The OUTCOME variable was coded 0 if the strong actor lost, and 1 if it won.49
44
63.6
opposite approach, n = 22
percent of all opposite-approach interactions. Weak actors were therefore nearly three times more likely to win when fighting strong actors in an opposite-approach strategic interaction.
three times more likely to win opposite-approach interactions than same-approach interactions (Pearson chi-squared (1), 11.38, p < 0.001). 52 Support in this context means arms, logistical support, and perhaps military advisers, but not combat troops. 53 The United States received support including actual combat units from Turkey during the Korean War and Australia during the Vietnam War. In these contexts, however, support was less about materially affecting the balance of forces available to the strong actor, and more about ratifying and legitimizing US policy. 54 There were not enough cases of positive external support to make a statistically significant finding. As a result, I report only the relationship of strategic interaction and outcomes when the weak actor received no external support.
45
Figure 5. Strategic interaction and conflict outcomes when weak actor received no external support
strategic interaction overwhelm the effects of external support for weak actors.
interactions has increased in rough proportion to strong actor failure over time.55 This analysis is limited because some data are missing: many civil and colonial wars recorded neither the quantity of forces committed nor the strategies actors used. Although these defects are balanced by statistical controls, even a perfect data set would support only a correlation between variables, not causation. Thus, although the data analysis might have refuted the strategic interaction thesis, only in combination with a careful comparison of historical cases can the thesis be confirmed.
Conclusion
Actors in a conflict of interests each come to that conflict with resources, a plan for the use of those resources, and hopes for help from allies or soon-to-be-deployed weapons in development. There is no question that all other things being equal an abundance of resources is good to have in a war. But if the strategic interaction thesis is right, the interaction of each actors plan for the use of those resources whether grand or meager turns out to be even more important.
The proportion of strong actor defeats as compared to the increased percentage of opposite-approach interactions is greater in the final fifty-year period than in the other periods. This suggests that other factors such as an established norm of anti-colonialism, a rise in nationalism, the spread of free trade regimes, and interference by superpowers during the Cold War explain some of the trend. However, as the data make clear, the strategic interaction thesis remains the most important causal variable.
55
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The Caucasus may be likened to a mighty fortress, strong by nature, artificially protected by military works, and defended by a numerous garrison. Only thoughtless man would attempt to escalade such a stronghold. A wise commander would see the necessity of having recourse to military art, and would lay his parallels, advance by sap and mine, and so master the place. Veliaminov (Baddeley 1908) When you do battle, even if you are winning, if you continue for a long time it will dull your forces and blunt your edge; if you besiege a citadel, your strength will be exhausted. If you keep your armies out in the field for a long time, your supplies will be insufficient . . . Therefore I have heard of military operations that were clumsy but swift, but I have never seen one that was skillful and lasted a long time. It is never beneficial to a nation to have a military operation continue for a long time. Sun Tzu (1988)
Russias attempt to annex the Caucasus began in earnest nearly two hundred years ago. Since many contemporary studies of interstate politics begin with caveats about the sensitivity of their findings to particular periods of history,1 it seems worthwhile to say why I think the careful study of so distant a conflict is still useful.
Appropriateness
Clearly there are many things about the place and time which appear unique to both. The character of warfare two hundred years ago was
1 For example, in Theory of International Politics, Kenneth Waltz restricts the explanatory power of structural realism to the post-Westphalian time period; and in Conventional Deterrence, John Mearsheimer restricts the explanatory power of his argument to the post-World War II time period. See Waltz (1979), and Mearsheimer (1983).
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different from that of the post-World War II era. In the period in question stretching from the time of the French Revolution to the American Civil War two differences in particular stand out. First, the profound sense of honor, duty, and glory associated with war was a major source of motivation for both officers and men. These things strongly motivated a willingness to take risks and make sacrifices; and, most particularly, bravery in battle. Bravery in battle was in turn widely believed to affect combat outcomes, and so it did. Second, the staggering costs of the Murid War in terms of time (thirty years) and lives (well over half-a-million men) call into question our preconceived notions about the meaning of victory in war; or less prosaically, of the relative costs of achieving a given political objective by military means. Russias conquest of the Caucasus gave it few new strategic advantages save stability on its southern frontier. The region was costly to control, difficult to traverse and, until the industrial age (which dawned quite a bit later in Russia than elsewhere), its wealth in oil lay fallow. These differences aside, there remain enough similarities during the time of the Murid War to make it relevant to our larger purpose. There was still an interstate system, with regime types well described as democratic or authoritarian. Weapons technologies were different from today, but strategies were similar, and the interaction between weapons technology and strategy were analogous as well. Most importantly, strategic interaction mattered as much in the nineteenth century as at Hannibals victory at Cannae in 216 BC, or Norman Schwarzkopfs in the Kuwaiti theater of operations in 1991.
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In effect, the mountains of Daghestan proper served as a sort of inner keep a virtually unassailable final barrier to conquest while the hills and dense forests of Chechnia served as a kind of outer wall or moat considerable barriers to conquest in their own right (Baddeley, 1908: xxxv). The lack of roads and the density of Chechnias beech forests severely restricted the utility of Cossack light cavalry, while at the same time exposing any line of march to an endless series of ambushes. In order to attack and defeat mountain strongholds, the Russians had to bring up sappers and heavy artillery. Yet powder, shot, and field pieces required considerable logistical resources, and these in turn required heavy security. The Russians were slow to adapt, yet adapt they did, though with mixed effect:
In front of the advance guard, behind the rearguard, and on both flanks of the column for its full length went the sharpshooters, with their reserves and mountain guns. On the level or on open places these flanking lines or chains kept at a good musket shot from the column, but on entering a forest they marched as the ground permitted, striving as much as possible to keep the enemys fire at a distance, for it was too deadly when directed at a compact body of troops. The soldiers called this carrying the column in a box. (Baddeley, 1908: 269)2
Give up the artillery and supplies, and you increased mobility, but upon reaching the mountain strongholds your troops would find it impossible either to advance or to hold their ground. In the end, Russia adapted to the difficulties of Caucasian terrain in two ways: first, by cutting trees,3 and second, by building roads and forts.
2 Note that this column in a box strategy is the precise analog of the World War I/World War II naval convoy strategy, with the Chechens taking the place of wolf packs, and the beech trees taking the place of the opaque North Atlantic. The disadvantage of both systems was also similar: more and more combat units had to be tied down to escorting logistical assets; and, worse still, there was simply no glory in the monotonous drudgery of escort duty. 3 Commentators have argued, in many ways convincingly, that Chechnya and Daghestan fell to the axe, not the sword. The strategy of terrain alteration is a logical, if drastic, counterinsurgency strategy. Yermolovs tree-cutting policies, amounting to systematic deforestation, anticipate the later US strategy of defoliating large areas of South and North Vietnam with Agent Orange; as well as Saddam Husseins drainage of the southern swamps of Iraq in order to contain and destroy the Shiite guerrillas whose insurgency was based there.
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Yet for all their defensive advantages, the mountains and forests did not constitute an unambiguous asset. On the contrary, as Baddeley argues, the difficulties of terrain and climate exacerbated the disunifying effects of ethnicity, language, and the adats (Baddeley, 1908: xxii). According to Baddeley, the Murids would win so long as they were able to maintain a politically united front, and alliance defections would ultimately doom them. If true, the terrain of Chechnia and Daghestan presented Shamil with a military advantage but a political disadvantage.
Background
Russias conquest of the Caucasus took place in three broad phases. The first occurred during the reign of Peter the Great, following immediately upon the heels of his successful war with Sweden in 1721. Taking advantage of an Afghan invasion of Persia, Peter himself led the expedition south, and his success resulted in the transfer of sovereignty of various administrative districts from Persia to Russia. This phase featured very little military conflict, yet such conflict as did take place foreshadowed what was to come: both in the forests of Chechnia and the mountains of Daghestan, the Russians experienced difficulties (Gammer, 1994: 2). Russias success in this first phase was due to the fact that its conflict was mainly with Persia, not with either the Chechens or the Avars (the main ethnic tribe of Daghestan):
The whole thing was accomplished in a few months, and in the joy of victory the Russians failed to notice how tremendously pleased the Persians were that they could hand over to the Russians this restless, unprofitable, and, in the last analysis, entirely independent land of brigands. (Essad-Bey, 1931: 213)
The second phase took place during the reign of Catherine the Great. In 1763 she established the fortress of Muzlik in the heart of Kabardia; and after fourteen years of hard struggle, Kabardia was conquered and occupied by a new Cossack regiment, the Mozdok Cossacks. Other wars of expansion were fought during Catherines reign Georgia was briefly occupied, then abandoned but Russian activity in the Caucasus remained half-hearted until just before her death, when the barbarous sacking of Tiflis provoked her into declaring war on Persia. The Russians defeated the Persians everywhere, but Catherine died during the war and her son Paul withdrew Russias forces from the Caucasus, intending to relinquish all Russian possessions there. He was unsuccessful,
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however, and after his death in 1800 his son Alexander agreed to accept a dying Georgian monarchs offer ceding Georgian sovereignty to Russia. It is only in 1800, therefore, that historians mark the beginning of Russias sixty-year-long attempt to conquer the whole of the Caucasus. The annexation of Georgia, like the later annexation of Manchuria by the Japanese in 1933, provoked a series of escalating military commitments which contained an inexorable expansion logic: in order to hold on to what we have, we have to expand to acquire more resources; but the resources we expend to expand make our new possessions tenuous; and so we must expand again just to hold on to what we have (Snyder, 1991: 34, 8). The period from 1800 to 1815 marked a difficult time for Russia in the Caucasus, but especially in the west. Russias de jure annexation of Georgia proved difficult to achieve de facto; and the Empire faced war with the Ottomans, Persia, as well as an invasion by Napoleons France during this time. Not until the defeat of Napoleon was Russia once again able to turn its sustained attention to its southern flank. The third and final phase of the conquest of the Caucasus thus begins roughly in 1816, and lasts until the capture of Shamil in 1859. This war eventually came to absorb the complete attention of the Russian Empire; along with the lives of many of its most talented officers, one of its most beloved poets, and hundreds of thousands of its serf soldiers. It is this third phase of the attempted conquest that constitutes the central focus of this chapter.
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What was his strategy for achieving this end? Yermolov was hardly the first or last to come upon what he considered an ideal counterinsurgency strategy: barbarism. The idea was to divide the region to be conquered into smaller regions, each of which would be attacked and razed piecemeal:
Baulked, the Russian generals decided on a ruthless system of reprisals. The native population must be broken, crops and villages razed, wells choked, orchards cut down, vineyards trampled. They must be brought to heel. No quarter must be given not that any was ever asked by the fighters and the campaign must be brought to a close without further delay. (Blanch, 1960: 23)
Yermolovs strategy was simple: to get at the inner keep (the mountain strongholds of Daghestan) it was first necessary to subdue the Chechens. To that end he began by building a fort called Grozny literally, menace. Yermolov intended to use Grozny as a base of operations for a succession of raids into Chechnia proper. These raids, as noted above, had the aim of conquering Chechnia by destroying it. The Chechens would either submit to Yermolov and become subjects of the tsar, or they would suffer and die: every man, woman, and child. For a time it seemed as though Yermolov would succeed. He felled trees, built roads, and completed a line of fortresses stretching from the Caspian to the Black Sea. He razed villages, blasted mountain fortresses to rubble, and forced tribe after tribe to submit to Russia. So great seemed his momentum that, by the end of June in 1820, he declared to the tsar the subjugation of Daghestan, begun last year, is now complete; and this country, proud, warlike, and hitherto unconquered, has fallen at the sacred feet of your Imperial Majesty (Yermolov as cited by Baddeley, 1908: 138). Though few could have guessed it at the time his assessment was to prove premature. Success followed on success, and not until 1824 did Yermolov begin to pay heed to rumors of religious fanaticism. Having conquered Daghestan, his command witnessed a spontaneous religious uprising in Chechnia. In December, 1825 Alexander I died unexpectedly, and Yermolov, thinking the tsars brother Constantine would accede to the throne, swore his and his commands allegiance to Constantine. Unbeknownst to Yermolov, however, Constantine declined to accept the crown, and it passed instead to the tsars son Nicholas. Yermolovs premature
53
commitment to Constantine woke Nicholass suspicions, however. Although allowed to continue in the command for another year, the accession of Nicholas I effectively marked the end of Yermolovs career. Yermolov was eventually dismissed in disgrace; forced even to beg for his own escort home from the Caucasus. His legacy to the contest for the Caucasus is a mixed one. On the one hand, he and Veliaminov invented the Caucasian Corps system, and they built a chain of fortresses which were to serve as crucial bases for the later conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan. On the other hand, his barbaric strategy directly paved the way for the rise of Muridism and Shamil, and for the historically unprecedented unification of the Caucasian peoples into a solid fighting front a front implacably opposed to Russian sovereignty.
Russias interests
During the Murid War the sprawling Russian Empire was ruled from St. Petersburg by two successive tsars: Nicholas I from 1826 to 1855, and Alexander II from 1855 to 1859. Although individual tsars tended to represent opposite political and social philosophies father seeking reform, son repression, grandson reform, and so on all the tsars in question shared an absolute secular and religious authority during their respective reigns.
Russias great advantage lay in her own system of government, that autocratic power which, coupled with the existence of serfdom, enabled her to fill the ranks of her armies at will, and, yet more important, to secure her conquests by a vast system of land settlement on the Cossack principle of military tenure. (Baddeley, 1908: 236)
This is an argument worthy of elaboration, because in many ways Russia constituted a medieval regime. Only a tiny minority of its citizens were literate, and the serf system amounted to slavery. In effect, Russia at that time had no real public which could exercise an independent influence on its foreign or military policies. There was no centralized collection or widespread dissemination of casualty or battle reports. Finally, to the extent that Russias social and political elites were engaged in the Caucasian campaigns, it is fair to say they were mostly engaged romantically.4
4
No more visible or durable evidence of this romanticism is needed than Mikhail Lermontovs poems and stories of the Caucasus (see Lermontov, 1966).
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Russias regime type was the very definition of authoritarian. And Russias interests in the Caucasus were simple: conquest, annexation, conversion, and pacification. These interests had not changed significantly since the reign of Peter the Great, and they did not change during the course of the war.
Murid interests
In 1816 Russias adversaries in the Caucasus could best be described as independent tribes and Khanates, each of which resisted Russian advances independently. Although most Christian regions eventually were bribed or browbeaten into swearing loyalty to Russia, Russias Muslim regions and Khanates were generally dealt with by military means (Gammer, 1994: 6). Regardless of faith, language, or loyalty, however, these areas were generally governed by hereditary ruling families. In formal terms, they were authoritarian regimes; though it should be added that until the advent of Muridism, no single tribes ruling family enjoyed a degree of authority comparable to that of the Russian tsars. Instead, rulers exercised an authority restricted by ancient laws called adats, which among other things specified appropriate rewards and punishments and codes of conduct for the sexes. The adats also institutionalized such practices as kanly or blood feud, which again, until the advent of Muridism, made unified resistance to Russian advances all but impossible. After 1830, however, the non-Christian regions and Khanates of Chechnia and Daghestan came under the sway of an absolute ruler, who like the tsar claimed both secular and religious authority. Khazi Muhammad was acclaimed first imam of Daghestan in 1830, and his creed has been called Muridism (see below). Khazi Muhammad was killed in battle at Gimri in October of 1832 (he was survived, in that battle, as if by a miracle, by a grievously wounded Shamil). In November of 1832, Hamzad Beg was proclaimed second imam of Daghestan. Like his predecessor, he spread the Murid creed, and his military actions were in the main confined to consolidating support among wavering Caucasian tribes. Yet Hamzad Beg, whose treachery was widely blamed for Khazi Muhammads fall at Gimri, was himself cut down by treachery; and in September of 1834, Shamil was acclaimed third imam of Daghestan. It was a title he was to hold for twenty-five years. It is no exaggeration to say that in terms of absolute authority Shamils leadership very quickly equaled that of the tsar who was to constitute his main opponent, Nicholas I.
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Prior to the advent of Muridism, the Caucasian tribes fought tactically brilliant but strategically uncoordinated engagements with the Russians. Their interests in such attacks were gain or personal fame. After the advent of Muridism, Shamil organized the Murids into a sophisticated order of battle based on a system of tens. Ten greater na bs (famous leaders and devoted followers, the equivalents of gen erals) commanded 100 regular nabs (unfailingly loyal, the equiva lents of colonels), who in turn commanded 1,000 lesser nabs or murshids (skilled tacticians, the equivalents of captains). Enlisted men and officers alike were motivated by the same burning passion: to free their lands of the infidel, where the term itself combined a secular (ethnic and political) and a religious (non-Muslim) meaning. Instead of gain and fame being the goal of engagements, they became by-products of service to God. The terms of that service were defined by the imam, the mouthpiece of God:
Muridism was a heady brew of mystic and absolute power, though even after it had become, to the Russians, synonymous with resistance, it was variously interpreted: there were the Murids of the Tarikat who never took up arms, as opposed to the Murids of the Ghazavat who fought a Holy War fanatically. To these last there was no other interpretation of the Prophets teachings. If to live in peace meant submitting to the Infidel rule, there could be no peace. While the Tarikat abhorred violence and, in the face of force, counseled a withdrawal to some inner spiritual sanctuary, this was not a doctrine which came easily to the fiery Caucasian tribes. Most of them felt that, in this issue, the Tarikat must be modified, or adapted, to meet the more bellicose tenets of the Koran, which promised short shrift to an Infidel foe. (Blanch, 1960: 5859)
This analysis is remarkable in its reminder that, as a religious philosophy, Muridism in and of itself did not demand armed resistance. It is therefore not the arrival of Muridism in Daghestan, nor its revival in the 1820s, which explain the waxing resolve of the Caucasian tribes to resist imperial Russia. It is the winning out of a particular interpretation of Muridism by successive imams which made Muridism the potent force it became a force which made political unity possible, bribery difficult, and self-sacrifice desirable. Shamils accession therefore marks both a shift in the quality of the forces opposed to Russia, and a shift in their interests: from fame, glory, and loot, to the ejection of infidel Russians from the territory of the Caucasus and the establishment of a theocracy to govern the lands from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea.
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coincides with both the apparent conquest of Daghestan, and the rise of Muridism (Baddeley, 1908: 237, 239). The years 182730 passed quietly enough in terms of conflict, although, all during this time, the first Murid imams were discreetly gathering strength and adherents throughout the Caucasus. By 1831, however, Khazi Muhammad, first imam of Daghestan, had rallied a considerable body of dedicated troops and begun raids against tribes allied to Russia. His Murids experienced some successes, but overall their first attempts proved a failure. Muhammad was a learned and holy man: he simply lacked the charisma and strategic skills needed to exploit victories and maintain allies. What emerges from accounts of battles in this early period is the theme of the importance of reputation in attracting alliance support. The Caucasus of the 1830s was a bandwagoning world:7 success meant allies, defeat meant isolation.8 Khazi Muhammads final defeat came in an heroic defense-to-the-death of Gimri aoul, in which he lost his life and, though mortally wounded, Shamil, his student and chief lieutenant, escaped. The Russians responded to this religious threat in Chechnia and Daghestan by renewed barbarism:
Greater Tchetchnia, in turn, was devastated with fire and sword, and a hatred sown and watered with blood, the traces of which are still visible after seventy years. (Baddeley, 1908: 275)
The ultimate effect of such policies was to guarantee the survival of Muridism of the Ghazavat. Russia had not yet gained the capacity to prosecute barbarism on a scale that could damage a Murid insurgency. Shamil recovered from his wounds in a short time and Russias punitive raids guaranteed a ready audience for his message. From 1833 to 1837 the Murids grew stronger and stronger, uniting more and more tribes and forever demolishing the image of Russians as militarily invincible. Even Russian military victories only strengthened Shamils grip (Baddeley, 1908: 304305). Again and again, Russias COIN strategy kill everyone and destroy everything backfired.
7 Bandwagoning means that the more allies you have, the more you will attract; and the reverse is true also, the defection of any ally implies the defection of every ally. On bandwagoning and its interstate implications, see Walt, 1987: 1921. 8 This is the essence of the Guevara/Castro foco theory: in opposition to Maos maxim that social organization must precede military adventures, Castro and Guevara held that in Latin America (Cuba specifically), military successes were a necessary precondition of social support. See e.g., Blaufarb and Tanham, 1989: 12.
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In 1839, Shamil again escaped almost certain capture after the Russians surrounded and defeated his forces after frightful losses on both sides at Akhulgo. By 1840, however, he was once more on the offensive; and from 1840 to 1842, Shamils Murids made themselves feared by Russias regiments and allies. Shamil was careful during this period to avoid pitched battles; choosing instead to attack only weak or isolated forces, and withdrawing before help could arrive. From 1843 to 1844 it was therefore Shamil, and not the Russians, who enjoyed the military initiative (Baddeley, 1908: 364). Paskyevitch, whose strategic plans favored the defensive, tended to play into Shamils hands. Yet the Murids were not the only ones learning important lessons. On the Russian side, a talented group of Russian junior officers were learning both how to fight, and how not to fight, the Murids. In 1845 Paskyevitch was replaced by Count Voronzov.
Shamil had by this time acquired full mastery of the strategic and tactical requirements of defense against such adventures. His strategy was again a GWS: avoiding direct confrontation with the enemy on his outward march, abandoning even fortifications if necessary to avoid contact, and then attacking the retreating armies when supplies and morale were low, and when exhaustion and frostbite had weakened them:
His opportunity would come later on when Nature, his great ally, had done her work, and the invaders, worn with toil, weak from privation, uninspirited by successes in the field, would have to face the
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In the event, Voronzov was only saved from complete annihilation by the bravery and foresight of General Freitag who, experienced in Caucasian warfare, had predicted almost exactly the fate of the expedition, and prepared in advance to relieve his superior upon the first hint of danger. This is what happened. On June 15, Voronzov, opened his campaign to catch Shamil with 21,000 men, and 42 pieces of artillery (Gammer, 1994: 153). Voronzov chased the Murids to Andi Gates, where his spies had assured him Shamil would make a stand. He found the site abandoned and in ruins, its population already evacuated by Shamil. After waiting three weeks at the ruined site, Voronzov then had to decide whether to push ahead in the hope of catching Shamil at another fortress (Dargo), or to return empty handed to Tiflis (Tblisi). Voronzov decided to advance, but the difficulties of terrain, combined with the increasing drain on supplies, soon forced a halt. He compounded his error by sending a body of troops half the combat strength of each unit in his order of battle back along the march route to gain additional provisions and evacuate his wounded. This so-called Biscuit Expedition proved a disaster. All along the route, long stretched-out columns of Russian soldiers became isolated. Following Suvorovs maxim that the head doesnt wait for the tail, impetuous Russian vanguards rushed ahead and were cut off from supply units carrying wounded. The Murids then attacked and annihilated the isolated columns piecemeal. As the wounded multiplied, the columns slowed still further.
9 Shamils strategy was the same as that used by the Russians against Napoleon during his invasion of Russia. Then it was the Russians who avoided confrontation, destroyed crops in the path of the invader, and waited until General Winter had weakened and dispersed French formations. Yet here, scarcely thirty years later, was Vorontsov playing the part of Bonaparte, marching toward almost certain destruction at the head of an overconfident, overburdened army. Moreover, Vorontsov had not arrived from St. Petersburg unaccompanied: on the contrary, his reputation and fame provoked dozens of Russias noble sons to flock to his standard in search of glory in the Caucasus. To the hostile and snowy wastes of Daghestan, these dandies brought elaborate tea services, personal slaves, plush tents and carpets, meticulously tailored uniforms, brandies, pheasants, and fine cigars.
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The expedition returned, but it cost Voronzov dearly. Only after reaching Shamils capital, Dargo, and finding it, like Andi Gates, abandoned and in ruins, did the magnitude of Voronzovs position become clear to him: isolated deep within the mountains, surrounded on all sides by nimble and well-supplied foes, he realized that even to regain the foothills would take a miracle. Quickly he gave the order to withdraw, and the entire formation began the retreat. Almost unbelievably, Voronzovs withdrawal was plagued by the same mindless adherence to maxims which nearly destroyed the Biscuit Expedition. Once again, the columns became separated. Once again, the nimble Murids cut the isolated formations to ribbons. As casualties mounted and food and ammunition dwindled to nothing, Voronzov sent five couriers to seek help from General Freitag. Amazingly, all five couriers reached Freitag, who set off without delay to relieve Voronzov. Gammer gives Voronzovs losses at 984 killed (including three generals), 2,753 wounded, 179 missing, 3 guns, a great sum of money in coins, and all the expeditions baggage (Gammer, 1994: 156). Freitags foresight saved Voronzovs expedition; and Voronzov, true to his earlier pronouncement, then set about organizing a more methodical destruction of Shamil and the subsequent conquest of the Caucasus. Over the next decade, this involved nothing more complicated or less deadly than the deforestation of Chechnia. The year 1845 was to mark the high point of Murid power. In 1846, Shamil attempted a conventional military offensive against Russian positions in Kabardia. His hope was that Kabardias people would rise up spontaneously in support of Muridism, and his bold stroke would completely sever Russian communications while leaving the Murids in control of a continuous geographic space between the Caspian and Black Seas. In the event, Shamil failed, mainly due to the bravery and doggedness of Freitag. Freitag, fully alerted to the strategic consequences of failure, immediately set off in pursuit of Shamils invading Murid cavalry with a woefully inadequate hodge-podge of garrison troops, Cossacks, and regular army formations. Shamil, isolated from his vaunted intelligence resources, did not realize that the force pursuing him was so weak. Neither, it turned out, did the Kabardians, who waited to see the outcome of the contest before declaring their support. After unexpected resistance at a Kabardian fort, Shamil faced the prospect of being trapped between a stubborn fort, and a relief force headed by the much respected Freitag. He withdrew, and later set about fulfilling his promise of prosecuting the steady and methodical conquest of the Caucasus.
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10 This implies that a sine qua non of effective GWS is a strong degree of social organization which makes bribery and coercion ineffective. The defection of the tribes suggests that Muridism was no substitute for nationalism as we have come to know it in the post-World War I context. For a general discussion of the relationship of nationalism to armed resistance, see Wolf, 1973.
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Bariatinskys clemency strategy was unconventional from the Russian point of view, and it proved effective. Although Shamil lost fewer troops in every engagement than the Russians, his ability to replace these losses constantly diminished. Russia could always draw on resources far beyond Shamils reach; whereas Shamils resources, human and material, were constantly and increasingly within Russias grasp; a fact which, once fully appreciated by Russia, was turned to such advantage that it ultimately led to Shamils defeat. It is very likely, in other words, that had the Chechens not already been weakened by decades of punitive raids, the Russians would never have been able to cut the trees. With the forests intact, it would have been as difficult as ever to bring heavy artillery to bear on the mountains. Finally, Bariatinskys clemency may have been taken for weakness, as Yermolov had previously warned.
able to declare the subjugation of the tribes in 1825. Russia employed an indirect strategy and the tribes had responded with an indirect strategy. Yet Russia had not yet developed the logistical reach necessary to make the barbarism decisive. As a result, the barbarism Yermolov and Paskyevitch unleashed against the Caucasian tribes isolated and devastated left smoldering embers. The Murids Khazi Muhammad, Hamzad Beg, and Shamil, successively fanned those embers into an inferno which nearly succeeded in ejecting the infidel Russians from the Caucasian theater. The greatest successes of the Murids coincided with the period of greatest strategic opposition: Russia employed a direct strategy, and the Murids countered with an indirect strategy. Yet the Russians did not give up. They switched strategies yet again to the indirect strategy of conciliation, to which the Murids had no other answer than their own indirect strategy, GWS. Bariatinskys conciliation strategy deserves special mention for two reasons. First, unlike all previous strategies, its aim was more to end the war than to win it. Bariatinsky was the first commander to treat his enemies as warriors and men instead of bandits and savages. He sought to persuade human beings, rather than destroy animals. He treated prisoners in accord with European standards, abolished torture and rape, and provided food and clothing to the women and children of his defeated adversaries. Second, such a policy would have been impossible under Nicholas I. Like his grandfather, Alexander II was a reformer and a firm believer in the power of kindness toward a defeated enemy.
First, relative power appears to have overwhelmed the effects of all competing arguments, including even strategic interaction. That is, the overwhelming advantage of the Russian Empire and, most importantly, its unflagging resolve to employ those resources for an indefinite period provides the most satisfying and intuitive explanation of the wars outcome. Second, this extreme cost insensitivity was only made possible by the fact of an absolute ruler and an illiterate population. The distribution of both conditions across time and space is limited, which makes this case a tougher test of competing explanations of asymmetric conflict outcomes. That said, there are a great many lessons to be learned from how the war was fought independent of its outcome. Strategic interaction explains why victory cost the Russian Empire so much more in time, blood, and treasure than any other great power could have been willing to pay under similar circumstances. Regime type proved vital for both strong and weak actors, arms diffusion played a small and unexpected role, and leadership, terrain, and climate were also important parts of the explanation of this particular war and its outcome. Interest asymmetry is not much use in explaining this war. Assessing the relative explanatory merits of competing explanations of asymmetric conflict requires answering four basic questions. First, what were the interests of the actors prior to the conflict and how are these best explained? Second, what was each actors regime type, and how did this affect strategy and political vulnerability? Third, what role did military arms diffusion play in the conflicts outcome? Finally, what were the strategies each side employed, what was the rationale given for their selection or change, and how did they affect the eventual outcome of the war?
Actor interests
Russias interests were not explained by its material power relative to that of the Murids. Russias interests appear to have been settled in the geopolitical context of the late eighteenth century, and to have simply continued momentum after that. In the context of Russia as an empire, its interests must best be described as expansion. Less obviously, the fact that Russias tsars were both secular and religious leaders meant that opposition to the will of the Tsar had the aspect of opposition to God especially when the opposition came from non-Christians. The very existence of resistance therefore became a casus belli.
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The Murids fought for their survival, but they also maintained the positive goal of ejecting Russia from the Caucasus. The negative goal could be explained by their relative material power, but not the positive goal.
Sevastopol were transferred from the Crimea to the Caucasus immediately upon the wars end.11 This meant a quick and significant influx of fresh troops for Russia. Second, and more importantly, the outcome of the Crimean War removed all hope of relief or support from either Britain or the Ottomans. Gammer and Baddeley both argue that this proved a crushing blow to Shamils morale, convincing him for the first time that his war with Russia was hopeless, and eventually infecting his forces with resignation (Gammer, 1994: 291; Baddeley, 1908: 459). In short, we dont see the trade-offs mechanism in this case. There is in fact no sense of political vulnerability either in Russias willingness to fight in the Caucasus or its soldiers conduct there, at all.12 Meroms democratic social squeamishness argument receives mixed support. On the one hand, no comparable democratic regime (and few authoritarian ones) could have sustained such costs in order to defeat Shamil. On the other hand, the proximate cause of Shamils downfall was not brutality which had been tried before but had never proven decisive but kindness.
Arms diffusion
Military technology played a relatively minor role in the Murid War. In the first interactions of the war, Russian military technology including firearms, artillery, and even clothing were much more poorly adapted to warfare in Chechnia or in Daghestan than that of their adversaries. In this sense, their technology was less advanced. Yet, as time passed, this situation improved to the point where Russian military technology equaled that of their adversaries, and in artillery far surpassed it. As all the commentators agree, artillery proved to be the decisive technology, but its effectiveness depended on very specific circumstances, and on strategy and doctrine (Baddeley, 1908: xxxii). For example, the Russians generally launched campaigns from forts situated in low hills or plains near river systems. Even had the Murids gained artillery capability (as they in fact did briefly), its utility against the Russians in these forts would have required (1) considerable escort
11
And note that Russias defeat did not weaken the tsars authority or imply a change of regime. 12 Again, see Baddeley, 1908: 236.
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to counter the Cossack cavalry formations which would be operating in their ideal environment, and (2) the capacity to advance against forts by sap and mine capabilities neither the mountain Murids nor the forest Chechens possessed. When the Murids did attempt to employ captured Russian artillery against the Russians, they met with disaster. First, their lack of skill with the technology caused them to miss their targets, but, more importantly, Shamyls insistence on hanging on to the guns once the engagement turned disastrous cost the Murids heavy casualties. For their part, the Russians were only able to employ artillery effectively after they had deforested Chechnia, and come to accept the high casualty rates necessary to advance and position the guns to destroy Murid fortifications (Blanch, 1960: 90).
Strategic interaction
If relative power doesnt explain relative interests, and regime type explains political vulnerability (or, in this case, its absence), what best explains the outcome of the Murid War? I argue that it is strategic interaction, but with an important caveat.13 Given the disparity in material resources between the two actors, and given the constancy of their interests over time, it is remarkable that the Murid War lasted twenty-nine years. As has been made clear in this case, there are three reasons it took so long to subdue the Murids. First, the terrain and climate made offensive operations very difficult, even assuming the best leadership, training, and equipment. Second, there is the problem of Russian arrogance and incompetence, both of which caused the Russians to underestimate their adversaries. Third, and most importantly, the Murids GWS systematically sacrificed fortresses for time. When Yermolov prosecuted a barbarism strategy against the Caucasian tribes, Russia won. When, after Paskyevitch, Voronzov switched to a direct attack strategy, the Murids won. And when, finally, Bariatinsky switched to a conciliation strategy, the Russians won. The final strategic interaction, same approach, ended the war.
13 The caveat is that for authoritarian regimes with large populations, the implied lack of cost sensitivity tends to overwhelm all other factors. Fortunately, the distribution of such regimes is low: China and Iran may be the only contemporary analogues of nineteenthcentury Russia.
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Conclusion
The Murid War was an asymmetric conflict between the Russian Empire, and a coalition of Caucasian tribes under the banner of Muridism. Russian interests were higher than that expected by the interest asymmetry argument. Russia wanted to conquer and annex the Caucasus, and it was willing to spend hundreds of thousands of lives, millions of rubles, and over half a century to accomplish this objective. Russias dubious possession of Georgia proved to be one of two reasons Russia refused to abandon its crusade in the Caucasus, even after Catherines decision to leave Russias possessions there fallow, and Pauls wish to abandon them altogether.14 As an ally, Georgias contribution to the war effort was neither inconsiderable nor decisive; though it gave the Russians a huge strategic advantage, lying as it did between another Muslim power, the Ottoman Empire, and Russias Muslim foes. Access to Georgias ports on the Black Sea also made it possible to ship supplies and reinforcements from Odessa or Sevastopol. Its only real strategic interest, therefore, lay in its desire to protect Georgia. It is impossible to argue, however, that the possession of Georgia itself materially or strategically benefited the Russian Empire in any reasonable proportion to the resources Russia was to expend to secure Georgia by conquering the Caucasus. Murid interests were in establishing their political and religious independence from Russia. To achieve this aim the Murids were willing to fight to the end and they did. In sum, hypothesis 8 relative material power explains relative interests in the outcome of an asymmetric conflict is not supported in the Murid War. Relative power proved a poor predictor of relative interests in this case at least on the Russian side. Did relative interests explain political vulnerability? Russia was simply not politically vulnerable. According to the interest asymmetry argument, its preponderance should have made it
The other reason was simple ethnic chauvinism: how dare these ignorant savages resist the will of the great white tsar? The language of both the commentators and original sources makes this view of the Caucasians clear: they are constantly referred to as savages, and their behavior is described as cunning where Europeans are described as brave or brilliant. The resistance of these uncultured children to the tsar was therefore constructed as an affront to civilization itself.
14
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politically vulnerable. The lack of a serious threat from the Caucasus should have made even an authoritarian Russia sensitive to resource trade-offs, and politically vulnerable in this sense. Yet, during the Murid War, Russia faced two potentially serious interstate conflicts, and neither caused the expected vulnerability. Strong actor regime type therefore matters more than is allowed by the interest asymmetry argument. Is the nature-of-actor argument therefore a better explanation of the outcome of the Murid War than strategic interaction? No. Regime type remained constant on both sides, but the fortunes of each side varied markedly during the wars three interactions. Regime type had little effect on the strategies chosen or prosecuted by either side. On the Russian side, what may be said is that Nicholas often lent a direct hand in strategic planning, and often with detrimental effects. It should also be added that merit was hardly the basis for assignment to command in the Southern Front: on the contrary, Russian officers with politically unpalatable ideas, or running from debts, or suffering from broken hearts, often ended up in command in the Caucasus. On the Murid side, what may be said is that Shamils authority for a time transcended all ethnic and territorial cleavages to make possible a sophisticated and effective GWS. Unlike the Russian army, advancement and command in the Murid army was based exclusively on merit. But, as can be readily appreciated, the differences between the two sides are not artifacts of their regime types, which were the same. Arms diffusion played almost no role in the Murid War, but its limited impact was the opposite of that predicted by the logic of the arms diffusion argument: the possession of modern artillery pieces by the Murids led them to abandon their comparative advantages in mobility and seriously weakened them. Hypothesis 6 the better armed a weak actor is, the more likely it is that a strong actor will lose an asymmetric conflict is therefore not supported in the Murid War. In terms of strategic interaction, the war played itself out in three interactions. During the first interaction, the strategic interaction was same-approach: the Russians pursued a barbarism strategy and the Murids a GWS. The Russians won militarily, but the political consequences of this first interaction led to the rise of militant Muridism. During the second interaction, the strategic interaction was oppositeapproach: the Russians pursued a conventional attack strategy and the Murids continued their GWS. The Murids won. But, during the final interaction, the strategic interaction switched to same-approach again:
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the Russians pursued a conciliation (indirect) strategy and the Murids, again, GWS. The Russians won, and Shamil went into exile. With one important caveat, then, hypothesis 5 strong actors are more likely to win same-approach interactions and lose opposite-approach interactions receives considerable support. The caveat is that the outcome of the war was determined more by the unwavering application of unlimited resources than by strategic interaction. On the other hand, the costs to the Russian Empire in time, lives, and treasure is best explained by strategic interaction. In sum, if we wish to explain why Russia won the Murid War, we cannot rely on relative power alone. Relative power clearly mattered. But what mattered most was strategic interaction.
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Britain in Orange Free State and Transvaal: the South African War, 18991902
They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from whose who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to . . . Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1985)
The war between the British Empire and the governments of Transvaal and Orange Free State which began on October 11, 1899, was once called the Anglo-Boer War, or Boer War for short, but historians now call it The South African War in recognition of the important role played in it by black Africans.
domestic unemployment and unrest. In 1820, 4000 British settlers arrived at Cape Town:
These nineteenth-century British immigrants, however, did not assimilate into the Afrikaner population as earlier French Huguenot and German arrivals had done. They came from an urbanized, industrializing society in Britain and in South Africa they tended to settle in the towns, the largest of which therefore became predominantly Englishspeaking. (Smith, 1996: 1516)
This urbanrural split exacerbated ethnic and linguistic differences, and eventually laid the roots for two convictions. On the British side, immigrants became convinced of their ethnic superiority to local Afrikaners (Smith, 1996: 16). At the same time Afrikaners came to be suspicious that these Uitlanders (outlanders) were not interested in sharing power or property in South Africa, but only in capturing it all for themselves. This was especially true after Britains parliament outlawed slavery in the Colony in 1834. Since slavery was seen then to be vital to the rural economy, many Boer were deeply embittered by this blow to their way of life. The abolition of slavery thus prompted a mass emigration into the South African interior an emigration now known as The Great Trek (183537). Thousands of Boer families took to wagons with all their property, and at great personal risk (many were attacked and killed by the then powerful African tribes such as the Xhosa and Zulu), moved inland, eventually to establish the Boer republics of Natal, Orange Free State, and further north and east, Transvaal. These were difficult times for the Afrikaners, who ran into hostile and numerous African tribes along the way. From the African perspective, the times were darker still. White settlers poured into their ancestral lands, more often than not killing or enslaving them as they advanced. Atrocities took place on both sides as native Africans were steadily displaced and dispossessed. In 1838, the Boer general Pretorious defeated the Zulu king Dingaan at the Battle of Blood River, and Afrikaners began to concentrate in Natal. By 1843, however, the British had annexed Natal and, five years later, Transorangia (later to become Orange Free State). After a number of sometimes bloody disagreements between the Boer trekkers and the Crown, however, Britain eventually agreed to allow limited autonomy for the two inland Boer republics, Transvaal (1852) and Orange Free State (1854). There followed nearly three decades of relative peace. In 1870, diamonds were discovered in Kimberley, a town between Orange Free State
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and Cape Colony (later quickly and illegitimately annexed by Britain in 1871). The diamond rush of 187071 brought a considerable influx of Uitlanders which included the then 18-year-old Cecil Rhodes into the previously pastoral and rural communities of Orange Free State. The miners and prospectors drank and gambled, and were an early shock to the conservative, pious, and hard-working Boer farmers who still constituted a majority within the republics. These tensions were only aggravated after Sir Theophilus Shepstone announced by proclamation the annexation of Transvaal as a British Crown Colony in 1877. This move was deeply resented by the Boers, who argued that the move was a direct violation of the Sand River Convention of 1852, in which Britain had previously guaranteed their sovereignty. Disagreements and bitterness aside, Britains de jure sovereignty in South Africa implied British de facto responsibility for the security of Europeans within its declared jurisdictions:
Thus British power succeeded in achieving for the Transvaal state what the Afrikaners had been too weak to achieve for themselves. British annexation may have removed their sacred independence but by the end of 1879 it had also secured the Transvaal against its most powerful African neighbours. This crucial development freed the Afrikaners to make a bid to regain their independence during the following year. (Smith, 1996: 28)
In 1879 the British destroyed the Zulus as a military force. The Zulus had been the last major African tribe to resist white imperialism in South Africa. With this last threat to Boer survival eliminated, the stage was set for a major confrontation between the Boer and the British. Although Shepstones annexation proclamation had promised Transvaalers a separate government, with its own laws and legislature, after 1879 the territory was ruled directly, as a Crown Colony, in a tactless, authoritarian way . . . (Smith, 1996: 28). As resistance in Transvaal mounted, and threatened to spill into open rebellion, Transvaals President Kruger waited for the results of a general election in Britain. The election brought Gladstone and the Liberals to power, and Kruger waited for policy to change in accordance with Gladstones speeches on British policy in South Africa:
In the Transvaal, declared Gladstone, we have chosen most unwisely, I am tempted to say insanely, to place ourselves in the strange predicament of the free subjects of a monarchy going to coerce the free
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Yet, once in power, Gladstone balked: how could he trust the prospect of a South African confederation to the uncultured hands of the likes of Kruger and his cronies? In the event, Gladstone refused to grant Transvaal its own sovereignty and soon the whole region was in open revolt. The three-month war culminated in a humiliating British defeat at the Battle of Majuba Hill (February 27, 1881):
The battle, in which only a few hundred troops were engaged and where British losses, including the death of Colley himself, accounted for about a third of the total for the whole war, soon acquired great symbolic importance. Like the failure to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum, it came to be regarded in Britain as a blot upon the national honour which Conservatives pointed to as an example of Liberal mismanagement. Remember Majuba became the rallying cry with which many British soldiers were to go into action in 1899. (Smith, 1996: 3132)
Thus, by 1884, three years after the Battle and two years before the discovery of gold, Transvaal became the South African Republic officially in the London Conventions. All the powers of a sovereign and independent state save the right to determine foreign policy (and expand beyond current borders) thus reverted to the Republic. Then came the discovery of gold at Witwatersrand in 1886. The gold rush which followed had three important effects. First, it led to a massive new influx of Uitlanders. It transformed the demography and economies of the Boer republics. Second, the discovery of gold created for Kruger the problem of maintaining Boer control of the state,1 while at the same time providing him the opportunity to use the revenues to buttress his states physical security and independence by purchasing arms and maintaining a state monopoly on dynamite manufacture (Smith, 1996: 54).
1 This problem, which was to become for the British a primary casus belli, revolved around the question of the franchise. The Transvaal, for example, restricted the franchise to Afrikaner burghers by means of legal requirements for residency. This meant the burgeoning population (a majority in Transvaal) of Uitlanders were not allowed the vote, and their protests over disenfranchisement, sent even to Queen Victoria herself, allowed Britain to use the franchise issue to disparage the Boers as corrupt and authoritarian in the local and British press.
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Kruger also granted a railroad concession (another monopoly) to a Dutch company. Both decisions were to prove crucial during the first interaction of the later war. Third, the gold and diamonds created extremely wealthy (and hence powerful) extra-state interests in the region. The conservative and by British standards corrupt government of peasants led by Kruger was a constant thorn in the side of the regions great capitalists, such as Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Beit. These wealthy men were hardly shy of using their influence to undermine Kruger, and their meddling ultimately culminated in the fiasco of the Jameson Raid. On December 29, 1895, Dr. Leander Starr Jameson and 500 Chartered Company2 police rode across the border into Transvaal in an attempt to spark a rebellion of Uitlanders in Johannesburg, providing a pretext for British intervention in Transvaal. No rebellion occurred, and Jamesons raiders were defeated and forced to a humiliating surrender at the battle of Doornkop. The main effects of the Jameson Raid were three. First, it provided a powerful impetus to the development of an Afrikaner nationalism which had been sparked at Majuba Hill. Second, it confirmed in the minds of Kruger and Steyn (his Orange Free State counterpart) that Britain was behind attempts to take back Transvaals sovereignty. Third, it caused Kruger to prepare seriously for war, most especially by building forts and investing in the latest and best military equipment.
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Convinced that annexation by force was the only way to assure British control over the two republics,3 Milner fretted over the prospect of peace:
What could be more alarming than the prospect of Krugers concessions leading to a settlement that he and every British South African were certain would prove to be a sham? Very great feeling of depression, he wrote on 23 July, as I can see no good is coming of the long struggle against S.A.R. misgovernment. British public opinion is going to be befooled and that is the long and short of it. (Pakenham, 1979: 82)
This passage highlights the importance key political elites placed on the power of British public opinion.4 And in this case public opinion was to be managed by means of the press, which was believed to exercise a direct influence on British public opinion:
But Milners other cronies from his Pall Mall days were now in a position to show their loyalty, and show it they did . . . All these newspapers taught British public opinion in the last few weeks of the dangers of delay, and of being fobbed off without a settlement on the franchise. It was The Morning Post and The Times, both staunchly pro-government, that banged the jingo drum loudest. (Pakenham, 1979: 86)
Milner exercised a great deal of influence over Chamberlain. He was not only charismatic, but connected. Milner pushed and bullied and threatened and cajoled in order to get his 10,000 troops sent to Natal. Now, under Milners breathtakingly comprehensive pressure, Chamberlain was to put a particular spin on Krugers latest proposals which would foreclose any chance of a negotiated settlement:
3 Milners concept of control included certain good intentions. He believed Kruger and his cronies were anachronisms well gotten rid of, and that Milners own administration would raise the level of civilization of all the people living in the republics, whether Boer or British. 4 Here is Pakenhams paraphrase of Milner regarding the threat of a British public undermining the tough necessities of Britains South Africa policies: Above all, the unctuous rectitude (quoting Rhodess famous sneer) of the British public must not be allowed to ruin the settlement. No votes for the coloured people in the Transvaal at all costs. There was only one set of laws in the Transvaal that the Uitlanders considered really excellent: The laws to keep the niggers in their place (Pakenham, 1979: 123124). This passage is important for two reasons. First it counts as evidence of what Mack would call political vulnerability. Second, the passage highlights the hypocrisy of Britains position regarding South Africas blacks. In his arguments to the Cabinet (Pakenham, 1979: 113, 520), Chamberlain went so far as to argue that South Africas blacks would be better off as British subjects (it was a base lie).
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But was the franchise really the casus belli the British made it out to be? No. Even as a justification for war to the British public, it had serious drawbacks:
[The franchise] may have served its turn to get things forrarder in South Africa and as a splendid battle cry to rally the support of British public opinion, but Chamberlain knew that if it came to a casus belli, grounds for this would have to be found elsewhere. British public opinion would not support a resort to war over the difference between a seven or a five years franchise. (Smith, 1996: 314)
In other words, British policymakers were constrained in their arguments and actions by a sense of what the British public would or would not accept. But Jan Smuts and other Boer moderates were not privy to such information, and as a result they crafted a peace proposal designed to assess Britains true intentions. Britains rejection of the proposal confirmed to Smuts and Kruger that the franchise was not the real issue, the real issue was instead British supremacy and Transvaal subservience (Smith, 1996: 354). There is another important feature of Chamberlains arguments to the Cabinet: precedent-setting effects:5
But the issue now went further than the grievances of Uitlanders, or natives. What was now at stake was no less than the position of Great Britain in South Africa and with it the estimate formed of our power and influence in our colonies and throughout the world. Such were Chamberlains formal arguments to the Cabinet. (Pakenham, 1979: 91)
In effect, Chamberlain argued that if Britain didnt threaten the use of force, others would think Britain weak and seek to take advantage of
5 In The Geography of Ethnic Violence, Monica Duffy Toft elaborates the difficulties multiethnic states face in negotiating settlements short of violence with independence-minded ethnic groups when doing so will set a precedent for other groups (Toft, 2003).
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that weakness. Keeping in mind that Victorian Britain possessed a sprawling colonial empire, this was a serious consideration. But Chamberlain had a final argument based on his low opinion of Boer culture and resolve. He argued that sending troops would make their use unnecessary because Kruger was bluffing, and faced with force he would back down (Pakenham, 1979: 9192). But did the British want war? Did their interests extend so far as to risk an all-out fight with the tiny Boer republics? Its a difficult question to answer, but the question of Britains war-willingness is important if we accept that a willingness to expend blood and treasure in a war is a good indicator of vital interests. The less willing to fight a war, the less vital the interests at stake.6 Smith argues that in fact the British did not want war, and his indicator of British intentions is Britains lack of military preparations for war (Smith, 1996: 337338). But there is one obvious problem with this interpretation: there may have been other reasons why Britain did not seriously prepare for a war in South Africa. Chief among these reasons is lack of regard for the military capabilities of ones adversary.7 Smith himself notes that the British were used to small wars which required very few troops to prosecute (Smith, 1996: 3). He also makes it clear that the British did not rate the Boer military threat very highly (Smith, 1996: 339). Pakenham takes the argument a step further:
Only a few days after his arrival Lansdowne cabled to ask his views about the first crucial questions. [Penn Symonss] reply: a mere two thousand extra troops would make Natal safe right up to its northern apex (hemmed in though it was by the two republics). (Pakenham, 1979: 74)
6 There were economic interests gold and diamonds in South Africa which commentators have long argued were the real reason Britain was willing to go to war. The most notable such argument was leveled by the socialist J. A. Hobson, then correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. In his influential book, The South African War: Its Causes and Effects, Hobson argued that British policy was hostage to capitalist interests, especially those of the goldbugs, such as Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Beit (Hobson, 1900). Subsequent scholarship has refuted this thesis soundly (see Smith, 1996: 393412). But even had it not been refuted, the argument would have reduced to the claim that South Africa counted as a vital British interest, one over which it was willing to fight and die. 7 Another interpretation is that the British were unprepared for any military action of a serious nature. For a thorough discussion of Britains overall lack of preparedness for a major war, see Hamer, (1970: chap. 6). Hamer shows that British lack of preparedness was not specific to the fight in South Africa, but would have been evident in anything other than a small war.
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The real question was, what would the Boer do? In September, the two Boer republics could field a total of 54,000 men, whereas Britain had a total of 10,000 men to guard Natal and Cape Colony. If the Boer attacked, would they seek to directly engage these garrison forces in strength, or would they adopt a raiding strategy, pushing only a few thousand commandos into Natal and the Cape? British military intelligence, under the command of Major-General Sir John Ardagh, predicted a raiding strategy:
How did Ardagh and his department come to this conclusion, that would seem so astounding in the light of events? Military Notes gives the answer: the Boers were not regarded as a serious military adversary. As fighting men, they were expected to be inferior to the Boers who had beaten Colleys small force at Majuba. Boer generals, used to fighting Kaffirs, knew nothing of handling large bodies of men . . . (Pakenham, 1979: 7475)
There is, of course, no way to definitively establish Britains willingness to go to war. However, as these passages make clear, preparations for war in this context does not make a good indicator of British intentions. Moreover, the weight of documentary evidence available suggests that whatever Britain wanted, Milner had his heart set on war as the only means of accomplishing British political objectives in South Africa. In short, the British did want war, but not the war they got.
To be fair and accurate there were no Boer interests: Despite the direct and painful testimony of Boer generals and participants on commando, the rifts and divisions on the Boer side tended to be glossed over. An Afrikaner nation did not exist in 1899 and Afrikaners in different parts of South Africa had been moulded in different contexts and states by very different experiences during the course of the nineteenth century. There were more Boers in the Cape Colony than in the two Boer republics. (Smith, 1996: 7). However, we may nevertheless discern a common denominator across republics: freedom from British rule.
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to war, the Boer proved themselves remarkably pragmatic and willing to compromise on many of the key issues for example, the franchise raised by Chamberlain and Milner. Yet by the eve of war two features of this conflict of interests made war inevitable. First, Britain had tipped its hand and made it clear that it would accept nothing less than annexation, while the Boer made it equally clear that although they were willing to redress a number of British grievances, they were not willing to compromise on the key issue of sovereignty. Second, neither side trusted the others declarations and overtures. To make matters worse, the British dramatically underestimated both the Boer military capacity, and their resolve to use that capacity. The end result was that both sides exchanged ultimatums, and when the conditions of neither were met, the Boer mobilized for war.9
Although the Boer initiated the war, this is only of technical interest. Britain is responsible for the war itself: on this there is no disagreement.
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There is no controversy concerning the relative power of the two sides in this fight. The UK was the strong actor, while the two Boer republics even including the possible support of citizens from Cape Colony and Natal were out-powered well in excess of 5:1.
The first half of Smutss vision seems hardly controversial in light of events. What damned this otherwise fine strategic plan was time and the hesitation of Orange Free States President Steyn. All through September Steyn hesitated as the British troop-ships steamed ever nearer Durban. By the time both republics mobilized it was too late. By 9 October the majority of British troop-ships had already landed at Durban.
10 Although the strategy itself is sound, it is difficult to read this sort of domino reasoning without, first, recalling similar reasoning on the part of the Japanese prior to their attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941; and, second, realizing how common such thinking was in that day. Milner and the British were certainly thinking along similar lines.
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And as to Boer tactics, equipment, and training, it must be added that although capable of conventional offensives against regular forces in fortified positions, their organization and training hardly made them ideal prosecutors of Smutss strategy:
Their elected civilian leaders were made commandants appointed, that is, to lead the five hundred to two thousand burghers of each commando in battle. In this commando system, it was no ones job to train the burghers . . . the men were left to fight as they had always fought with the tactics of the mounted frontiersman. If the enemy were superior in numbers, they would provoke the enemys attack, dismount, take cover and shoot, remount and ride away. In European military manuals it was a formula known as strategic offensive, tactical defensive. The Boers had never seen the manuals. (Pakenham, 1979: 105)
The war started with attacks by Boer commandos (essentially, mounted infantry with light artillery support) against the British in three areas: Dundee to the south, Mafeking to the north, and Kimberley to the northwest. The British were dangerously exposed north of the Tugela river in Natal. Britains general on the spot, Sir George White, wondered whether he should withdraw from Dundee to positions south of the Tugela, and he was answered in the negative by both local military authority (the Dundee garrisons commander, Sir Penn Symons) who did not consider the Boers much of a military adversary and by political authority (Natals governor, Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson) because it would encourage the Zulus to revolt (Pakenham, 1979: 109).11 The first armed clash of the war took place on October 20 at Talana Hill just outside Dundee in Natal. The Boer were under the command of Lucas Meyer, and the British were under the command of Penn Symons, who was just sitting down to breakfast as the first Boer shells plunged into Dundee. Symons was neither a fool nor a military genius. He organized the defense of Dundee by the book. His tactics in engaging the Boer were: (1) artillery preparation; (2) infantry attack (ending with a charge with fixed bayonets); and finally, (3) a cavalry charge to cut off the enemys retreat. And although a number of his subordinates worried about the target that closely packed troops might
11
Milner later made similar arguments and issued similarly dire warnings regarding the revolutionary potential of the Cape Afrikaners in the event of military defeat or a lack of sufficient military presence in the Cape.
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present to sustained and rapid rifle fire, Symons also believed in keeping his infantry in close rather than open order (so as to maximize punch). In this Symons was to prove wrong, but he should not be blamed as careless or incompetent on that account because, as Pakenham notes, In the whole of Europe there was no body of soldiers that had ever seen the concentrated fire of the magazine rifle, with the muzzle end facing them (Pakenham, 1979: 132). In effect, the curtain had just risen on a match between a highly mobile Boer military organization outfitted with dramatically augmented firepower,12 and a ponderous, hidebound, and overconfident yet superior (in terms of numbers) British imperial army. In the battle itself, in which the British won the artillery duel (eighteen guns against three), Symons and many of his officers and infantry died forcing the Boer commandos off Talana Hill, only to discover that most of Meyers commando had escaped on horseback. Unbeknownst to Symons, his cavalry, which was supposed to cut off Meyers retreat, had run into trouble and surrendered hours earlier. The British thus won the hill, but did they win the battle? The fight for Talana Hill proved typical of most encounters between the British and Boers up until Black Week in December. Although the Boer often had better guns, they were never locally sufficient to alter the outcome of the second act of the three-act pattern initiated by Symons and his peer commanders in the early interactions of the war. British infantry tended to rush straight against an entrenched Boer infantry in close order, sustaining heavy casualties against the concentrated firepower of the new Mausers. To the British officers leading their men into battle, the advent of smokeless powder proved to be disconcerting to say the least. To the British, the dug-in Boer were invisible until the advancing infantry were right on top of them. This made it difficult for officers on the ground to disperse, concentrate, advance, and retreat their infantry effectively. The result was high casualties. After fixing bayonets for the final charge, the British usually found their objective abandoned: a few dead Boer and in the distance, a majority of the commando trotting away on horseback. Where the British in fact had cavalry, as in the case of Boer General Kocks premature advance against White at Ladysmith, decisive if brutal outcomes were
Krugers foresight had armed the Boers with the Mauser 98 an accurate, reliable, magazine-fed, breech-loading rifle firing smokeless rounds.
12
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possible.13 However, the British never had a sufficient cavalry presence in South Africa to counter Boer hit-and-run tactics.14 In the next few weeks the two forces met in battle after battle, which the British had the worst of. In November, White was trapped at Ladysmith and all pretense of a short war ended. Whites internment at Ladysmith was perhaps the greatest British strategic blunder of the war. White had in fact already been ordered to fall back south of the Tugela River in the event of encountering superior forces. His orders, in other words, were to avoid becoming besieged at all costs. How then did it happen, and why? Essentially, White believed as all his peers at that time that the Boer were not a worthy military opponent; and that fighting ability aside, their morale would be so fragile that one decisive British victory would send them packing. Yet he was outnumbered by Joubert, the famous Boer general, by two to one. What made him willing to risk entrapment by offering battle against his specific orders? Pakenham provides an answer worth quoting at length:
To some extent, [White] was merely expressing the conventional British generals ignorance of the realities of large-scale war. For half a century Britain had fought small wars against the disunited and illarmed tribesmen of India and Africa. Often these wars had begun with
13 A British journalist on the scene provides the following description of the cavalry charge against Kocks retreating commando at Elandslaagte: The charge of two hundred horsemen galloping across a plain is designed to be an irresistible force. It does not stop simply because the enemy would like to surrender . . . The charging line of horsemen caught them broadside, like the steel prow of a destroyer smashing into the side of a wooden boat. People heard the crunch of the impact and saw the flash of the officers revolvers, and heard the screams of the Boers trying to give themselves up . . . Back came the cavalry for a second charge. (Most excellent pig-sticking . . . for about ten minutes, the bag being about sixty, said one of the officers later.) Again the shouts and screams . . . But a story had got round that the Boers had abused a flag of truce and, anyway, the order was: no prisoners (Pakenham, 1979: 143144). 14 Three problems arose in relation to fielding an effective cavalry in South Africa. First, the British found it impossible to get enough horses in theater. They stripped horses from other colonies as far away as India and Australia. But the transport took a heavy toll, and those horses which survived to reach the theater were often too weak to be used as cavalry mounts. Second, the climate and terrain of South Africa was hard on horses, who not only needed extra time to acclimatize, but could not afterward be used in sustained galloping (which killed them). By the time the British understood this, they had effectively destroyed their existing cavalry as a fighting force. Finally, the later British policy of farm-burning (a COIN strategy) had the effect of restricting the mobility of cavalry formations to the railways, because the policy not only destroyed forage for Boer horses, it destroyed forage for any horses. In the end, the British gave up trying to employ cavalry, and hit upon the wiser strategy of imitating the Boer by using their horses as mounts for trained infantry.
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Whites forces were beaten in the field by the Boer on November 2, and White retreated to Ladysmith, where he and his remaining troops remained trapped until February 28, 1900. By the end of the first week of November 1899, the British had been effectively bottled up in three sieges: Kekewich was stuck with Cecil Rhodes in Kimberley, BadenPowell was under siege at Mafeking, and White was trapped with his field force at Ladysmith. The three sieges significantly complicated the military campaign against the Boers, because Whites entrapment (and for political reasons, Cecil Rhodess in Kimberley) now forced the British to divide their forces in order to relieve the sieges, instead of concentrating them for an irresistible rush toward the Boer capital cities.
British) casualties, were in retreat public outrage over the weeks reverses reached crisis proportions. This outrage had in fact become a constraint on Britains conduct of the war:
To expand the British army in South Africa was not merely a question of recruiting the troops, hiring the ships, and sending them steaming off to South Africa. It was complicated by two political pressure waves, freak storms of public opinion, now making the windows rattle in Whitehall . . . The second was ominous for the whole world: a shock-wave of Anglophobia vibrating across the Continent, precipitated by the war, and prolonged by Britains failure to win it. (Pakenham, 1979: 257)
Again, perceptively I think, Pakenham continues trying to isolate what lay at the root of British public concern over Black Week. He argues that it was disappointment in victory so long delayed:
The people of Britain had had war on the cheap for half a century. Small wars against savages: the big-game rifle against the spear and the raw-hide shield. Small casualties for the British. To lose more than a hundred British soldiers killed in battle was a disaster suffered only twice since the Mutiny. Now, in 1899, they had sent out the biggest overseas expedition in British history to subdue one of the worlds smallest nations. It would have been odd if the public had not shared the governments confidence in a walk-over. The resulting casualties were thought shattering: seven hundred killed in action or dead of wounds, three thousand wounded since October . . . This was at the root of the publics humiliation. Then the spasm of bitterness passed. (Pakenham, 1979: 258)
This passage highlights two key issues: the context of British casualty sensitivity, and the degree to which pride and shame motivated British actions. And what of British war aims? Now that the costs were mounting, what of the anticipated gains? Paraphrasing Asquith, Pakenham adds:
But he warned people that it would be grotesque to get these reverses out of proportion. He compared the present humiliations and mortifications with periods of real national crisis during the Napoleonic War or the Indian Mutiny. How would Marlborough, Wellington or Havelock have survived this ordeal by telegraph every blow they struck and every blow they received made subject to hourly scrutiny by the public? The struggle now went much deeper than a mere question of asserting and maintaining our position in South Africa. It is our title to be known as a world power which is now upon trial. (Pakenham, 1979: 258)
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If the war had not begun as a vital security interest for the British, Asquiths remarks make it clear that it had now become one.15 This passage also points to what may be the first media complaint regarding the clash between a publics access to information about the costs and conduct of a war, and the degrees of freedom granted local military authorities in winning it. As will become clear in the next interaction of the war, it would not be the last such complaint. With the accession of Roberts and Kitchener to command and more importantly the arrival of massive British reinforcements the final stage of the first interaction of the war was now set. There were blunders on both sides, but by the end of June 1900, Robertss steamroller had captured Bloemfontein (March 13), Johannesburg (May 31), and finally, Pretoria (June 5). In the euphoria over his capture of Bloemfontein, Roberts issued his first proclamation (March 15): amnesty for Boer regulars (they could keep their property if they turned in their rifles and swore an oath of neutrality) but not for Boer leaders.16 The three sieges had also been raised; Kimberley (February 15), Ladysmith (February 28), and Mafeking (May 17). The war was over or rather, it should have been. But Robertss triumphant march to Pretoria marked the close of only the first third of the war, which was due to stretch on, in much more brutal form, for another two years.
15 This opinion was shared by the Gladstonian (Liberal) wings most outspoken member, ` Henry Labouchere, who now declared his belief in the doctrine of my country right or wrong. The danger of Britains being humiliated in front of the other Great Powers, he said, outweighed the moral disadvantages (Pakenham, 1979: 267). 16 Roberts believed his capture of Bloemfontein would knock all the fight out of the Orange Free State burghers, and left to themselves, [they would] accept the amnesty, take the oath of allegiance, and disperse to their homes (Pakenham, 1979: 400).
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The British had made mistakes too. First, underestimating their adversary, and second, failing to adapt their forces and tactics to exploit vulnerabilities in the Boer method of fighting. But the British, who had, after all, won, showed little interest in learning from their mistakes. After his capture of the Boer capitals, Roberts returned to a heros welcome in London. Kitchener replaced Roberts as commander-in-chief in November of 1900, and was not interested in the mistakes of other British generals:
Kitchener displayed no interest in learning from the mistakes of Buller and Methuen. He probably attributed their own failures, as Roberts did, to their lack of self-confidence. Of the revolution in tactics of the new, invisible war of the rifle-plus-trench he showed himself supremely unaware. (Pakenham, 1979: 351)
Other British generals, however, had worried about the tactical and strategic difficulties presented by the enemy, terrain, and climate. As early as October of 1899, Buller had planned to build and equip a large force of irregular colonial troops trained to fight like the Boer. It was Buller who had foreseen the problem of lack of mobility, and it was Buller who anticipated the Boers switch to GWS (and its rationale):
In this type of pioneering, colonial society, there was no highly organized machinery of administration, and the central government carried little influence or authority. Time has not yet glorified the seat of Government with a halo of sentiment, wrote Buller. To every man his own home is the capital. Hence there is no commanding centre by the occupation of which the whole country or even a whole district can be brought into subjection; no vital spot at which a single blow can be struck that will paralyse every member of the body. There are living organisms which can be divided into a multitude of fragments without destroying the individual life of each fragment. (Pakenham, 1979: 398)
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This was part of Bullers warning to Roberts: the Boer were a body with no head. But as we have already seen, Roberts had little faith in Bullers opinion:
Roberts . . . stuck to the conventional idea of surrender. Capture the capital and you have cut off the head of the enemy. Their spirit must die too. And he had long intended to use political means the kind that was often used in Indian frontier wars to smooth his march to Pretoria. On 15 March he offered an amnesty for every Free State burgher except the leaders. (Pakenham, 1979: 399)
The British were therefore slow to realize their strategy was not going to win the war. They continued to hold to the idea of capturing values and offering limited amnesty as a way to end Boer resistance.17 The Boer, by contrast, began planning for a new strategy right after the capture of Bloemfontein. That strategy was GWS. Its chief architect was De Wet, who put forward his arguments for a strategic shift at a war council held just four days after Robertss capture of Bloemfontein. The strategy had three key elements. First, it needed a new kind of force one made up exclusively of men who were fiercely dedicated to the Boer cause. After the fall of Bloemfontein, De Wet sent his exhausted commando home on ten days furlough, fully aware that many of them would not come back. But this was by design: those who did return could be counted on. Second, it needed a force which could operate independently of the ox-driven wagon trains which typically accompanied Boer commandos in the field. Third, De Wet urged a switch from attacking concentrations of British troops, to attacking British communications, which were extremely vulnerable. Above all, De Wet argued that even a few small victories could rally the morale of the burghers far out of proportion to their military impact (Pakenham, 1979: 408409). The new strategy thus promised new hope at least of avoiding defeat. Something else something vital was not discussed as part of the war councils deliberations: the presumption of British moral conduct in war. One reason the Boer had developed as a mobile military organization including mobile transport was precisely due to the character of warfare against native African tribes, who did not often respect the notion of noncombatant immunity. Boer trekkers thus kept
17 This would not last long, however. Within a month, Roberts would detach fully half his forces 20,000 men to both guard his communications and begin the process of looting and burning farms as a COIN strategy (see below).
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their women and children on wheels, ready to flee their farms on short notice. But since the destruction of the Xhosa and Zulu as military threats, the Boer had become more settled and less mobile. This meant values exposed to the British. But as De Wet makes clear in his later account of the war, it never occurred to the war council to question the safety of Boer women and children under British occupation:
Many a smart, well-bred daughter rode on horseback and urged the cattle on, in order to keep out of the hands of the pursuers as long as at all possible, and not to be carried away to the concentration camps, which the British called Refugee Camps (Camps of Refuge). How incorrect, indeed! Could any one ever have thought before the war that the twentieth century could show such barbarities? No. Any one knows that in war, cruelties more horrible than murder can take place, but that such direct and indirect murder should have been committed against defenceless women and children is a thing which I should have staked my head could never have happened in a war waged by the civilized English nation. (De Wet, 1902: 192193)
Of course, not all those attending the war council had such faith in British moral restraint. Louis Botha, commanding the last effective conventional Boer army in the field, objected to the change in strategy on humanitarian grounds:
But, however practicable, was a guerrilla war a civilized war? This was the question that obviously troubled the consciences of the Transvaal leaders, especially Botha, and explains why they clung so long to the strategy of regular warfare on the eastern front. Botha must have read enough military history Smuts certainly had to know what a guerrilla war inevitably entails for civilians. Shermans march through Georgia, the Prussian treatment of the French franc-tireurs; they cast ugly shadows on the veld, these international precedents. And a guerrilla war in South Africa, however gentlemanly the main combatants professed to be, threatened to have elements of savagery absent from warfare in more civilized states.18 (Pakenham, 1979: 500)
18 This is a critical debate. Key members of both sides appeared to accept the idea that a portion ranging from negligible to complete of the responsibility for the depredations which often form the heart of COIN operations is often placed on the defenders. So it was during the concentration camps controversy (see below). When cornered in Parliament on the issue of Britains farm-burning and camp policy, for example, Lord Broderick answered for the twentieth time, that the policy of sweeping the country had been forced on them by the guerrillas. Some of the women had been assisting the enemy; others had been abandoned by them; none of them could be simply left out on the veld to starve
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On May 3, Roberts resumed his irresistible advance to Pretoria by way of Johannesburg. He detached half his force 20,000 men to guard his line of communications and to begin COIN operations designed to deny support to De Wet by disarming Boer farmers and burning selected farms whose men were away on commando.
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For his part, as Roberts advanced, he became frustrated with the delayed victory. Where were the Boer armies to resist his advance? Why wouldnt they stand and fight? All along his advance from Johannesburg to Pretoria, De Wet and the other guerrilla generals harassed his communications, captured his troops and supplies, and generally humiliated his strung-out troops. As a result, Robertss new COIN strategy was about to take a more systematic and more brutal turn. Roberts reached Pretoria and marched through its abandoned, dusty streets, on June 5, 1900. During the next five months, as he continued his advance through the last Boer towns to the east, he waited in vain for the approach of Kruger, Steyn, or any of the Boer generals De la Rey, De Wet, Smuts, or Botha for terms of surrender. In November he sailed for England, while Kitchener took over as the new commander-in-chief. Under Kitcheners command, the farm burning continued and intensified. It may have made sound military sense, but it was not easy to prosecute at least not at first:
The worst moment is when you first come to the house. The people thought we had called for refreshments, and one of the women went to get milk. Then we had to tell them that we had to burn the place down. I simply didnt know which way to look . . . I gave the inmates, three women and some children, ten minutes to clear their clothes and things out of the house, and my men then fetched bundles of straw and we proceeded to burn it down. The old grandmother was very angry . . . most of them, however, were too miserable to curse. The women cried and the children stood by holding on to them looking with large frightened eyes at the burning house. They wont forget that sight, Ill bet a sovereign, not even when they grow up. We rode away and left them, a forlorn little group, standing among their household goods beds, furniture, and gimcracks strewn about the veldt; the crackling of fire in their ears, and smoke and flames streaming overhead. (Pakenham, 1979: 466467)
The practice of burning farms ostensibly only those of rebels but in practice nearly every farm in reach came to involve much more than just burning farm houses. Horses were taken, and cattle were either taken or slaughtered. By the time a British patrol had done its duty, in other words, they had effectively deprived noncombatants of food and shelter. The British decided to solve this problem by putting the women, children, and old men into concentration camps, for their own safety.
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In theory at least this would have been a brilliant COIN strategy. On the one hand, the British could argue that, after all, they couldnt just leave these women and children to fend for themselves against the elements, including black Africans. On the other hand, the real purpose of the practice to deprive the guerrillas of intelligence and logistical support could be kept secret (Krebs, 1992: 4142). The problem with the theory was that neither Roberts nor Kitchener ever concerned themselves with logistical matters, and for this reason British forces had suffered a far higher percentage of post-battle casualties than usual. To put it bluntly, Roberts had left the management of his field hospitals in thoroughly incompetent hands. That, plus his own reform of the system of regimental supply, and the direct actions of the guerrillas themselves, had caused thousands of casualties not only from battle, but from typhoid. Now these same defects were to strike down and ruin the benevolent justification for the internment of Boer noncombatants. Women and children began to die in the camps, and they began to die in alarming numbers.19 The Boer war may count as the first major war in which the literate soldiers of a democratic government participated. Many of the steamers and trains coming from and going to London contained mail letters to and from the homes of regular soldiers in the field. The British public too, as we have already observed, was both literate and able to influence British foreign policy. The British public found out about the conditions in the camps, and the alarming death rate, through the efforts of a well-meaning humanitarian relief worker named Emily Hobhouse. Hobhouse began her tour of the camps in January of 1901, and what she saw horrified her: poor sanitation, starvation rations, insufficient clean water, and insufferable crowding. By April she had seen enough. She raced back to England to report, and her report proved to be a political bombshell:
19 In May of 1901 there were 93,940 whites and 24,457 blacks in these camps of refuge. The death tolls had been rising steadily, and alarmingly, for months. In May, 550 died; in June, 782; in July, 1675. By October the death rates were 34.4 percent per year for whites of all ages 62.9 percent for children in the Orange River Colony, and 58.5 percent for children in Transvaal. At individual camps like Mafeking, the October figures represented an annual death-rate of 173 percent (Pakenham, 1979: 548). Pakenham calculates that at least twenty thousand whites and twelve thousand coloured people had died in the concentration camps, the majority from epidemics of measles and typhoid that could have been avoided (Pakenham, 1979: 549).
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Lloyd George and the Liberals made a great deal of the conditions of the camps, and it is in these speeches in Parliament we find supporting evidence for the claim that even as early as 1900 the British recognized a norm of noncombatant immunity, the violation of which was considered sufficient grounds for a change of government:
Why pursue this disgraceful policy, he asked; why make war against women and children? It was the men that were their enemies. By every rule of civilized war we were bound to treat the women and children as non-combatants. The novel method of warfare adopted was all the more disgraceful because it would prolong, not shorten, the war. We want to make loyal British subjects of these people. Is this the way to do it? Brave men will forget injuries to themselves much more readily than they will insults, indignities, and wrongs to their women and children. He concluded . . . When children are being treated in this way and dying, we are simply ranging the deepest passions of the human heart against British rule in Africa . . . It will always be remembered that this is the way British rule started there, and this is the method by which it was brought about. (Pakenham, 1979: 539540)
In the end, the government did not change. There were three reasons for this. First, the Liberal Party was itself divided on the issue of Britains war with the Boer. Second, the British public was divided as well: some felt that the Boers were to blame for their suffering and for the conditions in the camps.20 Others were rightly horrified at the thought of British participation in a system which had such fatal consequences for women and children. Third, the problems of the camps were not mysteries, nor were they expensive to correct. While the political crisis over the camps raged through August, effective reforms
20 Hobhouses tour was later repeated by special commissions from both the government and the opposition. The governments commission was headed by Millicent Fawcett, who blamed many of the conditions in the camps on the filthy and superstitious habits of the Boer women themselves: Boer women were ill-nature[d], unnatural. British women, it was understood, would not make war. The Boers were seen as primitive, unchanged since their arrival in South Africa from Holland two hundred years earlier. This put them on a lower scale of civilisation than the British, different in what would have been seen as a racial way while they were also a different class a nation of peasants (Krebs, 1992: 44).
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followed in September. By October the death-rates had stabilized and then began to plummet sharply. In the meantime, the war itself proceeded apace. Kitchener inherited an army of 120,000 regulars and 20,000 irregulars with which to oppose a Boer fighting force of at most 20,000. He divided his troops into more mobile columns, which he then sent out after the Boer commandos much as one would beat the brush for game. The strategy essentially a search and destroy mission on a massive scale was inefficient and destructive. It was inefficient because the Boer were still so much more mobile than the British, and the constant wearing away at them had reduced the average size of effective units to as low as one or two hundred. It was destructive not only of Boer farms and cattle, but of British horses and morale.21 Kitcheners next innovation was the use of barbed wire and blockhouses to create a massive net covering the countryside:
On the periphery, the barriers served as offensive, not defensive, weapons; not as cordons to keep out the enemy, but as cages in which to trap them, a guerrilla-catching net stretched across South Africa. By May 1902, there would be over eight thousand blockhouses, covering 3,700 miles, guarded by at least fifty thousand white troops and sixteen thousand African scouts. (Pakenham, 1979: 569)
The blockhouse and barbed wire net was expensive, but combined with all the other measures it finally broke the back of Boer resistance. The farm burning and concentration camps made it impossible for the Boer commandos to replace mounts or replenish their food supplies, and it made intelligence spotty. This resulted in close calls, where only luck and over-riding horses saved many commandos from capture. In addition, the British had begun arming native Africans and employing them as scouts and spies. The effects of this innovation were dramatic: suddenly the ponderous British columns began to find their game. Finally, Kitchener and his staff hit upon a novel idea: why not stop the practice of shipping Boer women and children off to concentration camps?
Here Pakenham quotes Allenby on the hardships of COIN operations: The struggle, as described in Allenbys letters, took shape and dissolved like a fog. There were no lines or fronts, no battles mere skirmishes with an invisible enemy, whose only aim, apparently, was to run faster than their pursuers . . . The physical strain of the three-month trek, and the moral stain of making war on women and children, left him exhausted and ill (Pakenham, 1979: 527).
21
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Another problem had already plagued the Boer war effort: what to do with prisoners. Unlike Boer prisoners, who remained prisoners throughout the remainder of the war, British prisoners were often returned to their own lines within hours of being captured:
It is much to be regretted that we were unable to keep them, for had we been in a position to do so, the world would have been astonished at their number. But unfortunately we were now unable to retain any of our prisoners. We had no St. Helena, Ceylon or Bermuda, whither we could send them. Thus, whilst every prisoner which the English captured meant one less man for us, the thousands of prisoners we took from the English were no loss to them at all, for in most cases it was only a few hours before they could fight again. (De Wet, 1902: 227)
It is a tribute to the dedication and skill of commanders such as De Wet, Smuts, and De la Rey that the Boer war effort lasted as long as it did against such overwhelming odds. Surrender terms were signed in Pretoria on 31 May 1902.
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Britain had already officially annexed Orange Free State renamed Orange River Colony back in May of 1900; and it annexed Transvaal in October of that year. Now the fighting ended, and Milner could at last preside over the formation of a federated South African Republic. Here Pakenham sums up the outcome of the war:
In money and lives, no British war since 1815 had been so prodigal. That tea-time war, Milners little Armageddon, which was expected to be over by Christmas 1899, had cost the British tax payer more than 200 million. The cost in blood was equally high. The War Office reckoned that 400,346 horses, mules and donkeys were expended in the war. There were over a hundred thousand casualties of all kinds among the 365,693 imperial and 82,742 colonial soldiers who had fought in the war. Twenty-two thousand of them found a grave in South Africa: 5,744 were killed by enemy action (or accident) and shoveled into the veld, often where they fell; 16,168 died of wounds or were killed by the action of disease (or the inaction of army doctors) . . . On the Boer side, the cost of the war, measured in suffering, was perhaps absolutely as high; relatively, much higher. It was estimated that there were over 7,000 deaths among the 87,365 Boers including 2,120 foreign volunteers and 13,300 Afrikaners from the Cape and Natal who served in the commandos of the two republics. No one knows how many Boers men, women and children died in the concentration camps. Official estimates vary between 18,000 and 28,000. The survivors returned to homesteads devastated almost beyond recognition. Several million cattle, horses and sheep, that had comprised their chief capital, had been killed or looted. (Pakenham, 1979: 607608)
for their selection or change, and how did they affect the eventual outcome of the war?
Actor interests
Britains interests were not explained by its material power relative to that of the two Boer republics that opposed it. Britain acted as if the survival of its empire was at stake. It marshaled three arguments in support of this calculation. First, although the Suez Canal was opened in 1869, because it could be easily closed (sabotaged or mined) in time of crisis, Britain calculated that political control over Cape Town was a vital security interest. Second, because a majority in Cape Colony were Afrikaners, Britain calculated that it could not compromise or back down regarding its efforts to replace Kruger and Steyn with more amenable leaders. If it failed in Orange Free State and Transvaal, it would only be a matter of time before the Afrikaners in Natal and Cape Colony, encouraged by British weakness, facilitated the annexation of Natal and Cape Colony by the two Boer republics. Britain would then lose control of its vital port at Cape Town. Finally, British policymakers calculated that failure to put down resistance from such tiny upstart republics would make Britain appear weak to its Great Power rivals, encouraging them to exploit British weakness, and eventually unraveling the tapestry of its empire. The Boer republics did fight and act as though their survival was at stake and so it was. The Boer leadership understood early and clearly that Britains aim was annexation: the end of their political independence and sovereignty.
best effort resulted in the franchise issue this gained them sympathy, but was insufficient to justify risking British lives over. In the event, as we have seen, they were saved from having to justify the use of force by Krugers ultimatum and subsequent mobilization. Self-defense was a casus belli every Briton could rally behind. Had Britain had an authoritarian regime, it could have dispensed with this concern over justifying its actions to an informed and empowered public. How many troops to send became the second strategic decision which would be constrained by public opinion. Britain could not send too many troops because this would be expensive, and they would moreover imply an interest out of proportion to the stated aim of merely securing Natal and Cape Colony from attack. Besides, what was the need? Part of the propaganda campaign leading up to the ultimatums had caricatured the Boer as backward, venal brutes: one good crack on the snout should be sufficient to send them packing by Christmas at the latest. The public expected a walk-over, and they expected it on the cheap. An authoritarian Britain could have sent as many or as few troops as it wished, without the constraint of public expectations. A final strategic decision subject to regime-type constraints was the decision to begin burning farms and concentrating noncombatants into camps. This was a bottom-up decision, started in the field by Roberts as a sort of reprisal for the Boers refusal to fight fair and give up after the capture of Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria. Yet its political impact was such that it very nearly forced Britain from the war. Had Britain been authoritarian, Emily Hobhouse would have been imprisoned or possibly executed as a Boer spy. Her entire family would have been locked up, and her report suppressed. As to regime type and political vulnerability, nothing emerges more strongly in this case than the sense that British political elites lived in constant fear of, as Cecil Rhodes was apt to put it, that unctuous British rectitude. Regime type mattered because in democratic Britain there was a gap between what was necessary and what was permissible. In an authoritarian Britain, anything necessary would have been permissible. In democratic Britain this was not the case, and leaders paid more than mere lip service to this constraint. As we have already seen, British interests do not explain its vulnerability in this case. For one thing, its interests were higher than those predicted by the interest asymmetry argument. For another, even though the British public of that day may have agreed that upstarts must be put in their place, British public opinion made it difficult for Britain to initiate hostilities in South Africa,
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or to do so with the necessary number of troops. In sum, democratic Britain was vulnerable to certain specific actions which violated the publics sense of right and wrong in a way that an authoritarian Britain would not have been. Yet the necessary condition for the operation of this vulnerability was time. Had the war in South Africa indeed been over by Christmas of 1899, then the publics unctuous rectitude would have had no room to operate. As it was, victory was delayed. This delay was due first, to underestimating the enemy, and second, to the interaction of the strategies adopted by the British and the Boers in March of 1900: a conventional attack vs. a GWS.
Arms diffusion
In the South African War, the arms diffusion argument appears to gain strong support. After the Jameson Raid, the two Boer republics embarked on a major arms acquisition and modernization program. They gained rifles comparable or superior to those of the British, and their artillery in particular was actually better than that fielded by the British. Moreover, the Boer had not neglected to train their artillerymen to employ their new field pieces effectively (Nasson, 1999: 59). There were, however, two problems regarding artillery that the Boer simply could not overcome. First, they depended upon contracts to re-supply ammunition for the guns which were subsequently bought out by Britain (Nasson, 1999: 59). The Boer succeeded to some extent in manufacturing their own ammunition, but it was never enough to match demand. Second, modern as they were (outranging the British guns in most cases), they were still too few. Once the full British expeditionary force landed and began to move inland, the relatively few guns the Boer had could do nothing to affect the strategic balance of forces. Boer mobility was hampered by the guns and their heavy logistical trains, so that the preferred method of fighting establishing a well-defended position in difficult terrain, then jumping to horse when overwhelmed would have been impossible had the Boer continued to rely on their artillery. The new and highly efficient Mauser rifles Kruger and Steyn had purchased for their burghers were a different story. These proved highly effective throughout the war, but particularly in its opening stages, when British troops were ordered to rush Boer in entrenched positions. The British had never before run into the business end of a breech-loading, magazine-fed rifle firing smokeless cartridges (Pakenham, 1979: 184, 238). It was some time, and not a few bloody
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engagements, before the British learned tactics that could minimize their soldiers exposure to concentrated rifle fire from entrenched positions. It is fair to say that they did not learn quickly. But their sheer weight of numbers made it less imperative to learn as time went on: they were taking heavier casualties than anticipated, but until the Boer switched strategies from conventional defense to GWS, they were winning.
Strategic interaction
The South African War took place in three interactions. In the first interaction, an overwhelmingly superior force of British imperial troops blunders notwithstanding decisively defeated their adversaries and captured their capital cities. The strategy employed by the British was conventional attack: they sought to bring the war to an end by destroying the Boer armies in the field (or forcing them to surrender), and by capturing state capitals Bloemfontein for Orange Free State, and Pretoria for Transvaal. In this first interaction, the two Boer republics countered British strategy with a conventional defense strategy: they sought to block the British advances. Both sides made mistakes, but overall the British had the worst of it. Yet by dint of overwhelming numerical superiority, it became clear that the Boer could not defeat the British with a conventional defense strategy. Indeed, the brighter generals among the Boer recognized their earlier strategy as counterproductive, insofar as the fighting style, training, armament, and discipline (or rather, indiscipline) of the Boer burghers made them poor regular soldiers. Thus, after the capture of Bloemfontein, the Boer switched to a GWS. This shift in strategies marked the opening of the second and far more brutal interaction of the war. For the first five months after the capture of Bloemfontein, the British continued a conventional attack strategy. When it became clear that the combination of amnesty offers and capital city occupation would not cause the Boers to surrender, the British switched to a barbarism strategy. Why should we characterize British strategy in this way? There is some controversy about one aspect of British strategy: the concentration camps. Clearly, the British intended the combination of farm-burning and internment of Boer noncombatants as a COIN strategy. In this sense alone, the policy falls under the heading of depredations against noncombatants. But as always we must qualify such
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judgments. It is true that the practice of confining Boer women and children led to more deaths due to malnutrition and plague than all the battle casualties on both sides combined. But it is equally clear that this particular effect was never intended by the British. Yet after the conditions in the camps were improved, the British then stopped the policy of forced internment in order to deliberately cause hardship to Boer noncombatants and hobble the guerrillas. On balance, local commanders violated the laws of war regarding noncombatant immunity in a systematic way and as a COIN strategy. Moreover, we have sufficient testimony from both sides in parliamentary debates to confirm that, overall, the British accepted the principle of noncombatant immunity as a law of war.22 On the Boer side, there were atrocities and violations of the laws of war as well. The three most common complaints from the British were (1) abusing the white flag of truce;23 (2) the use of prohibited weapons;24 and (3) the wearing of khaki.25 Yet at no time did these approach the
22 This was particularly important in this instance because, as is well known, a large portion of the justification of imperialism was the gift of civilization brought to those less civilized. Britains deliberate violation of the laws of civilized conduct undermined its moral claim to be civilizing the allegedly uncivilized Boer burghers. 23 Pakenham records a number of claims to this effect, but does not trouble to support or refute such claims. Here is one account, however, which appears to support the British claim in at least one case: The Boers reappeared with a white flag. They pointed out that the donga was full of wounded, who would unavoidably be shot, if Bullock insisted on fighting. They chivalrously offered to let the wounded be removed, before going on with the fight. Meanwhile, less chivalrously, about a hundred Boers had crept round the side of the donga, and emerged holding their rifles pointed at the heads of the Devons . . . Bullock and the rest of the Devons, and the unwounded gunners, were bundled off as prisoners (Pakenham, 1979: 247). 24 The Hague Convention of 1899 had prohibited the use of dum-dum bullets at least against European troops (the British had used them liberally in Sudan against the Dervishes). Sanctioned military rounds featured bullets made of lead with a copper jacket (to help maintain the shape of the bullet in flight and to reduce fouling of the rifle barrel). If the points of such bullets were cut or cross-hatched, however, they would become hot in flight and dramatically expand upon contact with a solid body. The likelihood of death when struck with such a round was thus much higher than when struck with a fulljacketed round. 25 In the later months of the war, Boer commandos were in such a state of poor supply that the soldiers often rode in rags or half-naked. They therefore thought little of liberating the fine uniforms of their captured foes. There is no evidence that Boer commandos sought to use such uniforms to deceive their adversaries (a violation of the laws of war), but Kitchener nevertheless ordered that any Boer caught in khaki be summarily shot. It should be added that by 1900 many British officers and men had begun to adapt their uniforms to the conditions of the veld especially the headgear (pit helmets were widely abandoned in favor of the floppy Boer veld hats). It is thus probably the case that British soldiers were as often mistaken for Boer, as Boer for British.
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scale of British violations. Moreover, such violations as did occur were never deliberate policy on the Boer side. In sum, the strategic interaction in the first and final interactions of the war was same-approach. In the first interaction, from October 1899 to March 1900, the British pursued a direct attack strategy which the Boer countered with a direct defense strategy. Facing imminent defeat, the Boer switched to a GWS in the second interaction of the war, from April 1900 to May of 1902. The British responded by switching to a barbarism strategy in the final interaction of the war, from June of 1900. The outcome was that the British won both the first and final interactions of the war, and the Boer capitulated at Vereeniging on May 31, 1902.
Conclusion
The South African War was an asymmetric conflict between Great Britain then the worlds pre-eminent great power and two of the worlds tiniest states Orange Free State and Transvaal. Britains interests were many, but its willingness to go to war in South Africa was due to its overriding interest: undisputed political control of the four South African republics and, by extension, security for a vital route of communications between Britain and its colonial possessions in India. Contrary to the interest asymmetry thesis, which holds that the stronger actor in an asymmetric conflict will have a low interest in a conflict, Britain calculated that control of Orange Free State and Transvaal was vital for three reasons. First, control of Cape Town was key to maintaining sea communications with India. Second, and related to the first reason, allowing the Boer republics to dictate to the British might encourage the majority population of Cape Colony Afrikaners to seize control of the Cape. Third and finally, allowing the Boer republics to dictate to the British would make the British appear weakwilled in relation to its European great power rivals, thus encouraging interference or intervention from those rivals. Employing a domino-like logic throughout, the British therefore calculated that war was necessary in South Africa. Boer interests were in maintaining their independence from Britain. The presidents of the two republics guessed that Britains real interests were not as they constantly maintained the franchise rights of Uitlanders and more civil conduct toward Kaffirs. They guessed that Britain wanted to end their independence, and they were proved right in the end.
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In sum, hypothesis 8 relative material power explains relative interests in the outcome of an asymmetric conflict is not supported in the South African War. Relative power was a poor predictor of relative interests in this case: at least on the British side. Did relative power and interests explain political vulnerability? Again, on the Boer side, it is difficult to answer this question. The lack of a solid transnational Afrikaner national identity severely undermined the effectiveness of the later Boer shift to a GWS. Without such an identity, or where such an identity was weak, the Boer GWS was vulnerable to British amnesty offers:
General Christian De Wet later described these proclamations as deadly lyddite bombs which . . . shattered Afrikanerdom. Some 13,900 of the Boer commandos voluntarily surrendered their arms by July 1900, this figure representing 26 percent of those liable for military service in the two republics, or about 40 percent of the number originally mobilized on the outbreak of war. (Smith, 1996: 7)
We should have expected a fight for their lives to have made the Boer defenders much more resolute than this. Yet, on the other hand, when faced with a choice between their political independence and their national survival (a choice which must in some sense depend on a surprisingly benevolent conception of post-war British rule), the Boers chose national survival:
Six months earlier, the tide had set finally against them their commandos immobilized and starving, beaten at last by blockhouses and food burning; their womenfolk threatened by Kaffirs. And, to set against all these sacrifices, there was no prospect of foreign intervention, or any corresponding gain. Negotiate now, said Botha and De la Rey and Smuts, while we still have control of our destiny, and can keep the volk together as a nation. Fight on, and the volk will die (or suffer a fate worse than death). The threat was not only to the lives of individuals, but to the continued existence of the nation. (Pakenham, 1979: 602)
British political vulnerability may be explained in part by its overwhelming material superiority over the Boer republics. Certainly it explains a large portion of Britains underestimation of the costs and risks of a war with the Boer. But is relative material capability the best explanation? No. Two other factors play into British political vulnerability and explain it better: regime type and time to objective. As leaders of a democratic state, British policymakers could not make policy without taking public reaction and judgments into account. In
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terms of the political theory of the laws of war, there were two loci of vulnerability for Britain: jus ad bellum the justness of Britains resort to force in South Africa; and jus in bello the justness of its conduct of a war in South Africa. In authoritarian regimes these vulnerabilities are managed by means of control over access to information about both loci, and by the fact that information notwithstanding, there is no mechanism for connecting popular will with foreign policy. As we have already seen, Krugers ultimatum spared British elites from difficulties over jus ad bellum: the British public recognized the legitimacy of self-defense as a justification for the resort to arms. But what of the moral conduct of the war itself? Here is where Britains regime type made a big difference. The concentration camp controversy created the possibility of Britains withdrawal from the war short of achieving its political objectives. We have already observed the reasons why this possibility was never realized, but the point is that in an authoritarian Britain withdrawal short of achieving the political objective due to jus in bello concerns would not have been a possibility. Regime type therefore matters more than allowed by the interest asymmetry argument. However, the most important determinant of vulnerability is time to objective. This case makes clear the importance of time to objective in war: it is a positive cost on almost equal footing with blood and treasure. Had the war been over by Christmas as widely anticipated by British elites and the British public these concerns over the legitimacy of a resort to force and the moral conduct of war would have had much less space in which to operate. Indeed, in this general category of conflict, we expect wars to be quick and decisive almost by definition, since the gap in the ratio of resources available to each actor exceeds five to one. If vulnerability is activated or caused by a delay in time to objective, it then makes sense to ask what caused the delay? It wasnt arms diffusion. Although the Boer had better arms than the British initially, their possession of a military technology advantage correlates with their rapid defeat, not victory. Thus, although hypothesis 6 the better armed a weak actor is, the more likely it is that a strong actor will lose an asymmetric conflict receives some support here, on balance the technological advantage enjoyed by the Boer did not affect the outcome of the war. It marginally increased the costs to the British in terms of killed and wounded soldiers, but only a shift in strategy saved the Boer from defeat in March of 1900. I argue that it was this shift in strategy to a GWS by the Boer in March of 1900 that explains the delay which nearly forced Britain from the war.
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The British won the first interaction of the war, and, after the fall of Bloemfontein, the Boer leadership gathered to discuss surrender or a strategy for continued resistance. After heated debate over the appropriateness of a GWS, and the risks under which it might place Boer noncombatants, the Boer leaders opted to continue their resistance by employing a GWS.26 It was five months before the British adjusted to this change in strategy. During this time, Roberts advanced from city to city, capturing each in turn and posting amnesty proclamations. When the Boer didnt give up, and in fact struck back at British communications and isolated units, the British intensified their earlier policy of collective reprisals against Boer noncombatants. They switched to a barbarism strategy, and although this created its own risks in terms of British public opinion, it also proved militarily effective against the Boer especially by 1901 (Pakenham, 1979: 500501). In evaluating the utility and effectiveness of barbarism as a COIN strategy, however, we should keep in mind the evidence that the strategy for shortening the war contained the powerful probability of making a later peace costly or unstable:
Dundonald agreed that collective punishments were neither fair nor politic. Attacks on the railway were not the work of locals; and when once these farms were burnt the country round became a desert and their owners inveterate haters of the British. (Pakenham, 1979: 479480)
It must remain one of the great counterfactuals of the conflict, but it seems likely that had the British not switched strategies, the war either would have continued for a much longer time, or the continued delay would have itself become a political issue which would have resulted in at least a change of government, and very likely, a settlement short of Britains ex ante political objectives (in other words, a defeat for Britain).
26 The decision also involved a recalculation of Boer interests: was it really the capital cities that represented Boer freedom, or was it something else? Here Pakenham recounts Boer deliberations following the capture of Bloemfontein: But the man who had inspired Botha and Smuts was Steyn. The Free State President had seen his own capital subjected to the same humiliations two months before, and had realized that it was not a city, but the illimitable veld, that was the true symbol of the volk. When Krugers despairing telegram reached him on 1 June in his hide-out near Lindley (by an oversight, Roberts had left the telegraph lines to the northeastern Free State intact), Steyns reply was characteristically blunt. We shall never surrender . . . Steyns reply was the most important telegram of the war (Pakenham, 1979: 457458).
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It is also clear that, as in the Murid War, the barbarism strategy lost in post-war political effectiveness anything it might have gained in wartime military effectiveness:
And the backward nation of farmers from whose misrule the British were going to save South Africa ended by being granted self-government in the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal. Just eight years later, rallying around an Afrikaner nationalism at least partly fueled by the memory of the thousands dead in the concentration camps, whites in the Cape Colony and Natal joined those of the former republics to become citizens of the Union of South Africa in the beginning of a new era of white government in South Africa. (Krebs, 1992: 54)
In sum, strategic interaction is the strongest explanation of the South African Wars outcome. Once it became clear that the capture of the Boer capitals would not force the Boer to surrender, the British had three strategic choices. First, continue with the present strategy, perhaps sending more troops, equipment, and horses to the theater. Second, offer the Boers terms: something which could save face yet end the war. Third, switch to a barbarism strategy: take the gloves off and go after Boer noncombatants, either by holding them hostage or by killing them outright in reprisal for continued resistance. The Boer faced an even starker choice after the fall of Bloemfontein: either give up or switch to a dangerous GWS. They chose a GWS, and the war lasted another two years. During that period, which opened a window of political vulnerability, British policymakers had to face the possibility that outrage over the delay itself, but especially over the concentration camp deaths, might actually force them from the war, or at least force them to make political concessions which would have destroyed the justification for going to war in the first place.
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We are valiant formations Of indomitable warriors Carrying the flags Into Eastern Africa. The symbol of glory, Of peace and civilization Will be made to shine once more By the Italic Victory . . . Slavery and barbarity Are doomed to vanish The very moment The Roman eagles appear . . . From an Italian marching song in the Abyssinian campaign We flung ourselves on the machine-gun nests to clear them out, we hurled ourselves against the enemy artillery. We held firm against their bombs and their containers of mustard gas. We put their tanks out of action with our bare hands. We cannot reproach ourselves with any taint of cowardice. But against the invisible rain of deadly gas that splashed down on our hands, our faces, we could do nothing. Yet I say again that we have no cause to be ashamed: we could not kill this rain. Haile Selassie
The war between fascist Italy and Ethiopia began on 2 October 1935. Italy was the strong actor by a wide margin.1 It was a sharp conventional engagement between a well-armed and well-supplied yet poorly led Italian army, and the poorly armed and poorly supplied Ethiopian
Using Singer and Smalls data (1992), the halved ratio of relative material power comes to 24.23 to 1 in favor of Italy.
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army. By May of 1936, the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, had fled, and the Italians marched triumphantly into Addis Ababa, the capital. Yet the war did not then end. It continued as a guerrilla war from 1936 to 1940, when Britain joined the fight. The Italians surrendered to the British in North Africa on May 5, 1941.
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Italy in Ethiopia
Such descriptions, though accurate, would later be used by Italy to justify its conquest and colonization of Ethiopia. Italian interest in Ethiopia dates from the waning years of the nineteenth century. Having established a viable colony in Eritrea, the Italians decided on a military campaign further inland. On January 26, 1887, a force of 500 Italians were annihilated by a force of 20,000 Ethiopians led by Emperor Yohannes IV at Dogali.2 This forced the Italians to postpone their conquest efforts for several years. In fact, after the death of Yohannes and the accession of Menelik II, relations between the two states thawed, and these friendly relations were marked by the signing of a treaty and the gift from Italys King Umberto to Menelik of 28,000 rifles and 28 cannon. In the Treaty of Uccialli, Menelik recognized Italys right to Eritrea and agreed to allow Italy to conduct some Ethiopian foreign affairs. But after the Italians chose to interpret the treaty as recognition that Ethiopia had become a protectorate of Italy, relations quickly soured. In order to soothe Menelik and convince him of the advantages of protectorate status, in 1893 the Italians made him a gift of 2,000,000 cartridges for the rifles they had previously given him. No sooner had Menelik received the cartridges than he denounced the treaty and began using the threat of Italian invasion to rally the Ethiopian chiefs around him:
The Italians then very obligingly fostered his efforts to develop Ethiopian nationalism and solidify his own power. Using his treaty denunciation as a pretext, they organized, under the leadership of General Oreste Baratieri, the Governor of Eritrea, an expeditionary force of 17,700 men, a considerably larger force than other colonialist countries were accustomed to using, and marched south into Ethiopia. (Coffey, 1974: ix)
But the Italians chose an invasion route which appeared poised to cross through Axum, one of Ethiopias most holy sites and the spiritual center of the Coptic Church. This allowed Menelik to rally more chiefs to his cause, and he assembled an army of more than 100,000 warriors armed with, among other things, the rifles and ammunition the Italians had already given him. But fielding an army of such size proved difficult for Menelik. His hungry soldiers threatened to desert him when the Italians, already established in an impregnable position at Sauria, decided to end the
2
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campaign quickly by launching a surprise attack on the assembled Ethiopians. Baratieri divided his forces into three columns who were all to reach key hills overlooking the Ethiopian positions and then, at the proper signal, descend in a crushing pincer movement to annihilate the Ethiopians. Unfortunately for the Italians, Baratieri failed to adequately scout the approaches and his maps were inaccurate. The columns became separated and the waiting Ethiopians wiped out a flank column before it could reach its assigned positions. The next morning (1 March 1896), as the remaining two columns went into action near Adowa they were unaware that their left flank was entirely unprotected. After being halted by lead elements of the Ethiopian army, the Italians were enveloped and though they fought bravely, 12,000 died before the sun set, ending the battle (the 5000 survivors owed their lives to this Ethiopian tradition of ending every battle at sunset). This crushing defeat at the Battle of Adowa marked the only successful repulse by an African state of a European attempt at colonization.3 It solidified Ethiopian nationalism and proved an intensely humiliating loss for the Italians so humiliating that it would still count as a primary casus belli for fascist Italy some thirty-nine years later.4 In the meantime, Italy licked its wounds, nursed its resentments, and waited. In 1906, it signed a secret treaty with France and Britain, in which the latter two states:
acknowledged Italys priority in Ethiopia, with the stipulation that Italy would never hinder the operation of the French-owned railway
3 It also runs counter to the predictions of the strategic interaction thesis: a strong actor and weak actor both used direct strategic approaches and the weak actor won. 4 Italys fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, was 13 years old at the time of the Battle of Adowa, and he personally experienced Italys humiliation over the defeat (Coffey, 1974: 22). Del Boca characterizes the effects of this humiliation this way: After Adowa, Alfredo Oriani had written:
We have signed a peace but there will be no peace. We will never give up Africa the war will be resumed. The defeat seared their minds and the words of the boastful patriotic ditties the soldiers had sung, words such as these stung them like whips: Baldissare, hey, beware Of these black folk with woolly hair! Menelik, youre dead here comes A shower of lead, not sugar plums. By and large Italians could not bring themselves to accept the fact that the barbarous Shoan hordes had succeeded in annihilating a European army. (Del Boca, 1969: 912)
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from Addis Ababa to Djibuti, or the flow of Blue Nile water from Ethiopias Lake Tana into the White Nile, which fed Englands dependencies, Egypt and Sudan. (Coffey, 1974: 11)
Essentially, Britain had argued that Ethiopia was not civilized enough to merit membership.5 After years of bitter internecine quarrels, Ras Tafari, a powerful Shoan noble, was later crowned emperor of Ethiopia under the throne name of Haile Selassie. The emperor was an educated, intelligent, and charismatic man who spoke French fluently and planned to reform and develop Ethiopia along the lines of a European state.6 He was handicapped by his countrys poverty, and by the difficulty of establishing and maintaining central authority over the independent princes who ruled Ethiopias distant regions. Above all, he was distracted by fascist Italys increasingly obvious acquisitive intentions. Selassie had attempted to reach an accommodation with Italy in the Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of Amity, Conciliation and Arbitration of August 2,
5 This was a theme which was to underlay all discussions and negotiations among the three European powers. It is difficult to estimate how much this influenced the bargaining, but the memoirs of the participants make it clear it proved to be a major, if at times unspoken, factor (see below). 6 He maintained a number of foreign advisors close to the throne, including an American, Everett Colson, a Swede, General Eric Virgin, and an Englishman, Sir Sidney Barton (His Britannic Majestys minister). His coronation on November 2, 1930 was directly modeled on the coronation of King Edward VII in London.
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1928, but Mussolini tended to use the more liberal provisions of the treaty to prepare for his invasion of Ethiopia. Del Boca recounts how Mussolinis efforts to build a road from Assab to Dessie was stymied by the emperor (although technically allowed under the treaty), and how Mussolinis propaganda machine characterized the emperors objection as tantamount to the rejection of civilization:
The emperors reluctance to furnish the country which had a common frontier with the most rapid route for an invasion was fully justified, of course, and Mussolini knew it. But from this time on we were the archangelic messengers of light and civilization, the Ethiopians the lowest, most deeply damned race on earth, the personification of all that was evil and abominable. Utterly puerile as this counterblast was, the majority of Italians honestly believed this rubbish was true; consequently, when the hour struck, they gladly acclaimed the act of aggression. (Del Boca, 1969: 14)
From 1930 on then, Italy began preparing for the invasion, conquest, and occupation of Ethiopia. All it needed was a decent pretext for invasion. The incident which proved to be the Sarajevo of the Italo-Ethiopian war took place at the distant outpost of Wal Wal in the Ogaden desert on December 5, 1934. Mussolini had already sent a large expeditionary force to Eritrea consisting of 200,000 troops, 7000 officer, 6000 machine guns, 700 cannon of every caliber, 150 tanks, and 150 pursuit and bomber planes (Del Boca, 1969: 21). But Selassie, clearly understanding Mussolinis intentions, had prudently moved all his armed forces a safe distance away from Eritrea, precisely so as to avoid any chance of a border incident which Italy could inflate into a pretext for invasion. He also set about seeking help under the articles of the Covenant of the League of Nations. But in the Ogaden the Italians had stationed troops at Wal Wal, 60 miles within Ethiopian territory. When a survey commission escorted by Ethiopian troops journeyed to the wells there, they were halted by Somali Dubats (African soldiers under Italian command). When the Ethiopians protested that they would not withdraw because Wal Wal was Ethiopian territory, the Italians replied that Wal Wal was Italian territory part of Italian Somaliland. The Ethiopians at first far outnumbered the Italians, and they refused to withdraw because to do so might be construed as acknowledging Italian claims on the area. Tensions increased, as did Italian reinforcements, until on 5 December
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1934, shots were fired and in the melee which followed, the Ethiopians were routed.7 What was most striking about the incident was the way in which Italy managed it, and the way in which the world powers reacted. Italy instantly claimed it had been the victim of unprovoked aggression on its own territory; it demanded, in the most insulting terms possible, an apology and reparations from the Ethiopians. The Ethiopians protested that they had been attacked by Italians 60 miles within their own borders, and made every effort to downplay the incident, while at the same time refusing to acknowledge guilt or apologize. At the League of Nations, most representatives simply assumed the Italian territorial claims were correct, and Ethiopia was strongly encouraged to accede to Italys demands.
Despite a few rumors that Wal Wal might actually be in Ethiopia, most newspapers accepted the Italian assertion that it was in Somaliland, especially after Italy sent a note to the League on December 16 renewing the assertion and decrying Ethiopias charges. Eventually, a correspondent in the press room of the League of Nations . . . on or about December 20, did something no one else had thought to do. He looked up at a map on the wall in front of him. It was a map of Africa, issued by the Italian Geographical Institute at Bergamo, which showed that Wal Wal was indeed at least sixty miles inside Ethiopia according to the terms of the 1897 treaty which settled the 1896 war between the two countries. The Italian delegation, apprised of this evidence, reacted immediately. Baron Pompeo Aloisi, Romes . . . representative in Geneva, demanded that the map be removed from the press room because it was obsolete. It took no account of certain modifications of the 1897 treaty which were made in 1908. No sooner had the map been removed than the correspondents, now full of enterprise, went all the way to the League library in the north wing of the main building, where they found an Italian government map of Ethiopia, issued by the Colonial Office in 1925. This map also showed that Wal Wal was at least sixty miles inside Ethiopia. (Coffey, 1974: 19)
In short, regardless of who fired the first shot, Italy was in the wrong; having invaded Ethiopia and established an armed outpost within Ethiopias territory. But none of this made any real difference. Italy
7 It was impossible to answer the question of who fired the first shot (Coffey, 1974: 8; Del Boca, 1969: 19), and the battle itself was decided by Italian armored cars, against which the Ethiopians had no effective countermeasures.
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continued to bluster, fabricate, and bully; in the end Mussolini used the incident as a way to justify sending more troops and supplies to the theater. The Ethiopians patiently applied for League assistance even arbitration but none was forthcoming. The two dominant great powers in the League Britain and France each negotiated separate deals with Mussolini in which the end result was to give Italy a free hand in Ethiopia. What then were Italys true interests in Ethiopia? The Wal Wal incident is useful in this regard, because as Mussolinis long-awaited pretext for the conquest of Ethiopia, it also prompted the Italians to advance arguments and justifications for that conquest. These come down to three things: reputation, responsibility, and resources. National humiliation over the defeat at Adowa was deeply felt by most Italians, Mussolini personally,8 and the military especially. A big reason for the attack and conquest of Ethiopia then, would be to erase that humiliation.9 Beyond this simple redress, however, there were two other reputation issues at stake: the reputation of Italy as colonial power and the reputation of fascism as a political and ruling ideology within Italy. Italians had also been humiliated by their lack of promised spoils from their victory over Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I (Coffey, 1974: 25). The responsibility interest centered on Italys conception of itself a conception which gained sympathy from Britain and France at the time10 as a civilizing European power:
8 Coffey adds that in a secret memorandum Mussolini argued for a fait accompli strategy in Ethiopia. Mussolini calculated that so long as British and French interests in the area were respected, he could get away with the conquest: [Mussolinis] dreams of colonial glory and his bitter boyhood memories of Italys defeat at Adowa forced him to hope so. This problem has existed since 1885, he concluded in his secret memorandum (Coffey, 1974: 22). Griffin points out that it is typical of fascism to refer to aggressive colonial myths and aspirations as problems, which must then be solved by military or totalitarian measures (Griffin, 1995: 74). 9 Baron Aloisi, Italys representative at the League of Nations, makes this link clear: There was the earlier defeat at Adowa which would have to be washed out in blood (Coffey, 1974: 73). 10 Here is how Britains foreign minister, Sir Samuel Hoare, put it to the House of Commons: We have always understood Italys desire for overseas expansion, he told the House. In 1925 [it was actually 1924] we ceded Jubaland [a bleak piece of East Kenya bordering Italian Somaliland] to Italy. Let no one in Italy suggest that we are unsympathetic to Italian aspirations. We admit the need for Italian expansion (Coffey, 1974: 105). This need for colonial possessions was therefore a norm of European power politics, and hence a legitimate aspiration for European powers outside of Europe. There was another logic at play: precedent setting: An Abyssinian victory might result in serious
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[Mussolini] also proclaimed that Italy could civilize Africa, and her position in the Mediterranean gave her this right and imposed this duty on her. Then as a warning to other colonial powers he said Italy did not want earlier arrivals to block her spiritual, political, and economic expansion. (Coffey, 1974: 21)
The negative argument had the form tu quoque: after all, Italy was only asking to do in Ethiopia what all the other European powers had done for centuries with impunity (Del Boca, 1969: 26; Coffey, 1974: 5960, 75). Finally, the weakest of the three was the resources interest. Mussolini calculated that developing and colonizing Ethiopia would be expensive, and might take as long as fifty years to return dividends. Nevertheless, such arguments were common among Italys efforts to justify its aggression: Italy had no other choice but to expand. Part of Italys resources problem had in fact been manufactured by the success of Mussolinis earlier efforts to increase the Italian birthrate. A final argument has to do with Mussolini himself and his craving for personal power. Coffey argues that part of Mussolinis ambitions abroad were pathological: since he had already acquired as much power from the Italian people as they had to offer, his satisfaction came to depend on gaining power over others abroad (Coffey, 1974: 20). Mussolini recognized all these interests in conquest, but his trump card interest was one we have encountered before: self-defense (Mussolini, 1995: 7475).11 ` The point is that Italys preponderance vis-a-vis Ethiopia did not reduce its interests in conquest or colonization.12 It was not greed
disaffections within British possessions. The Abyssinian victory over the Italians at Adowa in 1896, he said, was one of the governing factors which led to the AngloEgyptian campaign in 1898, because British authorities then felt strongly that the blow to white prestige in that area required a victorious campaign of whites against blacks (Coffey, 1974: 112). Of course, the real difficulty with this argument was that Ethiopia and Italy were not yet at war, and preventing war would have been relatively simple (close or threaten to close the Suez Canal). Moreover, Ethiopia was entitled to assistance under the provisions of the League Covenant. In other words, to prevent the proposed domino effects of a white defeat in black Africa, all that was necessary was to prevent the war. 11 When Ethiopias skillful diplomacy forced Italy to tip its hand, Mussolini, now deprived of the opportunity to realize his fait accompli strategy, resorted to a sunk costs variant: the war must go on because Italy has already spent millions of lire on the adventure (see Coffey, 1974: 75, 142). 12 Mussolini maintained that it was not bad generalship which lost the day at Adowa, but insufficient resources: For the lack of a few thousand men, we lost the day at Adowa. We shall never make that mistake. I am willing to commit a sin of excess, but never a sin of deficiency (Del Boca, 1969: 21). Unlike the constraints faced by democratic Britain in the South African War, fascist Italy could send overwhelming forces (and illicit weapons) to Ethiopia without fear of public recrimination.
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alone which motivated Italy to seek out a colony in Ethiopia. Nor was the desire to conquer Ethiopia an entirely fascist affair: colonies had long been a dream of Liberal Italy. Italians came to see their conquest of Ethiopia as both necessary and just, and this opinion was distributed across classes and political affiliations in Italy.13 Most depressing of all, Italys aims evoked more sympathy than condemnation from other states. The fact of Ethiopias membership in the League of Nations achieved little more than frequent embarrassment for Britain; and Ethiopias careful and patient efforts to secure for itself the help to which it was entitled under the provisions of the League Covenant ultimately came to nothing.
13 Del Boca argues that The vast majority of Italians, particularly the younger generation, hailed the colonial enterprise with sincere enthusiasm. They were fighting for a place in the sun that other great powers had enjoyed for years or for centuries, and to a country as poor and overpopulated as Italy, the conquest of Ethiopia meant jobs and a patch of land for millions of unfortunates (Del Boca, 1969: 26).
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Italians advanced cautiously again. The final advance into Adowa was in fact unopposed by the Ethiopians.16 Anxious Italians, and especially Mussolini, seemed disappointed by the lack of a decisive engagement. Meanwhile, the emperor set about rallying, organizing, and moving his troops to meet the invader. Ethiopians had no air support and no motor transport. They had very few radio sets, and when they did communicate using these sets, they were forced to do so in the clear (which meant that, combined with total air superiority, the Italians enjoyed strong communications intelligence). Most of the emperors soldiers went barefoot, and many did not even have rifles, but were armed instead with spears and swords. Many of those who did have rifles, had old ones, or had only a few rounds of ammunition for them. The logistical difficulties of mobilizing a coordinated conventional defense against the Italians were therefore staggering. In addition to mobilization difficulties, the emperor was being begged by his most loyal generals to oust a number of traitors before they revealed the emperors defensive plans, or defected at a decisive moment in a crucial battle. But when faced with evidence that one of his generals, Gugsa, was in the pay of the Italians, the emperor refused to take action against him, claiming that many of his generals took money from the Italians but they were all loyal to Ethiopia. Gugsa was a traitor, however, and he had promised the Italians he would bring 10,000 men with him to the Italian side. In November, he made his move, but both he and the Italians were embarrassed to discover that by the time he reached Italian lines his much-vaunted 10,000 men had dwindled to a mere 1200. Gugsa himself proved to be a thorn in the Italians side, constantly pestering De Bono to advance to Makalle (the seat of Gugsas familys power). But De Bono was cautious. He responded to Mussolinis increasingly frequent demands for decisive action by requesting delay after delay before advancing:
Mussolinis bewilderment and impatience at such telegrams from de Bono was hardly surprising. De Bono had spent almost a year preparing
16 Coffey highlights what would soon become a morale problem for the Italians: The reason the Third Eritrean Brigade had not been employed in the occupation of the valley, after spearheading the drive to capture it, was that they were black, and the honor of the reconquest of the area, as soon as it had been rendered safe by the blacks, was reserved for the white Italians. The monument whose unveiling he witnessed was inscribed: to the dead of Adowa, avenged at last (Coffey, 1974: 184). The prowess and battle honors of the black units soon began to cause serious morale problems for the Italians, especially the Black Shirt Divisions (see Coffey, 1974: 262).
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for the invasion of Ethiopia. Then, after an unobstructed advance of twenty-five miles into the country in three or four days, during which time his airplanes hadnt been able to find any enemy armies, he had decided it would be too dangerous to continue, even to a place like Makalle, the Ethiopian defender of which was now in his employ. (Coffey, 1974: 194)
Delays in Ethiopian mobilization, combined with excessive caution on the Italian side, best explain the relative lack of action in the theater of operations until December. In November, Mussolini finally grew weary of exhorting a virtually unopposed De Bono to advance and engage the enemy, and replaced him with Badoglio. Unfortunately, Badoglio, who had complained behind De Bonos back that De Bono was not aggressive enough, soon began sending his own telegrams requesting delays and more supplies. Unlike De Bono, however, Badoglio was about the meet the enemy in force.
In this passage lay both the possible salvation of Ethiopia, and the explanation of its doom. Ethiopian warriors marched and fought in the open and wore the white shamma (a kind of toga) instead of camouflage.
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Selassie was soon forced to acknowledge, therefore, that his ideal strategy could not be pursued for cultural reasons (Coffey, 1974: 311). By mid December both sides were bracing for their first major confrontation. After directly ordering Badoglio to advance to Makalle, the left wing of the Italian army had advanced and captured the town in November. Enduring constant bombardment from the air, the massed armies of Ras Seyum, Ras Kassa, and Ras Mulugeta attacked the weakest point in the Italian line at Tembien. Suffering frightful losses, they crossed the Takkaze ford and captured a number of key bridges and passes. Within days the advance threatened to cut the Italian army in two, forcing it to retreat back to Eritrea in ignominy. For the Italians, the situation was as critical as it was unexpected. The poorly coordinated attacks of Ras Kassa and Ras Seyum had proven the bravery and ferocity of the Ethiopian soldiers. They swarmed and destroyed Italian tanks and armored cars, often armed only with spears and swords. Their astonishing local mobility enabled them to fight hand-to-hand, a form of fighting at which they excelled, and against which Italian air support was useless. By January the situation looked grim:
The trackless terrain was ideal for the Ethiopians and suicidal for the Italians. Only airplanes could get at the advancing Ethiopians in such country. But since they were now learning to spread out and take cover, the airplanes would have to be armed with something more effective than bombs and bullets. Because of the foresight of Mussolini and De Bono, Badoglio found that he did have something more effective, and though his country had signed an international agreement never to use it, Mussolini, just a few days previously, on the sixteenth, had reiterated an earlier authorization to use it. Badoglio could congratulate himself now for his foresight in banishing the news correspondents to Eritrea. As long as they didnt actually see what he was about to do, they would probably believe him later when he denied having done it. (Coffey, 1974: 263)
There is some controversy over the Italian decision to use gas, and over its existence in theater.17 The best evidence, however, supports the
17 Del Boca argues that De Bono had refused to avail himself of this option, and that it was Badoglio who took the initiative in its use at the prompting of one of Mussolinis Roman rages (Del Boca, 1969: 78). The resort to the use of gas in the south seems especially egregious, because Grazianis 60,000 well-supported troops were opposed by 7000 starving Ethiopians under the command of Ras Desta. Yet Graziani still felt compelled by necessity to resort to bombing enemy positions with mustard gas canisters: A few days after the arrival of the Duces telegram, on Badoglios orders, the Takkaze fords were
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claim that Badoglio (and Graziani, commander of the 60,000 Italian troops advancing from Italian Somaliland) resorted to the use of mustard gas (yperite) in order to compensate for his own incompetence. The use of mustard gas was a clear violation of the laws of war. The Italians themselves had signed the Geneva Convention of June 17, 1926 prohibiting the use of gas as a weapon of war except in self-defense against a gas attack (Del Boca, 1969: 80). The Italians had earlier justified their shipping of mustard gas (680 tons) to the East African theater by arguing that they needed it for self-defense in the event of an Ethiopian chemical weapons attack (Coffey, 1974: 104). This was implausible, to say the least. Against the defenseless Ethiopians the air-dropped gas crushed the Ethiopian threat to Badoglios communications. The Italians could now breathe easy again.
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It was not just soldiers and retreating soldiers who were gassed in these aerial assaults, but lakes and streams and pastures as well. Ethiopian soldiers relied for food on livestock they drove with them to the battle site. The mustard gas killed not only women and children but also these cattle, by the thousands. Medical facilities were only the most rudimentary, and such as there were had become subject to frequent air attacks by Italian bombers. Since many of these hospitals were staffed by volunteers from civilized countries, such as Sweden and Britain, Mussolini had ordered these strafings and bombings to scare away witnesses to his use of gas. This created the rather ridiculous situation in which the Italians were committing one war crime (attacking clearly marked Red Cross hospitals) in order to conceal another. The Italian response to the increasing evidence of both practices followed a typical pattern. It began with outright denial: that the claim that photographic evidence had been fabricated,18 or that reporters were in fact communist agents. As evidence mounted, Italy argued that it had been forced to do some of these things, but on a small scale; and that they were justified as reprisals against Ethiopian atrocities (Del Boca, 1969: 81).19 Whether Italy was believed or not, the end result was that a muchhoped-for great power intervention on Ethiopias behalf never happened. Instead, the war dragged on, with the desperate Ethiopians fighting a losing battle against a rain of death from the air.
18 Del Boca relates a chilling story which supports the argument that many in the Italian military didnt know about Italys resort to gas. It seems a general in Italys military intelligence service and his aide had been snooping into the mail of a London news correspondent when they came upon some suspicious photographs: they found several photographs of Ethiopians whose bodies were covered with sores. These photographs struck them as extremely suspect and a few minutes later they were on my desk. I looked at them and took them straight to Professor Castellano, then the leading authority on tropical diseases. He examined them and confirmed what I had suspected there could be no doubt, he said, that the sores on the bodies of these Ethiopians had been caused by mustard gas. We stared at each other in deep embarrassment. After an awkward silence, Castellano added, Still, leprosy produces almost identical sores, and he handed me a few photographs of lepers so that I could compare them with the others. As I could not spot the difference, I suddenly made up my mind: I would substitute the pictures of the lepers for the original photographs and let the package go on its way (Del Boca, 1969: 80). This later enabled the fascist propaganda machine to declare the photographs, which later appeared in print, as fabrications intended to falsely malign the honor of Italian arms. 19 Tales of Ethiopian atrocities had become a major fascination for average Italians. Alleged abuses included mutilating Italian corpses (in particular, cutting off their genitals), and especially the use of dum-dum bullets. The Italians also claimed that Ethiopian soldiers were using Red Cross hospitals as shelters from air attack.
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Although the use of mustard gas killed or injured noncombatants as well as combatants, its use in this interaction of the war was directed against Ethiopias soldiers. In other words, it was used in order to coerce Ethiopia by destroying its capacity to fight, not to punish Ethiopia by destroying its will to fight. In this sense, Italian strategy must best be described as conventional attack supplemented by barbarism.20 After four more battles, and the liberal application of mustard gas on retreating Ethiopian armies, the only remaining organized opposition between Eritrea and Addis Ababa was the emperors Imperial Guard. After consultations with his advisors and surviving generals in which he attempted and again failed to convince them to adopt a GWS, Selassie decided to march to meet the Italians at Mai Chew with the best-trained and best-supplied forces Ethiopia could field. His plan was to feint a frontal assault against the Italian main position and then swing around with his main force to attack a weak point in the Italian left. The plan might have worked, but it depended on surprise and a degree of timing difficult to achieve under even the best of circumstances. In the event, the Italians intercepted a radio transmission containing all the details of the emperors planned attack, and they altered their defensive arrangements to counter it. The morning of the battle, March 31, 1936, the Ethiopians moved into position against the waiting Italians. Even with foreknowledge of the Ethiopian plans, the Italians were nearly overwhelmed in a few places. However, the tide of battle soon turned, and the emperor was forced to retire.21 As at all of the other battles, the Italian air force liberally doused the retreating Ethiopians with wave after wave of mustard gas mixed with high explosive. The retreat became a rout, and the emperor fled to
20 This is supported by Sbacchis argument that the fascists considered mustard gas to be a means of legitimate warfare (Sbacchi, 1985: 73). 21 Del Boca argues that the Italian need for a decisive engagement was so great that many felt actual disappointment over the low Italian (read: white) casualty figures in the battle: While no words can do justice to the heroic stand made by the Alpini and the gallantry of the Italian officers who set a shining example to their men, the battle for the empire was in fact won by the colored troops who shed their lifeblood so generously for the common cause. This afforded little comfort to Mussolini who hoped to certify that, through the state, his people had acquired a strength as solid and durable as cement. Indeed, for the next few months, he was filled with bitter disappointment. Denis Mack Smith interpreted his feelings correctly: The Duce grieved over the fact that the fallen Italians had not even numbered 2,000 and that the war had been won at too low a price to reinvigorate the national character to the extent Fascism required (Del Boca, 1969: 172).
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Addis Ababa, closely pursued by the Italians. On May 2 he quietly slipped out of the capital with his wife and family on a train bound for Djibuti. The war was over and Ethiopia had been crushed.
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[military] Academy (Del Boca, 1969: 222). Grazianis methods were heartily approved in Rome, but
the wish was nevertheless expressed that the executions be carried out in the utmost secrecy with no witnesses present, an instruction that, needless to say, was never followed. The apparent rebuke rankled Graziani, who wired back in order to justify himself, I cannot deny that some Ethiopians have shouted as they faced the firing squad, Long live Ethiopia! I beg to state, however, that executions ordered in consequence of the attempt on my life are invariably carried out in isolated spots where no one, I repeat, no one can witness them. (Del Boca, 1969: 222223)
But of course they were witnessed. Worse still, on May 20, 1937, Graziani ordered 297 monks of Debra Libanos, Ethiopias most famous monastery, to be shot. The enormity of this atrocity had the opposite of its intended effect: instead of cowing the population, it incensed them.23 Italian outposts came under fire, and convoys were ambushed and destroyed. Whole regions, in particular Gojjam and Beghemder, rose in revolt. In addition, Graziani appeared to have become mentally unbalanced by the attempt on his life and his failure to find the assassins. He reportedly locked himself into his bedroom at night, and had an entire battalion assigned to his personal security. By November, his eccentric behavior and his counterproductive policies eventually prompted Mussolini to replace him with the duke of Aosta a man reputed to be humane as well as intelligent.24
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to trust the Italians. To get that trust back was possible, but only after years of hard work and consistent policy. Mussolini was hardly likely to be patient in this regard, and the dukes main military advisor, General Cavallero, was soon complaining behind the dukes back to Rome that the dukes lenience was counterproductive. In March through April of 1938, the Italians launched a series of major military campaigns intended to crush the rebellions in Gojjam and Beghemder. The invasion of Gojjam was undertaken by 60,000 troops, and appeared to achieve all its aims. But no sooner had Gojjam been declared pacified than new threats appeared. Cavallero decided to try a different strategy. Instead of deploying regular forces in overwhelming numbers as at Gojjam, he created three flying columns or Gruppo Bande which he dedicated to the capture of Abebe Aregai, one of the most exasperating of the resistance leaders, who had been trying for months to relocate his forces in the much more forbidding terrain of Menz.25 The fighting, which lasted from the end of the rains in October to December of 1938, proved inconclusive.26 Aregai succeeded in reaching Menz and joining Dejaz Auraris, and both survived repeated Italian efforts to destroy them. The Italians withdrew. If Grazianis pacification policies sparked a unified rebellion against Italian rule, the duke of Aostas more lenient policies and more conventional assaults had not proven effective at solving the military problem. At the close of 1938, Ethiopia was still in full revolt. Its resistance leaders were still at large, and the sixty-five Italian battalions in Ethiopia were forced to live inside their forts. In March of 1939 the duke was recalled to Rome for talks. Meanwhile, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, and Europe began to brace itself for war.
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money had become staggering. The previous years operations alone had cost three times as much as the entire bill for the administration and development of the colony, and the results had been inconclusive. The second reason was a new focus on preparations to defend Ethiopia in the event of a war breaking out between the European powers. Mussolini did not intend to draw on support from Ethiopia in the defense of Italy, but he made it clear that in the event of war Ethiopia was on its own. For this reason, the Italians spent much of the year and proportionately more of their resources organizing an army for the defense of the AOI from an attack by British or French forces. As a result, Italian efforts against rebellion in Ethiopia shifted emphasis from coercion to bribery, amnesty, and negotiation. Ironically, now that they had given up trying to win a COIN war against the Ethiopian resistance, this combination of policies proved to be more effective than anything the Italians had so far attempted. As the year came to a close, Europe was at war, but although Poland had fallen, the situation in Europe had stabilized. Italy remained neutral, and as a result, tensions between Britain, France, and Italy in East Africa eased.
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The French in Djibouti were prepared to join with their British allies in the defense of East Africa. But they were soon knocked out of the war, and Djiboutis commander was forced to become a passive bystander in the Anglo-Italian fight. That fight did not last long. Although the British had hoped to spark a rebellion in AOI by the return of Haile Selassie 27 (supported by Britishled guerrillas along the lines of T. E. Lawrences adventures in Arabia), the fight itself was soon reduced to a series of conventional strikes and counterstrikes, with the British initially getting the worst of each encounter. In August of 1940, the Italians even succeeded in routing British forces in British Somaliland. But Italian success in Somaliland emboldened them to try their luck against Egypt from Libya. These forces, under the inept leadership of a rehabilitated Graziani, advanced several miles into Egypt, but stopped at Sidi Barrani. In December, the British Army of the Nile counterattacked, and the Italians were shattered: At one stroke the threat to Cairo and the hope of linking the two halves of Italys African Empire were removed; and at one stroke Italian morale dissolved (Mockler, 1984: 307). The collapse of Italian morale was not confined to North Africa. The impact on the AOI was devastating all the more so because the defeated Italian troops had been led by none other than Graziani:
But it was, naturally, among the Ethiopians that the defeat of Graziani had the greatest effect. He had been their conqueror and, as Viceroy, their tyrant. As the victorious Army of the Nile pressed on and in its turn invaded enemy territory to capture first Bardia and then Tobruk with fresh hordes of prisoners, George
27 Interestingly, Mockler argues that the British were embarrassed and concerned by Haile Selassies return to the Middle East. Their early concern was that his presence would provoke an attack on Sudan by Italy (Mockler, 1984: 226). After some thought, however, it occurred to the British that after all, they were at war so then the issue became, how best to use Selassie for their own ends. This was not clear either. Britain was dramatically outgunned in Egypt, Sudan, Kenya, and British Somaliland: all places where they expected Italian attacks. And attack the Italians did, though they never pressed their advantage. It then occurred to the British that the way to take the pressure off was to seriously foment rebellion within Ethiopia.
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Steer28 issued leaflet after leaflet with photographs of long lines of Italian captives. (Mockler, 1984: 309)
In 1941, it was the revitalized British who took the initiative, and Italian forces everywhere in East Africa collapsed. Haile Selassie was returned to Ethiopia on 20 January, 1941 and, after a series of sharp battles, British forces with Ethiopian support forced the Italians to surrender. On May 5, 1941, five years to the day since Badoglio had marched triumphant into Addis Ababa, the emperor once again took his seat on the lion throne.
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establishing a viable self-sustaining colony. It stimulated rather than reduced resistance, and it increased the costs of the subsequent bribes necessary to keep Ethiopias princes from leading attacks against Italian troops in AOI.
Italy in Ethiopia
almost certainly act to stop. Neither of these hopes were realized, but Ethiopia never surrendered to Italy.29
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Foreign correspondents were often fascists in their own countries, and those who werent often experienced technical difficulties filing their reports.30 Others were intimidated, or forbidden access to key areas or battles. Finally, foreign aid workers were initially the target of intimidation tactics. Italian planes were ordered to buzz Red Cross field hospitals and to strafe near them in order to frighten the hospital administrators into leaving. When this failed, the Italians took to directly attacking such facilities, claiming their attacks were justified reprisals for Ethiopian violations of the laws of war. When evidence did leak out, and it did, the Italians had other strategies for dealing with such crises (see also Sbacchi, 1985:63):
These were the Ethiopian charges [use of mustard gas, attack of Red Cross units, attacks on civilians], but the Italians, anticipating them, had already found a way to cloud them and confuse the issues. On December 26, the Italian government had sent a letter to the League of Nations charging the Ethiopians were using dumdum bullets. And on January 16 [the Italians] sent the League a letter reiterating the dumdum charge and adding to it a charge that Ethiopian soldiers were protecting themselves from bombardment by hiding under Red Cross flags. Wasnt that considered sufficient justification for bombing Red Cross units? It was considered sufficient justification in Geneva, anyway, for allowing the Ethiopian charges and Italian countercharges to balance themselves out. (Coffey, 1974: 275276)
There are two crucial points to be made here about the Italians getting away with mass murder. First, they had a specific strategy in place for preserving the secrecy of their barbarism, and that strategy presupposed an authoritarian regime type. Second, the use of mustard gas in the particular context of Ethiopia in 1935, combined with a more vigorous conventional attack strategy, ended the war in time to avoid international intervention. As a result, Italys victory was nearly a fait accompli. The question of Italys use of mustard gas was not formally raised in Europe until March 30, 1936. At that time, it was agreed that it couldnt be discussed until a formal inquiry could be launched, because, as Lord Halifax put it, it would be wrong to prejudge a matter so grave and so vitally affecting the honor of a great country [Italy] . . . The first step
As noted above, the Italian intelligence service specialized in interdicting unfavorable evidence.
30
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must be to obtain the observations and comments of the Italian government (Coffey, 1974: 317). When it became apparent to everyone that the Italians were not only using gas, but using it liberally and against noncombatants, the question again came up, this time at Geneva on April 8, 1936:
When a question was raised about Italys use of gas, most of the delegates agreed that efforts should be made to collect reliable information on the subject. But Pierre-Etienne Flandin, the French Foreign Minister, objected. He asked if any inquiries had been made into atrocities committed by Abyssinians, including the use of dumdum bullets. At a private meeting after the committees first morning session, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden attacked the implications of Flandins remarks. There was, Eden insisted, a distinction between the irresponsible atrocities of undisciplined military forces and the use of poison gas which could not be other than a governmental act. Flandin agreed. He said the Italians were very stupid to use this form of warfare, but he doubted the wisdom of issuing a formal condemnation at a moment when an attempt was being made to bring hostilities to an end, for this might disturb the negotiations. The Committee of Thirteen decided at a meeting later that day not to inquire into the Italian use of poison gas. (Coffey, 1974: 324325)
By April 8, fully a week had passed since the last Ethiopian army in the field had been smashed at Mai Chew. The war was already over. In sum, Italys authoritarian regime type made it much simpler to avoid the risk of public disaffection and international intervention when Italy resorted to a barbarism strategy. Still, even authoritarian Italy was not entirely able to hide its barbarism from the world or its own people. The fact of nonintervention can best be explained by the context of the day, in which the goal of European stability had come to mean so much to Europes leaders that they were willing to sacrifice every principle of morality and justice on its altar. The impact of Italys regime type on its political vulnerability to military setbacks is clear in at least one important respect. As already observed above, Mussolini had control of all the Italian publics access to information about the course of the war and its conduct. Every letter, photograph, and newsreel sent home was scrutinized and sanitized. But among Italys political elites, the course of the war and the frequent setbacks Italian forces suffered early on, should have, according to Mack, resulted in political vulnerability due to trade-offs among elite interests. They did not. Mussolini determined what resources would be
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expended to conquer and develop Ethiopia and that ended the matter. In fact, Mussolini himself makes the proposed link between authoritarian regime type and political vulnerability clear:
On July 6, [1935], at Eboli, he had allowed himself to venture beyond prudence in an address to four Black Shirt divisions which were about to embark for Africa. Speaking from the back of a truck, he had completely exonerated Italys soldiers of 1896 for their defeat at Adowa, blaming instead the abject government in Rome at that time. With his Fascist government in power, he assured the Black Shirt troops, their efforts in the field would get full support at home. (Coffey, 1974: 103)
There were trade-offs, of course, but these took the form of personnel transfers: generals sacked or promoted. But although there were intrigues and arguments, the basic aim of Ethiopias conquest and colonization was not questioned: not by the Italian people, and not by the fascist political elite. In sum, Italys authoritarian regime type made its resort to barbarism more likely, and reduced the probability that it would be forced to withdraw from the fight due to domestic political pressure or interstate intervention.
Arms diffusion
In none of the five historical cases analyzed here was arms diffusion a less plausible explanation for weak actor success than in the ItaloEthiopian War. As noted above, the Ethiopians had few rifles, and fought for the most part barefoot. Paradoxically, this gave them greater mobility in the tough mountainous passes leading from Eritrea to the central plateau upon which Addis Ababa sat. For their own part, the Italians and their Eritrean allies tended to move in motorized columns. This gave them some advantages in terms of the artillery they could carry but these advantages were on balance overwhelmed by the disadvantages of having to move and maintain communications along poorly made roads and across innumerable ideal ambush sites. The decisive technology proved to be airplanes. The Italians had them, the Ethiopians didnt. Once the Italians got organized, they were able to use their air force to spot concentrations of Ethiopian soldiers and thus degrade the Ethiopian ability to catch the Italians in surprise ambushes. This was especially devastating because the Ethiopians refused to fight at night, when the Italian air advantage could have been nullified. When air-dropped mustard gas was added
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to the reconnaissance function of air power, the military contest quickly became one-sided.
Strategic interaction
The Italo-Ethiopian war provides five independent tests of the strategic interaction thesis. In this case, there were some surprises. In the first interaction of the war, the strong actor should have won quickly, because Italy chose a conventional attack strategy and Ethiopia a conventional defense (same-approach). Yet not only did the Italian offensive bog down even before coming to grips with the enemy, but an Ethiopian counteroffensive threatened to drive the more numerous Italians back into Eritrea. The explanation for this outcome is poor Italian military leadership and an unwillingness to risk casualties. These factors, in this interaction, overwhelmed the expected effects of a same-approach interaction. In the second interaction, the strong actor should have won, because Italy continued its conventional attack strategy against an Ethiopian conventional defense. Italy did win, but it won with the help of mustard gas. In the Ethiopian theater, mustard gas proved to be a powerful force multiplier. Although the indiscriminate nature of air-delivered mustard gas makes its use barbarism under my definition, in this interaction of the war Italy used gas to destroy Ethiopias military capacity, not its will to resist. In this interaction, then, the use of gas does not indicate a shift in strategy so much as tactics. The interaction remains sameapproach and the outcome was as expected. In the third interaction, the strong actor should have won, because Italy employed a barbarism strategy against an uncoordinated Ethiopian GWS (same-approach). In this case, the use of gas was combined with the summary executions of noncombatants, rape, and reprisal killings, all intended to coerce the will of the Ethiopian resistance. It is difficult to assess with any certainty the outcome of this interaction, because it was so brief. As noted in Chapter 4, in a barbarism strategy there tends to be a gap between when the strategy is first put into effect and when it begins to yield military dividends. Although the Italians had been using gas against Ethiopian troops (and, inadvertently, noncombatants) for some time, the real initiation of a barbarism strategy dates from the accession of Graziani to the position of viceroy in 1936, and especially after the attempt on his life in February 1937. But, in November, Mussolini replaced Graziani just as he was getting started. The accession of the duke of Aosta to the position of viceroy caused a shift in strategy once again.
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In the fourth interaction, the weak actor should have won, since Italy pursued a conventional attack strategy against an Ethiopian GWS (opposite-approach). And, as predicted, the Ethiopians not only survived Italian attempts to destroy them but began to contest many of the areas formerly under Italian control. But, ironically, the very expense of the effort to use large conventional units to chase Ethiopian guerrilla leaders prompted yet another shift in strategy. In the fifth interaction, the strong actor should have won, because Italy switched from attempting to coerce Ethiopian resistance to trying to bribe it (conciliation vs. GWS: same-approach). As predicted, Italy did win, or might have won, had not World War II intervened. The accession of the duke of Aosta to viceroy had prompted a major thaw in BritishItalian relations. The duke liked the British, and the British admired and respected the duke (Mockler, 1984: 187188, 194). Yet Mussolinis decision to enter the war against France and Britain instantly changed all that. In sum, by the logic of the strategic interaction thesis, Italy should have won every interaction of its contest in Ethiopia save one (interaction four: conventional attack vs. GWS). Yet it lost interaction one (conventional attack vs. conventional defense). The reason it lost when it should have won is poor leadership. The five interactions of the Italo-Ethiopian War, the nature of the strategic interaction in each interaction, and outcomes are summarized in Table 1.
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The true test of this thesis would be to assess Italian military leadership in other theaters of war say Greece or Russia. Were Italian generals more aggressive or more generally competent? They were neither. One is tempted to argue that Italys top generals were merely Mussolinis fascist cronies with epaulettes, and the incompetence which resulted was therefore the inevitable concomitant of an authoritarian regime. But this is unsatisfactory. The French military had its share of cronyism and incompetence and it was a democracy. Moreover, fascist Germany fielded the most effective military leadership the world had ever seen.
Conclusion
The Italo-Ethiopian War was an asymmetric conflict between fascist Italy and imperial Ethiopia. Italy won. Italian interests reduced to revenge for the defeat at Adowa in 1896, a need to legitimize fascism as an ideology, responsibility for civilizing a barbarous black African state in the Horn of Africa, and resources with which to ameliorate its poverty and population problems. Ethiopian interests reduced to survival and honor. Relative material power did not explain relative interests in the case of the strong actor, Italy. Relative material power may explain Ethiopias interests, however. How, if at all, did regime type explain the strategies or political vulnerability of the strong actor? Hypothesis 8 relative material power explains relative interests in the outcome of an asymmetric conflict is not supported in the Italo-Ethiopian War. As we have seen above, Italys strategic choice was affected by its regime type. Mussolini was always concerned about the possibility of foreign intervention economic or military and he counted on being able to manage information about his intentions and conduct in the war in order to forestall such intervention. He understood the risks involved
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in his decision to make mustard gas a prohibited weapon of war available to his commanders in Ethiopia. Italys resort to barbarism in fact presupposed the total management and control of information on the conduct of the campaign. In terms of political vulnerability, Italians, regardless of political affiliation or class, all shared the dream of having a thriving colony in Africa.32 Mussolini demanded it as Italys right. Italys preponderance in material power should have made it politically vulnerable to military setbacks if not by the weight of public opinion then at least as a consequence of trade-offs among fascist political elites. But although Italy experienced stunning setbacks during its Ethiopian campaign, and although evidence of Italys use of mustard gas did leak out, this didnt happen. Regime type therefore matters more than allowed by the interest asymmetry argument. But if nature-of-actor and interest asymmetry arguments cannot explain the outcome, can arms diffusion or strategic interaction? Arms diffusion cant. Bluntly, the Ethiopians did not receive arms of any quantity or sophistication until the British entered the war in 1940. For this reason, hypothesis 6 the better armed a weak actor is, the more likely it is that a strong actor will lose is not tested here. Prior to the war, Ethiopias emperor had been counting on diplomatic support and even military intervention from his fellow League members in Europe. Ethiopia was too poor and too proud to import arms as the Boer had done prior to their fight with the British. Strategic interaction best explains the outcome of the war, though even strategic interaction is not proof against poor Italian leadership. With one exception, each strategic interaction of the war contained an interaction which favored an Italian military victory. The first interaction of the war featured a conventional attack vs. a conventional defense, and Italy appeared poised to lose this fight due to bad generalship. The stalling of the Italian advance, combined with effective Ethiopian counterattacks, led in the second interaction of the war to a shift in strategy. Italy employed a conventional attack strategy aided by a super-weapon against an Ethiopian conventional defense. This
32 For a contrary view, see Sbacchi, 1997. Sbacchi convincingly recounts a broad Italian opposition to Mussolinis planned adventure in Ethiopia, but fails to provide a sense of how widespread such opposition in fact was. In addition, Sbacchis account suggests that once Italians became convinced of military success in the initial months of the war, Italian public opinion shifted to support the invasion unconditionally.
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strategy proved highly effective militarily, and Ethiopias organized resistance collapsed within a few months. The Italians won. But the very methods used in Ethiopias conquest and especially the post-war policy of summary executions and continued use of mustard gas on rebels sparked renewed resistance. The Italians might have won this third interaction of the conflict, but before it could register a military impact Mussolini cancelled it. The fourth interaction of the war reverted to a conventional attack against any organized resistance. Only where Ethiopian forces sought to engage the Italians directly, as at Gojjam, were the Italians successful. In the remainder of the country the Italian conventional attacks were countered by a GWS, and the Italians lost. The costs of such operations were prohibitive, and the combination of those costs and the perceived need to become security self-sufficient in the event of war in Europe, led to a final shift in Italian strategy. This fifth interaction of the war introduced a conciliation strategy for Italy, opposed by an Ethiopian GWS. Conciliation proved the most effective of all the strategies the Italians had attempted since marching into Addis Ababa in May of 1936. Only one rebel leader held out, and it seemed likely that but for the outbreak of World War II even Abebe Aregai would have been forced to flee Ethiopia or submit. The Italians would have almost certainly won the war in the short term. But World War II changed all of this. The contest in Ethiopia ceased to be between occupying Italians and an Ethiopian resistance, and became a fight between the British and Italians fought in Ethiopia, Sudan, British Somaliland, and Kenya. At first, the Italians launched conventional attacks against British defenses, and they succeeded almost everywhere. However, they failed to exploit their victories, and after the collapse of Italys armies in Libya and Egypt, the British launched a series of conventional attacks against Italian defenses. The British had hoped to coordinate these attacks with a British-sponsored general uprising in Ethiopia. Yet although they had devoted enormous resources to finding and funding a Lawrence for Ethiopia Orde Wingate Wingates and Haile Selassies triumphant re-entry into Ethiopia were superfluous to the outcome. The Italians fought hard in the north, but again suffered from poor leadership. While, in the south, a British probe toward the port city of Kassala in Italian Somaliland resulted in a complete rout of vastly superior Italian forces. Within one month, British forces invading from the south had rolled up the Italians and entered Addis Ababa.
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On balance then, in four of five interactions, hypothesis 5 strong actors are more likely to win same-approach interactions and lose opposite-approach interactions was supported. In sum, if we wish to explain why Italy lost the Italo-Ethiopian war, we cannot rely on relative power, regime type, interest asymmetry, or arms diffusion. With the exception of arms diffusion, these factors clearly mattered. But what mattered most was strategic interaction and Italian military leadership. Once it became clear that the capture of Addis Ababa would not force the Ethiopians to surrender, the Italians had three strategic choices. First, continue with the present strategy, perhaps sending more troops, and equipment to the theater. Second, offer the Ethiopians terms: something which could save face yet end the war. Third, switch to a barbarism strategy: take the gloves off and go after Ethiopian patriots and their families, either by holding them hostage or by killing them outright in reprisal for continued resistance. In the event, the Italians chose the third option. From then on, the Ethiopians maintained a GWS. But the Italians shifted and innovated a number of times, painstakingly improving their advantage until World War II came to Africa and swept them away.
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Everything rotted and corroded quickly over there: bodies, boot leather, canvas, metal, morals. Scorched by the sun, wracked by the wind and rain of the monsoon, fighting in alien swamps and jungles, our humanity rubbed off of us as the protective bluing rubbed off the barrels of our rifles. We were fighting in the cruelest kind of conflict, a peoples war. It was no orderly campaign, as in Europe, but a war for survival waged in a wilderness without rules or laws; a war in which each soldier fought for his own life and the lives of the men beside him, not caring who he killed in that personal cause or how many or in what manner and feeling only contempt for those who sought to impose on his savage struggle the mincing distinctions of civilized warfare that code of battlefield ethics that attempted to humanize an essentially inhuman war. Caputo (1996)
US military intervention in Vietnam began soon after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The full commitment of US combat troops, however, did not occur until eleven years later. When US Marines came ashore at Da Nang in 1965 the US population was about 194 million, while North Vietnams was approximately 19 million.1 US and North Vietnamese armed forces totaled approximately 2.5 million and 256,000, respectively. Adding in allies who contributed combat troops (negligible), multiplying population and armed forces, and dividing the strong actors total by two results in a relative force ratio of about 53:1 in favor of the United States. Even allowing for the fact that the United States did not actually devote half its power to the
These figures are taken from Singer and Small, Correlates of War, war number 163.
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conflict,2 this was an asymmetric conflict and the United States and its allies were the strong actor.3
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Third, over the centuries Vietnam has been invaded often. Important ethnic divisions between North and South Vietnamese were most often shelved during foreign invasions. The Vietnamese people were therefore effective nationalists hundreds if not a thousand years before the rise of nationalism in Europe.4 Frequent invasions resulted in both a loathing of would-be foreign conquerors (see e.g., Karnow, 1983: 58), and a strong military tradition. That military tradition often favored an indirect defense, utilizing the advantages of terrain and climate to wear down more powerful invaders rather than meeting them head-on in pitched battles. Here Stanley Karnow recounts the strategy of a thirteenth-century Vietnamese general defending against a Mongol invasion:
The Vietnamese, commanded by the illustrious Tran Hung Dao, repulsed each offensive. Like outnumbered Vietnamese officers before and since, he relied on mobile methods of warfare, abandoning the cities, avoiding frontal attacks, and harassing his enemies until, confused and exhausted, they were ripe for final attack. (Karnow, 1983: 101)
Climate and terrain abetted this strategy, but in no way mandated its adoption. In its nineteenth-century struggles against France, for example, Vietnamese emperors and their generals were more often brought into direct engagements with their French attackers and in those fights invariably lost.5 But defeating the Vietnamese in battle never proved decisive. Again, this was partly because the Europeans had military technology specialized for winning major battles, not for maintaining control of hostile populations in difficult terrains and climates. By 1893 the French, after much difficulty and expense, had consolidated their control of what they came to call French Indochina: Tonkin (North Vietnam), Annam (South Vietnam), Cambodia, Laos, and Cochinchina. World War I soon followed, and Asian intellectuals, including Ho Chi Minh,
4 Vietnamese nationalism was not monolithic, save during foreign invasions. During the Vietnam War, South Vietnamese communists had a national identity separate from that of Northerners. What united them strongly during the war was the presence of foreigners on Vietnamese soil (see Connor, 1969: 5186; Karnow, 1983: 462, 534; and Herring, 1986: 271). 5 This happened in large measure because in earlier fights between the Northern Trinh and the Southern Nguyen, France sold modern weapons to both sides. Modern weapons (breech-loading rifles, e.g.) rewarded different tactics and strategies, and encouraged the Vietnamese to confront their adversaries head-on. This proved disastrous, as even small French forces could always defeat larger formations of similarly armed and trained indigenous soldiers.
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applauded US President Woodrow Wilsons passionate advocacy at Versailles of national self-determination as an antidote to future wars. Ho and others in Asia eagerly awaited the end of European colonialism. But when the victors Britain and France refused to dismantle their Asian empires, secret societies and revolutionary groups began to form and agitate. In 1930 the French brutally suppressed a nationalist uprising in Yen Bay, just north of Saigon. But, unlike elsewhere in Asia, French repression in Vietnam only succeeded in uniting their adversaries (Karnow, 1983: 58), giving them stronger incentives to resist French rule. Like Mao in China, Ho recognized the opportunity provided by the Japanese conquest of Indochina. He reorganized the Indochinese Communist Party in order to capitalize on Vietnamese nationalism and to forge a broad alliance capable of seriously hurting the Japanese in Vietnam. As a result, many of these underground groups became affiliated or incorporated into the Indochinese Communist Party. These groups sharpened their insurgency skills against the Japanese occupation, and, during this time, came to view the United States as a natural ally. By late 1944 Vietnamese resistance led by Ho and his allies had become troublesome enough that Japan decided to grant Vietnams independence under a puppet ruler, the Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dai. In March of 1945 Bao Dai declared Vietnams independence. But his rule was short lived. In August, assuming Hos claims to leadership of Vietnam had Allied support, Bao Dai abdicated and handed control of Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh, who proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) on September 2, 1945. The First Indochina War began in 1946, following the return of the French to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The tale of Frances failed attempt to re-conquer and pacify Vietnam, the intrigues of the 1954 Geneva Conference on the fate of Indochina, and the decade of political and economic blunders (on both sides) that followed the Geneva Conference make interesting reading, but there is no space for a detailed review here. There are important points to take away from each experience, however. First, by 1945, Vietnamese resistance to French rule had become truly nationalist and truly widespread. The French could not recognize that it was already too late to win enough hearts and minds to make reoccupation of Indochina a rational pursuit. Japans invasion had forged a national resistance, and that resistance could not be as easily broken as before the war. Contrary to US assessments at the time, French military
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forces were on the whole well trained, well equipped, and skillfully led. But they were never sufficient in numbers to quell Vietnamese resistance to French rule. The French struggled in vain, and their efforts to defeat the Viet Minh eerily prefigure later US struggles to accomplish the even more limited goal of securing South Vietnam.6 Second, the DRV was soundly betrayed by Chinas Zhou Enlai at the negotiating table in Geneva. Far from the unified Vietnam the DRV felt it had earned on the battlefield following its victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu, backroom negotiations between China and France forced the DRV to accept both partition and a delayed election to determine Vietnams ultimate fate. Further negotiations the Soviet Unions Molotov intervened forced a division at the 17th parallel, and set the date for elections in the summer of 1956.
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serve and protect. In 1963 the DRV and VC began more aggressive and larger-scale actions against South Vietnam (henceforth the government of Vietnam or GVN). In January, a well-planned assault on VC forces at Ap Bac went horribly awry, as GVN soldiers effectively refused to fight and were severely mauled by the VC. On the eve of Indochinas second war, the DRV maintained its passionate even maniacal interest in unifying Vietnam under Vietnamese rule. In pursuit of this objective, the DRV possessed two distinct armed forces: a conventional military (the North Vietnamese Army or NVA) and a nationalist guerrilla military (the VC).
from the DRV, Diems often brutal suppression of dissent visibly weakened South Vietnams defenses. By 1963, even loyal officers with little interest in risking their lives in adventures against the VC in the Mekong delta were aware that allowing Diem to continue might mean South Vietnams and by extension, their own destruction at the hands of the DRV. Diems restructuring of the GVN had taken the better part of a decade, and by the early 1960s US diplomats and military advisors were well aware that it might take a decade of hard work to reconstruct a GVN capable of capturing broad public support a necessary precondition for fighting and winning a major war against a dedicated, well-supplied, and increasingly skilled foe. This is why the decision to oust Diem was so controversial at the time. If, as some in the Kennedy administration believed, Diem had to go (Diems repressive measures had become the focus of increasingly irrepressible South Vietnamese public outrage), then who would replace him and what positive difference could his replacement make? Diem was murdered on November 1, 1963 and replaced by General Nguyen Khanh. Instead of beginning the difficult work of repairing the GVN and building a coalition of social and economic forces capable of an effective defense against the VC, however, Khanhs first priority was securing his own rule. Corruption and incompetence continued, prompting the United States, now under the leadership of Lyndon Baines Johnson, to further escalate its support. That support would begin with the presidents approval of covert sabotage and espionage operations against the DRV, and eventually include the commitment of US combat forces in March of 1965.
advisors from Vietnam, the assassination of Diem put those plans on hold while the presidents national security team reevaluated the costs and benefits of a withdrawal from Vietnam. Moreover, Johnson was well aware that his chief rival, the Republican nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater, would attack him as a liberal who was soft on defense. For this reason alone Johnson continued to support covert military action against the DRV, including secret sabotage and espionage operations against DRV military facilities.8 His immediate political objective was to provide enough support to stabilize Vietnam and defend against Goldwaters accusation that he was soft on communism. Once elected, he planned to reassess Vietnam: perhaps escalating a US commitment or perhaps engineering a withdrawal. Second, the United States was never interested in seeking the direct overthrow of the DRV. It remained content with a Vietnam divided across a DMZ just as Korea had been divided and for the same reason: it feared Chinas entry into the war and a possible escalation to, as Johnson put it, World War III. US interests were in this sense, and only this sense, accurately described as limited. In 1965 the United States viewed the survival of the GVN as worth fighting and dying for, under the condition that (a) it wouldnt be too costly a war, and (b) in support of the theory that the fall of the GVN would very likely lead to the collapse of other noncommunist regimes in Southeast Asia, perhaps overwhelming Japan and India and ultimately threatening more vital US interests in Europe and the Western Hemisphere.9 Third, the deployment of US combat forces to Da Nang in 1965 was viewed by the president as crossing a threshold, but not to the degree that with hindsight seems so obvious today. As would happen so many
8 It was these operations, an accidental coincidence of an Op-Plan 34-A sabotage attack against the DRV, and a top-secret DeSoto electronic espionage mission being undertaken by the USS Maddox, that led to the first Tonkin Gulf incident of August 2, 1964, in which three DRV patrol boats attempted to attack the Maddox with torpedoes, but were driven off with minor damage. A second attack was alleged, and at the time genuinely believed, by the United States on August 4. Subsequent analysis and extensive research has revealed that this second attack, which prompted Johnsons military retaliation and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (August 7, 1964), never actually happened. On this last point see Moisie (1996). 9 After 1968 it became increasingly clear that the survival of the GVN was not worth the cost of securing it, but by then the United States had another rationale for staying prestige and precedent setting. The United States had said the GVN would stand, and even those in the administration now long convinced of the hollowness of the domino argument could agree that a US failure in South Vietnam might endanger vital US national interests elsewhere or in the future.
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times later, Johnson and his advisers were attempting to use US military forces to send careful and clear messages to the North we dont seek to overthrow you but we refuse to permit your support of aggression against the GVN never fully comprehending how badly these messages would be translated. These force messages were invariably thought of as necessary and limited escalations which were likely to yield quick and positive political results. When they did not, the president and his team tended to respond not by questioning the process of communicating by the use of military strikes but by sending yet another clarifying message. Overall, the United States went to war in Vietnam to stabilize an ally and prevent what it then believed to be the first step in a Sovietinspired, Chinese-supported, communist takeover of Southeast Asia. In 1965, the Johnson administration believed that US military power and technology could make it possible to secure the GVN without a major escalation or a declaration of war. With the power to punish the DRV from the air and destroy the VC on the ground, most in the administration believed the only question unresolved as the Marines waded ashore at Da Nang was, how much punishment would they take before calling it quits in the South? (Mueller, 1980: 500).
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the guerrilla war campaign against South Vietnam, and as its name implied, the campaign was expected to take time:
Instead of a coordinated air campaign . . . which would destroy the enemys ability to wage war and break their will to resist, air operations over the North were designed as a diplomatic slow squeeze signaling device. As Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara said on February 3, 1966, US objectives are not to destroy or to overthrow the Communist government of North Vietnam. They are limited to the destruction of the insurrection and aggression directed by North Vietnam against the political institutions of South Vietnam. (Summers, 1995: 96)
The United States sought to inflict enough pain on North Vietnam to compel it to stop supporting the VC in the South. North Vietnams defense against ROLLING THUNDER was conventional: it sought to thwart US military attacks on its infrastructure and forces by means of fighter aircraft and an increasingly dense radar and surface-to-air missile defense network supplied to them by the Soviets. US Air Force generals and their civilian leaders shared a theory about the general effectiveness of strategic bombing as a strategy. Strategic bombing should have both hampered North Vietnams war effort (interdiction) and coerced its leadership into giving up (pain). When neither expectation was met, military and civilian elites faced a stark choice: either reject the theory, or blame failure on some flaw in implementation. The Air Force chose to emphasize flaws, while the Johnson administration was increasingly split: some agreed that the United States was hitting the wrong targets, or not hitting the right targets hard enough, whereas others including eventually Defense Secretary McNamara concluded that strategic bombing against the DRV could not work. McNamaras reports indicated that the military value of ROLLING THUNDERs destroyed targets was zero.11 Bombing that accepted collateral damage subsequent to this recognition was therefore barbarism: the deaths and injury to individual noncombatants
is that when air power is used to target an adversarys armed forces, it generally wins, and when used to target an adversarys values (including infrastructure), it generally fails. Insofar as punishment and denial represent indirect and direct strategic approaches, respectively, Papes argument, as Mearsheimers (1983) before it and mine after, is an argument for the independent causal impact of strategy on conflict outcomes, (see also May, 2000). May explains French defeat in the Battle of France in 1940 as a function of strategic interaction: the Germans simply had a better strategy. 11 Its political utility was less than zero: it increased international and domestic opposition to the US war effort, and although the North Vietnamese feared and hated the bombing, they never considered altering their war aims as a result of the pain it inflicted.
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and their property were not specifically intended, but they were collectively deliberate and systematic. ROLLING THUNDER continued until a week before the November 1968 US presidential election. It was an interaction in which a strong actor (the United States) employed an indirect strategy against a weak actor (North Vietnam) using a direct strategy, and lost.12
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quickly that allied forces could not benefit from close air or artillery support. In strategic terms, the North shifted more of its resources into the guerrilla campaign in the South.
14 The record of performance by ARVN units is mixed. Some units and their commanders are extolled for their bravery, skill, and loyalty, while many are remembered only for their cowardice, incompetence, and venality (see, for example, Karnow, 1983: 441; and Summers, 1995: 80).
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effective, CAP success only highlighted the inability of the South Vietnamese government to protect its own citizens. The United States lost this interaction. Its combat forces had been trained and equipped to fight a uniformed regular adversary using massive firepower, not an invisible enemy that refused to meet it in battle.15 The indiscriminate impact of the US Armys (and the ARVNs) heavy reliance on artillery and air support progressively alienated potential allies among South Vietnams people. As losers, however, US forces were not slow to innovate a strategic response.
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The overall military view is that Phoenix was a legitimate military operation. It relied on special intelligence to target and destroy VC leadership, and it proved to be the single most successful strategic initiative pursued by US forces during the war.18 To most observers, participants, and historians, however, the sustained effort to kill noncombatants raised troubling questions about its legitimacy as an extension of US policy, or as a COIN strategy, regardless of its effectiveness. Overall, the United States won this interaction. The Strategic Hamlets program was never implemented properly, so its contribution to US success in this interaction was negative. By contrast, the Phoenix program, which eviscerated the VC command infrastructure in the South, may even have provoked the North into its premature and disastrous direct confrontation with US regular forces during the 1968 Tet Offensive. Because both strategies systematically and deliberately targeted noncombatants, both must be counted as barbarism albeit barbarism at the milder end of the violations spectrum.
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in this book, the DRVs victory is puzzling in that the most powerful actor, the United States, lost a war against a weak actor, the DRV. Second, the DRV won the war even though, unlike weak actors in every other case examined here, it lost on the battlefield.19 How can these puzzles be explained?
Actor interests
A first explanation is that the DRV won because, as all observers came to know, it was profoundly dedicated to the outcome it sought. As a nation, the DRV appeared to forge itself into the living embodiment of the sentiment better a dead lion than a live jackal. Better, in other words, to be annihilated as a people than to live under foreign rule. There was always, during the war, a sense of disbelief about this sentiment (possibly on the DRV side as well), and a reasonable concern that it represented more the propaganda of a desperate regime than the true aspirations of a people a people very often divided historically. But the balance of evidence supports the argument that the dedication of the people of the DRV and their VC allies in the South, was nearly unprecedented historically.20 General Abrams may have destroyed their ability to reunify Vietnam and even set it back another twenty years. But even under those circumstances the DRV showed no signs of injury to its willingness to unify Vietnam, whether it took another twenty, fifty, or a hundred years. In short, the roots of DRV resolve had less to do with its survival as framed by IR theory (i.e., less to do with it being the weak actor), and more to do with a two thousand year history of nationalist opposition to foreign rule, regardless of the balance of forces.
19 To clarify, the DRV lost on the battlefield to the United States and the United States withdrew in 1973. The DRV won on the battlefield against the GVN in 1975, but by then few could have been surprised at the outcome. 20 If willingness to absorb casualties and continue pressing ambitious political demands is an indicator, then the DRV is in rare company. As Mueller puts it, the Communists lost some 2.53 percent of their prewar population in the war in battle deaths. How does this compare with other wars? It is almost unprecedented . . . scarcely any of the hundreds of participants in the 100 international wars in the last 160 years have lost as many as 2 percent of their prewar population in battle deaths. The few cases where battle deaths attained levels higher than 2 percent of the prewar population mostly occurred in the two world wars in which industrial nations fought with sophisticated machines of destruction for their very existence. In World War II . . . Germany and the Soviet Union each lost some 4.4 percent of their prewar populations in battle deaths. In World War I, Germany lost 2.7 percent, Austria-Hungary, 2.3 percent, France 3.3 percent, Rumania, 4.7 percent, and England 2.0 percent (Mueller, 1980: 507508).
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Compared to this the interests of the United States must at first seem trivial. The United States sought only the survival of the GVN. But by 1965 the United States had come to view the survival of the GVN as a necessary part of its larger overall strategy to contain communism. Containing communism, in turn, was a vital national security interest because if it could not be contained if it spread it could either directly threaten US vital interests (stability in Europe, or oil in the Middle East, for example), or escalate to another world war capable, in the thermonuclear context, of ending all life on the planet. US interests in the outcome of the Vietnamese civil war were therefore far higher than suggested by the interest asymmetry thesis (Karnow, 1983: 377378), but not as high as those of the DRV and VC. The United States did fight in Vietnam, initially, because many in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations believed that if they didnt fight the communists in Vietnam sooner, then theyd be force to fight them in Europe or the Western Hemisphere later. For the United States, Vietnam was a limited war not because South Vietnams fate was a peripheral US interest, but because US political elites believed that the use of force in proportion to US interests might provoke Chinese military intervention and lead to a third world war. Hypothesis 8 relative material power explains relative interests in the outcome of an asymmetric conflict is therefore not supported in the Vietnam case. The problem with actor interest asymmetry as an explanation of the outcome of the Vietnam War, however, is not that it is poorly explained by relative power, but rather that it doesnt explain potential outcome variation. In 1968, the United States was still committed to the idea that the GVNs survival was a vital US national security interest, under the theory of protecting US credibility (rather than the earlier domino theory). In other words, both actors were equally committed, independent of the nominal balance of coercive forces, and on top of that the United States had won the military contest on the ground. Given its high interests and its physical capacity to continue escalating the use of force against its weak adversary, the United States shouldnt have been as politically vulnerable as it was. Yet the United States was politically vulnerable, and that political vulnerability functioned just as Macks thesis predicts: it forced the United States from the war.
because its authoritarian structure made it possible to completely control information from the battle space, and enabled it to engage in more brutal and hence, more effective tactics, than its democratic foe. It is true that the DRV maintained an extraordinary degree of control over information about the outcomes of battles, and about the degree to which its enemies resorted to brutal conduct.21 In general, the DRV lied to its people. It lied about nearly every aspect of the war, from the conduct of US and ARVN forces, to casualties suffered their own and those of their adversaries. The DRVs efforts to control information from the battle space came at a significant cost in resources, and was aided by the fact that most common soldiers in the NVA and VC were not literate, and therefore could not write letters home in which alternate versions of events could compete with the DRV line. This was equally true of the ARVN but not of US forces, whose letters home eventually accelerated a credibility gap already being widened by journalists in theater. There is also ample evidence that neither the DRV nor its VC allies observed the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of noncombatants in war ranging from surrendering soldiers, to prisoners of war and enemy soldiers wounded in combat (many of whom were tortured and then murdered, or simply murdered on the spot). The argument that in Vietnam, in particular, a willingness to act with deliberate brutality was necessary to win, is captured nowhere better than in the words of the fictional Lieutenant Colonel Walter E. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppolas 1979 film Apocalypse Now:
Its impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means . . . I remember when I was with Special Forces . . . We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldnt say. We went back there, and they had come, and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember I, I cried. I wept like some grandmother . . . And I thought: my God, the genius of that. The genius! . . . And then I realized they were stronger than we because they could stand it. These were not monsters. These were men trained cadres these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love. But they had the strength, the strength to do that. If I had ten divisions of
See Tin (2002: 3032). Bui Tin supports the argument that the democratic structure of the US government made it highly vulnerable as compared to that of the DRV.
21
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The weakness of this argument is that the GVN was also authoritarian and fully willing to do what was necessary to win, and yet the ARVN was always said to be a hindrance to military effectiveness rather than an aid. In the calculation of US forces and diplomats in theater, the ARVN were in fact the most brutal yet the least effective forces engaged against the DRV/VC in the war. Also, US forces proved to be just as brutal on several occasions (the My Lai massacre being only the most famous and most public of many such incidents), and as observed above, accepted considerable collateral damage in strategic bombing raids designed to coerce the DRV through the infliction of pain. Yet the military effectiveness of the bombings was negligible. Had it escalated to the point of destroying the Red River dike system (killing up to a million DRV civilians), Bui Tin, then a colonel in the NVA, argues that the results would have been catastrophic for the United States:
Such a tragedy would . . . have offered Hanoi an incomparable occasion for whipping up anti-American sentiments throughout the world, for arguing for large-scale international aid and support, and for rallying the whole socialist bloc. My feeling is that when you take into consideration the sociopolitical and psychocultural makeup of the Vietnamese, destroying the dikes would have worked in Hanois favor. The government would certainly have been faced with many difficulties and the people would have suffered untold hardships, but their war effort would not have diminished . . . (Tin, 2002: 34)
But the strongest argument in favor of the effectiveness of regime type is the structure argument; the structure of the DRV and GVN both authoritarian regimes did not permit public disaffection with the war or how it was fought to affect policy. But the structure of the US government a democratic regime did permit public opinion to affect US policy. Mack, Merom, and others correctly identify this as political vulnerability, and specify how it operated to force the United States from the war despite a military victory in theater. The most important consideration here, however, is whether the United States failed because it was a democracy. The answer is no, on
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two counts. First, if democracies are to be associated with more restrained conduct on the battlefield (historically not a sound association), then the United States may, as Merom asserts, have lost because it couldnt escalate the level of violence and brutality to that which can secure victory (Merom, 2003: 15). It is difficult to argue, however, that the United States and ARVN were not brutal enough, considering that as a proportion of pre-war population, the DRV lost from 2.5 to 3 percent higher even than that suffered by Japan in World War II (Japan lost an estimated 1.4 percent in that war).22 Second, it is hard to argue that the United States in Vietnam was more politically vulnerable, given its high interests in the outcome, than it was in the first Gulf War of 1990, in which the rationale given for US military intervention was only the preservation of a new world order (nothing said about dominos). Yet the United States and its allies, who together inflicted tens of thousands of casualties on their hapless Iraqi adversary while sustaining only hundreds of casualties themselves, won that war quickly and decisively, forcing the Iraqis to agree to humiliating terms of surrender. Thus, political vulnerability drives democracies from wars when it cant affect authoritarian regimes, but only when there is a gap in time between the commitment of armed forces and the achievement of political objectives. This is what happened in Vietnam. Thus regime type is necessary but not sufficient to explain the DRVs victory. A full explanation demands accounting for why some asymmetric conflicts are over with quickly while others drag on.
Arms diffusion
Arms diffusion is not a good explanation of US defeat in the Vietnam War for two reasons. First, the DRVs acquisition of armaments from the Soviet Union and China did make a difference (especially to the air defense of key installations in North Vietnam), but only at the margins.23 Second, the battlefield impact of access to better arms was often negative (Johnson, 1968: 442, 443). The DRVs acquisition of new arms
Numbers are from Mueller (1980: 509). A good counterargument would be that given low US interests in defeat of the DRV, increasing costs at the margins was sufficient. But US interests were not low. Moreover, the most serious costs imposed on the US were in the form of (a) outraged public opinion following reports on the collateral damage of US bombing strikes in the North, and (b) improvised booby traps and mines against US forces in the South. If Bui Tin and others are correct, a lack of any conventional air defense of the DRV might have caused the United States even greater problems by accelerating the trend toward increasing negative public reaction to high-tech, high-altitude attacks against a poor, defenseless, backward
23 22
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tended to encourage premature escalation to direct confrontations with US or US-supported ARVN units, and this invariably proved disastrous. Moreover, the lack of dependency on locals for logistical support made it possible for the cadres to terrorize wavering South Vietnamese peasants (summarily executing informants and so on) in direct opposition to Maoist dicta concerning the necessity of treating peasants with respect. The legacy of this abuse would haunt the VC following the loss of so many of their cadres in the ill-fated Tet Offensive of 1968. The DRV was forced to send replacements from the North, but these men could not reconstruct the intimate web of relationships with the peasants and terrain of their predecessors. In addition, the new cadres were haughty toward the ethnically distinct Southerners, and this, along with the disaffection brought about through previous years of terrorization, made it impossible to re-establish a viable insurgency in the South after 1968. On balance then, absolute increases in armaments hurt more than helped the DRV war effort. Hypothesis 6 the better armed a weak actor is, the more likely it is that a strong actor will lose an asymmetric conflict is therefore not supported in the Vietnam case.
Strategic interaction
If it is true that actor interests and regime type are themselves insufficient to account for the DRV victory in Vietnam, it is nevertheless obvious that they are necessary. But the best explanation of the wars outcome is strategic interaction. Strategic interaction explains how the high resolve of the DRV/VC, along with the regime-affected political vulnerability of the United States, combined to force the United States from the war as and when it did. According to my account, however, it is difficult to assess the cumulative impact of the four 24 strategic interactions that made up the war.
country. Ironically then, the DRVs use of Soviet anti-aircraft technology might count as yet another example of advanced technology imports hurting, rather than helping, a war effort. 24 Lewis Sorley (1999) argues that the war had yet another crucial phase after Tet, in which US forces shifted strategies under their new commander, General Creighton W. Abrams. In terms of the strategic interaction thesis, this would count as Phase 5: Guerrilla War III/ indirect indirect/US wins: abandons Vietnam/war ends. The difficulty with Sorleys argument is measuring the effectiveness of Abramss talented leadership in the context of a VC recently devastated by Phoenix and Tet, and a similarly routed NVA. If, as many assert, the North had retreated to lick its wounds after Tet, then US military effectiveness would appear high regardless of its strategy. For this reason, and because its inclusion would add little in the way of a test of competing explanations, I do not include the interaction in this analysis.
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These interactions and their contribution to the outcome of the war are summarized in Table 2. The United States won two and lost two; and the impact of the interactions on the wars duration also seem equivocal. Shouldnt this imply a tie? Perhaps. But considering US public and elite expectations prior to the fight, even a tie must count as a failure from the US perspective, because anything other than a quick victory was going to be politically unacceptable. Keep in mind that US strategy was aimed, and aimed publicly, at intimidation at coercing the DRV by force and the threat of even more force to stop supporting the war against the GVN in the South. In World War II, the United States had been fighting a war many Americans believed to have been a real war: a war for survival against a powerful, technologically fearsome, and unambiguously evil enemy. For the United States, that war lasted three long years (194245). If three years is a long time in a real war, how much longer must it have seemed in Vietnam, a far away place with a poor, weak, backward and hence sympathetic enemy? Three years into its war of intimidation against the DRV, the United States and the GVN were attacked boldly and on all fronts by the DRV and VC. Clearly, whatever else was working in Vietnam, and regardless of the military outcome (NVA/VC defeat), US hopes of intimidating the DRV were bankrupt, and the American people knew it. Strategic interaction explains two things that Macks and Meroms theses cant. First, as demonstrated in the Vietnam case, relative power in an asymmetric conflict is a poor predictor of relative interests (resolve, if you will) in the outcome of an asymmetric contest. Even when facing weak actors, strong actors whether superpowers or middling powers, whether authoritarian or democratic justify their attacks against weak actors in terms of survival of some sort. This can be by means of domino logic (the additive power of otherwise small defeats could eventually constitute a direct survival threat), precedent-setting logic (if we dont hold here, an imagined audience will conclude we cant hold anywhere, and vital interests will be put in jeopardy as a result), or by reference to some cherished identity or principle (one thinks, e.g., of Margaret Thatchers justification for attacking Argentina over the Falklands/Malvinas Islands in 1982; or George Bush Sr.s declaration of a need to protect a new world order by forcing Iraq from Kuwait in 1990). The point being that these causes need not be objectively existential. It is enough that they are metaphorically existential, at least in the initial stages of conflict. If the war is over quickly, then the
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shortens war
metaphorical justification will likely stand. If it is protracted a function of strategic interaction however, the metaphorical justification will be challenged. In sum, strong actors are not vulnerable in small wars because such wars are less than existential. They are vulnerable because the time it takes to defeat an objectively weak adversary calls into question the legitimacy of the interests, regardless of their bases in reality or metaphor. Second, and most importantly, the strategic interaction thesis shows why the Vietnam War wasnt over with quickly, in say, one or two years. As most critics of the US military in Vietnam have observed, the initial strategic interaction was dominated by a conventional attack (US/ARVN) against a GWS (VC). This interaction in fact best characterizes the overall strategic interaction of the war; and as the thesis predicts, one consequence of an opposite-approach interaction is that it makes wars last longer. The failure to achieve quick results with conventional search-and-destroy missions then led US forces to innovate, leading to the CAPs program, Strategic Hamlets (again), and Phoenix. These innovations had the effect of hurting the DRV and VC, but the United States would not advance north of the 17th parallel with ground forces, so the DRV could afford to wait. If Macks thesis were sufficient to explain why big nations lose small wars, political vulnerability would have to generally affect the ability of strong actors to defeat weak actors. It doesnt. Political vulnerability operates only when there is an unanticipated delay between the commitment of armed forces and victory.
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If Meroms thesis were sufficient to explain how democracies lose small wars, he would have to support the empirical claim that strategic interactions in small wars are constant, not variable. In other words, he would have to show that, as his case selection implies, all [democratic] strong actors will attack with a conventional attack strategy, and all weak actors will defend with a GWS, terrorism, or nonviolent resistance (i.e., an indirect defense). But we in fact observe variation in strategic interactions in small wars all the time; against all expectations to the contrary, the Taliban did not attempt a GWS against the USsupported Northern Alliance in 2002. They attempted a conventional defense and were soundly defeated. The same was true of the Iraqis a year later. Moreover, the Russian Federation, a nominal democracy, is still prosecuting an extremely brutal and yet counterproductive COIN campaign in Chechnya. Even if we accept for the sake of argument that the Russian Federation is not a real democracy, clearly the extreme brutality (rape, extortion, looting, murder, torture, indiscriminate shelling) of the Russian campaign is not winning Russias small war in the Caucasus.
Conclusion
In Vietnam, the DRV (weak actor) had two entirely distinct militaries ready to oppose US forces: one trained and equipped to fight an indirect war (the VC), the other trained and equipped to fight a direct war (the NVA). This meant that the DRV could be far more nimble than the United States in shifting its strategic approach. As Eliot Cohen, Andrew Krepinevich, Donald Hamilton, and others have argued, with the possible exception of the US Marine Corps which had considerable operational experience with COIN the US military could never reconcile itself to the demands of a COIN war (Cohen, 1984: 165; Krepinevich, 1986; Hamilton, 1998: 155). These demands do not imply the necessity of creating a force capable of barbarism; as the CAPs demonstrated, it was possible to fight a GWS in the South within the framework of the laws of war. What it was manifestly not possible to do was defeat a people in arms quickly by such methods. Thus the CAP example only underscores the importance of the key causal mechanism of the strategic interaction thesis: when the power relationship implies a quick victory, and the interaction causes a delay, the way is clear for the operation of political vulnerability. That is, even an ideal COIN strategy one that destroys enemy forces without
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destroying enemy values takes time. If such strategies are to become a model for future COIN operations, this implies a counterintuitive policy: when weak actors employ indirect defense strategies, strong actor political and military elites must prepare their publics for long-delayed victories. In Vietnam, interest asymmetry and regime type helped the DRV inflict costs on the United States and ARVN; and its open alliance with the Peoples Republic of China (and Soviet Union) made it impossible for the United States to launch a ground invasion in the North. These factors might not have mattered had the DRV escalated to an all-out conventional assault on the South in 1965 (a strategy for which the United States and ARVN were prepared). They also wouldnt have mattered had the United States taken British and French advice and chosen the long and difficult strategy of a law-enforcement rather than a military COIN strategy.25 To do so would have required three things: first, reform and restructuring of the GVN (the relevant example of success in this regard being Ramon Magsaysays reforms of the Philippine government during the Hukbalahap insurgency in 1952). Second, the politically difficult in the US domestic political context step of persuading the US public of the need for a long struggle. Third, the even more difficult job of convincing the US military to build and deploy sufficient special operations forces to work in close conjunction with well-trained and competently led GVN law enforcement forces. Either same-approach interaction could, without resort to barbarism, have secured US political objectives in Southeast Asia. Although this strategy would suffer from the defect of taking a long time to show results, that cost would be offset by, first, a consistent political effort to keep expectations of a quick victory low, and more importantly, by reducing friendly casualties and the DRV propaganda advantage of frequent and widely publicized incidents of injury to noncombatants. But, in the event, the United States encouraged the view that the fight to save the GVN was a military matter and that it could be won quickly.26 The United States attempted to coerce the DRV with
25 See Shaw (2001). Adopting this strategy would count as switching from a war-winning to a war-termination strategy. 26 This encouragement culminated in the infamous prediction by US commander William Westmoreland just prior to Tet that the enemys hopes are bankrupt (see Karnow, 1983: 539). Westmorelands proclamation mirrors that of French General Henri Navarres on the eve of the battle of Dien Bien Phu, Now we can see it clearly, the light at the end of the tunnel (Karnow, 1983: 189).
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firepower (Herring, 1986: 226), and the DRV/VC defended their interests by means of an indirect strategy and at a tremendous cost in lives lost. Stymied, US forces innovated new strategies in order to defeat the DRV/VC, but the reverses they achieved on the battlefield took too long (Karnow, 1983: 464, 480; Herring, 1986: 200). By 1968 the US public had already begun to grasp what the Johnson and Nixon administrations and the military leadership could not; by the time US Marines landed at Da Nang in 1965 it was already too late. The war in Vietnam had become what Michael Walzer would later term an anti-social war:
The war cannot be won, and it should not be won. It cannot be won, because the only available strategy involves a war against civilians; and it should not be won, because the degree of civilian support that rules out alternative strategies also makes the guerrillas the legitimate rulers of the country. The struggle against them is an unjust struggle as well as one that can only be carried on unjustly. Fought by foreigners, it is a war of aggression; if by a local regime alone, it is an act of tyranny. The position of the anti-guerrilla forces has become doubly untenable. (Walzer, 2000: 195196)
Just as it had to the French public after General Massus defeat of the FLN in Algeria, the thought of winning such a war soon became intolerable to most Americans. Better to risk a communist takeover of Southeast Asia than to contain communism by means of winning an anti-social war.
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The Afghan society may now be regarded a murderous society . . . We have become soulless and dry, no longer beings of care and love, but brutal and fierce animals. It is not right to name a society murderous, but the Afghan society may be called so . . . The state is a state of killing, not only in the battlefield but also in the lanes and streets of cities where there is no state of war. No one feels secure, and because of this many families have fled abroad. Hassan Kakar (1995) In Afghanistan I served at Ghazni . . . Life in the unit was fairly calm, unless we were involved in operations, when everything was different . . . We didnt see any friendly Afghans anywhere only enemies. Even the Afghan army was unfriendly . . . Everyone around us was an enemy. I remember an intense feeling of anger toward the rebels because so many of our guys were getting killed. I wanted revenge. Then I began to doubt the goals and methods of international aid. I had a difficult time deciding what I really believed. I just knew what I had to say during the political instruction meeting: that we were fighting American aggression and Pakis. Why had we mined all the approaches to the regiment? I asked myself. Why were we aiming our machine guns at every Afghan? Why were we killing the people we came here to help? Whenever a peasant was blown up by a mine, no one took him to the medical unit. Everyone just stood around, enjoying the sight of his death. This is an enemy, the officer said. Let him suffer. Mickola Movchan (a Russian deserter in Afghanistan)
The war between the Soviet Union and resistance forces of Afghanistan began on 27 December 1979, and ended with the withdrawal of Soviet armed forces on 15 February 1989.1
1 The fighting did not stop, but for our purposes the asymmetric conflict between the USSR and the various Afghan resistance groups ended when the Soviet troops evacuated Afghan territory.
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forced to look elsewhere for development aid, which his country needed to build roads, irrigation and power facilities, and a modern military. The USSR stepped into the vacuum, offering billions of rubles to the Daud regime, showcasing its assistance as friendly no strings attached development aid. But, in 1963, Afghanistans king, Zahir Shah, dismissed Daud as prime minister. During the next fifteen years, Dauds successors liberalized Afghan domestic politics while continuing to develop Afghanistans infrastructure. In 1965, political liberalization resulted in the formation of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) under the leadership of Muhammad Taraki and Babrak Karmal. In 1967, the PDPA split into separate factions: Parcham, headed by Karmal, and the more radical Khalq, headed by Taraki. The liberalization of Afghan politics resulted in accelerating factionalization and a growing opposition to the constitutional monarchy. In 1973 Daud staged a bloodless coup with Soviet and Parchami support and declared Afghanistan a republic. But Daud immediately set about slowing the pace of Afghan political reform. He arrested prominent Islamists and Marxists, and began to purge Parchamis from government posts while at the same time reducing Afghanistans technical and economic dependence on the USSR (he signed development pacts with Iran and Saudi Arabia which together would have dwarfed the entire Soviet aid program of the previous two decades). Alarmed, the Soviets requested an interview with Daud in Moscow in April of 1977, and Brezhnev bluntly ordered Daud to stop hiring foreign technical specialists on the grounds that many of these were NATO spies. Daud retorted angrily that Moscow had no say in Afghanistans internal politics, and the Soviets decided to replace him (Magnus & Naby, 1998: 118119, 121). In July, the Soviets forced the reunification of the two feuding factions of the PDPA, and a year later (April 1978), the PDPA staged a Soviet-engineered coup in which Daud and his family were mur dered.2 Taraki and his protege Hafizullah Amin took over, and began purging the new government of Parchamis (Karmal fled to Moscow). Chaos ensued as the inexperienced Marxists attempted to re-engineer Afghan society overnight. Uprisings soon broke out in major Afghan cities, such as Herat, and were brutally suppressed. Amin eventually
Lloyd Rudolph argues that the April 1978 coup caught the Soviets by surprise (Rudolph, 1985: 4).
2
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ousted Taraki, who fled the country. As uprisings continued and DRA desertions increased, Amins regime threatened to fly apart. Moscow decided that the only way to salvage the situation was to depose Amin and replace him with the more moderate Taraki.3 But their plans were discovered by Amin, who had Taraki arrested and later murdered after Tarakis return to Kabul. In September 1979 the deeply angered Soviets began elaborate plans to invade Afghanistan and install Babrak Karmal as leader.
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about the USSRs long-term objectives in Afghanistan, their immediate objectives were clear from the beginning: (1) replace Amin with Karmal; (2) occupy and stabilize major Afghan cities (Kabul, Herat, Kandahar, Jalalabad); and (3) secure lines of communication between cities (especially the Salang highway, linking Kabul with Termez to the north and Jalalabad to the east). In short, the Soviet mission was strictly limited. Their goal in Afghanistan was to stabilize the new regime under Karmals leadership, so that Karmal could set about the difficult political task of putting the Afghan Humpty-Dumpty back together again (Litwak, 1992: 79). The limited mission, poor quality and small quantity of forces supports the Brezhnev Doctrine7 and sunk costs arguments better than the geopolitical bridgehead argument (Litwak, 1992: 7980). The bridgehead argument is further weakened by the fact that the alleged advantages of outright conquest (in terms of air bases and so on) would have been available to the Soviets by treaty anyway. But why intervene with regular armed forces in the first place? The answer is that Amin had succeeded too well in purging opposition from, and securing control of, the armed forces and secret police. In essence, Amins efficiency and brutality forestalled the possibility of his being replaced in the old-fashioned way, by a well-organized coup (his discovery of the plot by the Soviets and Taraki to remove him is proof of this). Thus the only means left to the Soviets was direct military intervention with their own armed forces. In sum, Soviet interests in Afghanistan were defensive from the beginning. Their limited objective was to secure the regime, major urban areas, and communications links so that Afghanistans new political leadership could consolidate the revolution and pacify the state by political, rather than military means.
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April 1978 coup which toppled the Daud regime (Kakar, 1995: 125). What remained in Afghanistan were two highly factionalized camps gathering around two opposite poles. On the one side were the various factions of the PDPA, which sought to reform Afghan society while enriching themselves and eliminating their rivals. Kakar argues that there were two problems with these reform attempts. First, the PDPA leadership had no cadre of experienced ministers who could oversee the implementation of their radical decrees. Second, they relied on a Soviet or Marxist interpretation of history in order to understand Afghan problems and to prescribe proper solutions:
each [of the men who replaced Daud] was convinced that the PDPA blueprint was the guideline for reorganizing both society and the state. Thus, they relied on Soviet, not Afghan, experience, and thus, too, they broke with the Afghan past. This may explain why, after they rose to power, they became ever more alienated from their own people and ever more disunited among themselves. (Kakar, 1995: 15)
On the other side were a number of mainly rural-based groups with different ideologies, ethnicities, and agendas. Some were Sunni Muslim and others were Shia. Of the Shia, some were Twelvers and some were Seveners.8 Among the Sunni Muslims, some were ethnic Pushtuns while others were Tajiks, Turkmen, or Uzbeks. Cordesman and Wagner identify twelve separate resistance groups (Cordesman & Wagner, 1990: 1719). All the major resistance groups maintained a similar organization: political leadership was located in Peshawar in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, while most field commands were located in home provinces in Afghanistan.9 But however many groups or agendas there were, a key feature of the decade-long conflict in the Afghan war was this: so long as Soviet troops were involved in operations, resistance groups were united:
The invasion turned the civil war into a war of liberation. It gave that war a new meaning, summed up in the word jehad, an expression particularly moving to Muslim Afghans in such times . . . The Russians were godless communists, and their ruthless suppression
8 Seveners and Twelvers constitute variants of Shia Islam. For a concise discussion, see Magnus and Naby, (1998, pp. 8487). 9 Kakar argues that Pakistan, fearful of another Palestinian situation in the North-West Frontier Province, deliberately fostered the rivalries and factionalization of the resistance groups (Kakar, 1995: 93).
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Furthermore, because Karmal had arrived on the back of Soviet tanks the resistance fighters did not distinguish between DRA and Soviet troops. To the mujahideen, they were all the Russians (Magnus & Naby, 1998: 139).10 In sum, among the constellation of interests and identities that composed the Afghan resistance, a single dominant theme emerged: get the Soviets out (Urban, 1988: 53, 72). Beyond this simple goal there was no consensus, and the lack of a broader consensus made the task of ejecting the Soviets that much more difficult.
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of five divisions four motorized rifle (MRD) and one air assault division supported by an additional two air assault regiments (the 103rd and 104th). The plan was for the 66th and 357th MRDs to advance from Kushka in Soviet Turkmenistan to Herat, Farah, and then Kandahar, while the 360th and 201st MRDs moved south from Termez in Soviet Uzbekistan through Mazar-e-Shariff to Kabul. The 105th Guards air assault division and its two attached regiments were already in place at Bagram and along the Salang highway passes, and began the operation to capture Kabul at 7:15 p.m. By 8:45 p.m., the Soviets had announced via a radio station in Termez claiming to be Radio Kabul, that Karmal had taken over the government and requested Soviet assistance. The ground forces now began crossing the Oxus River on pontoon bridges. The only serious fighting on that first day was between Soviet airborne and special forces troops and Amins personal guards at the Darulaman Palace on the outskirts of Kabul. The Soviets had done as much as possible to facilitate a quick takeover, including poisoning Amin, emptying fuel from armored vehicles of the two divisions loyal to Amin, and exchanging live rounds for blanks (for exercises) in the weapons of those same divisions (Kakar, 1995: 23). All that stood between Amin and death were therefore 1800 personal guards who occupied defensive positions in the palace. When the attack on the palace by Soviet special forces units began, Jahandad, the guard commander, came to Amin to ask for instructions. Due to Amins condition (Kakar claims he was poisoned by the Soviets), however, Jahandad had to make up his own mind. He decided to resist, and the attackers were thrown back several times:
The confrontation was intense and prolonged. Both sides sustained losses until the Afghans were finally overcome by some kind of nerve gas . . . The invaders feared that if the Afghans were not soon overcome, forces from the nearby military divisions of Rishkhor and Qargha might join them. (Kakar, 1995: 25)
This passage not only references a violation of the laws of war,11 but cites its most common rationale: it was necessary in order to increase military effectiveness.
11
Kakar notes that none of the 1800 palace defense force survived the attack, which tends to support the argument that something unusual was used to overcome the defenders.
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In January 1980, Karmal announced a package of reforms and compromises designed to reestablish government and end resistance and violence. Most Afghans ignored him:
The Karmal package was a comprehensive one, but it was ignored by a large number of Afghans. To them the pledges of freedom, the release of prisoners and the new trades unions were all irrelevant. What was relevant was that Karmal clearly depended on the army of a foreign power a power that was perceived as godless and anti-Islamic. (Urban, 1988: 53)
Most Afghans were outraged by the Soviet invasion. Many quit their jobs and joined the mujahideen. Worse still, entire DRA units defected to the mujahideen. The defection of whole units was a particular problem because it meant the transfer of arms sometimes sophisticated arms to the resistance. Karmals well-intentioned attempt to reach compromises within his government caused still more problems. Amins Khalqis were still in key positions in the army and secret police, and because Karmal refused to purge them, they remained capable of obstructing his policy initiatives. By mid-January DRA desertions had become such a problem that Marshal Sokolov, in overall command of Soviet operations in the DRA, mobilized his reserve-echelon forces. In order to seal the Iranian border, Sokolov sent the 5th MRD to Farah and the 54th MRD to Herat. A third MRD, the 16th, was deployed to Mazar-e-Shariff. He also sent the 201st MRD east from Kabul to Jalalabad in order to stabilize the situation there.12 Meanwhile, in order to relieve the pressure on the DRA 9th Division at Jalalabad, the Soviets planned to take the offensive in the Kunar valley. The Kunar valley perfectly illustrates the conflict topography of Afghanistan: a long fertile valley flanked by steep mountains containing numerous smaller side canyons. The valleys themselves usually feature a river, which flows down to join other rivers from similar valleys all through the Hindu Kush mountain range. Such roads as there were in Afghanistan usually follow the rivers, and the intersection of rivers thus becomes the site of urban centers and major highway junctions. In short, Afghanistans valleys open onto strategic values.
12 The DRA 9th division was garrisoned at Jalalabad on the key highway connecting Pakistan to Kabul. Urban estimates that so many of its units defected that by the summer of 1980 its effective strength was down to no more than 1000 (Urban, 1988: 55).
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What the Soviets quickly discovered is that they could not achieve their minimal objective of protecting these strategic values because there werent enough forces among the DRA and the Soviet army combined to protect more than a fraction of them.13 Convoys of fuel, ammunition, food, and replacement soldiers and parts had to travel the full length of highways which were flanked in many places by these valley openings. Thus, the Soviets found themselves having to mount COIN operations outside of their garrisons simply in order to relieve pressure on them and secure their lines of communication. The Kunar valley operation in March of 1980 was their first major effort, and it proved completely ineffective. The offensive began with a sustained aerial bombardment, which warned the mujahideen, killed civilians and livestock, destroyed fields, houses and irrigation facilities, and initiated the depopulation of the valley. Next, armored regiments lumbered up the valley floor, suffering numerous ambushes. The column succeeded in relieving the garrison at Asadabad and reestablishing government authority in Asmar, after which it returned to base. Days later the mujahideen returned from the mountain caves where they had hidden as the Soviets pacified the valley, and the strategic situation returned to what it had been before the offensive. In June and July fighting intensified, especially in the three key frontier provinces of Kunar, Nangrahar, and Paktia.14 The Soviet offensive in Paktia proved to be a major disaster for the Soviets. There were three problems. First, the troops themselves were poorly trained reservists, and the system of enlisted seniority in the Soviet military essentially destroyed the effectiveness of NCOs.15 Second, the equipment of the Soviet Southern Front Military District was old and obsolete.
13 By way of comparison, at the height of the US commitment in Vietnam, US troops maintained a coverage density of 7.3 soldiers per square mile, while at no time during the decade-long occupation of Afghanistan did Soviet soldiers achieve a coverage density of greater than 0.7 soldiers per square mile (Cordesman and Wagner, 1990: 96). Even restricting Soviet troops to highways, supply depots, and cities was never enough to secure them adequately (Urban, 1988: 119120). 14 These were key provinces because they bordered Pakistan, which throughout the war remained the primary conduit of mujahideen logistical support (arms, ammunition, and so on). 15 Terms of service typically run for two years, and soldiers serving their second year, the old soldiers, have license to harass and abuse new arrivals, NCO stripes or not (see Urban, 1988: 127128). This gap in small unit leadership meant that junior officers often had to take on the responsibilities normally fulfilled by NCOs. This seriously degraded the combat effectiveness of these units, especially given their COIN missions.
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Armored personnel carriers (APCs) were 1015 years old, and tanks were often 20-year-old T-55s. Neither vehicle had anti-personnel weapons which could depress or elevate sufficiently to engage targets in steep mountain terrain. Third, the tactics used were ineffective for COIN operations, which require infantry-heavy small units trained to act independently, and supported by helicopters. In the summer of 1980, there were still only an estimated 4560 helicopters in the whole theater. In the Paktia offensive an entire motorized rifle battalion was wiped out in a single ambush. The first vehicle in the formation was immobilized by a mine or grenade, and the rest of the convoy halted. Once shooting started, the inexperienced troops began firing blindly, and continued firing from within their vehicles until their ammunition ran out. They were then overwhelmed. The defeat at Paktia, along with many other setbacks that summer, prompted a massive Soviet reorganization: From June 1980 to mid-1981, the 40th Army was restructured from a force of seven [MRDs] to one of three [MRDs], two independent motor rifle regiments and two motor rifle brigades (Urban, 1988: 67). Tanks were sent out of Afghanistan and helicopters were sent in. From about 60 total helicopters in 1980, by mid-1981, Afghanistan had three complete helicopter regiments of 4050 machines each. Finally, the vulnerability of fuel convoys prompted the construction of a fuel pipeline from Termez to Pol-e-Khumri in Baghlan province (north of Kabul along the Salang Highway). This pipeline was complete by August of 1980 (Urban, 1988: 68). Offensive operations continued during the reorganization and, in September, the Soviets launched the first of what would become the focal point of the contest between the Soviet army and mujahideen: the nine Panjsher pacification offensives. The Panjsher valley opened onto a key area of the Salang highway south of the famous tunnel linking north and south Afghanistan through the Hindu Kush mountain range. The lower end of the Panjsher valley thus opened on the main supply route from the USSR to Kabul. Mujahideen under the expert command of Ahmad Shah Massud had been wreaking havoc along this route for months. In September, the Soviets prepared to teach Massud a lesson. It didnt work. Although the Soviet offensive included a heliborne landing by Soviet air assault troops, the results were the same as at Kunar, except that this time the Soviets lost several helicopters.16 A second offensive in Panjsher in September (Panjsher II) took a similar
16
The mujahideen claimed to have shot down ten (Urban, 1988: 70).
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form and had similar results. Meanwhile, the Soviets moved against several mujahideen strongholds in the Logar valley, which opened on the vital stretch of highway from Kabul south to Jalalabad. Here the Soviets deployed heliborne troops in a new cordon and search tactic.17 These new tactics, along with the deployment of much improved APCs, led to the most successful COIN operations of the year (Urban, 1988: 72). Still, the overall results were quite meager, and the mujahideen still controlled most of the countryside. In 1981 the USSR reduced its sweep operations and relied more heavily on air power. Most of the few ground offensives which were launched were of the Kunar and Panjsher pattern: they resulted in sporadic desertions, lost equipment, and minor Soviet casualties, while killing noncombatants and destroying Afghan infrastructure.18 The mujahideen were left largely unscathed. In 1982 the Soviets returned to large-scale pacification sweeps, and achieved moderate success. In April and May they launched Panjsher V, and in September, Panjsher VI. Neither proved decisive, though again, Soviet tactical (especially air-mobile) and technological innovation made them somewhat more effective than previous Panjsher campaigns. Still, Massuds mujahideen were left with their fighting strength intact, while the Soviets were forced to retreat to their garrisons. Urban gives the relative casualty figures for Panjsher VI as 2000 Soviet, 1200 DRA, 180 mujahideen, and 1200 civilians dead or wounded (Urban, 1988: 109). In other areas, however, the Soviets were roundly defeated. In April an independent DRA division attempted to clear the road from Jalalabad to the Pakistan border and was almost annihilated. What marked the Panjsher VI campaign off from previous campaigns however, was the shift in Soviet strategy from direct attacks against
17 The tactic worked this way. A village suspected of containing mujahideen was selected for attack. After a preliminary mortar or air strike, an air assault battalion stop group is airlifted to a position between the village and the most likely route of retreat. Mines are dropped to seal off others as a motorized rifle regiment slowly moves into and through the village, closely supported by combat helicopters (Isby, 1989: 50). 18 Note that the Soviet strategy here is not yet barbarism, although it clearly had this effect. Instead, the Soviets were attempting to delouse Afghanistan (in both ideological and racial terms, the Soviets viewed the mujahideen as subhuman parasites). But delousing requires tweezers and what the Soviets had was a tommy gun. The results of their punitive offensives (a term used by Urban to describe both the motivations and effects of Soviet operations see Urban, 1988: 88) were akin to attempting to delouse their DRA ally with a tommy gun. For the remainder of the conflict the Soviets could never innovate a way to remove the parasite without also killing its host. After 1982 they simply gave up trying.
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mujahideen bases, to the deliberate and systematic destruction of buildings, irrigation systems, crops and orchards (Rais, 1994: 102103), as well as the deliberate targeting of noncombatants to sow terror and cleanse disputed valleys:
Since they could not differentiate the mujahideen from the locals and since they could not engage the mujahideen in battles, the invaders tried to detach them from their own people. Intending to destroy the rebels support among the civilian population, they also turned against the non-combatants, destroying their villages, their crops, and their irrigation systems and even killing them. Indiscriminate destruction of property and human life, civilian as well as military, thus became a feature of Soviet military expeditions. This was particularly so when the mujahideen killed Russian soldiers. In such cases the invaders massacred civilians by the droves. By the force of circumstances the invaders found themselves in a situation in which they killed hundreds and thousands of those for whose protection they had purportedly come. (Kakar, 1995: 129)
If Kakar and Rais are right, the Soviets were pursuing the very textbook definition of a barbarism strategy: a systematic targeting of noncombatants in pursuit of a military or political objective. Urban himself notes that the Panjsher VI operation had a devastating effect on Massuds forces:
For [Massud] this was the more serious long-term cost of Panjsher 6. By October he was forced to appeal for food for his men. Although Massud himself remained alive and much of his army was intact, Panjsher 6 did cause lasting damage to guerrilla infrastructure in the valley, undoing years of work by the mujahideen. Visitors estimated that the population of the valley dwindled from 80,000 prewar to 45,000. (Urban, 1988: 109)
In short, Soviet barbarism appeared to be militarily effective. But was the Soviet strategy a barbarism strategy or was it, as Urban argues, a particularly blunt direct attack strategy which resulted in high collateral damage?
15 million had been reduced by almost 10 percent (Sliwinski, 1989: 39). This means that as a percentage of their population the Afghans suffered more deaths than did the Soviet Union during World War II. Moreover, the war prompted probably the largest mass emigration in history: almost half the civilian population 6,000,000 Afghans fled to Iran and Pakistan during the war (Cordesman and Wagner, 1990: 10). These figures by themselves cannot support the barbarism claim because there could be other causes for the high casualties and refugees (such as the complete lack of organized medical facilities, disease or age, or a naturally fearful population), but they are still suggestive of an unusually high devastation rate among noncombatants. Second, there is widespread agreement on the deliberate destruction of Afghan infrastructure especially buildings, orchards, and irrigation systems which cannot be attributed to collateral damage, because such destruction followed the conclusion of offensive operations:
Soviet/Afghan forces stayed in the [Panjsher] valley until 10 September, when they withdrew to Rokka once more. Before they did so, they set about destroying houses, irrigation systems and burning crops. A major refugee flow was triggered. (Urban, 1988: 109)
It is therefore difficult to consider this collateral damage, since the term is invariably used to refer to damage (a) not intended by the aggressor, and (b) incidental to an attack against a legitimate target (allowing that the definition of legitimate sometimes varies during the course of a conflict). Third, there are questions concerning the use of mines, chemical weapons, and the treatment of prisoners. As noted above, the Soviets deployed a wide variety of mines as part of their cordon-and-search tactic. The most common (and infamous) such mine is a tiny antipersonnel mine designated PFM-1, which Western sources referred to as a butterfly mine. But such mines were not only used to support direct operations, they were also dropped across wide areas along suspected guerrilla supply transit routes, including also fields and pastures. Not surprisingly, the majority of victims were noncombatants. As to the use of chemical weapons, there is strong evidence that the Soviets experimented with a variety of chemical agents in Afghanistan (Isby, 1989: 76; Cordesman and Wagner, 1990: 214218; Kakar, 1995: 215). Yet while the issue was and remains a highly politicized one, and though no hard evidence was obtained to confirm the use of chemical agents (Urban, 1988: 219; Rais, 1994: 106108), the
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balance of evidence suggests they were used as a counterforce weapon against isolated mujahideen strong points.19 Finally, Soviet troops rarely if ever took prisoners (Kakar, 1995: 246). In sum, although many of the atrocities cited by witnesses, journalists, and historians were those normally incidental to war, the weight of evidence suggests that the main causes of Afghanistans high noncombatant casualty and refugee rates were due to the systematic and deliberate targeting of noncombatants and their food, water, and shelter. These attacks were intended to weaken the mujahideen by disrupting their logistical and intelligence base among the broader civilian population. The year 1983 marked a lull in the fighting in Afghanistan. Massud signed an armistice with the Soviets in January, and each side paused to lick its wounds. The Soviets undertook very few sweep operations that year, and instead increased their use of air power (again, the disproportionate impact fell on civilians, not mujahideen). They also rotated, retrained, and resupplied their troops with better weapons; including the lighter AK-74 assault rifle, flak jackets, cluster bombs (RBK-250), a new 30 mm automatic grenade-launcher (AGS-17), an improved infantry fighting vehicle (the BMP-2, whose 30 mm cannon could elevate 50), and RPG-18 rockets. After the Massud cease-fire expired in 1984, the Soviets launched Panjsher VII in April and May. Warned of the attack, Massud launched a pre-emptive strike on support convoys traveling the Salang highway. His mujahideen destroyed many vehicles, but Soviet response time caught them by surprise and many were surrounded and killed by heliborne air assault troops. Massud launched another pre-emptive raid on April 20, but that same day the Soviets began high-altitude carpet bombing of the valley and mountains. Unnerved, Massud ordered his remaining forces to withdraw to side canyons and avoid
19 Kakars account contains a number of similarities to those of Coffey and others concerning the Italian use of mustard gas during its conquest of Ethiopia in 1935 (see Chapter 5): The Soviets used chemical agents in inaccessible areas so that others might not know about it. For this reason, the Soviets and the regime wreaked havoc by helicopter gunships on areas where the presence of foreigners was suspected. Apart from other considerations, the Soviets feared the foreigners would inform the world about their use of chemical agents in Afghanistan. They bombed the few health centers set up in certain areas by French and other physicians. The symbol of the International Committee of the Red Cross was anathema to the Soviets (Kakar, 1995: 246). If true, the Soviet use of chemical weapons would share the same rationale. Their method of covering it up the intimidation of foreign aid workers would also be identical. Only the scale of chemical weapons use would differ.
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contact with the mechanized forces advancing along the valley floor. But this time the Soviet operational plan included coordinated attacks up the canyons. These blocking forces had been specially deployed from opposite sides of these canyons so as to trap the mujahideen between two heavily armed and air-supported forces. This plan, and the new Soviet combined-arms tactics were taking a much heavier toll than usual (Urban, 1988: 147). After the battle, both sides claimed victory, although the Soviets clearly had the better claim: they had captured an important mujahideen leader and established a new series of fortified posts throughout key areas of the valley. They killed many more mujahideen than in any previous punitive offensive, and were later able to claim that civilians in the area were able to resume a normal life (Urban, 1988: 148). On the other hand, the mujahideen could claim victory because (a) they had managed to evacuate noncombatants before the bombing; (b) they had not been destroyed as a fighting force and they had shot down many Soviet helicopters which had been attempting to support side-canyon clearing operations; and (c) the Soviet decision to build fortified posts meant their job would soon be even easier with more attractive targets close to home. This last point proved especially important, because although the Soviets viewed these fortified posts as a clear threat to the mujahideen, they soon proved otherwise.20 Once built, such forts had to be manned and constantly supplied with replacements, food, fuel, and ammunition. This meant a much smaller distance for the guerrillas to travel in order to impose costs on the Soviets by ambushing supply convoys.21
20 Had the Soviets read their history books theyd have understood why. The French tried the same tactic in Algeria in the 1830s against Abd-el-Kader (Asprey, 1994: 97), and later in Vietnam in the 1950s. It was a disaster both times. The British were only able to make it work during the South African War because they could use the entire black African population of South Africa as a strategic resource. There are no other examples of the successful use of a fortified line or blockhouse strategy. 21 In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence describes the advantages of keeping the Turks in Medina, and the terminus of a long and vulnerable line of communications: One afternoon I woke from a hot sleep, running with sweat and pricking with flies, and wondered what on earth was the good of Medina to us? Its harmfulness had been patent when we were at Yenbo and the Turks in it were going to Mecca: but we had changed all that by our march to Wejh. Today we were blockading the railway, and they only defending it. The garrison of Medina, reduced to an inoffensive size, were sitting in trenches destroying their own power of movement by eating the transport they could no longer feed. We had taken away their power to harm us, and yet wanted to take away their town . . . What on earth did we want it for? (Lawrence, 1926: 189). In a sense, what the Soviets had unwittingly done was agree to build small Medinas all along the Panjsher valley floor.
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The personnel inside these posts could not exert anything other than a negative influence on such civilians as remained in the valley:
The militia posts were also unable to influence the districts where they were stationed. Their presence in the midst of the hostile rural people was merely an odious symbol of the regime. When the mujahideen attacked that symbol, the militiamen played havoc with their guns on the villages . . . [Villagers] begged the mujahideen to leave their villages or not to fire at the posts. A rift was thus created between the villagers and the mujahideen. This was a victory for the regime. A network of military posts throughout the country would have enabled the regime to pacify the land, but the government was, of course, unable to create such a system. (Kakar, 1995: 174)
Note that such a network was precisely what the British had been able to create, maintain, and expand in South Africa. But the Soviets simply did not have the mission (or the resources proportional to it) to build such a network. Again, T. E. Lawrences thinking on the subject is illustrative. Here he calculates what it would take for the Turks to control the 100,000 square miles of territory ranging from the Hejaz to Syria:
Then I figured out how many men they would need to sit on all this ground, to save it from our attack-in-depth, sedition putting up her head in every unoccupied one of those hundred thousand square miles. I knew the Turkish Army exactly, and even allowing for their recent extension of faculty by aeroplanes and guns and armoured trains . . . still it seemed they would have need of a fortified post every four square miles, and a post could not be less than twenty men. If so, they would need six hundred thousand men to meet the ill wills of all the Arab peoples, combined with the active hostility of a few zealots. (Lawrence, 1926: 192193)
This then establishes the limited mission of the limited contingent as a major explanatory factor in the strategy the Soviets pursued.22 The territory of Afghanistan is 245,000 square miles; and even acknowledging that the Soviets only needed to control some lesser portion of that, they never had sufficient troops with which to do it (Urban, 1988: 119120). In fact, the Soviets were so thinly spread in Afghanistan that Massud could use threats to these posts to manipulate the pace of operations in other provinces.
Kakar goes so far as to suggest a direct connection between the barbarism strategy and the limited number of Soviet troops assigned to the theater (see below).
22
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Little would change from 1985 until the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and in May, Babrak Karmal was replaced by Mohammed Najibullah, who had been head of the DRA secret police (KhAD) under Karmal. Although Gorbachev clearly did not share the views of his predecessors regarding the costs and benefits of the Afghan adventure, he gave his newly appointed Southern Front commander, Mikhail Zaitsev, one year to engineer a military solution to the Afghan problem. The operations of 1985 accelerated the Soviets barbarism strategy:
Soviet artillery and rocket-launchers supplemented aircraft to achieve de-population through firepower, an approach mandated by the continued weakness of Kabul regime forces . . . The destruction of rural agriculture was the goal of offensives in Laghman and in the Helmand Valley. (Isby, 1989: 34)
But, after three years, the Soviets had clearly begun to hit the flat of the curve in terms of the military effectiveness of their depopulation strategy. Zaitsev intensified the use of air power and especially heliborne-supported operations, but the mujahideen refused to unravel. Why? In 1986, Soviet operations focused more on interdiction of mujahideen supplies. Having destroyed almost entirely the mujahideen supply infrastructure in Afghanistan through the cumulative effects of four years of barbarism, the mujahideen had by this time become almost entirely dependent on logistical support from Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States (Rais, 1994: 112113). This support arrived mainly at Karachi, and flowed from there north through Peshawar and Quetta to mujahideen forces throughout Afghanistan. In 1985 the SA-7 (shoulderfired surface-to-air missiles, or SAMs) used by the mujahideen with moderate effect were supplemented by British-made Blowpipe SAMs. In 1986, the mujahideen began to receive the much more effective US-made Stinger SAMs. This prompted the Soviets to increase their pressure on Pakistan. They did this by means of a limited number of minor raids on mujahideen bases in Pakistan, and by attempting to bribe non-Pushtun tribes along the Pakistani side of the border to interdict mujahideen convoys into Afghanistan. The effort proved an expensive failure. But the biggest problem of 1986 proved to be the Stingers. In a major offensive in the Nangrahar province, three out of four Soviet helicopters in a formation were destroyed in quick succession by US-made
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heat-seeking man-portable Stinger [SAMs] (Isby, 1989: 38). The increase in attrition of Soviet helicopters had a disproportionate impact on its military effectiveness, because for the prior six years the entire force structure and organization of the Soviets in Afghanistan had come to rely almost entirely on air-mobile tactics and weapons.23 In 1987 things only got worse:
[The Stinger] was the most effective [weapon] which the mujahideen received . . . It became a turning point of the campaign. From then on Stingers partly neutralized Soviet aerial offensives. According to the estimates of Pakistans Intelligence Service (ISI), During the summer of 1987 the mujahideen hit an average of 1.5 aircraft of varied description every day. By the end of 1987 the military situation had deteriorated to the extent that even Najibullah admitted that 80 percent of the countryside and 40 percent of towns were outside the control of his government. (Kakar, 1995: 260)
Zaitsev, in other words, had inherited a heliborne-dependent force in 1985, and the arrival of Stingers in quantity in 1986 and especially 1987 made it difficult for him given the constraint in overall forces and one-year time deadline to engineer a military victory using that now highly specialized force. Gorbachev called a halt, and the Soviets began the sequential withdrawal of their forces, which ended as the last Soviet unit crossed the Oxus River into the USSR on February 15, 1989.
23 This is not the same thing as saying that technology won the war for the mujahideen. What it did do was make it impossible for Zaitsev to meet his one-year deadline. Had he been given more time, its possible the Soviets could have developed and deployed effective countermeasures without escalating.
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The regime collapsed within three years of the Soviet departure, so by Urbans criteria the Soviet intervention may be judged either a success, or a humiliation somewhat less severe than the scale of Vietnam. In March of 1989, the mujahideen began a series of offensives between the Pakistani border and Jalalabad, which came under siege. In April, the mujahideen began to form regular army units in preparation for drives on Kabul. They spent most of 1990 consolidating and reorganizing. In March of 1991 they captured Khost, taking 2200 prisoners. In July, the Wakhan corridor fell, opening the road transport of supplies from Pakistan to Badakhshan. In September, the United States agreed to halt all military aid by the end of the year and, in November, the Soviets begin withdrawing 300 SCUD missile operators from Afghanistan. On December 8, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and Soviet assistance to the Najibullah regime terminated. In April of 1992, Najibullah appealed to the United States for help in stopping the spread of fundamentalist Islam in Central Asia, and on April 12 the Salang highway fell to the mujahideen. Two days later, Massud and his allies captured the airbase at Bagram. On April 18, Herat, Kunduz, and Shindand air base fell. Two days later, Najibullah was stopped at Kabul airport as he attempted to board a plane to join his family in Delhi. He took refuge in the UN compound.24 The mujahideen continued to close in on Kabul, which they occupied on April 27, 1992, the 14th anniversary of the coup which had toppled Daud. The costs to each side in terms of casualties are not entirely clear. Cordesman and Wagner estimate (Cordesman and Wagner, 1990: 10; see also Isby, 1988: 62) that the Soviets lost no more that 15,000 men killed and about three times that many wounded.25 DRA losses are cited as 34,00042,000 killed or wounded, and 52,00060,000 desertions. The mujahideen lost about 140,000200,000 killed or wounded. Fully half the civilian population of Afghanistan was either killed or made refugees (about 1,500,000 and 6,000,000 respectively). The Soviets did not achieve their political objectives in Afghanistan. They were not able to secure the DRA from attacks even in Kabul; and the DRA itself could never gain enough legitimacy among the Afghan people to mount a political challenge to the authority of the
24 Najibullah remained at the UN compound until the Taliban a group of conservative Sunni Islamists trained and supplied by Pakistan captured Kabul in September of 1996, when he was taken from the compound and hanged. 25 Borovik reports that this is a gross underestimate: according to his research, there were already 20,000 Soviet casualties by 1981 alone (Borovik, 1990: 281).
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mujahideen. Even more importantly, within a year, the Taliban a group of Islamic extremists and the very type of regime which the Soviets most feared would come to power in Afghanistan became the de facto government of all but a tiny fraction of territory held by the Northern Alliance.
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heliborne-assisted cordon-and-search tactics, new equipment, and reorganization, training and supply of DRA units are all evidence of this. Their decision to stay implies that Soviet interests in Afghanistan were higher than those suggested by the interest asymmetry argument, yet their refusal to escalate suggests that their interests in Afghanistan were in fact limited a term that applies equally to their forces and their objectives in Afghanistan. Which is it? There is no definitive way to answer this question, but the best evidence supports the argument that whatever their initial objectives the fact of the war and mujahideen resistance increased the importance of the outcome for the Soviets far beyond that predicted by the interest asymmetry argument. The Soviets did not leave until after they had killed or displaced half of Afghanistans civilian population, and gained the promise of a dramatic reduction of foreign support for the mujahideen. Meanwhile, they continued to pour billions of rubles in development and military aid into Afghanistan, and Najibullahs regime was able to survive until the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. Put more bluntly, the real reason the Soviets did not escalate is because they believed they had achieved their limited objectives in Afghanistan. The mujahideen fought as though their very survival was at stake, and the extreme brutality of Soviet and DRA operations in Afghanistan make it clear that they were correct. Once the Soviets withdrew, however, the mujahideen began to fight among themselves. This only accelerated once the government which had been imposed on the Afghan people by the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992.
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Its press was tightly controlled, its soldiers letters were censored, and its people had no say in its foreign policy.28 Its initial conventional attack strategy in Afghanistan was based on its mission, its force structure, and its assumptions about the quantity and quality of the resistance it expected to encounter. The third-echelon mechanized forces which swept into Afghanistan on December 27, 1979 did not expect resistance, and they encountered very little until after they had settled into garrison. Their initial punitive offensives into major Afghan valley systems were little more than a show of force intended to cow the backward reactionary peasants who opposed the efforts of the PDPA to advance the standard of socialism. But the Afghans were not cowed, they were outraged. The conventional attack strategy initially thought sufficient to intimidate the Afghans soon changed to a COIN campaign which is best understood in Soviet historical context:
In the case of Afghanistan, one may not rule out a centrally-organized strategy aimed at what Louis Dupree described as migratory genocide. The transfer of population was a part of the Soviet counterinsurgency doctrine which had been practiced before in its wars in Central Asia. An effective counter-insurgency war could not be fought against guerrillas swimming in a sea of a supportive population. The Kabul regime, having failed to win the hearts and minds of the Afghans, collaborated with the Soviet forces in depopulating areas of tough resistance. (Rais, 1994: 102103)
This is another way of saying that barbarism is a traditional COIN strategy in Soviet military doctrine. Since the Soviet Unions regime type did not change from 1917 until its collapse in 1991, it is difficult to evaluate the impact of regime type on the decision to switch to a barbarism strategy in the Soviet case. Difficult, but not impossible; there are two ways to understand the relationship of regime type to strategy in the Afghan Civil War. First, the interstate dimension was clearly a concern even for Brezhnev. Satellite and signals intelligence data would quickly make both the build-up and deployment of troops in Afghanistan evident to the world. But Brezhnev calculated that just as it had in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, international public opinion would soon blow over:
28 Soldiers letters were mostly self-censored: soldiers knew their families would be worried, and most often wrote encouraging letters home so as not to worry their parents (Tamarov, 1992).
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Brezhnev was wrong, and he left his successors to pay the price. Admittedly, this price was not prohibitive at first. The United States led a boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, and the Carter administration embargoed wheat to the USSR. But with the accession to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, the closest thing to a regime change in the USSR since Khrushchevs denunciation of Stalin soon made the Afghan adventure prohibitively expensive. True, the Soviet people still did not have a direct say in foreign affairs, and they were never told the real casualty figures in Afghanistan, but for a new leadership attempting to bring the Soviet Union into the twenty-first century intact, Afghanistan had become an albatross:
The war in Afghanistan . . . did not fit into Gorbachevs overall policy of glasnost and perestroika. He felt that it had turned into a debacle for the Soviet Union and was too closely associated with the policies of the Brezhnev era and the renewed Cold War. Glasnost meant that it was no longer possible to keep the price of the war a secret . . . (Magnus and Naby, 1998: 132)
Gorbachev was attempting to harmonize what his predecessors had always considered to be mutually exclusive aims: nationalism, liberalism, and socialism. Like Afghanistans Mahmud Beg Tarzi, Gorbachev had become his own countrys greatest modern liberal thinker. Unlike Tarzi, however, Gorbachev was in charge. In sum, the long history of authoritarian regime-types in the Soviet Union had made it possible to prosecute a barbarism strategy without sustaining domestic political costs.29 Barbarism had become its
29 Interstate military intervention such as that of NATO in Kosovo in 1999 was then, as now, out of the question: Russia is still a big country and one still armed with thermonuclear missiles besides.
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standard COIN strategy. But communications and military intelligence technology and the accession to power of a reform-minded general secretary changed this. The Soviet barbarism strategy began to impose international political costs almost from its outset. Domestic costs were experienced within the USSR because many Soviet boys returned home in zinc coffins, while many others returned shattered by mines or by the experience of combat. These costs were not experienced by the Soviet people as a whole until after 1986, when glasnost made it possible to share more stories about the Afghan campaign and its costs.30 As to regime type and political vulnerability, the Soviet regime was at no time vulnerable to the sorts of political costs anticipated by the interest asymmetry argument. If the trade-offs mechanism anticipated by Macks argument were operating, wed expect to see major battlefield defeats result in either pressure to withdraw or escalation. Yet Soviet commitment in terms of men and materiel remained constant over time. Moreover, even glasnost and perestroika combined did not create conditions which made possible a public outcry on the war at least not one of a scale sufficient to force the regime to reconsider its foreign policy.
Arms diffusion
In this case the arms diffusion argument gets its strongest support. The mujahideen gained increasing advantages from arms they received through Iran and Pakistan, and these increased the costs of conquest and occupation to the Soviet Union and its DRA client. What is most important to recognize, however, is that in no theater of war has the crucial relationship between technology, tactics, climate, and terrain been made clearer than in Afghanistan. Soviet motorized infantry and armored columns were very often disabled with technology as simple as pushing boulders onto roads
30 In fairness, however, the immense pride (in many cases deserved) and propaganda surrounding the Soviet victory in World War II (what the Soviets called The Great Patriotic War), and the officially released casualty figures from the war, made it difficult for many average Soviet citizens to appreciate the sacrifices of their Afghan veterans. Vladislav Tamarov, a Russian survivor of the Afghan war, notes that In the United States there are 186 psychological rehabilitation centers open to help Vietnam veterans. But where are we in the Soviet Union to go for help? We dont even have one such center. And so we look for that kind of help from people. That is when we run up against misunderstandings. From these misunderstandings comes the high divorce rate among Afghan vets, from these misunderstandings comes the turning inward, into oneself (Tamarov, 1992: 7).
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and then tossing Molotov cocktails onto the engine compartments of immobilized vehicles. Then simple machine-gun fire a technology dating in its most serious use from World War I would finish the job of the convoys complete destruction. Essentially, the mujahideen used simple technology to exploit weaknesses in Soviet tactics and strategy. This was especially the case after 1986, when the arrival of US-made Stinger SAMs dramatically shifted the balance of power in Afghanistan. As observed above, it was not so much the Stingers themselves that mattered, but rather the context: the Soviets had used heliborne infantry and helicopter gunships to exploit a weakness in mujahideen tactics, only to find the tables turned once their helicopters fell prey to the Stingers. There is no question that had the USSR been ruled by a Stalin or even a Brezhnev, the Soviets in Afghanistan would have innovated around this weakness. But Gorbachev called a halt to the war, wisely reckoning that to win it would gain the USSR little, and might require the invasion of Pakistan.
Strategic interaction
The Afghan Civil War had two strategic interactions, and during the first the Soviet pursued a particularly blunt conventional attack strategy against a mujahideen GWS. Neither side had adequate leadership, training, or equipment, but Soviet forces were so thoroughly unsuited to a COIN mission that their failures must be attributed almost entirely to strategic interaction. They swung a blunt club, and the mujahideen ducked and stabbed them in the foot with a sharp stick. The strategic interaction was opposite-approach and the Soviets were forced to reorganize and switch strategies. But the second interaction of the war turned far more deadly for the mujahideen. The Soviets consciously and deliberately targeted noncombatants and their support infrastructure as a COIN strategy. According to the strategic interaction thesis, barbarism should have been the ideal counter-GWS strategy, quickly destroying the mujahideen as a fighting force. It did not do this, but the reason it did not does not refute the strategic interaction thesis. Instead, it highlights a specific condition under which the dynamic does not apply. The very real destruction of Afghan infrastructure and the mass killing and forced emigration of peasants did hurt the mujahideen, but most, like Massuds Panjsher fighters, managed to reorganize themselves and their resources to compensate. After 1983 they began to rely more for intelligence on sympathizers within the DRA, and more on
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logistical support from foreign sympathizers.31 They were still able to mount offensive operations, and Massud was able to do so farther and farther from his home bases of support (a sign that they mattered less as the war dragged on). But this made them proportionately more dependent on outside support. The degree of mujahideen dependence on outside support is revealed in the sharp decline of their fighting capacity after the Soviet evacuation in 1989 (Cordesman and Wagner, 1990: 97; Magnus and Naby, 1998: 134, 159): Not only had they fallen increasingly to fighting among themselves, but the flow of arms quickly dried up. In sum, the Afghan Civil War makes it clear that the more independent guerrillas are of their popular support base due to outside support, the more insulated they will be from the devastating effects of barbarism, assuming they are able to gain good intelligence. However, outside aid poses its own risks. First, it may provoke guerrillas to attempt to defeat the strong actor in decisive engagements (such as the Tet Offensive of 1968, which proved a military disaster). Second, if the contest is fought on nationalistic terms, as it was in Afghanistan, foreign assistance especially military advisors can be used to paint its recipients as the lackeys of the foreign powers supplying the arms and other support. The Karmal (and later Najibullah) regimes attempted and failed to tar the Islamic mujahideen with the foreign lackey brush. They failed because the United States did not send military advisors to Afghanistan in quantity. But the mujahideen had no difficulty convincing Afghan and international audiences alike that the PDPA regime was the mere puppet of Soviet interests. Even so, the operational impact of the Soviet barbarism strategy should not be underestimated. These depredations hurt the mujahideen, and while the most successful commanders adapted themselves to the changes, others could not, and their forces were either killed, captured, or dispersed.
Conclusion
The Afghan Civil War was an asymmetric conflict between the DRA and its Soviet masters (strong actor), and the Afghan mujahideen (weak actor). The Soviets had a number of interests in Afghanistan, and the two most important were negative: (1) defending a friendly Marxist regime,
They were also able to rely on the military intelligence of the ISI, Pakistans highlyrated intelligence service.
31
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and (2) thereby preventing the accession of a radical Islamic republic on its southern border. To these seemingly limited objectives it was willing to commit a force of four MRDs, one-and-a-half Air Assault divisions, and lavish economic aid. It did not act as if its survival was at stake, but neither can its level of interest in Afghanistan be explained by its relative power, as implied by the interest asymmetry argument. Mujahideen interests were in ejecting the Soviets from Afghanistan, where the PDPA regime which controlled Kabul was not distinguished from the Soviets. To this end they fought as if their survival was at stake. In sum, hypothesis 8 relative material power explains relative interests in the outcome of an asymmetric conflict receives moderate support. It cannot be rejected, but neither can it be accepted as an explanation of Soviet interests. Did relative power and regime type explain political vulnerability? According to the interest asymmetry thesis, a major military setback should have caused the Soviets to reevaluate their occupation regardless of their regime type. This didnt happen. Every year brought a mix of successes and failures, with the successes short lived and the failures at times catastrophic. Yet there is no evidence that the failures ever provoked the sort of trade-offs anticipated by the interest asymmetry argument. Even commanding generals were not cashiered after such failures. Instead of withdrawing, the Soviets attempted gamely to learn from their failures and innovate around them. They often succeeded, but never in a way which could compensate for their relatively low numbers. In short, relative power asymmetry did not cause political vulnerability. Instead, the Soviet Unions authoritarian regime type insulated it from such vulnerabilities. Regime type also made it possible for the Soviets to avoid the three most common defects of a barbarism strategy. Authoritarian regimes are first of all free to construct the enemy as they see fit. Second, and more importantly, the lack of public access to accurate information about the costs of a conflict short-circuits domestic unrest and, hence, political vulnerability. Third and finally, authoritarian regimes do not by definition contain a mechanism by which popular will can be translated into foreign policy. These are, of course, ideal-type descriptions but, in the Soviet case during the Afghan Civil War, this is the way things worked. Thus, the decision to switch from a direct attack to a barbarism strategy was a doctrinaire response to a recognition that the Soviet mission had changed to COIN.
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The mujahideen did not have a regime type, and cannot be considered as even a remotely unified actor. On the contrary, some commentators argue that this lack of unity actually proved to be an asset, because it gave the Soviets no way to decapitate resistance leadership:
Among significant features of Pushtun life are the practice of Islam, mainly in its Sunni aspect among nearly all Pushtuns, the nonhierarchical structure of tribal groups, and the Pushtun code known as the Pushtunwali. All three features have come to contribute significantly to the persistence of the Afghan resistance to the Soviet army at first, and then to the stubborn inability of the Pushtuns either to agree among themselves on how a new government should be formed or to work with like-minded ideological groups to end the civil war. (Magnus and Naby, 1998: 14)
In the context of GWS, Urban is simply wrong. The mujahideen could win by simply not losing, and having no hierarchical structure only made it more difficult for the Soviets to defeat them.32 Arms diffusion also receives some support in this case. But a close examination of how arms technology interacted with tactics and strategy makes it clear that the logic of the arms diffusion argument, hypothesis 6 (the better armed a weak actor is, the more likely it is that a strong actor will lose an asymmetric conflict), is only weakly supported here. Strategic interaction explains why the Soviets lost the first interaction of the war, but it doesnt explain the second. From 1980 to 1982, the Soviet pursued a conventional attack strategy against a mujahideen GWS (opposite-approach). It failed on every count. Yet after the switch to a barbarism strategy in 1983 (same-approach), the USSR did not win, and in 1989 it withdrew from Afghanistan completely. Why? Barbarism should have been an ideal COIN strategy because the Soviets were not vulnerable to domestic or interstate political costs
32 Contrast this with the Algerian resistance against France from 1958 to 1962. The FLN did have a hierarchical structure and the French were able to exploit this by means of, among other things, torture.
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associated with its prosecution.33 Moreover, it should have devastated the intelligence and logistical capacity of the mujahideen. Instead, it only provided the mujahideen with defectors and recruits. Barbarism wasnt decisive in Afghanistan because the mujahideen were able to rely on intelligence and logistical support from foreign powers from the sanctuary of Pakistan and Iran. The mujahideen had in fact become so dependent on this aid that when it ceased in 1989 and 1990 it shattered their ability to topple the illegitimate government of Najibullah. Not until the logistical supply tap was turned back on this time for the Taliban did that change. Afghanistan therefore highlights one condition under which barbarism is less effective as a COIN strategy: when the guerrillas have access to a significant source of intelligence and logistical support (and sanctuary) beyond the reach of the strong actor, and beyond its capacity to interdict.34 In sum, strategic interaction best explains the outcome of Soviet intervention in the Afghan Civil War. Once it became clear that the fight in Afghanistan was a COIN struggle, the Soviets had three strategic choices. First, continue with the present strategy, perhaps sending more troops and equipment to the theater. Second, withdraw in some way which could save face yet end the war. Third, switch to a barbarism strategy. The Soviets chose the third option and their strategy succeeded in hurting the mujahideen and killing or making refugees of nearly half of Afghanistans pre-war civilian population. The mujahideen faced an even starker choice after the Soviets switched strategies: either give up or continue with a strategy which would force them to rely more and more on outside powers for support.
33 This contrasts with the Italian case in Chapter 5, because Italy was a minor power and even the slightest real sanction by Britain (such as closing the Suez Canal to Italian transport) or France would have been sufficient to force Italy to withdraw. 34 The same proved true of US experience in Vietnam, with Laos and Cambodia playing unwilling host to DRV supply transits. Unlike the USSR, the United States was initially less circumspect about violating the neutrality of Laos and Cambodia in its efforts to interdict supplies flowing from the DRV to the VC in the South. But then neither Laos nor Cambodia were nuclear powers or strong allies of the United States, whereas from 1979 to 1989 Pakistan was both. The KLA in Kosovo in 1999 also serves as an example of this problem. Serb barbarism rapidly depopulated Kosovo of ethnic Albanians, and eviscerated what had been a relatively incompetent (though impassioned) KLA resistance. But, unless willing to invade Albania, the Serbs could never eradicate the KLA, and in the event Serb barbarism only served to prompt NATO intervention and keep NATO united in its efforts to punish Milosevic. On the relationship between Serb and Serb-supported barbarism in Kosovo and NATO intervention, see, e.g., Daalder and OHanlon (2000).
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In the end, no one really won the war. The Soviets left in 1989 and the DRA fell in 1992. The mujahideen were almost entirely overcome by the Taliban a group of extremely conservative Islamists supported by both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan itself has been devastated on a scale not witnessed since the destruction of Germany and the Soviet Union in World War II.
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Conclusion
The vast majority of wars do not come into the heavyweight range, but are distinguished more by their duration and bitterness than their weaponry. In a way they become more amenable to Western intervention when they do develop into straightforward clashes between regular forces. Civil wars, involving irregular fighters and skirmishes in the streets, with political confusion rife and good intelligence at a premium, present an appalling prospect to outsiders. Decisive victories are few and far between. Even success can mean a long-term commitment of troops to sustain an uneasy peace. Freedman
This book began with a puzzle. How do the weak win wars? Through a combination of statistical tests and the tracing of causal logic through historical case studies, I have shown that weak actors in this case mainly states win wars against much stronger adversaries when they are able to adopt and maintain an ideal counterstrategy. Strategy, in other words, can multiply or divide applied power. Strong actors come to a fight with a complex combination of interests, forces, doctrine, military technology, and political objectives, but because armed forces are thought to be versatile in their employment, and because strong actors are only relatively, not absolutely, strong, strong actors do have choices in the strategies they use. Similarly, weak actors often face constraints in their choice of strategies, but strategy is never endogenous.
Conclusion
you.1 The weaker you are, the more likely I am to provoke you, knowing you wouldnt dare object. More importantly, the greater the disparity in power, the more quickly we expect the strong to subdue the weak if it comes to blows. In this book I examined three arguments that had the potential to explain why strong actors lose to weak actors; using the puzzle of increasing strong actor failures over time as a kind of test of the arguments soundness and generality. The first and strongest of these alternative explanations was Andrew Macks interest asymmetry thesis, but natureof-actor (including Meroms democratic social squeamishness argument), and arms diffusion arguments were also introduced and tested.
1 It is not only the force applied that causes this effect, it is more importantly the force available to be applied that matters most. This is why it makes sense to argue that the dynamics of asymmetric conflict apply even though so-called strong actors are often not overwhelmingly strong within a given conflict theater. Strong actors have choices about their other commitments and the relative priorities of their interests. Weak actors understand this, and can never rely on the existence of other commitments as a guarantee against future strong-actor escalation. On this point see Schelling (1966: 26).
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escalate the level of violence and brutality necessary in order to win (Merom, 2003: 15). A third argument was that the diffusion of relatively advanced small arms and other military technology to the developing world in and of itself made conquest and occupation of weak actors more difficult; essentially, because like strategy, technology can also be a force multiplier, weak actors were not really as weak as anticipated.
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Conclusion
Strategy
For purposes of this analysis I reduced a wide array of specific attacker and defender strategies to four: two for attackers and two for defenders. Attacker (strong actor) strategies are conventional attack and barbarism. Defender (weak actor) strategies are conventional defense and GWS.3 I then simplified each actors range of strategic options further into two analytically distinct strategic approaches: direct and indirect. Direct approaches conventional attack and defense target an adversarys armed forces with the aim of destroying or capturing that adversarys capacity to fight. Indirect approaches barbarism and GWS aim at destroying an adversarys will to fight. These simplifications and they are that highlight what is most important about the role of strategy in mediating between raw power resources and asymmetric conflict outcomes: strategic interaction.
Strategic interaction
Once a strategy is chosen, is it the best strategy under the circumstances? In this context circumstances means given the other actors strategy. Each strategy has an ideal counterstrategy. Actors can dramatically increase the effectiveness of their own strategy (essentially multiplying their forces) by guessing correctly about their adversarys strategy and then selecting and executing that ideal counterstrategy.4 Specifically, similar approaches (indirectindirect, or directdirect) imply defeat for the weak actor and victory for the strong. These wars will be over quickly, making political vulnerability (whether caused
3 These strategies are detailed in Chapter 2 . They are ideal-type constructions and by no means exhaustive representatives of their approach categories (e.g., conciliation is another indirect-approach strategy available to strong actors). Each of these four strategies (save perhaps barbarism) is represented by an extensive literature which need not be reviewed here. I have instead simplified and fixed the meanings of the most relevant strategic options, which actors may pursue independently, sequentially, or simultaneously. 4 This said, executing an ideal strategy may be difficult for at least two reasons. First, a given actors forces may have been trained, armed, and prepared for a different strategy against a different enemy. Switching strategies especially in the middle of a fight can therefore be risky. All other things being equal, it will be easier to switch to a different strategy in the same approach (say, from terrorism to nonviolent resistance or GWS) than to a different strategy in an opposite approach (say, from conventional defense to GWS). Second, some of the strategies themselves cannot be quickly implemented; when guerrilla warfare as a tactic is not supported by a previous period of social organization it tends to fail. This was the experience of, e.g., Che Guevara in Bolivia.
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by asymmetric interests, as argued by Mack, or by regime type, as argued by Merom) irrelevant. By contrast, opposite approaches (directindirect, indirectdirect) favor weak actors at the expense of strong actors. They will drag on, forcing strong actors especially democratic strong actors to make tough and costly decisions in order to continue with any prospect of success.
My argument
Relative power, regime type, and political vulnerability are necessary but not sufficient to explain variation in asymmetric conflict outcomes. The strategies actors use are important (as are the constraints actors face when evaluating competing offensive and defensive strategies), but what is more important is how opposing strategies interact. I hypothesized that same-approach strategic interactions would favor attackers in proportion to their advantage in material resources. Oppositeapproach strategic interactions would favor defenders, regardless of the attackers material preponderance. Assuming the strong actor is in each case the attacker and the weak actor the defender, the expected relationship of strategic interaction to conflict outcomes can be seen in Figure 3 in Chapter 2. In sameapproach interactions the strong actor wins because there is nothing to deflect or mediate the use of its material advantages in resources, including soldiers and wealth. In opposite-approach interactions, the strong actors resources are deflected (weak actors attempt to avoid open confrontation contact with a strong actors armed forces) or directed at values which dont necessarily affect the capacity of the weak adversary to continue to impose costs on the strong actor (e.g., capturing cities and towns).
Statistical evidence
The core claim of strategic interaction theory hypothesis 5: strong actors are more likely to win same-approach interactions and lose opposite approach interactions received strong statistical support. For this relationship see Figure 4 in Chapter 2: Clearly, weak actors do better when strategies are opposite than when they are similar. A strong actor using a direct approach (say, a blitzkrieg or standard offensive campaign employing infantry, artillery, armor, and motorized infantry) is likely to lose against a weak actor employing a GWS, but likely to win quickly against a weak actor employing a standard defense (such as
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Conclusion
Taliban forces in Afghanistan in 2001). Weak actors were nearly three times as likely to win opposite-approach interactions (63.6 percent) as same-approach interactions (23.2 percent). Three other important propositions were tested. First, I tested whether and to what degree external noncombat support for weak actors might make their victory more or less likely. Although a lack of available data made it impossible to evaluate the positive value of this relationship, I was able to determine that even when weak actors received no external support, they were still more than twice as likely to win when strategies were opposite than when they were similar. Second, I argued that the main reason oppositeapproach interactions favored weak actors is because time is an important cost for strong actors,5 and opposite-approach interactions take longer to resolve themselves. A statistical review of all asymmetric conflicts since 1816 strongly confirmed this proposition: oppositeapproach interactions take longer than same-approach interactions. Finally, I explained the trend toward increasing strong actor failures over time by recourse to a state socialization argument: actors whether states, boxers, terrorists, or firms imitate the successful practices of other actors.6 At a minimum then, the number of opposite-approach asymmetric conflicts should increase over time in proportion to the number of wars in which the weak won. They do. Thus, this books statistical tests of the strategic interaction thesis strongly support its logic.
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In terms of regime type and vulnerability, Russia simply was not politically vulnerable. The lack of a serious security threat from the Caucasus should have made even authoritarian Russia sensitive to resource trade-offs, and politically vulnerable in this sense. Yet during the Murid War, Russia faced two potentially serious interstate conflicts, and neither caused political vulnerability. Regime type did affect the strategies employed by each side. Russian strategy changed to suit each new tsars preferences: sometimes scrupulously avoiding barbarism, for example, and other times targeting noncombatants with vigor. Shamil was just as autocratic about strategy. He was able to go against his own soldiers training and inclinations in ordering a switch to a conventional offensive in Kabardia. The arms diffusion argument was not supported in the Murid War. The Murids did not receive weapons or ammunition from abroad, and the effectiveness of each sides arms technology depended on the system of its use, which in turn depended on variations in terrain and climate. Heavy artillery proved vital to the Russian effort to conquer the Murids, but was effective only under circumstances where Russian forces were willing to ignore the staggering toll in casualties required to maneuver the guns into position. The brief capture of artillery by the Murids proved to be contrary to expectation a military disaster. In terms of strategy, the war played itself out in three strategic interactions. The Russians won the first interaction: barbarism against a Murid GWS (same-approach).7 They lost the second interaction: a Russian conventional attack strategy against a Murid GWS (oppositeapproach). The final interaction was again same-approach: a Russian conciliation strategy opposed by a Murid GWS. The Russians won, and Shamil went into exile. The outcome of the Murid War was determined by Russias extreme almost historically unique cost insensitivity.8 This insensitivity was
7 Since their aim was conquest and subjugation, rather than annihilation, the victory would prove elusive. In theory, Russias willingness and ability to resort to barbarism should have deterred subsequent Murid resistance. It did not. Instead, it only stimulated and intensified resistance. If democracies lose small wars because they cant escalate to the level of brutality necessary to win, then Meroms thesis will have a tough time explaining why authoritarian regimes dont win small wars more often than they do. 8 Recall, however, that Alexander did not approve of barbarism as a Russian military strategy, however effective. This is worrisome for Meroms model, which holds that in general authoritarian regimes will be able to win small wars because they will escalate the level of violence to barbarism. The Murid War shows that even in an autocratic regime, normative difference between state and society can exist and affect strategy (and, by extension, costs and outcomes).
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Conclusion
due to its regime type and to the fact that Russias public was almost entirely illiterate. But the costs half a million casualties and twentynine years are best explained by the strategic interaction thesis.
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over by Christmas or soon after as widely anticipated by British elites and the British public neither concern would have mattered. It therefore makes sense to ask: what caused the delay in a war in which Great Britain out-powered the Boer by a ratio of more than 5:1? The delay was caused in part by the fact that the Boer possessed modern rifles, and were skilled in their use. The British had never fought a major engagement against an enemy so equipped, and it took time for them to adapt, tactically, to the new situation. But the real reason the war was not over by Christmas was because (1) the British dramatically underestimated the Boer; (2) the Boer were much more mobile; and (3) the Boer had better intelligence. But the battles fought through 1900 made it clear that not even the possession of superb infantry rifles, superior artillery, and highly mobile forces could compensate for the overwhelming number of Britains forces in South Africa. British forces simply steamrolled the Boer, moving in an almost straight line from Cape Colony to Pretoria. The arms diffusion argument therefore counts as a partial explanation of the South African Wars outcome. The real cause of the delay was a shift to a GWS by the Boer in March of 1900. The British won the first interaction of the war (same-approach) after overcoming their initial shock and after deploying sufficient troops in theater. By February of 1900 the conventional war was over and the Boer had lost. But after the fall of Bloemfontein the Boer leadership chose to switch to a GWS. Strategic interaction is the best explanation of the South African Wars outcome. Once it became clear that the capture of the Boer capitals would not force the Boer to surrender, Britain had three strategic options. First, continue with the present strategy, perhaps sending more troops, equipment, and horses to the theater. Second, offer the Boers terms: something which could save face yet end the war. Third, switch to a barbarism strategy: take the gloves off and go after Boer noncombatants, either by holding them hostage or by killing them outright in reprisal for continued resistance. The British chose the third option, and the war ended soon after.
Kitchener) are misleading in this regard. He suggests that Kitcheners barbarism was restrained by Whitehall, but no one taking the history of the war seriously could support such a claim, except perhaps the weakest form of argument that, barbaric as Kitcheners farm burnings and concentration policies were, they could have been worse (see Merom, 2003, pp. 6162).
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of the Italian advance, combined with the surprisingly (to the Italians) effective Ethiopian counterattacks, led to a shift in Italian strategy. Italy supplemented a conventional attack strategy with a super-weapon13 against an Ethiopian conventional defense. Ethiopias organized resistance collapsed within a few months. But Italian barbarism sparked renewed resistance. The Italians would have won this third interaction of the conflict (same-approach: barbarism vs. GWS), but before it could register a military impact Mussolini cancelled it. The fourth interaction of the war reverted to a conventional attack against any organized resistance (opposite-approach). Only where Ethiopian forces sought to engage the Italians directly, as at Gojjam, did the Italians win. In the remainder of the country, the Italian conventional attacks were countered by a GWS, and the Italians lost. The costs to the Italians of such operations were staggering, and the combination of those costs and the perceived need to become security self-sufficient in the event of war in Europe, led to yet another shift in Italian strategy. This fifth interaction of the war introduced a conciliation strategy for Italy, opposed by an Ethiopian GWS (same-approach). Conciliation proved the most effective of all the strategies the Italians had attempted since marching into Addis Ababa in May of 1936. Only one rebel leader held out, and it seemed likely that but for the outbreak of World War II, even Abebe Aregai would have been forced to flee Ethiopia or submit. The Italians would have almost certainly won the war. But World War II changed all of this. The contest in Ethiopia ceased to be between occupying Italians and an Ethiopian resistance, and shifted to become a fight between the British and Italians fought across Ethiopia, Sudan, British Somaliland, and Kenya (it also ceased to be an asymmetric conflict as defined here). Within a few months, British forces invading from the south soundly defeated the Italians and entered Addis Ababa.
Leadership
In the Italo-Ethiopian War, the problem of poor Italian leadership is an important explanation of the wars outcome. In the first interaction Italian timidity threatened the entire invasion, which for political and
13 Again, the effectiveness of a given military technology can vary a great deal depending on context. In Europe during World War I, the use of chemical weapons had not given either side a strategic advantage. In Ethiopia, however, the use of such weapons could be (and was) decisive during the conventional phase of the war.
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ideological reasons demanded a swift and decisive victory. It was this timidity that allowed the Ethiopians to seize the initiative, and it was further incompetence that resulted in a series of Italian defeats which threatened to throw them back into Eritrea. Poor Italian leadership thus became the proximate cause of Italys resort to mustard gas attacks. In sum, the outcome of the Italo-Ethiopian War is best explained by strategic interaction and poor Italian military leadership. Once it became clear that the capture of Addis Ababa would not force the Ethiopians to surrender, the Italians had three strategic choices. First, continue with the present strategy, perhaps sending more troops and equipment to the theater. Second, offer the Ethiopians terms: something which could save face yet end the war. Third, switch to a barbarism strategy: take the gloves off and go after Ethiopian rebels and their families. The AOI generally chose the third option, though it shifted strategies and innovated a number of times, slowly and painstakingly improving its advantage until World War II came to Africa and swept them away. Italy would have won the war in Ethiopia had World War II not intervened. But after a few years, at most, Italy would have lost Ethiopia even without the intervention of the British in North Africa because its ideal COIN strategy conciliation was one it was economically incapable of sustaining. Italys earlier resort to barbarism both the use of mustard gas and mass murder had raised the costs of a policy of bribery beyond what it could afford to pay.
after 1945. The GVN began with a credible nationalist, but Diem the very definition of an autocrat could not see an interest in Vietnam separate from his own. He restructured the GVN and its military to serve one purpose at the expense of all others: to keep him in power. Diems assassination and the later introduction of US combat troops foreclosed any possibility of the GVN winning the fight for nationalist legitimacy. This put the democratic United States vulnerable due to its regime type in the position of having to support an illegitimate (and corrupt) GVN. Arms diffusion did play a role in Vietnam, but the increase in costs to the United States and GVN of Soviet and Chinese (not to mention inadvertent GVN) support were not what drove the United States out of Vietnam. Most US casualties during the war were not caused by direct enemy action, either in terms of air defense or guerrilla attacks. Most were inflicted by relatively primitive explosive devices and booby traps some improvised from common materials. Strategic interaction best explains the costs of the conflict for each side, especially in terms of time. The US military has rarely won the first battles of any war in which it participated. Instead, its strengths have always lain in its ability to learn quickly and adapt to a wide variety of combat conditions. Vietnam proved a case in point. The US military began by underestimating its adversarys will and capacity to fight. It ignored the considerable COIN experience of France and, to a lesser extent, Great Britain. But it ended by innovating a number of strategies capable of neutralizing the VC and eviscerating the NVA. By 1969 the military contest was over and the United States had won. But the political contest ended in a US defeat, and the strategic interaction explains why. No war in the twentieth century was more complex than the Vietnam War. It featured at least five adversaries (the DRV, VC, China, and USSR against the GVN and United States) and four overlapping strategic interactions. The United States lost ROLLING THUNDER, which featured US barbarism against an NVA conventional defense (opposite-approach). But the United States won the main force units war: an NVA conventional attack against a US conventional defense (same-approach). The United States lost the main guerrilla war in the south, which featured a US conventional attack against a VC GWS (opposite-approach), but won the other guerrilla war when it initiated the Phoenix Program (barbarism) against a VC GWS (same-approach). Most importantly, the US Marine Corps the
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US military institution with the most historical experience of fighting small wars innovated a strategy capable of defeating the VC without a resort to barbarism. The CAP programs only liability proved to be its costliness in terms of time. In sum, in most wars military victory leads to political victory, and the duration and quality of that political victory bear some meaningful relationship to the means used to overcome a resisting military. If barbarism is employed to achieve military victory, any peace that follows will be fragile and costly at best. The United States and GVN did use barbarism and did overcome the DRV and VC militarily. Strategic interaction explains why the war took as long as it did, how the United States was able to defeat the DRV and VC, and why, after doing so it was nevertheless forced to abandon the GVN. But, in the Vietnamese civil war, military supremacy proved meaningless. The political contest for Vietnam was what mattered and it was already lost before the US marines came ashore at Da Nang. Even had the United States adopted an ideal counterstrategy against each of the two militaries it faced no easy task it still could not have won the war politically (i.e., coerced the DRV into accepting a divided Vietnam). At best, the United States would have driven its enemies into Laos, Cambodia, and China, and then been forced to spend decades attempting under constant duress and with little hope of success to engineer a viable nationalist alternative to the DRV.
and innovate around them. They often succeeded, but never in a way which could compensate for their relatively low numbers.14 In short, the Soviet Unions authoritarian regime type insulated it from political vulnerability. Regime type also made it possible for the Soviets to manage the domestic political opposition.15 Authoritarian regimes are first of all free to construct the enemy as they see fit (democratic regimes do the same thing but with much less freedom). In previous wars the Soviets had shown a remarkable capacity to control the publics access to reliable information about the domestic costs of war, especially casualties. In this war, however, Soviet efforts to control this information failed: the combination of letters home and an unprecedented network of soldiers mothers combined to make it increasingly clear that Soviet soldiers were getting killed in numbers far larger than claimed by the government. However, there remained no mechanism by which rising alarm and discontent could be translated into a shift in Soviet policy or strategy.16 In no other case does the arms diffusion argument receive stronger support than in the Afghan Civil War. From 1979 until 1986, the Soviet Unions troops and its DRA allies had better weapons than the mujahideen but, with the exception of the combat helicopter, most of that better technology was of dubious utility in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. As Soviet and DRA forces innovated better COIN tactics they came to rely more and more heavily on combat helicopters. By 1986 their tactics including the use of heliborne special operations troops as blocking forces during canyon sweeps made them both disproportionately powerful and vulnerable. That vulnerability was
14 Numbers are not a reliable indicator of interests. As in the case of US intervention in Vietnam, the Soviets had higher-than-expected interests (including the problem of creditability), but were constrained to observe limits in the number of troops deployed for fear of escalating the conflict to another world war. 15 Domestic political opposition is one of two risks of adopting a barbarism strategy postWorld War II; the other is foreign military intervention. Here regime type plays no role whatsoever. As in its later forays into Chechnya (1994 and 1999), Russias nuclear status precluded foreign military intervention. Milosevics Serbia, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq were not as well protected and were therefore subject to invasions justified in large measure by accurate reports of barbarism. 16 The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan strongly supports Meroms model of an authoritarian regimes advantages in small wars, but presents the problem that the Soviets and DRA together employed a strategy of exceeding brutality yet still lost the war. Brutality or barbarism may not therefore be as effective and efficient as Meroms model suggests (see Merom, 2003: pp. 4246).
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made salient by a US-supplied shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missile called the Stinger. Almost overnight what had been an unopposed tactical advantage turned into an unmitigated tactical liability. In 1985, the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev resulted in new calculations of Afghanistans political importance. Gorbachev placed a time limit on Soviet support of the DRA. The mujahideen use of Stingers meant that in order to maintain combat effectiveness, the Soviets would have to innovate or dramatically increase their numbers. Gorbachevs accession meant that there would be no time to innovate and no increase in troops. The arms diffusion argument therefore receives strong support in the Afghan Civil War. Combined with the shift in Soviet leadership, it raised the costs of occupation beyond what the Soviets could afford. They therefore left. Strategic interaction explains why the Soviets lost the first interaction of the war, but it doesnt explain the second. From 1980 to 1982, the Soviets pursued a conventional attack strategy against a mujahideen GWS (opposite-approach). It failed on every count. Yet after a switch to barbarism in 1983 (same-approach), the Soviets did not win, and in 1989 they withdrew from Afghanistan completely. Why?
17 Mujahideen intelligence was much diminished as a result of Soviet barbarism. But relative to the DRA and the Soviets, each of whom maintained an urban-bound and mechanized force, it remained superior and benefited from US technical intelligence support.
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the guerrillas have access to a significant source of sanctuary,18 intelligence, and logistical support outside the control of the strong actor. In sum, if we wish to explain why the USSR failed in Afghanistan, what mattered most was strategic interaction. Once it became clear that the fight in Afghanistan was a counterinsurgency struggle, Soviet doctrine led them to go after mujahideen noncombatants. The strategy hurt the mujahideen logistical and intelligence infrastructure, but sealing the border with Pakistan proved impossible. The Soviets succeeded in killing or making refugees of roughly half of Afghanistans pre-war civilian population. The mujahideen faced an even starker choice after the Soviets switched to barbarism: either give up or continue with a strategy which would rely more and more on outside powers for support. In the end, no one won the war. The Soviets left in 1989 and the DRA fell in 1992. The mujahideen were subsequently almost entirely overcome by the Taliban a group of extremely conservative Islamists raised in and funded by Pakistan, as well as by Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan itself was devastated on a scale not witnessed since the destruction of Germany in World War II.
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Civil Wars, the actual outcome of the conflict was strongly affected by extreme cost insensitivity, incompetent leadership, and external support for the weak actor respectively. The expected and actual outcomes of the strategic interactions in the five historical case studies are summarized in Table 3. 20
Alternative hypotheses
Hypotheses 5, 6, and 8 were evaluated in the individual case studies. Hypothesis 5 strong actors are more likely to win same-approach interactions and lose opposite-approach interactions was supported in all five cases. In each case, same-approach interactions made it possible for the strong actor to apply the full weight of its advantages in material power to the fight, and this imposed severe costs on weak actors (sometimes they switched strategies, sometimes they gave up). Opposite-approach interactions made it possible for weak actors to avoid defeat and thus made conflicts drag on. As a result, weak actors did better in opposite-approach interactions, avoiding costs while at the same time inflicting them on their stronger adversaries. Hypothesis 6 the better armed a weak actor is, the more likely it is that a strong actor will lose an asymmetric conflict was not supported. In each case, including even the Afghan Civil War, the impact of technology depended on strategy and tactics in the context of climate and terrain. When weak actors had better technology but the wrong strategy, as in the first year of the South African War they lost quickly and decisively. Hypothesis 8 relative material power explains relative interests in the outcome of an asymmetric conflict was refuted. In no case was an actors interest in the outcome of a fight explained by its relative power. Hypotheses 7, 7a, and 9 can only be evaluated across cases. Hypothesis 7 authoritarian strong actors fight asymmetric wars better than do democratic strong actors was not supported. In fact, it may be the case that authoritarian and democratic actors fight asymmetric wars the same way; both Britain and the USSR began with direct strategies and resorted to barbarism when the going got rough. On the other hand, hypothesis 7a authoritarian strong actors fight asymmetric wars in which the weak actor uses an indirect strategy better than do democratic strong actors was supported here. Public reaction to
20 Table 3 features summaries of thirteen strategic interactions. I count eleven because although an indirect strategy (targeting an adversarys will rather than capacity to fight) conciliation is a war-termination strategy rather than a war-winning strategy.
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The Murid War, 183059 1 barbarism 2 conventional attack 3 [conciliation] The South African War, 18991902 1 conventional attack 2 conventional attack 3 barbarism The Italo-Ethiopian War, 193540 1 conventional attack 2 conventional attack/barbarism 3 barbarism 4 conventional attack 5 [conciliation] The United States in Vietnam, 196573 1 barbarism 2 conventional attack 3 conventional attack 4 barbarism The Afghan Civil War, 197989 1 conventional attack 2 barbarism
Conclusion
Britains resort to barbarism nearly forced it from the war, but at no time did the USSRs resort to barbarism threaten to do so. Thus, to the extent that an authoritarian regime type insulates an actor from the costs and risks of initiating a barbarism strategy, and to the extent that barbarism is a militarily effective COIN strategy, this support for hypothesis 7a should come as no surprise. Finally, hypothesis 9 authoritarian and democratic strong actors share roughly equal political vulnerability in a prolonged asymmetric conflict was decisively rebutted here. Britain was at considerable risk of being forced from the war after Emily Hobhouse brought the concentration camp controversy to light. But the Russian Empire, the Italian Fascists, and USSR were never at risk of similar problems. Italy ran a risk in 1935 that its fellow European states would demand its withdrawal from Ethiopia or halt the use of mustard gas, but in the event the weakness of Europes great powers allowed him to get away with the brutal attack and profound immiseration of a League member.
Even more seriously, officers and men trained in one context are often not useful in another. Britains military ineffectiveness in World War I was often said to be due to the fact that much of its officers combat experience was colonial. The reverse also holds true: commanders who excel at conventional operations rarely do as well in COIN operations. On the differences in leadership in conventional and unconventional settings, see, e.g., Bowden (2000: 172174), and Marquis (1997: 4, 8).
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struggle, innovation, retraining, and new technology in order to defeat the Murids. The British came to South Africa buoyed by years of success in small wars against the tribes and kingdoms which peppered their vast empire. They came piecemeal, ill-equipped, and ill-trained to fight the mounted Boer on the hot and mountainous veld. Time and again the British lined up against the Boer for their Aldershot exercises: artillery preparation of the enemy line, infantry advance in close order, fix bayonets for the charge, and cavalry to annihilate the routed foe. But what they found was counter-battery fire, and a wall of lead from wellaimed fast repeating invisible rifles which devastated their closely packed infantry advances. Then, after suffering this withering fire, they charged the enemy positions only to find a few dead Boer and the rest of the commando trotting off on their horses, kicking up dust in the distance. The British needed a new army, new training, new equipment, many more horses, and many more men in order to bring the Boer to bay. The Italians came to Ethiopia with precisely the quantity and quality of troops they required in order to conquer Ethiopian tribes united under Haile Selassie. By all accounts, with the exception of the Black Shirt divisions, Italys soldiers fought well. But Italys military leadership was so poor as to almost cause Italys defeat against the mostly barefoot, poorly armed and outnumbered Ethiopian warriors. The United States arrived in Vietnam with the conviction that its unmatched technology and long history of military victory would prove decisive. True, US forces had suffered a near rout in the early months of the Korean Conflict, but US General Matthew Ridgeways reapplication of basic soldiering discipline had restored US forces to combat effectiveness, turning the tide and pushing the North Koreans back. As a result, in Vietnam many US generals believed that talk of new or unconventional warfare was a smokescreen for a lack of good discipline and aggressiveness. They were wrong. As in all such conflicts lower and mid-level officers (lieutenants through lieutenant colonels) did most of the rapid learning and adaptation; while senior officers attempted to apply the weight of their own, often marginallyrelevant, experience to the difficult problems facing US forces in Vietnam.22 The US military had the right forces and doctrine to defeat the NVA, but in the years following World War II it had systematically
22
The best account of this is Sheehan (1988). See also Krepinevich (1986).
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gutted its COIN capabilities (Marquis, 1997: Ch. 2). What it needed in Vietnam was two armies,23 and what it had was one army desperately trying to adapt to two different military universes. The Soviets entered Afghanistan in 1979 with four motorized rifle divisions at two-thirds strength. These reservists had outdated equipment, and they had been trained to use that equipment in large-scale operations on open terrain. They were unsuited in every imaginable way to prosecute a COIN war in mountainous terrain. During their decade-long struggle to defeat the mujahideen, the Soviets innovated an almost entirely new army: new doctrine, new technology, new training, and different troops. All of this demonstrates that strong actors especially great powers who have not recently fought small wars will tend to enter them unprepared to fight them in terms of either doctrine or equipment. Even those who have recently fought such wars may find their experiences in one theater against one adversary do not transfer well to different theaters and different adversaries. This doesnt imply that strong actors must lose asymmetric conflicts, but rather that their initial costs will be higher than anticipated by conventional IR theory, and by the political elites charged with committing armed forces to combat. After combat is joined, strong actors can lose if they adopt the wrong strategy given their adversarys strategy. If weak actors choose a conventional defense strategy, strong actors can lose if they attempt to use strategic air power (indirect-approach) to win. The costs in terms of time and the collateral damage which inevitably follows such attacks provoke outrage internationally, and often domestically as well. Either sort of outrage can create pressure to cease hostilities short of achieving a strong actors political objectives. If weak actors choose an indirect defense strategy, strong actors can lose if they attempt to use a conventional attack strategy (direct-approach) to win. GWS is specifically designed to trade time for territory, so unless strong actors are willing to commit millions of troops for decades, they are unlikely to win against an adversary that avoids contact and strikes when and where least expected. Strong actors can use barbarism to defeat weak actors using a GWS or nonviolent resistance militarily. But whether authoritarian or
See Cohen (1984: 180) on the desirability of creating two distinct forces to fight two distinct types of war.
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democratic the costs for strong actors of achieving such victories even in narrow military terms appear to have risen steadily since the end of World War II. More importantly, strong actors can no longer win a subsequent peace against weak actors theyve overcome by barbarous means.24 And strong actors can also lose if they attempt to use a risky barbarism strategy to overcome recalcitrant defenders employing a GWS. Increasingly, barbarism appears to be stimulating military resistance rather than deterring it. The risks of barbarism are greater for democratic regimes than for authoritarian regimes, but both may face the problem of international sanction. For strong actors who are great powers or superpowers, the costs of international sanction may be negligible, but for strong actors who are minor powers such as Italy in 1935, or Serbia in 1999, the risk of international sanctions can be prohibitive.25 Democratic strong actors also face domestic risks when prosecuting a barbarism strategy: the effects of Britains concentration camp policy in the South African War, for example, would almost certainly have forced its withdrawal from the war had there not been such a long delay between the effects and their political impact in Britain. In the digital age, such delays have shrunk dramatically, and barbarism is much more difficult to conceal than at the turn of the century. In sum, the problem for strong actors is weak actors who pursue an indirect defense strategy, such as a GWS or terrorism. This presents strong actors with three unpalatable choices: an attrition war lasting perhaps decades; costly bribes or political concessions, perhaps forcing political and economic reforms on repressive allies as well as adversaries; or the deliberate harm of noncombatants in a risky attempt to win a military contest quickly and decisively.
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and arms diffusion arguments; strategic interaction theory brackets the conditions under which each of these important factors operates. Finally, strategic interaction theory explains the fact of strong actor failure in a way consistent with the observed trend toward increasing strong actor failures over time. As a general theory, it will be relatively less satisfying as a complete explanation of any particular asymmetric conflict outcome, but relatively more satisfying as an explanation of all asymmetric conflict outcomes, and in particular as a guide to strategy and policy. It has application, for example, to counterterrorism as well as COIN strategy (Arregun-Toft, 2002), both of which will prove vital subjects for US policymakers in the coming decades. But as with any general theory it is not without its limitations. First, although strategic interaction theory highlights the limitations of narrow or material definitions of power, it does not comprehensively resolve those limitations. Consider strategic interaction in the RussoJapanese War of 1905, for example. The Russian Empire was the strong actor and Japan the weak one. The strategic interaction was sameapproach but Russia lost. Why? Although the statistical analysis in Chapter 2 reports the conflict this way, it is clear that another necessary nuance of power must be a maritime/continental power distinction. Russia was a continental power, Japan a maritime power. Japan won because the key battles were fought at sea (even the bloody battle for Port Arthur was determined by the superior ability of the Japanese to deploy ground forces and reinforcements by sea).26 In demonstrating that military effectiveness depends both on raw resources and the interaction of plans for the employment of those resources, this analysis has established beyond question that power is more nuanced than realist international relations theory has to date allowed,27 yet a true general definition of power remains beyond its scope. Second, nothing in this analysis has made it possible to disaggregate the effects of anti-colonialism and nationalism from those of strategic interaction at least not in the trend aspect of the argument. Clearly, the
26 Other examples include Britains successful resistance to Napoleons France in the nineteenth century and to Hitlers Third Reich in 1941. 27 This is not the same thing as allowing that the realist IR theory definition of power is a straw man in terms of argumentation. This too-simple definition of power is neither my own nor is it a straw man. It is not a straw man because it is still relied upon by policymakers in the real world to make calculations of the likelihood of success and failure in asymmetric conflicts.
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success of Maos resistance to Japan and the Kuomintang was due to strategic interaction. But could Mao have knit together the mass movement he did without Chinese nationalism? No. In fact, nationalism religious or ethnic may count as a permissive condition of a GWS with the capacity to evolve into a conventional sustained offensive. The Avars of Daghestan could not have managed a coordinated offensive against the Russian Empire alone. Something an idea and a charismatic leader had to knit together the patchwork of feuding tribes into a cohesive movement before skilful offensive operations became possible. On the other hand, nationalism represented in a same-approach strategic interaction will have no impact on conflict outcomes, asymmetric or otherwise. The Belgians were nationalistic and lost quickly to the Germans in 1914. The French were nationalistic yet lost handily to the Germans in 1940. The Arabs are nationalistic and far more numerous than the Israelis, yet their zeal has never been translated into military victory. In sum, the best terrorist, guerrilla, and nonviolent resistance movements will be nationalistic, but not all nationalists will oppose strong actors by means of terrorism, GWS, or nonviolent resistance.
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itself no mean feat. Additionally, weak actors must have or gain access to the physical or political sanctuary necessary to make an indirect strategy a viable choice. For strong actors, the strategic interaction theory suggests that weak adversaries employing an indirect defense will be difficult to defeat. Of course, not all or even most asymmetric conflicts need follow this pattern but, when they do, and when a resort to arms seems the only viable option, how should a strong actor such as the United States react? One response might be a resort to barbarism, which appears to be an effective military strategy for defeating an indirect defense.29 But even a cursory review of postwar conflicts reveals that at best barbarism can be effective only as a military strategy: if the desired objective is long-term political control e.g., nation-building, peace keeping, or other stability or transition missions barbarism invariably backfires. The French, for example, used torture to quickly defeat Algerian insurgents in the Battle of Algiers in 1957. But when French military brutality became public knowledge it catalyzed domestic political opposition to the war in France, and stimulated renewed and intensified resistance by the non-French population of Algeria (Mack, 1975: 180; Asprey, 1994: 669671). Within four years, France had abandoned its claims in Algeria even though it had won the war. Barbarism thus sacrifices victory in peace for victory in war a poor policy at best (Liddell Hart, 1967: 370). The same must be said of counterterrorist barbarism: assassination, torture, and random reprisal. These counterterrorist strategies have been doggedly and expertly pursued for more than forty years by the Israelis in Palestine, but they have brought the Israelis no closer to peace. An ideal US strategic response therefore demands three key elements: (1) preparation of public expectations for long wars despite US
29 This is the essence of Meroms argument: democracies lose small wars because theyre generally too reluctant to suffer the casualties and brutality necessary to win. Beyond the cases he analyzes, however, are many that dont fit this pattern. Authoritarian strong actors with no limits on their willingness to use barbarism or suffer casualties have lost small wars, and democratic actors have won small wars even while refusing to resort to barbarism (e.g., Britain in the Malayan Emergency of 1948). The same logic that barbarism pays appears at first to be true of counterterrorism and terrorism as well. Laura K. Donohue analyzes the impact of British counterterrorist legislation in Northern Ireland and concludes that Britains numerous temporary and emergency measures which were never temporary, and which violated civil liberties and due process proved highly effective in the short term. Her analysis suggests, however, that insurgents always found a way around such measures, eventually prompting yet another round of emergency restrictions (see Donohue, 2001: 322323).
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technological and material advantages; (2) the development and deployment of armed forces specifically equipped and trained for COIN operations;30 and (3) an awareness of and preparation for the political consequences of military victory. Without a national consensus and realistic expectations, the United States would be politically vulnerable in an asymmetric conflict. Without more special operations forces the self-reliant and discriminate armed forces necessary to implement an ideal COIN strategy what begins as military operations against isolated violent minorities will tend to escalate into wars against an entire society (Walzer, 2000: 187). It is crucial to add that in order to be effective these forces will need to be supported by a human intelligence network that may take a state such as the United States years to build.31 Without a well thought-out postwar plan emphasizing economic recovery under a competent and uncorrupt administration, even rapid military victories can degenerate into desultory insurgency. As Eliot Cohen argued twenty years ago, the United States must be prepared to fight and win both conventional and asymmetric wars. Strategic interaction theory shows why the two missions demand two kinds of armed forces: one to defend US interests in conventional wars, and one to defend them in small wars or against terrorists. It also highlights the importance of politics and diplomacy in combating insurgencies and terrorists. Determined insurgents and terrorists are difficult to defeat. But where strong actors have succeeded, they have done so most dramatically by preceding discriminate military attacks with meaningful political and economic reforms reforms that effectively isolated guerrillas or terrorists from their the base of social support.32 This was the pattern of British success in Malaya in 1948, and of US and Philippine government success in the Philippines in 1952. By contrast, military and economic support for repressive, corrupt, and incompetent regimes led to superpower defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Thus, strategic interaction theory explains not only how the weak win wars, but how the strong lose the peace. Contrary to Meroms
30 See, for example, May, in Hoffmann et al. (1981: 8, 9); Hoffmann (ibid.: 10); Cohen (1984: 166167); and Johnson (2001: 181182). 31 Conventional US forces are already well supplied with the kinds of technical intelligence satellite and electronic spectrum intelligence necessary to achieve overwhelming victory. 32 This will not stop all terrorism but it will make such terrorism as survives (a) less deadly, and (b) less likely to be viewed by target audiences as much more than criminal or irrational behavior.
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thesis, following World War II the unrestrained application of brute force rarely wins wars and can never win the peace. This is true for two reasons. First, it has proven technically impossible to entirely destroy a people or to destroy them sufficiently to foreclose the possibility of a future backlash (the Hutus murdered Tutsis in Rwanda even more efficiently than the Germans had murdered Jews in World War II, but the Tutsis are in control in Rwanda today and the Jews have their own state). Second, the principle of national self-determination has made it increasingly rational for people to sacrifice their lives for the cause; the implications of murder against a disparate group of unrelated people differ dramatically from the implications of murder against a national. In this nationalist context it is much more difficult to coerce a person who would prefer to die than accede; and barbarism-provoked fear is as likely to lead to violent resistance as to cowed compliance. If the United States wants to win wars it must build two different militaries. If it wants to win the peace a far more ambitious and useful goal it must support its resort to arms by eliminating foreign policy double standards and by increasing its capacity and willingness to use methods other than violence to resolve or deter conflicts around the world. So long as the United States continues to support corrupt and repressive regimes in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, terrorists and insurgents will continue to frustrate US interests in global peace and prosperity. The current US government has confused military power with state power, and by over-applying the former has actually undermined its interests. If this policy continues and follows the historical pattern of every previous attempt to accomplish the same ends (peace) by the same means (the overwhelming application of military force unsupported by political, economic, and administrative resources), the result will be costly quagmires such as Vietnam, Afghanistan (1979 and 2002), and Iraq (2003), and a future attack on the United States or its allies that makes the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 pale by comparison.
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Appendix
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1816 1825 1818 1818 1828 1826 1826 1830 1826 1840 1831 1831 1859 1831 1832 1836 1842 1840 1842 1847 1841 1843 1848 1844 1846 1847
(strong actor)
wins wins wins wins loses/tie wins wins wins wins wins wins wins wins wins loses/tie loses/tie wins wins loses/tie wins wins wins wins wins wins wins
STRATINT
same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach opposite-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach opposite-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach
228
Appendix
Table App. 1 (cont.) OUTCOME WARNAME Cracow Revolt Austro-Sardinian First Schleswig-Holstein Hungarian Second BritishSikh Roman Republic Second Kaffir La Plata Second Anglo-Burmese First Turko-Montenegran Third Seminole War Yakima War Anglo-Persian Second Opium War Kabylia Uprising TukulorFrench War FrenchIndochinese Second Turko-Montenegran SpanishMoroccan Italo-Roman Second Maori Apache and Navaho War Taiping Rebellion Nien Rebellion Franco-Mexican First Sioux War Second Polish SpanishSanto Dominican Second Schleswig-Holstein Lopez War SpanishChilean BritishBhutanese Second Sioux War First Cretan Ten Years War Algerian Second Apache War Second Ashanti Tonkin DutchAchinese Red River Indian War Balkan Third Apache War Third Sioux War Ninth Kaffir START 1846 1848 1848 1848 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1852 1855 1855 1856 1856 1856 1857 1858 1858 1859 1860 1860 1860 1860 1860 1862 1862 1863 1863 1864 1864 1865 1865 1865 1866 1868 1871 1871 1873 1873 1873 1874 1875 1876 1876 1877 (strong END actor) 1846 1849 1849 1849 1849 1849 1853 1852 1853 1853 1858 1858 1857 1860 1857 1857 1863 1859 1860 1860 1870 1865 1864 1868 1867 1864 1864 1865 1864 1870 1866 1865 1868 1867 1878 1872 1873 1874 1885 1878 1875 1877 1886 1877 1878 wins wins wins wins wins wins wins wins wins loses/tie wins loses/tie wins loses/tie wins wins wins loses/tie wins wins wins wins wins wins loses/tie wins wins loses/tie wins wins wins wins loses/tie wins wins wins wins wins wins wins wins wins wins wins wins STRATINT same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach opposite-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach opposite-approach same-approach same-approach opposite-approach opposite-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach opposite-approach opposite-approach same-approach same-approach
229
Appendix
Table App. 1 (cont.) OUTCOME WARNAME Russo-Turkoman Second BritishAfghan BritishZulu Gun War First Boer War Tunisian Franco-Indochinese Mahdist First Franco-Madagascan Sino-French Russo-Afghan Third Anglo-Burmese First Mandigo-French War First Italo-Ethiopian Second Cretan Dahomey Second Senegalese Messiah War Congo Arabs Franco-Thai Third Ashanti MatabeleBritish War Sino-Japanese Franco-Madagascan Balian Cuban Italo-Ethiopian Fourth Ashanti Third Cretan DruzeTurkish First Philippine Sudanese War Greco-Turkish Indian Muslim Nigerian Hut Tax Second Philippine Second Boer War Somali Rebellion Russo-Manchurian Ilinden Russo-Japanese War South West African Revolt MajiMaji Revolt Second Zulu War START 1878 1878 1879 1880 1880 1881 1882 1882 1883 1884 1885 1885 1885 1887 1888 1889 1890 1890 1892 1893 1893 1893 1894 1894 1894 1895 1895 1895 1896 1896 1896 1896 1897 1897 1897 1898 1899 1899 1899 1900 1903 1904 1904 1905 1906 (strong END actor) 1881 1880 1879 1881 1880 1882 1884 1885 1885 1885 1885 1886 1885 1887 1889 1892 1891 1891 1892 1893 1894 1893 1895 1895 1894 1898 1896 1896 1897 1896 1898 1899 1897 1898 1897 1898 1902 1902 1905 1900 1903 1905 1905 1906 1906 wins wins wins wins loses/tie wins wins loses/tie wins loses/tie wins wins wins loses/tie wins wins wins wins wins wins wins wins loses/tie wins wins wins loses/tie wins loses/tie wins loses/tie wins wins wins wins wins wins wins wins loses/tie wins loses/tie wins wins wins STRATINT same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach opposite-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach opposite-approach opposite-approach same-approach
230
Appendix
Table App. 1 (cont.) OUTCOME WARNAME SpanishMoroccan First Moroccan First Balkan War Tibetan War of Independence Second Moroccan Arab Revolt Irish Troubles Yunnan First Sino-Tibetan Russo-Polish LithuanianPolish HungarianAllies Franco-Turkish Third Afghan Franco-Syrian IraqiBritish Sanusi Riffian Druze Rebellion USNicaraguan Chinese Muslims Chinese Civil War Manchurian SovietTurkestani Italo-Ethiopian Sino-Japanese Chankufeng Winter War Franco-Thai Indonesian Independence Indochinese Madagascan First Kashmir Palestine Malayan Rebellion Hyderabad Korean Conflict Sino-Tibetan Philippines Kenya Tunisian Independence Moroccan Independence Algerian BritishCypriot Cameroon START 1909 1911 1912 1912 1916 1916 1916 1917 1918 1919 1919 1919 1919 1919 1920 1920 1920 1921 1925 1927 1928 1930 1931 1931 1935 1937 1938 1939 1940 1945 1945 1947 1947 1948 1948 1948 1950 1950 1950 1952 1952 1953 1954 1954 1955 (strong END actor) 1910 1912 1913 1913 1917 1918 1921 1918 1918 1920 1920 1919 1922 1919 1920 1921 1932 1926 1927 1933 1928 1935 1933 1934 1936 1941 1938 1940 1941 1946 1954 1948 1949 1949 1957 1948 1953 1951 1952 1956 1954 1956 1962 1959 1960 wins wins loses/tie loses/tie wins loses/tie loses/tie wins loses/tie loses/tie wins wins loses/tie wins wins wins wins wins wins wins wins wins loses/tie wins wins wins loses/tie wins loses/tie loses/tie loses/tie wins wins loses/tie wins wins loses/tie wins wins wins loses/tie loses/tie loses/tie loses/tie loses/tie STRATINT same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach opposite-approach opposite-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach opposite-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach
231
Appendix
Table App. 1 (cont.) OUTCOME WARNAME Russo-Hungarian Sinai Tibetan Cuba South Vietnam Congo Kurdish AngolaPortugal Sino-Indian Guinea Bissau Mozambique Vietnam Second Kashmir Six Day War IsraeliEgyptian Bangladesh PhilippineMoro Yom Kippur War Turko-Cypriot Eritrean Kurdish Autonomy East Timor VietnameseCambodian Western Sahara Chadian Civil War EthiopiaSomalia Afghanistan Sino-Vietnamese Peruvian Civil War Tamil Rebellion Sino-Vietnamese Gulf War IraqKuwait Kurdish Rebellion Serbian Rebellion Russo-Chechen Kosovo I Kosovo II Russo-Chechen II Anti-Taliban Gulf War II START 1956 1956 1956 1958 1960 1960 1961 1961 1962 1962 1964 1965 1965 1967 1969 1971 1972 1973 1974 1974 1974 1974 1975 1975 1975 1977 1978 1979 1982 1983 1985 1990 1990 1991 1991 1994 1998 1999 1999 2002 2003 (strong END actor) 1956 1956 1959 1959 1965 1965 1963 1975 1962 1974 1975 1975 1965 1967 1970 1971 1980 1973 1974 1991 1975 1975 1979 1983 1988 1978 1989 1979 1992 1990 1987 1991 1990 1999 1996 1996 1999 1999 2002 2003 wins wins wins loses/tie loses/tie wins wins loses/tie wins loses/tie loses/tie loses/tie loses/tie loses/tie loses/tie wins wins loses/tie wins loses/tie wins loses/tie wins wins wins wins loses/tie wins wins loses/tie loses/tie wins wins wins loses/tie loses/tie wins wins wins wins STRATINT same-approach same-approach opposite-approach opposite-approach opposite-approach same-approach same-approach opposite-approach opposite-approach opposite-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach opposite-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach opposite-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach opposite-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach same-approach
232
Appendix
OUT3
0.29 0.28
p < 0.01
Associated statistics for correlation between strategic interaction and conflict duration, 18002003
Table App. 3 Strategic Interaction (STRATINT) by collapsed duration of war (WARDUR2)
WARDUR2 STRATINT
Samestrategic expected count row percent Oppositestrategic expected count row percent Column totals Chi-Square Significance
1 (01 years)
93 84.7 61.6 4 12.3 18.2 97 (56.1 percent) Value 17.273
2 (25 years)
38 41.9 25.2 10 6.1 45.5 48 (27.7 percent) DF 4
3 (69 years)
14 17.5 9.3 6 2.5 27.3 20 (11.6 percent) Pearson 0.002
4 (1014 years)
4 5.2 2.6 2 .8 9.1 6 (3.5 percent)
5 (1550 years)
2 1.7 1.3 0 .3 0 2 (1.2)
233
Appendix
Percent
69.7 13.9 5.0 11.4 100.0
Single interaction 0 Sequential interaction 1 Simultaneous 2 interaction Total Valid cases: 178
Missing cases:
234
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242
Index
Abrams, Creighton, General 157, 158, 163n Adowa, battle of (1896) 112, 112n, 116, 117n, 118, 119 Afghan war (197989) 14, 19, 22 casualties 180, 181182, 188, 188n, 193n ceasefire 183 (explanations of) outcome 6n, 187, 188189, 226 international response 191192, 192n mujahideen aims/interests 174175, 190, 196, 213 mujahideen (imported) resources 178n, 186, 193194, 198, 215n, 215216 progress of hostilities 175181, 183184, 202 Soviet aims/interests 172n, 172173, 173n, 189190, 195196, 213, 214n Soviet resources , 172n, 178179, 183, 196 Soviet strategy/tactics 179, 180n, 180183, 184187, 189190, 198, 221 theoretial analysis 189199, 213216, 214n, 217219 Afghanistan ethnography 170 geography 170, 177, 185 political history 170172, 173174 post-1989 developments 175n, 188, 190, 199, 216 (reductions in) population 182 US invasion (2001) 1920, 166, 204205 air attack 31n, 32n, 4041, 161 counter-measures 186187, 194 effectiveness 40n, 136137 Akhulgo, battle of 59 Alexander I, tsar 52 Alexander II, tsar 54, 64, 66, 206n Alfieri, Dino 133
Algeria see under France Ali, Muhammad 23 Allenby, General 96n Aloisi, Pompeo, Baron 115, 116n Amin, Hafizullah 171172, 176 Andreski, Stanislas 9n Aosta, Duke of 127n, 127128, 129130, 137, 138 Ap Bac, battle of (1963) 149 Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979) 160161 ArabIsraeli conflicts 224 Ardagh, Sir John, Maj.-Gen. 80 Aregai, Abebe 128, 129, 142, 210 arms diffusion theory 1013, 11n, 42, 202 applicability to case studies 193194, 197, 212, 214215 inapplicability/irrelevance to case studies 6768, 70, 101102, 106, 136137, 141, 162163, 206, 209 artillery, use of 6768, 70, 101102 Asian countries, common strategic preferences 37 Asquith, H. H., prime minister 8788 asymmetric conflicts 23 defined 43 duration 27, 2829, 35, 46, 164, 202, 205, 207208, 213 frequency 20n, 200201 initiation 30n theoretical analyses 5, 6n, 20, 2425 (see also arms diffusion; interest asymmetry; strategic interaction) unexpected outcomes 21, 157158 (see also weaker side, victory of) Athens 2 Auraris, Dejaz 128n authoritarian regimes conduct of hostilities 6667
243
Index
authoritarian regimes (cont.) control of information 7, 89, 28, 135136, 160, 214 decline in numbers 5, 8 demands on soldiery 78, 9 local competition 211212 military advantages 78, 2728, 42, 68n, 196, 201202, 209, 214n, 217219 military disadvantages 810, 140, 214 wartime relaxation 8 Baddeley, John F. 5253, 67 Baden-Powell, Lord 86 Badoglio, General 121, 122123, 122123n bandwagoning 58n Bao Dai 147 Baratieri, Oreste, General 111112 barbarism aims 34 counterproductivity 17n, 58, 63, 92, 108, 126, 127n, 197198, 221, 225 defined 3132, 43 drawbacks 910, 3536, 4142n, 213, 214n, 215216 (see also counterproductivity above) effect on participants 9n employment in case studies 53, 70, 9294, 107, 143, 153154, 157, 175, 180183 as end in itself 36n international response 222 military effectiveness 2728n, 35n, 194195 public reactions 100, 217219 (see also concentration camps; public opinion) reluctance to use 1516 use by authoritarian regimes 16, 191, 196 use by democracies 16 see also air attack; chemical weapons; concentration camps; hospitals, bombing of; indirect attacking strategy; mines; mustard gas Bariatinsky, Prince 57, 62, 64, 66, 68 Beit, Alfred 76, 79n Belgium, German invasion (1914) 224 Black Week (1899) 8687 Blanch, Lesley 63 Blaskowitz, Johannes 910 blockhouse strategy 96, 184n, 184185 Blood River, battle of (1838) 73 Boer War see South African War bombing see air attack Botha, Louis 86, 9192, 93, 105 bravery, role in battle 49 Brezhnev, Leonid 171, 190, 191192 Brezhnev Doctrine 172, 172n, 173 Broderick, Lord 9192n Bui Tin 161 Buller, Sir Redvers (Lord), General 86, 8990 Bullock, Colonel 103n Bush, George (sr.), President 164 Calley, William, Lt. 9n Cape Town 7273, 99 Caputo, Philip 144 Castellano, Professor 124n Castro, Fidel 58n casualties 8, 10 Catherine the Great 51, 69 Caucasus geography 4951, 68 political organization 55 (see also Muridism) population 57 Russian conquest of see Murid Wars Cavallero, General 128, 128n cavalry, use of 85n Chamberlain, Joseph 76, 77, 99100 Chechnia deforestation 50, 50n, 61, 62, 63, 68 geography 50 Russian attacks on 53, 58, 166, 214n chemical weapons 31n, 182183, 183n, 210n see also mustard gas Churchill, Winston 129 Ciano, Galeazzo 129130 civilians casualty figures 162163n execution 31n targeting 8, 25 see also barbarism; concentration camps clemency see conciliation Cohen, Eliot 11, 12, 166, 226 COIN (counterinsurgency) campaigns/ strategies 3132, 32n, 41, 102103, 107, 155157, 166167, 191, 215, 226 Cold War 67n, 1112 collateral damage 181183 colonialism justifications 103n, 116117, 118n struggles against 4n, 37n, 4142n, 146148 commando units, use of 83, 9697 concentration camps 31n, 32n, 91, 9394, 102103 conditions 95n death rates 94n, 103 justification 9192n public reaction to 9496, 106, 222 conciliation 30n, 6263, 7071, 138, 210, 211
244
Index
Conrad, Joseph 72 Constantine, Grand Duke (brother of Alexander I) 5354 conventional attack 34 conventional responses 38, 102, 137, 154155, 203204 defined 3031, 43 indirect responses 3839, 64, 102, 138, 175, 194, 204 predicted outcomes 38, 39 conventional defense 32, 34, 43, 221 see also under conventional attack; indirect attacking strategies Craft, Cassady 11n Crimean War 6667 Cronje, General 8889 Czechoslovakia German invasion 128 Soviet invasion 191 Daghestan geography 50 leadership 55 Russian attacks on 53 Daud Khan, Sardar Mohammed 170171, 188 De Bono, General 119, 120121, 122, 122123n De La Rey, Koos, General 92, 93, 97, 105 De Wet, Christiaan, General 8889, 9091, 9293, 97, 105 Debra Libanos monastery, massacre at 127 deforestation, as military tactic see Chechnya Del Boca, Angelo 110, 114 democracy/ies authoritarian measures 8 military effectiveness 1518, 28, 166, 201202, 217219, 225n strategic choices 99101, 161162, 207208, 211212 Diem, Ngo Dinh 148149, 149150, 151, 212 Dien Bien Phu, battle of 144, 167n divine will (victory as expression of) 2627 domino theory 82n, 164 Donohue, Laura K. 225n Douhet, Gulliano 40 Downes, Alexander 35n Duffy Toft, Monica 78n Dundonald, Earl, Brig.-Gen. 107 economic sanctions 40, 40n Eden, Anthony 135 Egypt 130 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 170 Eritrea 111, 113114, 119n, 119120, 120n Ethiopia geography 110 political system 110111, 118 see also Italo-Ethiopian War European countries, common strategic preferences 37 expanding bullets, prohibition of 103n fait accompli, victory as 26, 116n Falkland Islands 164 Fawcett, Millicent 95n Flandin, Pierre-Etienne 135 foreign support (for weaker side) 4546, 186, 193 dependence on 195 pitfalls 195 France German invasion (1940) 224 involvement in Algeria 42n, 168, 184n, 197n, 225 involvement in Vietnam 144, 146n, 146148, 148n, 184n military strategies 16, 37n relations with Italy 112113, 116117 franchise, as point of dispute 75n Franco-Prussian War 39n, 91 Freedman, Lawrence 200 Freitag, General 57, 60, 61 Gammer, Moshe 57n, 61, 67 Gandhi, Mahatma 41n Geneva Convention see laws of war genocide 222n geography, influence on combat strategies 12n, 178 Georgia 69 Gladstone, W. E., prime minister 7475 gold/gems, discovery of 75, 79n Goldwater, Barry, Senator 151 Gorbachev, Mikhail 186, 187, 190, 192193, 215 Grabbe, General 57 grand strategy, defined 2930 Graziani, General 122123, 122123n, 126127, 128, 130131, 137 Great Trek 73 Grenada 26 Grozny, construction of 53 guerrilla warfare 12n, 1415n, 16, 25n, 37, 132133 aims 34, 35n conditions (un)favorable to 41, 62n, 105, 197 defined 3233, 43
245
Index
guerrilla warfare (cont.) employment in case studies 57, 5961, 68, 7071, 8889, 9092, 93, 102, 106107, 121122, 138, 155156, 175 evolution into direct strategy 32n origins 17n rejection 39n, 125, 131, 166 Guevara, Che 58n, 203n Gugsa, General 120 Hague Convention (1899/1907) 92n, 103n Haile Selassie, Emperor 109, 109110, 113n, 113114, 118, 119, 120, 121122, 125126, 130, 130n, 131, 132133, 209, 220 Halifax, Lord 134135 Hamilton, Donald 166 Hamzad Beg 55, 64 Hannibal 49 Hely-Hutchinson, Sir Walter 83 Himmler, Heinrich 910 Hitler, Adolf 49 Ho Chi Minh 146147, 149 Hoare, Sir Samuel 116117n Hobhouse, Emily 9495, 95n, 100, 219 Hobson, J.A. 79n honor, role in military ethos 49, 118 hospitals, bombing of 124, 134 Hungary, Soviet invasion of 191, 202 Hussein, Saddam 50n incompetence, role in strong-actor setbacks 68, 70, 131, 137, 138140, 210211, 220 India, gaining of independence 170 indirect attacking strategies direct responses 3941, 154, 204 indirect responses 3334n, 41, 137, 203204 predicted outcomes 4041, 42 by weaker side 40n see also air attack; barbarism; civilians, targeting of; economic sanctions indirect defensive strategies 2728, 221222, 224 see also conventional attack; guerilla warfare; indirect attacking strategies interest asymmetry, theory of 1314, 25, 4243, 201 applicability to case studies 66, 69 inapplicability to case studies 104, 159, 190, 196, 213214, 217219 weaknesses 1415 international relations theory (conventional approaches) 2, 2n, 45, 2324, 221, 223, 223n internment 25 Iraq, conflicts involving 19, 20, 162, 202 see also Kuwait Israel 225, 227 Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of Amity, Conciliation and Arbitration (1928) 113114 Italo-Ethiopian War (193540) 22, 28, 198n casualties 125n conclusion 133n Ethiopian aims/interests 118, 132133 Ethiopian resources 120, 136, 141 Ethiopian strategy/tactics 121122, 125 historical background 111116 Italian aims/interests 116118, 119, 132, 140 Italian malpractice (see hospitals; laws of war; mustard gas) Italian strategy/tactics 123125, 126129, 140141 progress of hostilities 109110, 119129 theoretical analysis 132143, 209211, 219 Italy in World War II 129131 see also Italo-Ethiopian War Jahandad, Commander 176 Jameson Raid 76, 101 Japan, military initiatives 52, 147, 223224 see also Russo-Japanese War Johnson, Lyndon B., president 29n, 150152, 153 Joubert, General 85 Kakar, Hassan 169, 174, 176, 181 Karmal, Babrak 171, 172, 173, 176, 177, 186, 189 Karnow, Stanley 146 Kekevich, General 86 Kennedy, John F., president 150151 Khazi Muhammad 55, 58, 64 Kimberley, siege of (18991900) 86, 88 Kitchener, Lord 86, 88, 89, 9394, 9697, 98, 103n, 207208n Kock, General 8485, 85n Korean War (19503) 1112, 45n, 220 Kosovo 19, 3334n, 40n, 41n, 198n Krepinovich, Andrew 166 Kruger, Paul, president 7475, 76, 7778, 8081, 84n, 93, 101 Kuwait, Iraqi invasion/expulsion 19, 49, 164 ` Labouchere, Henry 88n Ladysmith, siege of (18991900) 85n, 8586, 88
246
Index
Lansdowne, H. C. K. Petty-Fitzmaurice, marquess of 79 Lawrence, T. E. 23, 130, 185 laws of war, violations of 31n, 103n, 103104, 160161, 176 alleged 124n attempts at concealment/justification 124, 124n, 127, 133136 see also chemical weapons; hospitals, bombing of; mustard gas League of Nations 113, 114, 115116, 118, 132133, 134135 Lloyd George, David, PM 95 Mack, Andrew J. R. 57, 13, 1415n, 16, 1718, 24, 25n, 27, 2829, 161, 165, 201, 202, 202n Mafeking, siege of (18991900) 86, 88 Magsaysay, Ramon 167 Majuba Hill, battle of (1881) 75 Malayan Emergency (1948) 17, 202n, 226 Manchuria see Japan Mao Tse-tung 12n, 32n, 33, 34, 37, 41n, 223224 Massu, General 42n, 168 Massud, Ahmad Shah 179, 180, 181, 183184, 185, 188, 194195 McNamara, Robert S. 29n, 153 Mearsheimer, John 3n Menelik II, emperor of Ethiopia 111112, 118 Merom, Gil 15, 1618, 29, 67, 161162, 166, 201202, 202n, 206n, 207208n, 225n, 226227 Methuen, Lord 86 Meyer, Lucas 8384 Milner, Alfred 7677, 77n, 80, 83n, 98, 99100 Milosevic, Slobodan 40n mines, use of 182 Mitchell, William 40 Molotov, Vyacheslav 148 motivation (levels of) 24 Movchan, Mickola 169 mujahideen see Afghan war; foreign support Murid War (182049) 22 cost 49 historical background 5154 outcome 64, 206n progress of hostilities 57 Russian aims/interests 6566 Russian military strategy 5051, 53, 5859, 6364 theoretical analysis 6471, 205207, 206n, 219220 Muridism 55, 58, 224 military organization 56, 70 religious dogma 56 Mussolini, Benito 112n, 113114, 116n, 116118, 117n, 120121, 122, 125n, 126, 127, 128, 129, 132, 133, 135136, 137, 140141, 172n mustard gas, use of 122125, 122123n, 125126, 131132, 133136, 137 attempts at concealment/justification see under laws of war, violations of effects on victims 123124 My Lai massacre 9n, 160161 Najibullah, Mohammed 186, 188, 188n, 190 Napoleonic wars 17n, 49, 52, 60n nationalism 5, 67n, 37n, 62n, 195, 223224 NATO, military activities 19, 31n nature-of-actor theory see authoritarian regimes; democracies naval warfare, strategies 50n Navarre, Henri, General 167n Nazis, treatment of occupied territories 910, 3536, 36n Nguyen Co Thach 157n Nguyen Khanh, General 150 Nicholas I, Tsar 5354, 59, 64, 66, 70 noncombatants, targeting of 3132 see also civilians Northern Ireland 225n Orange Free State 7374, 88n, 98 Pakenham, Thomas 79, 82, 8586, 8788, 98 Pakistan 170 see also Afghan War: mujahideen resources Paktia offensive (1980) 178179 Panjsher offensives (19805)179181, 183184 Pape, Robert 40, 40n, 152153n Paskyevitch, General 5758, 59, 63, 68 Patriot Act (US 2002) 8 Paul, T. V. 6n Paul I, Tsar 5152 Persia, conflicts with Russia 5152, 66 Peter the Great 51, 69 Philippines 202n, 226 Phoenix program 156157, 157n Poland, German occupation of 910 political vulnerability, impact on military strategy 1314, 24, 25, 4243 absence of 66, 67, 6970, 141, 206, 214 in Soviet Union 193
247
Index
political vulnerability, impact on military strategy (cont.) in UK 100, 105106, 207208 in United States 159, 161162, 165, 213 in Vietnam 211212 Posen, Barry 1213 posts, fortified see blockhouse strategy power defined 2n, 3n, 223, 223n, 224 relationship with conflict outcomes 23, 63, 65, 69, 71, 140 see also interest asymmetry precedent, setting of (as factor in determining strategy) 7879, 116117n, 173n, 189n see also domino theory prisoners of war inability to hold 97 mistreatment 8 refusal to take 183 public opinion, impact on military strategy 78, 87, 9496, 99101, 105106, 161162, 209n racial issues, role in South African war 77n Ras Imru, General 123, 126 Ras Kassa, General 122 Ras Mulugetta, General 122 Ras Seyum, General 122 Rhodes, Cecil 74, 76, 76n, 79n, 86, 100 Rhodes, Richard 910 Ridgeway, Matthew, General 220 Roberts, Lord 86, 88, 88n, 89, 90, 90n, 9293, 94, 100, 107 Roghe, Bruno 133 Rolling Thunder, Operation (196568) 152153n, 154n, 156157 Russia activities post-1992 166 political organization 5455, 65, 6667 population 57 see also Murid War; Soviet Union Russo-Japanese War (1905) 223 Rwanda 227 Sbacchi, Alberto 141n Schwarzkopf, Norman 49 September 11 attacks 227 Shamil (Murid leader) 4950, 52, 54, 5556, 5861, 60n, 64, 70, 206 downfall 6263, 67, 68 Shepstone, Sir Theophilus 74 Sherman, William, General 91 Smith, Iain R. 79, 81 Smuts, Jan 78, 82, 91, 92, 93, 97, 105 social structure, relationship with military effectiveness 67n see also democracies; public opinion socialization (of strategy) 3637, 205 Sokolov, Marshal 177 Sorley, Lewis 163n South African War 20, 22, 4344n, 44n, 8182 Boer aims/interests 80n, 8081, 99, 104 Boer strategy/tactics 33n, 82, 8485, 9092, 107n British aims/interests 7680, 99, 207 British strategy/tactics 32n, 8788, 89, 9294, 184n, 185, 220, 222 casualties 98 (see also under concentration camps) historical background 7276 outcome 9798, 105, 108 pre-war negotiations 8081 progress of hostilities 8294, 9697 theoretical analysis 98108, 207208, 207208n, 217 uniforms 103n South Vietnam, political regime 148150 Soviet Union 5, 8 dissolution 188 involvement in Afghanistan (pre-1979) 171172 military strategies/traditions 37, 38, 178n, 191, 192193, 193n political system 190193 see also Afghan War; Cold War Sparta 2 Stalin, Joseph 8 Steer, George 130131, 131n Steyn, Marthinus, President 76, 8081, 82, 93, 101, 107n Stinger missiles 186187, 194 Strategic Hamlets program 156 strategic interaction thesis 67, 18, 21, 2425, 27, 29, 4445n, 222223, 224227 application to case studies 6364, 65, 68, 7071, 102104, 106, 137143, 163166, 194195, 197199, 206207, 208, 209211, 212213, 215216 central hypotheses 42, 4647, 203204, 217219 empirical evaluation 4347, 204, 216219 exceptions 112n limitations 223224 strategy/ies choice of 29n, 3738, 200, 203, 203n, 209n, 221222 counterstrategies 3435
248
Index
strategy/ies (cont.) defined 29, 29n limited aims 32n, 159 switches 36, 36n, 4344n, 44n, 70, 102, 106107, 212 types 30, 3435, 203, 203n see also conventional attack; conventional defense; guerrilla warfare; indirect attacking strategies; strategic interaction thesis Suez Canal 99 Sun Tzu 48 survival, as reason for going to war 25, 164165 Suvorov, Alexander 60, 219 Sweden, war with Russia 51 Symons, Sir Penn 79, 8384 tactics, defined 2930 Tajikistan 189n Talana Hill, battle of (1899) 8384 Tamarov, Vladislav 193n Taraki, Muhammad 171172 Tarzi, Mahmud Beg 192 technology (military) 4n, 5, 187n relationship with combat effectiveness 1113, 6768, 217 spread of 11, 12n see also arms diffusion Tembian, battle of 122 terrorism 32n countermeasures 225, 226n war on 21, 38 Tet Offensive (1968) 157, 163, 163n, 195 Thatcher, Margaret, PM 164 Thucydides 2 time, significance to military objectives 106, 164165 see also asymmetric conflicts: duration Tonkin Gulf incident (1964) 151n Tran Hung Doo 146 Transvaal 73, 7475, 98 Trezzani, General 138n Turtledove, Harry 41n Umberto, King of Italy 111112 underestimation of opposition by Russia/Soviet Union 69n, 191 by UK 79, 81, 87, 8990, 100 United Kingdom involvement in Ethiopia 119n, 129131, 130n, 142, 210 military history/limitations 37n, 79n, 8586, 101102 parliamentary proceedings 9192n, 9596, 116117n relations with Italy 112113 116117 see also Malayan Emergency; South African War United States domestic policy/legislation 8, 25 foreign policy 1921, 26, 192 military effectiveness 1213 military history/strategies 37, 38, 212 military strategy, ideal/future 225227 see also Afghanistan; Iraq; Korean war; Kuwait; Vietnam war; World War II unpreparedness, role in strong-actor setbacks 219n, 219221 see also United Kingdom: military history Urban, Mark L. 181, 187, 197 Veliaminov, General 48, 54 Vietnam Democratic Republic of (DRV) 147, 148149, 150, 157, 158, 159161 economy 145 geography 145 political history 145148, 146n see also France; Vietnam War Vietnam war (196573) 22, 44n, 45n, 178n civilian casualties 158n (explanations of) outcome 6n, 14, 157, 158n, 226 progress of hostilities 152157, 167168, 202 theoretical analysis 4344n, 157168, 211213 US aims/interests 150152, 151n, 159, 214n US engagement in 14, 144145, 151152 US strategy/tactics 16, 29n, 4041n, 50n, 155157, 164, 167168, 189, 198n, 220221 Vietnamese aims/interests 158 Vietnamese resources 162163, 166 Vietnamese strategy/tactics 154155, 160161 Vittorio Emmanuele II of Italy 113 Voronzov, Count 57, 5961, 60n, 6263, 66, 68 Wal Wal, Ethiopia 114116 Waltz, Kenneth 18, 3637 Walzer, Michael 168 Watson, Bruce 9n Watson, C. Dale 17n
249
Index
weaker side, victory of frequency 34, 4345 historical trends 4n, 45, 36, 46, 47n, 205 reasons 67n, 1617n Westmoreland, William 167n White, Sir George, General 83, 8486 Wilson, Woodrow, President 146147 Wingate, Orde, Major 142 World War I 210n, 219n World War II aftermath 1011, 12, 17, 18, 37, 4142n Allied strategies 25, 32n, 4041n commencement 128 duration 164 impact on war on Ethiopia 129, 131, 142, 210 motives for engagement 8, 25 Yermolov, Mikhail 50n, 5254, 6364, 68 Yevdomikov, General 57 Yohannes IV, emperor of Ethiopia 111 Yugoslavia 36n Zahir Shah, King 171 Zaitsev, Mikhail 186, 187 Zhou Enlai 148 Zulus, conflicts involving 74
250
89 Patrick M. Morgan Deterrence now 88 Susan Sell Private power, public law The globalization of intellectual property rights 87 Nina Tannenwald The nuclear taboo The United States and the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945 86 Linda Weiss States in the global economy Bringing domestic institutions back in 85 Rodney Bruce Hall and Thomas J. Biersteker (eds.) The emergence of private authority in global governance 84 Heather Rae State identities and the homogenisation of peoples 83 Maja Zehfuss Constructivism in International Relations The politics of reality 82 Paul K. Huth and Todd Allee The democratic peace and territorial conflict in the twentieth century 81 Neta C. Crawford Argument and change in world politics Ethics, decolonization and humanitarian intervention 80 Douglas Lemke Regions of war and peace 79 Richard Shapcott Justice, community and dialogue in international relations 78 Phil Steinberg The social construction of the ocean
77 Christine Sylvester Feminist International Relations An unfinished journey 76 Kenneth A. Schultz Democracy and coercive diplomacy 75 David Houghton US foreign policy and the Iran hostage crisis 74 Cecilia Albin Justice and fairness in international negotiation 73 Martin Shaw Theory of the global state Globality as an unfinished revolution 72 Frank C. Zagare and D. Marc Kilgour Perfect deterrence 71 Robert OBrien, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte and Marc Williams Contesting global governance Multilateral economic institutions and global social movements 70 Roland Bleiker Popular dissent, human agency and global politics 69 Bill McSweeney Security, identity and interests A sociology of international relations 68 Molly Cochran Normative theory in international relations A pragmatic approach 67 Alexander Wendt Social theory of international politics 66 Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp and Kathryn Sikkink (eds.) The power of human rights International norms and domestic change 65 Daniel W. Drezner The sanctions paradox Economic statecraft and international relations 64 Viva Ona Bartkus The dynamic of secession
63 John A. Vasquez The power of power politics From classical realism to neotraditionalism 62 Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett (eds.) Security communities 61 Charles Jones E. H. Carr and international relations A duty to lie 60 Jeffrey W. Knopf Domestic society and international cooperation The impact of protest on US arms control policy 59 Nicholas Greenwood Onuf The republican legacy in international thought 58 Daniel S. Geller and J. David Singer Nations at war A scientific study of international conflict 57 Randall D. Germain The international organization of credit States and global finance in the world economy 56 N. Piers Ludlow Dealing with Britain The Six and the first UK application to the EEC 55 Andreas Hasenclever, Peter Mayer and Volker Rittberger Theories of international regimes 54 Miranda A. Schreurs and Elizabeth C. Economy (eds.) The internationalization of environmental protection 53 James N. Rosenau Along the domestic foreign frontier Exploring governance in a turbulent world 52 John M. Hobson The wealth of states A comparative sociology of international economic and political change 51 Kalevi J. Holsti The state, war, and the state of war 50 Christopher Clapham Africa and the international system The politics of state survival
49 Susan Strange The retreat of the state The diffusion of power in the world economy 48 William I. Robinson Promoting polyarchy Globalization, US intervention, and hegemony 47 Roger Spegele Political realism in international theory 46 Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (eds.) State sovereignty as social construct 45 Mervyn Frost Ethics in international relations A constitutive theory 44 Mark W. Zacher with Brent A. Sutton Governing global networks International regimes for transportation and communications 43 Mark Neufeld The restructuring of international relations theory 42 Thomas Risse-Kappen (ed.) Bringing transnational relations back in Non-state actors, domestic structures and international institutions 41 Hayward R. Alker Rediscoveries and reformulations Humanistic methodologies for international studies 40 Robert W. Cox with Timothy J. Sinclair Approaches to world order 39 Jens Bartelson A genealogy of sovereignty 38 Mark Rupert Producing hegemony The politics of mass production and American global power 37 Cynthia Weber Simulating sovereignty Intervention, the state and symbolic exchange 36 Gary Goertz Contexts of international politics
35 James L. Richardson Crisis diplomacy The Great Powers since the mid-nineteenth century 34 Bradley S. Klein Strategic studies and world order The global politics of deterrence 33 T. V. Paul Asymmetric conflicts: war initiation by weaker powers 32 Christine Sylvester Feminist theory and international relations in a postmodern era 31 Peter J. Schraeder US foreign policy toward Africa Incrementalism, crisis and change 30 Graham Spinardi From Polaris to Trident: The development of US Fleet Ballistic Missile technology 29 David A. Welch Justice and the genesis of war 28 Russell J. Leng Interstate crisis behavior, 18161980: realism versus reciprocity 27 John A. Vasquez The war puzzle 26 Stephen Gill (ed.) Gramsci, historical materialism and international relations 25 Mike Bowker and Robin Brown (eds.) From Cold War to collapse: theory and world politics in the 1980s 24 R. B. J. Walker Inside/outside: international relations as political theory 23 Edward Reiss The Strategic Defense Initiative 22 Keith Krause Arms and the state: patterns of military production and trade 21 Roger Buckley US-Japan alliance diplomacy 19451990 20 James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (eds.) Governance without government: order and change in world politics
19 Michael Nicholson Rationality and the analysis of international conflict 18 John Stopford and Susan Strange Rival states, rival firms Competition for world market shares 17 Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel (eds.) Traditions of international ethics 16 Charles F. Doran Systems in crisis New imperatives of high politics at centurys end 15 Deon Geldenhuys Isolated states: a comparative analysis 14 Kalevi J. Holsti Peace and war: armed conflicts and international order 16481989 13 Saki Dockrill Britains policy for West German rearmament 19501955 12 Robert H. Jackson Quasi-states: sovereignty, international relations and the Third World 11 James Barber and John Barratt South Africas foreign policy The search for status and security 19451988 10 James Mayall Nationalism and international society 9 William Bloom Personal identity, national identity and international relations 8 Zeev Maoz National choices and international processes 7 Ian Clark The hierarchy of states Reform and resistance in the international order 6 Hidemi Suganami The domestic analogy and world order proposals 5 Stephen Gill American hegemony and the Trilateral Commission
4 Michael C. Pugh The ANZUS crisis, nuclear visiting and deterrence 3 Michael Nicholson Formal theories in international relations 2 Friedrich V. Kratochwil Rules, norms, and decisions On the conditions of practical and legal reasoning in international relations an domestic affairs 1 Myles L.C. Robertson Soviet policy towards Japan An analysis of trends in the 1970s and 1980s