Irregular War: Dr Ahmed S Hashim
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Sri Lanka won the first counter insurgency victory of the 21st century. This comes as a remarkable achievement in the light of the protracted, bloody nature of this conflict. It is essentially nasty, brutish and long. After three decades of protracted war, Sri Lanka's victory came as a surprise to a wide range of observers, journalists, academics and NGO heads. The Sri Lankan Government and academics regarded the LTTE as a virtually unbeatable enemy. And until around 2005 or 2006, even the head of the LTTE and their leadership regarded their position as unassailable. Sri Lanka's victory took considerable planning, restructuring and vast resources after years of deadlock.
First, it is important to address the controversy, particularly in media and general non-expert opinions generated by Sri Lanka's victory. In light of the current situation in the world the presence and prevalence of new media creates a narrative; it's a battle of perceptions in the world. Countries can lose battles of perception in the context of the new media. It is not sound advice for countries to try and control the media as it is difficult to succeed in this era.
What governments need to do however, is to be able to counter the non-state actor with their own media narrative, prior to the conflict, during the conflict and particularly after the conflict. The first entity to actually do this effectively was a non-state entity, it was Hezbollah. From the 1980s right through to now, Hezbollah sent media out with its combatants. They are trained soldiers, they film and they know how to fight as well. They won the media war in 2006. Secondly, there is the issue of commensurability, of how to measure insurgency and counter insurgency campaigns against one another without, a one-dimensional point of view.
There are specific generalities common to all revolutionary wars. But there are also general specificities of each war. Anybody studying another country's war or revolutionary war has to understand this fact, because despite the commonalities or the principles of war that you can apply across the board, there are also things that you cannot. Quite often many countries fail in that essential test. One cannot compare and contrast without taking into consideration, what is general, what is specific, and what is peculiar to a specific country. In short, all wars are similar, but no two wars are the same.
When a country is faced with a war, particularly an internal war and is in the process of learning intellectually and practically, it had better learn what is common to its war and other similar wars, and what is different and why.
When a country, particularly one faced with an internal war, is trying to learn the lessons of other states' successes or failures, its Government and military establishment must learn properly to understand thoroughly the lessons of case X, that is to say what it can adopt effectively, and what it must discard as being irrelevant, and inapplicable to its way of fighting, its environment, culture and circumstances; because despite the fact that every specific irregular war is unique, they all have certain similarities, lessons to be learnt and recurring events or phenomena, some of them quite disturbing from the perspective of the state.
In almost every case studied to compare Sri Lanka with, ranging from Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, the Fertile Crescent, Columbia, the Columbian Government against FARC, the Peruvian Government against Sendero Luminoso, the state is woefully unprepared for irregular war. In about every case of irregular war the intelligence organisations are geared for conventional war and not for the peculiarities of irregular war.
In discussing the evolution of irregular war types, there is in the contemporary era, what's known as hybrid warfare. Hybrid non-state actors are a particularly lethal and deadly manifestation of 21st century irregular war. They're not just mere terrorist organisations, they're not like the average 'insurgent organisation', of the sixties and seventies, this is a different category.
No state likes to think that it faces an internal crisis or problem. This goes to the heart of legitimacy. Similarly, no state likes to be faced with the loss of the monopoly of violence. Not surprisingly, in some cases including Sri Lanka, when a state is facing an internal conflict, in the opening stages, the opposing side is almost invariably always referred to as bandits, miscreants, criminals or foreign mercenaries.
This is political discourse, but political discourse has the possibility of obstructing effective policy to deal with the problem at hand. If a nation and its leadership buries its collective heads like ostriches, in the sand and says, "No, we do not have an internal problem" then a basket of, military, diplomatic, social, and legal measures to deal with that problem cannot be devised.
In terms of civil military relations and agency cooperation and coordination, in almost every case a state that is beginning to face an insurgency, has some serious civil military, inter agency cooperation and coordination, that will take on average, three to five years or on average longer, to deal with. By that time, the conflict has worsened and has become, a 'wicked problem'. A wicked problem is one, which is not capable of resolution by the same set of solutions you've applied before. You have to keep applying and reapplying different solutions as time goes by. And some of the solutions you may apply may actually worsen it, before things get better.
The war in Sri Lanka defied simple categorisation. Although from the outset what was apparent was that it was an internal war rather than an interstate war. Having said this, this does not detract from the fact that it did have an important international dimension. It was of hybrid nature; Terrorism, guerrilla war and conventional war. Terrorism is a controversial issue. There is no one universally accepted definition. According to Alex Smith of St Andrews University there are something like 112 or 115 definitions.
Despite the tendency of states the world over to label even large political movements as just mere terrorists, the LTTE transcended the issue of simple terrorism against the state. It conducted terrorist attacks such as attacks against civilians and off duty military people. It was clearly more than a mere terrorist organisation. This was an insurgent organisation.
No mere terrorist organisation could have undertaken the well organised attacks on military installations as did well trained LTTE cadres. The assaults on Anuradhapura air base, Bandaranaike International Airport and Katunayake military airports north of Colombo are such instances. It was also an insurgency. An insurgency of course, has a long pedigree.
Again, as with terrorism there is no one single universal definition of insurgency and there are a large number of synonyms. We will never get a universally accepted definition of terrorism.
There are several types of insurgencies. A primitive insurgency takes place when a foreign power invades and occupies another territory. The local inhabitants are less powerful than the invader, less organised, and may even not constitute a state but a tribe or a confederation of tribes. The struggles of the Gallic tribes in Gaul and the Celtiberians are what we call primitive insurgencies. This does not make them any less lethal. This does not mean that both groups did not have some brilliant leaders to be able to wage guerrilla war against the Romans. They did but these leaders could never transcend the primitiveness of their social construct to develop a more effective insurgency campaign. The other aspect of primitiveness is non-literate societies. Non-literate societies would wage primitive insurgencies and a non-literate society is an oral society so it cannot capture the lessons of its war against the more formidable enemy in the written word. It captures it through oral traditions but unfortunately because primitive societies waging insurgent wars occurred primarily in the ancient past and quite often were wiped out, as such there are no records. The most significant records existing of ancient primitive insurgency was the one of Jews against the Romans. And that's because the Jews were a nation with literacy.
Terrorism is an instrument of insurgent organisations, however terrorists should not be confused with insurgents. There is a very refined separation here. Terrorist groups are usually small and functionally weak. They don't have what we call functional specialisation. Lets compare the LTTE to the Baader-Meinhof. The Baader-Meinhof had no capacity to do what the LTTE was able to develop over thirty years. The LTTE, Hezbollah the FARC, Sendero Luminoso in Peru, are functionally specialised non-state actors. They are able to wage terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and some form of mobile conventional warfare against their opponents. They can go up and down the spectrum. It is not a one shot deal where they developed from a small organisation to a medium sized, to a conventional. They have a whole panoply of weaponry and instruments in their arsenal. They are functionally specialised. Guerrilla tactics are also an example of the weapons within 20th and 21st century organisations.
The LTTE was a terrorist organisation and it was an insurgent organisation, it was also a hybrid because it was developing and had developed a quite effective and lethal quasi-conventional capacity, or capacity for mobile warfare as Mao would define it. By the late 1990s the LTTE had transformed itself into a quite disciplined and highly effective fighting force capable of operating along a continuum that encompassed at one extreme, suicide bomb attacks and conventional war in the North. A non-state actor that develops this spectrum of sophisticated capabilities also - the key here is that war is a dialectical process. When you're measuring the strengths of your state in fighting an insurgency you have to do a process of looking at your strengths and weaknesses and the strengths and weaknesses of the other side.
The LTTE had some considerable weaknesses. First of all, it overestimated its strength, particularly what it was building and under estimated changes that were occurring in the Sri Lankan Army. Military over confidence can be lethal. Secondly, its political wing was under developed in contrast to its military wing and any insurgent organisation that suffers from this problem, will face problems in fighting a state.
Another aspect that is really important to note is that the lines between terrorism, insurgency and quasi-conventional capabilities are increasingly blurred for the more sophisticated and developed non-state actors. In the coming decades of the 21st century's growing problems of legitimacy, governance and state failure, collapsing states around the world, not every single insurgent or organisation is going to be able to develop this capability. We will also have an era of new wars where insurgency also blurs into criminal enterprise.
Considering the issue of new media, there is a tendency of governments to want to control the media to develop their own narrative. The problem is that in all the cases governments are less flexible than non-state actors in making effective use of new media. This is one of the biggest problems that states are going to face, before, during and after a conflict. Because once the shooting war is over the conflict is not over. The government, the state must continue to shape the narrative.
Shaping the narrative is not a case of mere triumphalism; it is also a question of reconstruction and reconciliation. Social reconciliation is of paramount importance in a separatist or an ethnic insurgency. If you want to restore legitimacy and have a harmonious society, reintegrate the population, and it is not only reintegration of population, it is that everybody, whether it is the dominant social class or ethnic community, must see the others as equal citizens. Any country facing the possibility of serious ethnic fissures within its society and manages to transcend that has to develop effective reconstruction and social reconciliation approaches. This requires shaping and dominating the narrative. You cannot give that up. This requires that a government create a country of what we call information warriors. They can be both civilian and military. The military are applicable to the shooting side of the war and the civilian cadre come in to their own after the shooting war is over. Governments almost invariably have a problem with information in terms of dominating and shaping the narrative.
If you look at some of the most successful counter insurgency campaigns by third parties of the 20th century a small footprint can actually be much better than a larger foot print. Then there is the issue, which is very important in the context of irregular war and will be increasingly important in the 21st century. It's the notion of intelligence, or information gathering that then becomes an intelligence project. It has to be formatted, it has to be addressed and assessed before it becomes intelligence. Most government intelligence organisations, military or civilian, particularly military ones, are not optimised for dealing with irregular warfare. They're optimised in the typical image of the state of looking at other states. They're trained that way as well. Things are beginning to change as countries like the US, Britain, Australia have realised that intelligence gathering is a social endeavour as well, not a measure of bean counting.
The best lesson, that one should learn as a state actor, and also if you're a non state actor is to look at Hezbollah's domination of the media over the years. Various non-state actors are trying to learn from Hezbollah. Countries facing non state actors should learn from Hezbollah's in trying to shape the narrative. Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV reached 220 million Arabs and also reached Israel with their information operations. When the war started in 2006, there was generally very little sympathy for Hezbollah at the beginning, because it was perceived as having engaged in a reckless adventure and particularly governments adopted a sort of pro Israeli neutrality. This was diminished by the fact that Al-Manar, in spite of what Israel tried to do to Al Manar, managed to reach the Arab populations, which curtailed the freedom of movement of the Arab governments.
Reiterating that when you are faced with this kind of war fare, consider the psychological and non-kinetic aspect of it and also consider that this is a war for the hearts and minds of people, and that even if you adopt a kinetic, an enemy centric approach, which may by the way, as you face a very difficult and lethal foe, that has a hybrid capability, any country in that situation needs to develop an effective kinetic capability against that enemy, but also a nation building and reconstruction capacity. But, this is the crucial aspect here, if you're facing a really lethal, sophisticated, hybrid enemy, you may have to adopt, for much of the conflict, an enemy centric approach until that enemy is actually defeated. Their military capacity becomes the centre of gravity to a considerable extent.
