Bullets Not Ballots by Hazleton

Ref: Jacqueline Hazleton (2021). Bullets Not Ballots: Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare. Cornell.

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Summary

• My research here focuses on counterinsurgency as a form of liberal great power military intervention with relevance to contemporary Western policy debates and also to better understand how the use of force may—or may not—help threatened governments attain their political objectives. I analyze how Western great powers attempt to create greater security within other states by using and supporting uses of force to shape the political landscape, and under what conditions they achieve their goal. In short, this book is about great power efforts to create greater order through the use of organized violence. 

• What explains success in counterinsurgency? I argue that government success against an insurgency is a nonviolent and violent competition among elites that leads to political stability after a single armed actor—the counterinsurgent government—gains dominance over the others within its territory. 

• This book develops a new dimension in the study of counterinsurgency by examining the counterinsurgent’s choices and the political outcomes of those choices rather than focusing on patron demands or client promises. It relies on comparative historical case studies to investigate the conduct of these counterinsurgency campaigns.

• I analyze six successful counterinsurgency campaigns to ask what the government did and when and where it did it, and what came of their choices. I do not rely on what the government said it would do…I ask six questions of each of my six cases: 

• 1) When was the counterinsurgent successful in marginalizing the insurgents “to the point at which they are destroyed, co-opted, or reduced to irrelevance in numbers and capability”? 

• 2) How did it succeed? 

• 3) Were there reforms? If so, to what extent were they implemented, and when did they occur relative to the defeat of the insurgent threat? 

• 4) Were there accommodations? If so, when did they occur relative to the defeat of the insurgent threat? 

• 5) Was there an increase in popular support for the government? If so, when did it occur relative to the defeat of the insurgent threat and any reforms or accommodations implemented? 

• 6) Does the strength of the insurgency vary with any of the key elements in my theory? 

• This book provides a rigorous, policy-relevant examination of the causes of counterinsurgency success when a great power intervenes militarily to back a threatened government. I define success as the “marginalization of the insurgents to the point at which they are destroyed, co-opted, or reduced to irrelevance in numbers and capability.” 

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Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency Success: Marginalization of insurgents to the point at which they are destroyed, co-opted, or reduced to irrelevance in numbers and capability. Success includes bargaining with rival elites (rather than sharing wealth and power to serve popular interests, used systematic brute force both intentionally and directly against civilians, not instituting reforms until after defeating the insurgent threat (if at all).  

• The historical record shows that success in countering insurgency is the result of political accommodation to gain the support of other elites and the government’s use of brute force against civilians. The former political efforts make the latter military efforts possible. 

• The military campaign is one of attrition; it is not necessary to kill all the insurgents, or their political and military leaders. It is necessary to break their will to fight by showing them that they cannot attain their goals. The military campaign depends on the information and resources gained from buying off rival leaders. 

• Counterinsurgency success is about power, co-optation, building a coalition, and crushing opposition, not good governance. It requires co-opting rival elites to build a winning coalition that will overpower the opposition by cutting the flow of resources to insurgents, often through the use of brute force against civilians. 

• In successful counterinsurgency cases, state and political development slowly follows success against an insurgency over the course of many years, if at all. 

• Insurgency is a domestic political problem.

• Counterinsurgency success requires neither good governance reforms that redistribute power and wealth among all citizens nor popular support for the state. Rather, success of a counterinsurgent has three requirements. These three elements represent a phased process in which the counterinsurgent government builds its strength and, as it does so, exerts its capabilities to directly and indirectly weaken the insurgency and remove the threat it poses to government survival. 

• 1) Government’s relatively low-cost accommodation of elite domestic rivals—that is, political actors such as warlords and other armed actors, regional or cultural leaders, and traditional rulers—to gain fighting power and information about the insurgency. 

• 2) The application of brute force to reduce the flow of resources to the insurgency, often but not always and certainly not only by controlling civilian behavior with brute force. 

• 3) The direct application of force to break the insurgency’s will and capability to fight on. 

• My argument suggests that US efforts to reduce violence in internal conflicts by introducing political reforms are unlikely to flourish, and that such efforts will continue to raise human, moral, and financial costs for the US, as well as within its partners’ borders. 

• Miller argues that success in “armed liberal state building” requires matching the state-building strategy to the type of state failure that the liberal power intervenes to correct. He identifies five types of state failure: anarchic, illegitimate, incapable, unproductive, and barbaric. To resolve these identified problems of anarchy, illegitimacy, incapability, and so on, the intervening state must select an appropriate matching goal to attain within the target state. The possibilities include enforcing order, building institutions, spreading liberty, and winning converts. 

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Good Governance Approach

• The good governance approach grows from modernization theory, which identifies insurgency as a problem created by incomplete modernization of government, political system, economic system, and society and the solution as state bureaucratization, economic development, and democratization to resolve popular grievances. 

• There is a long-standing debate in the civil wars literature over whether insurgency is caused by greed or grievance—that is, whether the opportunity to mount an insurgency, such as the presence of funding resources, is a likelier cause of internal conflict or whether political grievances such as a high level of inequality are a likelier cause. The position advocating good governance logically flows from a belief that grievances cause insurgency. 

• Today’s Western policy prescription for insurgency is based on the good governance approach, which flows from the belief that the counterinsurgent government must do three things to succeed. 

• It must provide political, economic, and social reforms that meet the needs of the population and gain its support.

• It must make sure that these reforms reduce the grievances fueling the insurgency in order to obtain information about the insurgency from civilians and, ideally, gain their support.

• It must use force against the insurgency with great care to avoid civilian harm, again to gain popular support and thus information on the insurgency. 

• Good governance typically means “economic growth, political representation, and efficient administration.” In this view, good governance is necessary to defeat insurgency because it is bad governance that causes insurgency. 

• Governments willing and able to make good governance reforms do so. Those that resist reforms continue to resist, and for logical reasons. Making governance more equitable and just, serving popular interests, institutionalizing and bureaucratizing the state, instituting free and fair elections, liberalizing the media, instituting the rule of law—these are all reforms that directly or indirectly reduce the power and wealth of government-aligned elites. Corrupt, repressive governments persist because corruption and repression serve the interests of those in power. They are not a function of ignorance or error. Any great power interested in forcing a client into making reforms needs leverage. Great powers that commit themselves to client survival, however, yield significant leverage over their client, leaving them with little power to impose reforms. Even when US forces ruled directly in Japan, Germany, Iraq, and Afghanistan, they were forced to accommodate the interests of elites within the occupied states.

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Compellence Theory

• My theory of counterinsurgency success, which I call the compellence theory, differs in two important ways from the conventional wisdom, which I call good governance counterinsurgency for its focus on developing liberal democratic states. 

• First, my theory identifies armed and unarmed elites as the key actors in counterinsurgency, rather than the populace or the great power intervener, along with the need to accommodate the few rather than provide benefits for all. The need for coalition building as part of the state-building process is not a new political insight, but it is not one that has previously been highlighted in the counterinsurgency debate. 

• Second, the compellence theory identifies the government’s use of force against civilians as well as insurgents as an important factor in counterinsurgency success rather than a choice likely to damage or doom the government’s chance of success. 

• I argue that counterinsurgency campaigns backed by great powers succeed when the counterinsurgent government forms a coalition with rival civilian and military elites who cooperate in exchange for personal or group gain, and when the government uses the resources provided by the new coalition to cut the flow of support to insurgents, most often by targeting civilians with brute force to control their behavior, as well as targeting the insurgency directly.

• The key relationship in the compellence theory is that of elites, those formally and informally holding power and their rivals for power, including members of the insurgency. 

• The most frequent choice in the cases here is to use brute force to control civilians, including by putting them in prison camps, destroying or moving communities, putting communities under military lockdown, and controlling the flow of crucial resources such as foodstuffs. The process ends with the insurgents’ and supporters’ will to fight broken. The government need not kill all the insurgents. It only needs to show them that they cannot win.

• In the compellence theory of counterinsurgency success, the independent or explanatory variable is compellence. There are two intervening variables. One is political and the other is military. The first, the political variable, is accommodation—the use of threats and rewards to gain the cooperation of political and military leaders in exchange for information on the insurgency and populace and provision of military capabilities to the government. The second, the military variable, is a military campaign to destroy the insurgency’s capability and will to continue fighting. The military campaign has two facets, direct and indirect. The direct military effort is an attrition campaign against the insurgency. The indirect military effort uses brute force to block the flow of resources to insurgents, often by using force to control civilians.

• The use of compellence (the use or threat of force to change an actor’s behavior) and brute force (the power to take and to hold) together break an insurgent’s ability and will to fight. Successful counterinsurgency is not, contra the conventional wisdom, a process of building a centralized, modern, liberal, democratic state; providing political, economic, and social reforms intended to support such an effort; and providing public goods to the people to gain their support for the government. It is not a competition to govern with the people as the prize. Counterinsurgency is competition for power among armed groups. Successful counterinsurgency is one armed group coming to dominate the rest. 

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Malaya Insurgency

• Great Britain entered Malaya as the private British East India Company in 1786, following the Portuguese and Dutch into the lush islands of Southeast Asia in their search for natural resources and trading opportunities. Malaya, by WWII a British colony, was occupied by the Japanese during the war. The British retook control after the Allied victory. The Communist and nationalist Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) began a terrorism campaign against economic targets in 1946. In 1948, the MNLA included about 12K lightly armed guerrillas (a high estimate compared with other sources) and a political organization based in the ethnic Chinese community. 

• The evidence shows that the British defeated the MNLA threat through elite accommodation and uses of force, supporting the compellence theory. Rather than taking care to avoid damage to civilians and avoiding uses of force against them, and making reforms that gained it popular support, the government made the accommodation of rival elites a key part of its campaign, along with the use of force to control civilians. 

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Greek Insurgency

• US policymakers feared that Communist victory in Greece would disastrously provide the Soviet Union with access to the Middle East and its oil.

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Huk Insurgency

• Huk Insurgency (Philippines): Grew from peasant resistance to landlord efforts to modernize and improve their yields after WWII. During WWII, the Huk had fought the occupying Japanese as a guerilla force. 

• Huk guerrillas had fought the occupying Japanese during WWII. 

• The Philippines was a US possession from 1898 until 1934, when POTUS FDR signed a bill making it a US commonwealth until 1946.

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Dhofar Insurgency

• Dhofar’s insurgency began with the formation of the nationalist Dhofar Liberation Front (DLF) and scattered attacks on oil exploration sites, Oman’s sultan was determined to use his anticipated petroleum wealth to modernize more wisely than had his Gulf neighbors. 

• Wali: Omani governor; appointed by the sultan and a qadi (judge). 

• Negd: The high plain beyond the mountains in Oman. 

• In 1970, Oman’s infant mortality rate was 75%. It had three primary schools, no media, and a literacy rate of 5%.

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El Salvador Insurgency

• El Salvador is a small, land-poor Central American state about two thousand miles from the Texas border. It had been ruled by the military from 1931 in a mutually beneficial arrangement with the rural oligarchy. The planters grew cotton, cattle, coffee, and sugar cane, while security forces kept the sharecropper peasants working the land and in exchange received wealth and power through running the government. 

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PKK Insurgency

• The Turkish belief in the so-called Kemalist state as the only way to define citizenship hardened over time, making it difficult for many Turks to grasp the concept of any other ethnic identity within Turkey.2 Turks generally have seen the concept of a Kurdish or any other non-Turkish identity as a threat so powerful that Turkey was willing to withstand international condemnation for its war on the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (Kurdistan Workers’ Party; PKK) despite its desire to be seen as a Western power and to join the European Union. 

• The PKK received significant state and nonstate support. Its longest-standing friend was Syria, which used it as a tool to bleed regional rival Turkey, with which it has border and water disputes. Syria provided safe haven within its own territory and training facilities in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, as well as military, logistical, and financial support. Syria finally expelled Ocalan upon a direct military threat from Turkey in 1998. He was captured in Kenya with US help in 1999. 

• The military’s increased offensive capability in the countryside put the PKK on the run and quickly wore it down. The military shifted from routine patrols and ambushes, garrison duty, and convoy protection to a constant war on the insurgents and often the remaining populace. The military put commandos and special forces in the field day and night hunting insurgents. Units even pressed the PKK in their famous “mountain strongholds.” Equipment upgrades including night vision systems, GPS, and armored helicopters facilitated night and winter operations, longer operations, and quick-reaction operations. Air power, mostly helicopters, hindered PKK movement in border areas with little cover. The military continued clearing villages, particularly in mountainous areas, and pushing civilians into urban centers, where they were more easily monitored and controlled. Finally, increased military capabilities were used for large and small operations into northern Iraq, including aerial bombing, to deny the PKK its safe havens. 

• Turkey rewarded aghas, the landowners and tribal chiefs of the region, for providing men to serve as village militias, intelligence sources, and guides. Aghas had significant control in their territory; they determined everything from water and land allocations to contact with the outside world. 

• The use of air power in particular enabled the military to bomb an area, then use helicopters to attack it at lower altitudes, and then send in special forces and finally ground troops to attack. 

• The government succeeded primarily based on elite accommodation and its resultant uses of military force against the PKK and civilians.

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Great Power Policy

• What matters for success when a great power partners with a smaller, weaker client is the alignment of interests rather than values. Elites in the smaller state regain significant leverage over their own behavior and are more likely to act in what they consider to be their own interests than they are to obey great power orders. Great power leverage is limited by its own commitment to client survival.

• The great power is unlikely to attain ambitious political objectives even with an alignment of interests with elites in the smaller state. The intervener is likelier to achieve its goals, and avoid the embarrassment of failure and any costs to reputation or credibility, when it sets relatively modest political objectives. 

• Policymakers, practitioners, and concerned publics bear responsibility for considering the costs as well as the benefits of a military intervention. 

• Great powers that intervene to back client states against insurgencies are more likely to succeed when they set modest goals and focus on achieving narrow interests shared with client elites. 

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Misc Quotes

“War upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.”

“Democracies are not more likely than authoritarian states to have better outcomes in health and education, they are unlikely to experience less crony capitalism and clientism, and democracies are not necessarily more redistributive.”

“Military history as a literature is didactic, determined to deliver lessons rather than analytical or explanatory arguments, and much of the counterinsurgency literature falls within this bailiwick.”

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Terminology

• Accommodations: Narrowly targeted offers that the government can make to gain another actor’s assistance. They benefit the few rather than the many. Accommodations are the normal stuff of politics, including the exchange of benefits that supports formation of a minimum winning coalition to retain power or otherwise reinforce and extend patronage networks. 

• Reforms: Counterinsurgent efforts to gain popular support by making structural changes to political, economic, or social elements of governance. Reforms are used to extend political power—for example, through democratization efforts such as free and fair elections—could cost the government by diluting its influence or even throwing it out of office. 

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Chronology

• 2020: Death of Omani Sultan Qaboos.-Bullets by Hazelton. 

• 2004: The PKK resumes scattered violence against the Turkish government following the US Invasion of Iraq.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 20 Dec, 1989- 31 Jan, 1990: Operation Just Cause in Panama; US Forces under POTUS Bush invade Panama to depose the de facto ruler Manuel Noriega, wanted by US authorities for racketeering and drug trafficking. The operation ended with the surrender of Noriega (3 Jan), the dissolution of the Panama Defense Forces (PDF), and the swearing in of President-elect Guillermo Endara. The Pentagon estimates ~516 Panamanians killed (314 soldiers and 202 civilians) to 23 US Soldiers and 3 US Civilians killed. The UNGA and the OAS both condemned the invasion as a violation of international law (Wiki). 

• 1984-1999: Turkish Forces defeat a PKK Insurgency.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1999: PKK Leader Abdullah Ocalan is captured in Kenya with US help.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• Aug, 1999: The PKK leaves Turkey on Ocalan’s order, abandoning its armed struggle against the Turkish government.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1998: PKK’s #2 man, Semdin Sakiki, is captured by Turkish Special Forces in N. Iraq.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1998: Syria expels PKK Leader Abdullah Ocalan after Turkey directly threatens the country.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• May, 1997: Turkish forces deploy 50K troops against the PKK.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• Mar- Apr, 1995: Turkish forces deploy 35K troops to push the PKK back from the border and disrupt logistics.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1992: Turkish forces make a large-scale sweep into Iraq to destroy PKK bases and disrupt supply lines.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• Apr, 1991: The Turkish government rescinds a law banning spoken and written Kurdish and use of Kurdish names, however the use of Kurdish in education and broadcast remained forbidden and its use generally remains highly restricted.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1984: The PKK begins a campaign of violence targeting the Turkish Government.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 25-29 Oct, 1983: Operation Urgent Fury; US forces and a coalition of six Caribbean nations invade the island nation of Grenada, ~160km N. of Venezuela, after the People’s Revolutionary Government executed the previous leader and second PM of Grenada, Maurice Bishop. The invasion resulted in the appointment of an interim government, followed by elections in 1984 (Wiki). 

• 25 Aug, 1982- 31 Mar, 1984: The Multinational Force in Lebanon (MNF) conducts a peacekeeping mission following a 1981 US brokered ceasefire between the PLO and Israel to end their involvement in the conflict between Lebanon’s pro-government and pro-Syrian factions. The ceasefire held until 3 Jun, 1982, when the Abu Nidal Organization attempted to assassinate Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to London. Israel blamed the PLO and three days later invaded Lebanon. West Beirut was besieged for 7 weeks before the PLO acceded to a new agreement for their withdrawal, which provided for the deployment of the MNF to assist the Lebanese Armed Forces in evacuating the PLO, Syrian forces and others involved in Lebanon’s Civil War (Wiki).  

• 2 Apr- 14 Jun, 1982: The Falklands War; British forces fight a 10-week undeclared war against Argentinian forces to retain the Falklands, S. Georgia, and S. Sandwich islands following Argentinian invasion and occupation on 2 Apr. The conflict resulted with an Argentine surrender, the return of the islands to British control, and the deaths of 649 Argentine military personnel, 255 British military personnel, and three Falkland islanders killed (Wiki). 

• 1979-1992: US forces assist the El Salvador government in defeating an insurgency.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1978: The Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (PKK, Kurdistan Workers Party) led by Abdullah Ocalan forms as a Marxist-Leninist political party demanding political and cultural Kurdish rights within Turkey. It grows to include political, financial, media, and armed activities.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1965-1976: A British led campaign in Dhofar, Oman defeats an Omani insurgency by controlling civilians to cut the flow of resources to insurgents, physically blocking the flow of resources from the insurgents’ safe haven across the border with Yemen, and controlling the populace in the guerrilla-ridden mountains.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1970: Omani Palace Coup; the sultan’s son replaces him and gains additional British and regional support for the campaign.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1948-1957: British forces in Malaya defeat the MNLA insurgency.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1957: Malaysia gains independence from the British.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1948: The MNLA includes ~12K armed guerillas.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1948: The British replace the liberal Malayan Union (1946) with the Malayan Federation and declare a state of emergency. They begin resettling civilians and controlling their movements and resources.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1947-1949: US Forces assist the Greek government in defeating a Greek Marxist/nationalist insurgency.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1947: The US begins supporting the Greek Government after London informs Washington it could no longer do so.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1946-1954: US Forces in the Philippines defeat the Huk Insurgency.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• Apr, 1946: Philippines President Manuel Roxas preserves his 2/3 majority in congress by refusing to seat six democratically elected candidates from an alliance of peasants, progressives, and nationalists in Luzon.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1946: The Communist and Nationalist Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) begins a terrorism campaign against economic targets.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1923: The modern Turkish state is founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk from the remnants of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire that was shattered in WWI; it is based on a conception of citizenship as secular Turkishness. Ataturk banishes ideas of religion and ethnicity.-Bullets by Hazelton.

• 1786: The British East India Company first enters Malaya in search of natural resources and trading opportunities.-Bullets by Hazelton.

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