The Department of Defense keeps trying to find the key to winning these small wars it is called upon to fight with inappropriate conventional weapons. A draft of a new manual on counterin- surgency written by Generals Petraeus and Mattis is being circulated for adoption. It has a lot of good advice for field commanders, but the central, political fact of insurgency is glossed over. An insurgency is only viable if it has the active or at least coerced support of the population that forms a matrix in which it operates. Mao wrote about this necessary condition in his famous "Little Red Book". If I may resort to an analogy from Hollywood, Col. Kurtz, in his deranged isolation, fathomed the horror of this reality too. He describes to his assassin how the enemy cut off the arms of village children inoculated by American medics.
Of course an insurgency can be defeated and an occupation made a success. The French did it in Algiers, but they had to resort to methods of torture used by the Nazis against them. The Nazis occupied almost all of Europe subject to only isolated pockets of organized resistance. They quickly quelled rebellion by savage retaliation against civilians, sometimes en masse. The Romans achieved two centuries of success in occupying the Mediterranean basin. They also used violent reprisal to suppress uprisings by example, and provided reliable military government to keep the peaceful civilians in line. Thus, rebels have been historically deprived of support by the people.
Americans do not want their military to commit atrocities as a matter of fundamental political principle. They are equally unwilling to expend the blood and money needed to police an unruly tribal populace for generations. The occupation of Iraq was doomed to failure when the looters of Baghdad were not shot. Alas, Henry, we have no Gurkhas. Since the price of empire is too high, we should wipe the blood from our hands.
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