2RHPZ
06-07-2004, 04:16 PM
Counterinsurgency Lessons for the Afghan Case
by Jason Heretik
___________
Thesis for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences College of Liberal Arts and Sciences University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, Illinois
2004
Three historical cases, the British in Malaya, the Portuguese in Angola, and the
French in Algeria, are reviewed in this paper in an effort to learn lessons for
the United States? ongoing-campaign in Afghanistan. The United States in
Afghanistan is acting like a colonial power; a weak but loyal government has
been installed, one that is dependent for aid and military support from the
West. The role of the United States as a colonial power is, however, a topic for
another paper. The conflicts faced earlier by the imperial powers and currently
by the United States share some similarities and many of the same goals. In each
instance, the foreign power was obligated to remedy the situations that had
caused the insurgents to take up arms while at the same time attempt to keep the
guerrillas at bay. The most basic objective was to preserve a friendly
government. In Afghanistan, the United States wishes to keep the pro-West
government of President Hamid Karzai in power, much the same way that the
British, Portuguese, and French sought to maintain control of their colonies.
Three commonly used words in the paper will be defined in the order that they
are used. The first word is imperial, referring to a nation that directly
controls people outside its native land by subjugating them through economic,
political and military means. The land controlled by the imperialist nation is
always exploited for the economic benefit of its owner. In some cases,
imperialism is accompanied by a significant number of people taking up residence
and creating a colony. Since the native inhabitants are usually not given the
same rights, this can eventually lead to an insurgency (Rourke 1999, 197). In
Algeria, France was a colonial power since there were over one million Frenchmen
residing there. Malaya and Angola had far fewer imperial settlers. The second
term is insurgency, a protracted campaign of political subversion with the goal
of changing the existing political system using guerrilla war and terrorist
attacks. The insurgents themselves can vary from large, well-organized, and
well-equipped groups to small, poorly trained and poorly equipped bands with
little direction from higher headquarters. The military wing of the insurgents,
referred to as guerrillas, carry out the attacks. The insurgents take up arms
against the government because political problems are not being addressed, and
there is no other realistic recourse (Jones 2001, 1-2). The last word is
counterinsurgency, the action taken by the government to defeat the insurgents.
This is normally a mixture of military and police action, along with political
and social reforms, in an attempt to rectify the circumstances that caused the
insurgency in the first place (Jones 2001, 1-4).
Afghanistan
It has been over eighteen months since the American-led military coalition
forcibly removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, yet that nation is still
not at peace. The Taliban began its resurgence in December 2002 with a series of
raids on Afghan-manned border outposts along the Pakistani border and an ambush
of an American patrol. The Taliban insurgents have apparently learned that they
cannot stand up to the levels of firepower American forces can bring to bear if
given the chance. In response, the Taliban has been operating in small bands
conducting hit-and-run raids on outposts, killing or terrorizing foreign aid
workers, and performing a few, carefully planned ambushes after which they
retreat over the porous border into Pakistan. American-led sweeps have netted
little in the way of results because they are normally unable to find the enemy
fighters. In summary, a low-level insurgency is underway, and the American-led
coalition has not had much success in combating it thus far. Looking at imperial
counterinsurgencies carried out since World War II, this paper will attempt to
take appropriate lessons and apply them to the Afghan case.
During the Soviet-Afghan War from 1979-1989, a number of Afghans fled to either
Pakistan or Iran, where eventually their numbers would reach six million at
their peak in the late 1980s. They lived in refugee camps that came to be used
as staging grounds for the mujahedin in their efforts against the Soviets. It
was this generation of young males, mainly Pashtun, who lived nearly their
entire lives in these camps with little memory of their homeland and who were
exposed to radical Islam during their camp life, which formed the core of the
Taliban. It was also during the Soviet-Afghan War that smuggling equipment and
weapons from Pakistan into Afghanistan really expanded by using secret paths to
cross the border (Schmeidl 2002, 11-20).
After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, peace did not return to the
already war-torn country as rival warlords soon began to battle each other for
power. The Taliban entered the fray in 1994 and by 1998 controlled approximately
90 percent of the country (Rubin 2002, X-XII). In part because of the Taliban?s
horrific human rights and in part due to opium poppy production, United Nations'
sanctions were imposed on Afghanistan; this mainly served to further radicalize
the Taliban (Schmeidl 2002, 10-12). After the September 11 attacks were tied to
al-Qaida, run by Osama bin Laden and based in Afghanistan, the United States
briefly tried to talk the Taliban into turning over bin Laden but soon turned to
military action. On October 19, 2001, the first Army Special Forces teams were
inserted into Afghanistan, greeted by Central Intelligence Agency members, and
soon set about aiding the faltering anti-Taliban Northern Alliance (Moore 2003,
51-66). What many predicted was going to be a long and grueling campaign against
the Taliban and al-Qaida forces in the largely mountainous country the size of
Texas proved to be anything but for the American coalition. By December 2001, an
American-backed government was formed under the temporary leadership of Hamid
Karzai, who in June of 2002 became president of Afghanistan. The only major
ground engagement between American and Taliban forces, which took place over a
week in early March 2002 in the Shah-i-Kot Valley near the Pakistani border,
resulted in a major defeat for the Taliban (Moore 2003, 271-295).
On May 1, 2003, the United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld,
declared an end to combat in Afghanistan and said the country was ?secure.?
However, since then a number of American servicemen have been wounded, several
have been killed, rockets are still fired at United States' bases several times
per week, and the number of Taliban attacks has been increasing. Additionally,
four German peacekeepers were killed and thirty injured in a suicide bombing
(Gezari 2003). On July 18 following the assassination of a Red Cross worker the
previous month (Gall 26 April 2003), eighty international aid organizations in
Afghanistan sent an open letter to the United Nations warning that the security
situation outside the capital of Kabul was so poor that the workers cannot reach
them, and some local Afghans were beginning to talk about the ?better days?
under the Taliban (BBC 2003). With the guerrilla-style attacks made by the
Taliban forces based in Pakistan continuing, if not increasing, and the
possibility of a wider movement occurring, the prospect of a prolonged
insurgency in Afghanistan seems reasonable.
Choice of Cases
This paper will look at lessons of three previous imperial counterinsurgency
campaigns and then apply what is learned to Afghanistan. The cases are the
British action in Malaya, the Portuguese experience in Angola, and the French
campaign in Algeria. Each of these examples involves an insurgent organization
or organizations fighting a campaign against an imperial power. However, each
counterinsurgency campaign is affected by unique circumstances. For instance,
the jungles and mountains in Malaya and Algeria respectively made it easy for
insurgents to hide, while the rather flat terrain in Angola made hiding
difficult. One large difference between the three cases and Afghanistan is the
advanced technology the United States possesses and that the other nations
mounting counterinsurgency campaigns did not have. Despite each case's
differences from Afghanistan, they still are invaluable examples that can
provide ideas for the United States to follow.
The British action in Malaya was unique in that it was one of the few successful
counterinsurgencies mounted in the postwar era. The Portuguese in Angola
successfully fought the conflict for an extended period without vastly superior
strength over the insurgents. The French in Algeria used great force in an
attempt to maintain their power but ultimately were never able to gain the
support of most of the population. The three cases were chosen on several
grounds. First, the major power in each of these cases was attempting to hold
onto a piece of territory where the local population was not overwhelmingly
supportive of its presence . Second, each of these insurgencies takes place
after the Second World War because the technology present in the postwar period
(such as airplanes and helicopters) plays a large role in modern
counterinsurgencies. Third, in each conflict the foreign intervening power for
various reasons, mostly political, could not deploy as many troops as the
officers in charge would have liked and were forced to make do with the numbers
they had. Fourth, the foreign power made immense use of the local population to
add to military and police forces to fight the guerrillas. Finally, each case
was not chosen on grounds of whether the foreign power was eventually victorious
but on the potential of lessons applicable to Afghanistan, since one can learn
as much from defeat as from victory.
Each of the reasons used in choosing the three cases relates directly to the
American-led coalition in Afghanistan. First, the United States in this case is
the foreign occupying power of Afghanistan with the goal of keeping the friendly
government of President Hamid Karzai in power, just as the other imperial powers
sought to maintain their rule. Second, the coalition forces rely heavily on
airpower as a means of supply, transportation, observation, and attack, much
like the British and Portuguese forces did. Third, the coalition has only 15,000
troops deployed; the only sizeable combat unit is one brigade of three
battalions, currently from the 82nd Airborne Division, which is a small number
to control a population of about 25 million. Similarly, the British and French
had numerous other locations where their forces were needed and could only spare
a small number of soldiers. Fourth, the military and police forces of the
current Afghan government are used a great deal, often to maintain checkpoints
and border outposts as well as to patrol for Taliban forces, just as the British
and Portuguese did. The three cases which will be studied are placed in order
from least to most deadly per day (Cann 1997, 189). This is to highlight the
reasons for increasing violence in each subsequent conflict.
The following is a brief overview of all the conflicts and their significant
features. The Malayan Emergency began in 1948 and lasted until 1960. The British
forces successfully defeated the communist guerrillas in what is widely
considered the model of how to win against rebel forces. Noteworthy components
included: heavy use of police, not soldiers, to make the population feel more
secure, and very high levels of patrolling by small numbers of soldiers in the
jungles (Beckett 2001, 143-145). The Portuguese fought to hold onto their
territory of Angola from 1961 to 1974. Although the Portuguese were unable to
maintain control in the end, how the war was fought is worthy of study. The
imperialist power fought the war while successfully conducting social operations
to win over the support of the Angolans and restructuring their military to a
lighter force that could keep up with the insurgents better. (Beckett 2001, 13-15).
In Algeria, the French tried to hold power from 1954 until 1962 when they left.
One particularly relevant lesson is the effectiveness of the Morice Line at
cutting off the insurgents in Algeria from outside support. (Beckett 2001, 6-9).
The discussion of each case will focus in particular on the means that yielded
either particular success or important lessons.
The following is an explanation of the different methods of counterinsurgency
that will be studied later. While all the counterinsurgency campaigns mounted
contained a social-operations part to win the hearts and minds of the native
inhabitants, the Portuguese and the British conducted theirs with considerable
success. Social operations included providing better services, such as medical
care and education, to righting past wrongs with the goal of gaining loyalty.
All imperial powers used police to combat the insurgents; however, the British
and, to a lesser scale, the Portuguese deployed police to not only enforce laws
but to show their presence as a good thing to the locals. The Portuguese
significantly retrained and reequipped their military when the fighting in
Angola began in an effort to make their soldiers less abrasive towards the local
population. The French were the only power to build a defensive line, which cut
off the insurgents inside Algeria from outside support. The British and, to a
reduced degree, the Portuguese used a large number of small patrols in an effort
to make contact with the insurgents in order to hunt them down. The following
chart shows the five methods on a graph ranging from low coercion to high
coercion.
Low Coercion High Coercion
Social Operations Police Retrained Military Defensive Line Heavy Patrolling
Social operations rank as low coercion; there is little force involved since it
concentrates on winning the support of the local population by improving their
standard of living and granting more rights (Cann 1997, 145). Police are next on
the continuum because, while they do employ force in some situations, in most
circumstances it is much less overwhelming than that of the military. The police
enforce the laws and normally try to arrest people, not kill them (Newsinger
2002, 41). Retrained military is in the middle of the continuum because the
soldiers have been taught to interact in a friendly manner with the civilians
and to try to avoid civilian casualties as much as possible (Cann 1997, 71). The
defensive line ranks next on the scale because it is designed to stop insurgents
from infiltrating the country at the border and cut off those insurgents inside
the country from outside support. To accomplish this, what essentially is a wall
is built and garrisoned by a number of soldiers (Horne 1987, 262). The most
coercive is heavy patrolling, which has the goal of hunting down and killing all
of the insurgents. Many small patrols are sent out to find the insurgents so a
larger force can be sent in to destroy the base.
Britain in Malaya, 1948-1960
Historical Background
Beginning about 1400, a city in Malaya - Melaka - became increasingly important
in controlling the spice trade due to its close proximity to the shipping
routes. This success attracted traders from all over the world and the attention
of the Europeans. The Portuguese, who were the first Europeans to arrive, seized
Melaka in 1511. Their dominance was assured by a series of Papal Bulls that drew
an imaginary line near the Cape Verde Island and gave all the land to the east
to Portugal while the west went to Spain. In 1641, the Dutch took the land from
the Portuguese and soon after dominated all the trade in the area (Andaya and
Andaya 1982, 57-74).
The Dutch in 1824 surrendered all of Malaya to the British, who before long had
either direct or indirect control over the peninsula. To increase their revenues
from Malaya, the British expanded tin mining and in the late 1800s brought in
rubber trees from Brazil. A number of Chinese workers were imported to operate
the plantations and mines (Andaya and Andaya 1982, 121-137). The Japanese seized
Malaya in 1942 and held onto it until the end of the war. During the Japanese
occupation, the main resistance came from the Malayan Communist Party (MCP),
which was one of the few, well-structured organizations in prewar Malaya.
Interestingly, the overwhelming majority of the MCP members were not Malayans
but actually part of the sizeable Chinese population living in Malaya. A number
of non-communist Malayans were drawn to the MCP to fight during the Japanese
occupation. These recruits were gladly taken in by the MCP, which converted many
to its cause by war's end (Short 1975, 19-24). The MCP, which was supported by
and had a number of leaders trained by the British during the war, received
airdrops of weapons and supplies from the Allies. Practical considerations such
as aircraft range, however, meant that little was delivered until the final year
of the war. By the time the fighting ended, the MCP had built up a considerable
arsenal of weapons, including a great many taken from the surrendering Japanese;
some were turned over to the British when they returned, but many others were
hidden away (Leary 1995, 9-12).
In September 1945, the British began to return to Malaya and were greeted with
much enthusiasm by the Malayans, who hoped for a return to the order and the
prosperity that was present before the Japanese invasion. However, these
unrealistic expectations that the war-torn land would soon be the way it had
been before would not happen because of inept British policies, a lack of
personnel, and a shortage of funds (Stubbs 1989, 10-14). Overall, the immediate
postwar years were not easy for Malaya with differences in wages and large-scale
labor unrest throughout the territory, including countless strikes. While the
British were in the process of giving up some of their other areas of control,
including India and Palestine, Malaya was exceedingly important for economic
reasons. Britain was all but bankrupt after World War II, and Malaya earned more
money each year in rubber and tin sales than Britain did in exporting goods. The
British realized that eventually they would have to give Malaya independence;
however, many thought that this was perhaps twenty to twenty-five years down the
line and, even then, it was assumed that Malaya would remain under strong
British influence (Newsinger 2002, 40-42). The new government proved its
ineptitude by managing to alienate nearly every segment of the population one
time or another through police harassment, poor economic planning, a rice
shortage, and a high cost of living. This, coupled with the poor economic
situation, led to increasing civil discontentment in the years after World War
II (Stubbs 1989, 36-38).
Malayan Insurgency
By early 1948, a number of local communist cells began a grass-roots terrorism
campaign without approval from the Malayan Communist Party hierarchy. The MCP
was not a well-organized insurgent movement; the local commanders often had
infrequent contact with their superiors. The MCP was the political branch of the
insurgency while the military wing was the Malayan Races Liberation Army, a
misleading name since nearly all of its members were ethnic Chinese. In the
first six months of 1948, over one hundred murders and abductions were
attributed to the communist forces; its local commanders, many of whom felt they
should have never given the British a chance to return after the Japanese
surrendered, essentially forced the MCP into a conflict. The MCP planned to
target some British government employees and businessmen for assassination and
use fear to drive out the others (Leary 1995, 9-12).
On July 19, 1948, the British declared a state of emergency following the
killing of three estate (plantation) owners a few days earlier. However, the
killings were merely the final excuse for declaring the Emergency, which gave
the British significantly more latitude in arresting and detaining suspects; the
British government had been under increasing pressure to take retaliatory action
against the escalating violence. Both the British and the MCP realized war was
coming, but the actual declaration of the Emergency caught the communists by
surprise before a number of them could go underground, and some were
subsequently arrested (Stubbs 1989, 60-62). While the MCP had experience in
guerrilla operations previously, likewise the British had a good deal of
background in combating guerrilla movements. Since World War I, they had fought
numerous insurgencies: Ireland (1919-1921), Iraq Revolt (1920), Arab Revolt
(1936-1939), and Palestine (1945-1948); they also were involved in the Greek
Civil War (1945-1949) (Beckett 2001, 28-30).
To fight the communists initially in 1948, the British Colonial Government in
Malaya could marshal a force of about 10,000 policemen, who were mostly Malay,
and a total of ten infantry battalions, which were a mixture of British, Gurkha,
and Malayans totaling 7,000 men, although only 4,000 were riflemen. Facing the
British, the MCP could initially call upon a force of somewhere between 3,000
and 23,000; although 5,000 is a common and reasonable number, it is believed
that even the communists did not accurately know the size of their own forces
(Leary 1995, 12-13).
The initial strategy implemented by the British proved to be clumsy and
ineffective against the guerrillas and, in fact, drove a number of people into
the arms of the MCP. There are several instances of the military burning down
entire villages that were only briefly occupied by, or had aided, the
guerrillas; additionally, the army had a propensity to shoot people who were
acting suspiciously. Neither of these actions helped the British win friends.
Furthermore, company-sized patrols in the jungle were both common and
ineffective. However, in late 1948 the MCP withdrew deeper into the jungle to
train and regroup, thereby giving the British some much-needed time to reform
(Stubbs 1989, 66-93).
In March of 1950, a new British commander was assigned to Malaya. General Briggs
soon implemented a different plan to defeat the MCP by recognizing the
underlying problem of the insurrection as a political one. The new priority was
to eliminate the massive political support the MCP drew, mainly from the Chinese
population. Nearly five hundred new villages were created to separate the
numerous Chinese squatters from the insurrectionists; at the same time, ethnic
communities (including the Chinese) gained more rights, including citizenship.
The new villages for squatters had hospitals as well as schools, and those who
lived there were given the deeds to the land they farmed in 1951 (Beckett 2001,
27-28).
The changes introduced by General Briggs proved to be critical in defeating the
MCP. By 1953, the guerrillas were clearly losing ground and on the defensive.
The continued patrols, combined with political changes, created a situation
where the MCP was unable to replace their losses. Malaya was given independence
from Britain in 1957 with the multiracial Alliance Party coming to democratic
power. Surviving MCP members were continually pushed further into the jungles
while becoming even more removed from their support. In July 1960, the Emergency
was declared over while a small number of insurgents remained in remote jungle
areas (Beckett 2001, 143-145).
When the British arrived in Malaya in 1824, they expanded tin mining and created
rubber plantations using Chinese labor. However, when Malaya fell to the
Japanese during World War II, the only real resistance came from a communist
group that, at the time, the British supported. When the British returned to
Malaya after the war ended, they were in desperate need of the revenue that
could be produced; to the dismay of the population, the postwar years did not
bring stability and wealth. In 1948, the communist insurgents began their
campaign but soon withdrew into the dense jungle. By 1953, the British clearly
had the upper hand, and in 1957 Malaya was given independence. The Emergency
ended in 1960 with the hunting down of nearly all the insurgents. The British
campaign against the MCP was helped in large part by the tactics employed. The
two notable items that will be studied further are the British use of police and
also the switch from a few large patrols to many smaller ones.
Counterinsurgency in Malaya
British Employment of Police
Background
It should be remembered that at the start of the Emergency it was the police
force that was largely responsible for the failure to maintain law and order
since 1945. The British quickly set about trying to dramatically increase the
size of the police force, in part because additional military forces would not
be as available as the British liked due to a downsized, postwar military and
commitments elsewhere. In two years, the regular police force tripled in size
from a little over 10,000 to nearly 30,000, a level where it stayed throughout
the Emergency. Most of the new police recruits were Malayan with the Chinese
constantly being underrepresented because of a general unwillingness to serve.
In early 1949, nearly five hundred new officers arrived from outside Malaya;
most were former policemen in Palestine, although some came from India and Hong
Kong. While their experience was helpful, they brought a number of problems with
them, notably the lack of speaking either Malayan or Chinese that was compounded
by little knowledge of the local customs and culture. There were always more
police in Malaya than soldiers; especially after 1950 when the military spent
much of its time in the jungle, the police became the public face of the British
government to the local inhabitants.
Police Action by the British
Within days of the Emergency being declared, the police swept into action
detaining 600 communists and suspected-communist sympathizers; by the end of
August, nearly 4,500 leftists were imprisoned. Because of the state of
emergency, trials were not always necessary and many suspected MCP members were
held without charges. The initial crackdown was successful in that several key
leaders of the Communist movement were captured because they were surprised by
the sudden declaration of the Emergency and did not have time to retreat into
the jungle. By the time reality sank in, the MCP was then in a full-scale
guerrilla war for which they were not entirely prepared. With many of their
members and supporters arrested, the MCP was then forced into a number of
piecemeal raids from their jungle bases, instead of a series of coordinated
attacks all through Malaya that would have been preferable. Besides putting the
MCP in a tactically poor situation, the initial police action also helped to
seal the communists off from the urban areas. A quarter of the Malayan
population lived in cities at the time, including a significant number of ethnic
Chinese who were essentially the only members of the MCP. The police helped to
cut off the insurrectionists from a number of possible recruits (Newsinger 2002,
41-43).
For the first several months of the Emergency, the fighting consisted of a
number of erratic firefights in which the police forces were often involved.
Several police stations were raided, and patrols were ambushed while the police
struggled to keep informants and civilian collaborators from meeting an early
demise. By the end of 1948, the communists withdrew deeper into the jungles to
regroup and retrain, which bought the British much-needed time to bring in
reinforcements and create an intelligence network that they had been previously
lacking (Newsinger 2002, 41-45).
Additionally, the large police force helped the military by taking over many of
its guard duties, especially in the first several years of the insurrection. By
replacing the military, who were manning various security posts by guarding
bridges, road junctions, checkpoints and the like, the police freed up more
soldiers to patrol the jungles for the MCP. However, the downside of this was
that the police, who were not trained for heavy combat, often suffered
noticeably higher casualties than the guerrillas in raids on these posts and in
ambushes where the army suffered less in the same circumstances (Short 1975,
210-214).
The state of emergency that the British imposed on Malaya was very much akin to
a police state, and the British did not waste the power. By 1950, 8,500 were
being held in detention camps; most people never had a trial or were even
formally accused of a crime. Additionally, the British did not hesitate to
deport opponents, mostly ethnic Chinese - the group that the MCP drew its
membership from; about ten thousand were deported in 1949. Additionally, the
death penalty was made available for crimes such as possessing a firearm or
explosives; by the end of the Emergency, 226 communists had been hung. While
mass arrests and deportations were not popular with the ethnic Chinese, the rest
of the Malayan population remained largely unaffected by them, so they were not
largely concerned with the arrests. To be sure, many of the powers given and
used by the British were rather draconian and perhaps unnecessarily so,
especially concerning the expanded crimes for which one could be executed.
However, there is generally little doubt that these measures helped to play a
major role in weakening the communists, first by imprisoning several leaders and
a number of members and later by weakening the base of support for the MCP by
literally removing them from the country (Newsinger 2002, 44-46).
The police also played a critical role beginning in 1952 with the so- called
?hearts and minds? attempt to reduce support for the MCP by offering support and
aid to those who helped the government. As part of this, police replaced
soldiers in many local Chinese villages because it would be easier to build a
dialog with the locals by having police who were stationed there permanently,
instead of soldiers whose units would be rotated out of the villages. To make
the police better at their new, more public roles, many were retrained from the
paramilitary role they played earlier to that of a more typical police force.
The police became less on edge; the fear of guerrilla attacks weakened in 1953
as the shooting war became much quieter, which in turn made the police not as
ill-disposed to the public at large. The Malayan government mounted several
public relations exercises with the police to show them as servants of the civic
sector who were there to protect the civilians. These factors had a positive
impact as far as the British were concerned; the Chinese civilians began to
trust the police, and communication between the two groups increased (Stubbs
1989, 155-164).
Conclusion for Police Employment
Due to a lack of available soldiers when the Emergency was first declared, the
police were forced into a paramilitary role to help fight the insurgents. In a
similar manner in Afghanistan, the police are being forced to do more than mere
law enforcement and are often exposed to considerable danger. Because there are
not enough international soldiers present in Afghanistan to protect the entire
country thoroughly and the Afghan National Army is currently pitifully small and
still undergoing training, the Afghan police often help guard American bases and
patrol roads (Rohde 2003).
The police in Malaya were successful in arresting a number of MCP members when
the Emergency was first declared. After using the broad powers granted them by
the Emergency, the police detained significant numbers of suspected communist
sympathizers. The American forces made sweeps of Afghan villages looking for
suspects but had a habit of arresting anyone who seemingly got in their way.
Unfortunately, a lack of adequate translators tends to put many people in this
category. These untargeted arrests of local Afghanis are normally short-lived
with the detainees often released later that day. However, these often-unwarranted
arrests tend to upset the local Afghan villagers, thereby further straining
relations with the international forces (Gall 26 April 2003).
Heavy Patrolling
Background
When the Emergency began in 1948, the ten battalions of British infantry were
spread rather thinly throughout Malaya trying to put down a guerrilla movement
the size of the MCP. The British Army initially began to conduct operations in
line with the traditional method of ?Imperial Policing,? which called for large-scale
infantry sweeps of suspected guerrilla camps. However, given that Malaya was
about fifty thousand square miles and four-fifths was covered by dense, tropical
rain forests, which were ideal hiding places, it should not come as much of a
surprise that these sweeps met with little success. The MCP would receive word
from local sympathizers that a large number of Malayan government soldiers were
approaching the area and, as the soldiers were still moving into position, the
guerrillas would be fleeing (Newsinger 2002, 44-47).
Additionally, these large patrols - normally company size (about 100 men) to
battalion size (700 men) - won few friends from the civilian populace near the
towns where they operated. There were numerous incidences where, after an
unsuccessful search of the jungle, soldiers would take out their frustrations on
some of the nearby, uncooperative Chinese villagers. The worst such incident
occurred in December 1948 when British soldiers massacred twenty-four Chinese
villagers who apparently had little, if any, loyalty to the MCP and were merely
at the wrong place at the wrong time (Newsinger 2002, 47-49).
It was only a matter of months until the British Army realized that the tactics
they were employing netted little in the way of results. In late 1948, the
British began a campaign to drive the MCP out of the jungles and into the open
where conventional forces could annihilate them. They timed several large-scale
sweeping operations hoping to catch as many communists as possible. The first
week ended with no discernible results; the British called for artillery and air
strikes into the jungle to help dislocate the MCP. However, the shells and bombs
struck only an empty jungle; the operation was soon called off and could be
considered nothing but a dismal failure (Jones 2001, 81-89).
New Tactics
With the Greek Civil War winding down in early 1949, some of the British Special
Air Service (SAS) commandos were withdrawn since they were no longer needed. The
SAS was looking for a reason to justify their continued existence out of the
very real fear that they would be shut down by conventional Army officers, who
believed the SAS were glory hounds and unnecessary. As the British in Malaya
were requesting more forces, a small number of SAS men arrived with hopes of
proving themselves useful in addition to the six infantry battalions that were
recently deployed. Soon after, the SAS men were given permission to set up the
Jungle Guerrilla Force, which was commonly known as Ferret Force. This new force
was essentially a duplicate of the raiding forces the SAS had organized in
Greece with the goal of locating and destroying insurgents. The Ferret Force was
composed of four groups with about eighty men each. Nearly a third of the men
were Chinese, who were important for their language ability; there were also a
number of local trackers. The Ferret Forces were deployed in the jungle for up
to three weeks while small teams would search for the MCP (Jones 2001, 88-91).
The Ferret Forces soon began to prove that the small-unit patrolling tactics
they employed had a great deal of value. The British, who still continued to
perform company and battalion-sized sweeps in accordance to standing policy,
searched for the MCP but had negligible results. Many local army commanders,
however, began to conduct smaller patrols, often squad to platoon size. Instead
of searching a wide area, it became common to conduct ?saturation patrolling?
where a number of small parties intensively patrolled a limited area for several
days on end. While contacts with the MCP in the jungle were still limited due to
poor intelligence on enemy locations, these new tactics did help the British
take the fight to the MCP (Jones 2001, 96-99).
Through 1950, the British continued to mount battalion-sized operations into the
jungle, although even the most stubborn officers began to conduct small-unit
patrols as well. The effectiveness of these patrols was increased when the
British set up a school for teaching jungle warfare (Jones 2001, 109). By 1951,
it became commonplace for small detachments, often SAS troops, to spend up to
six weeks in the jungle being re-supplied occasionally by aircraft and for small
patrols from conventional infantry units to last there upwards of a month.
Abandoning large-infantry sweeps, these patrols essentially became the only way
the British deployed their forces. Since the local Malayans had little contact
with these patrols, it caused them little duress while the MCP was seriously
hampered. From the latter part of 1953, when the MCP was obviously being
weakened, until the end of the Emergency in 1960, the general tactics employed
by the military remained very much the same. Patrols were usually small by
conventional British standards, ordinarily only about fifteen men, and they were
generally in the jungle for two weeks. The SAS would be used in an area
suspected of having large numbers of enemy units and were, in some cases, on
patrol for three months at a stretch. Helicopters, which saw their first
widespread use in Malaya in 1953, made resupplying and deploying patrols in
remote parts of the country possible (Jones 2001, 125-137). As the MCP lost
ground to the British, they also lost the ability to recruit new members and
could not replace their casualties, thereby causing them to give up more ground.
This cycle continued until the MCP was almost completely hunted down by 1960
(Newsinger 2002, 57-59).
Conclusion for Heavy Patrolling
The large-scale-company to battalion-sized patrols the British initially
preferred in Malaya met with little success. The MCP was largely able to avoid
these slow and cumbersome sweeps by the military, due in part to warnings
provided by sympathetic villagers. Unfortunately, it seems that the United
States Army is determined to use large sweeps in an effort to hunt down the
Taliban remnants. In one instance, an American battalion conducted a three-week
operation conducting a village-by-village search over a hundred-mile-long
valley. In the end, this operation involving hundreds of American soldiers
netted little; the Taliban leader, who was the main target, is thought to have
slipped away along with his family, and only a handful of suspected militants
were killed (Gall 5 March 2003).
The British used SAS teams and Ferret Forces on extended patrols to find the
insurgents and then engage them. These missions in extreme cases could last up
to three months but up to six weeks was more commonplace. American Army Special
Forces are well-trained to carry out this kind of mission, but they are
understrength as a unit and their skills of dealing with locals are needed
elsewhere. When the Special Forces do mount a patrol, it is often by jeep with
the goal of visiting a nearby village. However, these routes are predictable
and, in at least one case, resulted in a Taliban ambush killing two American
soldiers (Gall 15 April 2003).
The British Experience in Malaya: A Summary
The British victory against the Malayan Communist Party in Malaya was not due to
any one tactic employed; rather, it was a result of a number of factors. Arrests
made by the police, along with their active role in patrolling key areas in the
first year of the Emergency, helped to buy time for the British to receive
reinforcements and to develop more-effective plans. One of the most successful
tactics was heavy patrolling in areas of suspected MCP presence. These patrols,
especially ones conducted by the SAS, would last several weeks while searching
for trails of the MCP in remote areas of the jungle. The police and patrols
eventually began to deny the MCP from various parts of the country; this kept
the insurgents from gaining new recruits, which further weakened them until 1960
when the last remnants were hunted down.
Portugal in Angola, 1961-1974
Historical Background
Between 1961 and 1974, Portugal was forced to mount three simultaneous
counterinsurgency campaigns in the African lands of Guinea, Angola, and
Mozambique. The Angolan guerrilla movement was the first and largest; therefore,
in the following section it will be more discussed than the other two countries.
However, the tactics and programs which occurred in one of the three regions
were, in nearly every case, being used in the other two as well. Portuguese
forces were routinely rotated between the three areas as the demands changed.
The Portuguese history in sub-Saharan Africa is a lengthy one and accurately
described as the ?first in and last out.? The Portuguese first reached the area
in 1443 with the goal of obtaining slaves, gold, and other valuables for the
European market and were the first Westerners to make any significant
penetrations below the Sahara. The commerce was made into a crown monopoly where
individuals could obtain contracts to run their enterprises. The crown
strengthened the position of its monopoly by signing a number of treaties with
African sovereigns and other European states. Eventually, a series of Papal
Bulls drew an imaginary line near the Cape Verde Island and gave all the land to
the east to Portugal while the west went to Spain. Spain and Portugal received
the right to colonize as a reward for their efforts in spreading Christianity.
For a time, no Catholic country would violate this for it had the force of law,
and Protestant countries did not dare violate it out of fear. By the early
seventeenth century, slave trading had become so profitable that few Portuguese
traders concerned themselves with other commodities. Nevertheless, over the
course of the century the Portuguese slowly lost most of their slave-trading
ports to the Dutch (Newitt 1981, 1-10).
The first three centuries of trade with Africa helped to play a role in leaving
both Portugal and her territories underdeveloped. The relationship between
Portugal and Africa was not equitable; Portugal would bring in goods while
taking away resources and, oftentimes, people. However, unlike many other
nations that traded with Africa, for the most part Portugal was not selling its
own products. By the eighteenth century, the Portuguese had invested little in
the future development of its lands; instead, it chose to transport other
nations' goods to sell in its territories, which in turn meant it never
developed industry as other European nations did (Newitt 1981, 11-15).
When the slave trade was finally abolished in 1836, the Portuguese were forced
to find another ?resource? which could be profitable in their lands. To do this,
the Portuguese would have to penetrate the interior of the continent, a process
that they had only halfheartedly tried before, each time ending in failure.
However, by this point, the other European countries had cut up Africa in the
Berlin Conference, and Portugal could do little to compete with the industrial
powers when it was hardly developed (Humbaraci and Muchnik 1974, 87-93). This
process was to prove to be a lengthy one, since nearly every time the Portuguese
advanced, the local African tribes would mount a counteroffensive of their own;
resistance was not fully put down in most cases until the 1930s. During the
First World War, the Portuguese fought off several large-scale German offensives
in Angola and Mozambique (Beckett 2001, 193-194).
The Portuguese claimed that Africans could obtain full citizenship, but this was
a rare occurrence. Compounding this situation were the exploitative economic and
social policies that kept the African in a poor position. If an African was
somehow able to earn citizenship, it could not be passed to his children, who
would then have to go through the process themselves. These factors helped to
contribute to the eventual insurgent movements in Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique
(Humbaraci and Muchnik 1974, 109-112).
Insurgency in Angola
The guerrilla movements in all three countries have much in common, including
the fact that they were formed and led by the tiny middle class of Africans who
were educated enough to realize the unfairness of their situation and were all
nationalists. While there had been some talk of fighting the Portuguese imperial
system beginning in the 1930s, the first clandestine groups began to form in
Angola in 1953, and in 1956 the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola
(MPLA) was formed (Humbaraci and Muchnik 1974, 109-120). The MPLA was strongly
Marxist and eventually had some of its members trained in Bulgaria and the
Soviet Union. The Portuguese put down the MPLA, which began its uprising in
early 1961, with excessive brutality (Beckett 2001, 76-77). The Angolan National
Liberation Front (FNLA) drew much of its support from tribes located near the
border with the recently freed Belgium Congo; this allowed the FNLA to use that
land as a staging ground. The FNLA launched its first offensive in Angola in
March of 1961 relying on sheer numbers. Its people were very poorly trained,
even by guerrilla standards, and showed a great unwillingness to engage the
Portuguese security forces under any condition, including a favorable one (Cann
1997, 21-23).
When the uprisings in 1961 began, Portugal had only eight thousand soldiers in
Angola, a modest number for a country of about five million people. While the
MPLA?s initial effort was a dismal failure, beginning in March the FNLA had
success in destroying a number of plantations while butchering the owners and
overrunning a number of government outposts, relying on a concentration of force
to overcome any resistance. However, the FNLA could not maintain its momentum;
by October 1961, the reinforced Portuguese Army had forced the FNLA to give up
its land. This bloody series of events shocked the Portuguese public and helped
to harden them for a protracted campaign to maintain law and order in the
territories. Adding to the trauma of the Angola uprising was the loss of the Goa
colony to Indian forces in December of that year (Cann 1997, 25-31).
With a lull in the fighting towards the end of 1961, the Portuguese wasted
little time in formulating plans for fighting what they correctly believed would
be a drawn-out conflict. They had been studying the lessons learned from
previous counterinsurgency campaigns, especially the British in Malaya. The
government immediately set about enlarging the size of the military, including
locally recruited forces in the colonies. The army also began retraining its
forces from a more conventionally trained infantry to a lighter force ready for
extended patrols (Cann 1997, 49-51). While the military was gearing up for the
expected campaign, the government also moved to reform the administration and
fix some of the shortcomings of which it was accused. The Portuguese campaign
for the ?Hearts and Minds? was quite effective in the long run (Newitt 1981,
228-230).
While the war in Angola continued, it was never to become an extremely intense
and bloody conflict after the atrocities committed by all parties in the
beginning. The MPLA and FNLA drew the majority of their support from a few
tribes that were mostly located on the border; as such, the war stayed almost
exclusively on the frontier. By 1964, the Angolan insurgents were forced to
operate out of neighboring countries because of intense, Portuguese pressure.
Casualties remained relatively low, and the war rarely affected the daily lives
of civilians, in either Portugal or the colonies. Both sides were noted for
treating each other's prisoners well. When fighting broke out in Guinea in 1963
and in Mozambique the following year, it followed the general pattern of Angola
by not having heavy combat zones. Guinea was the most heavily contested, largely
because the small size of the country made contacts between the army and
guerrillas much more likely. One Portuguese officer commented that the war was
one of ?rockets and mines versus helicopters,? referring to the habit of the
guerrilla groups to fire rockets occasionally at Portuguese bases and place
mines on roads, while the Portuguese would often use helicopters to attack them
(Newitt 1981, 229-232).
by Jason Heretik
___________
Thesis for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences College of Liberal Arts and Sciences University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, Illinois
2004
Three historical cases, the British in Malaya, the Portuguese in Angola, and the
French in Algeria, are reviewed in this paper in an effort to learn lessons for
the United States? ongoing-campaign in Afghanistan. The United States in
Afghanistan is acting like a colonial power; a weak but loyal government has
been installed, one that is dependent for aid and military support from the
West. The role of the United States as a colonial power is, however, a topic for
another paper. The conflicts faced earlier by the imperial powers and currently
by the United States share some similarities and many of the same goals. In each
instance, the foreign power was obligated to remedy the situations that had
caused the insurgents to take up arms while at the same time attempt to keep the
guerrillas at bay. The most basic objective was to preserve a friendly
government. In Afghanistan, the United States wishes to keep the pro-West
government of President Hamid Karzai in power, much the same way that the
British, Portuguese, and French sought to maintain control of their colonies.
Three commonly used words in the paper will be defined in the order that they
are used. The first word is imperial, referring to a nation that directly
controls people outside its native land by subjugating them through economic,
political and military means. The land controlled by the imperialist nation is
always exploited for the economic benefit of its owner. In some cases,
imperialism is accompanied by a significant number of people taking up residence
and creating a colony. Since the native inhabitants are usually not given the
same rights, this can eventually lead to an insurgency (Rourke 1999, 197). In
Algeria, France was a colonial power since there were over one million Frenchmen
residing there. Malaya and Angola had far fewer imperial settlers. The second
term is insurgency, a protracted campaign of political subversion with the goal
of changing the existing political system using guerrilla war and terrorist
attacks. The insurgents themselves can vary from large, well-organized, and
well-equipped groups to small, poorly trained and poorly equipped bands with
little direction from higher headquarters. The military wing of the insurgents,
referred to as guerrillas, carry out the attacks. The insurgents take up arms
against the government because political problems are not being addressed, and
there is no other realistic recourse (Jones 2001, 1-2). The last word is
counterinsurgency, the action taken by the government to defeat the insurgents.
This is normally a mixture of military and police action, along with political
and social reforms, in an attempt to rectify the circumstances that caused the
insurgency in the first place (Jones 2001, 1-4).
Afghanistan
It has been over eighteen months since the American-led military coalition
forcibly removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, yet that nation is still
not at peace. The Taliban began its resurgence in December 2002 with a series of
raids on Afghan-manned border outposts along the Pakistani border and an ambush
of an American patrol. The Taliban insurgents have apparently learned that they
cannot stand up to the levels of firepower American forces can bring to bear if
given the chance. In response, the Taliban has been operating in small bands
conducting hit-and-run raids on outposts, killing or terrorizing foreign aid
workers, and performing a few, carefully planned ambushes after which they
retreat over the porous border into Pakistan. American-led sweeps have netted
little in the way of results because they are normally unable to find the enemy
fighters. In summary, a low-level insurgency is underway, and the American-led
coalition has not had much success in combating it thus far. Looking at imperial
counterinsurgencies carried out since World War II, this paper will attempt to
take appropriate lessons and apply them to the Afghan case.
During the Soviet-Afghan War from 1979-1989, a number of Afghans fled to either
Pakistan or Iran, where eventually their numbers would reach six million at
their peak in the late 1980s. They lived in refugee camps that came to be used
as staging grounds for the mujahedin in their efforts against the Soviets. It
was this generation of young males, mainly Pashtun, who lived nearly their
entire lives in these camps with little memory of their homeland and who were
exposed to radical Islam during their camp life, which formed the core of the
Taliban. It was also during the Soviet-Afghan War that smuggling equipment and
weapons from Pakistan into Afghanistan really expanded by using secret paths to
cross the border (Schmeidl 2002, 11-20).
After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, peace did not return to the
already war-torn country as rival warlords soon began to battle each other for
power. The Taliban entered the fray in 1994 and by 1998 controlled approximately
90 percent of the country (Rubin 2002, X-XII). In part because of the Taliban?s
horrific human rights and in part due to opium poppy production, United Nations'
sanctions were imposed on Afghanistan; this mainly served to further radicalize
the Taliban (Schmeidl 2002, 10-12). After the September 11 attacks were tied to
al-Qaida, run by Osama bin Laden and based in Afghanistan, the United States
briefly tried to talk the Taliban into turning over bin Laden but soon turned to
military action. On October 19, 2001, the first Army Special Forces teams were
inserted into Afghanistan, greeted by Central Intelligence Agency members, and
soon set about aiding the faltering anti-Taliban Northern Alliance (Moore 2003,
51-66). What many predicted was going to be a long and grueling campaign against
the Taliban and al-Qaida forces in the largely mountainous country the size of
Texas proved to be anything but for the American coalition. By December 2001, an
American-backed government was formed under the temporary leadership of Hamid
Karzai, who in June of 2002 became president of Afghanistan. The only major
ground engagement between American and Taliban forces, which took place over a
week in early March 2002 in the Shah-i-Kot Valley near the Pakistani border,
resulted in a major defeat for the Taliban (Moore 2003, 271-295).
On May 1, 2003, the United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld,
declared an end to combat in Afghanistan and said the country was ?secure.?
However, since then a number of American servicemen have been wounded, several
have been killed, rockets are still fired at United States' bases several times
per week, and the number of Taliban attacks has been increasing. Additionally,
four German peacekeepers were killed and thirty injured in a suicide bombing
(Gezari 2003). On July 18 following the assassination of a Red Cross worker the
previous month (Gall 26 April 2003), eighty international aid organizations in
Afghanistan sent an open letter to the United Nations warning that the security
situation outside the capital of Kabul was so poor that the workers cannot reach
them, and some local Afghans were beginning to talk about the ?better days?
under the Taliban (BBC 2003). With the guerrilla-style attacks made by the
Taliban forces based in Pakistan continuing, if not increasing, and the
possibility of a wider movement occurring, the prospect of a prolonged
insurgency in Afghanistan seems reasonable.
Choice of Cases
This paper will look at lessons of three previous imperial counterinsurgency
campaigns and then apply what is learned to Afghanistan. The cases are the
British action in Malaya, the Portuguese experience in Angola, and the French
campaign in Algeria. Each of these examples involves an insurgent organization
or organizations fighting a campaign against an imperial power. However, each
counterinsurgency campaign is affected by unique circumstances. For instance,
the jungles and mountains in Malaya and Algeria respectively made it easy for
insurgents to hide, while the rather flat terrain in Angola made hiding
difficult. One large difference between the three cases and Afghanistan is the
advanced technology the United States possesses and that the other nations
mounting counterinsurgency campaigns did not have. Despite each case's
differences from Afghanistan, they still are invaluable examples that can
provide ideas for the United States to follow.
The British action in Malaya was unique in that it was one of the few successful
counterinsurgencies mounted in the postwar era. The Portuguese in Angola
successfully fought the conflict for an extended period without vastly superior
strength over the insurgents. The French in Algeria used great force in an
attempt to maintain their power but ultimately were never able to gain the
support of most of the population. The three cases were chosen on several
grounds. First, the major power in each of these cases was attempting to hold
onto a piece of territory where the local population was not overwhelmingly
supportive of its presence . Second, each of these insurgencies takes place
after the Second World War because the technology present in the postwar period
(such as airplanes and helicopters) plays a large role in modern
counterinsurgencies. Third, in each conflict the foreign intervening power for
various reasons, mostly political, could not deploy as many troops as the
officers in charge would have liked and were forced to make do with the numbers
they had. Fourth, the foreign power made immense use of the local population to
add to military and police forces to fight the guerrillas. Finally, each case
was not chosen on grounds of whether the foreign power was eventually victorious
but on the potential of lessons applicable to Afghanistan, since one can learn
as much from defeat as from victory.
Each of the reasons used in choosing the three cases relates directly to the
American-led coalition in Afghanistan. First, the United States in this case is
the foreign occupying power of Afghanistan with the goal of keeping the friendly
government of President Hamid Karzai in power, just as the other imperial powers
sought to maintain their rule. Second, the coalition forces rely heavily on
airpower as a means of supply, transportation, observation, and attack, much
like the British and Portuguese forces did. Third, the coalition has only 15,000
troops deployed; the only sizeable combat unit is one brigade of three
battalions, currently from the 82nd Airborne Division, which is a small number
to control a population of about 25 million. Similarly, the British and French
had numerous other locations where their forces were needed and could only spare
a small number of soldiers. Fourth, the military and police forces of the
current Afghan government are used a great deal, often to maintain checkpoints
and border outposts as well as to patrol for Taliban forces, just as the British
and Portuguese did. The three cases which will be studied are placed in order
from least to most deadly per day (Cann 1997, 189). This is to highlight the
reasons for increasing violence in each subsequent conflict.
The following is a brief overview of all the conflicts and their significant
features. The Malayan Emergency began in 1948 and lasted until 1960. The British
forces successfully defeated the communist guerrillas in what is widely
considered the model of how to win against rebel forces. Noteworthy components
included: heavy use of police, not soldiers, to make the population feel more
secure, and very high levels of patrolling by small numbers of soldiers in the
jungles (Beckett 2001, 143-145). The Portuguese fought to hold onto their
territory of Angola from 1961 to 1974. Although the Portuguese were unable to
maintain control in the end, how the war was fought is worthy of study. The
imperialist power fought the war while successfully conducting social operations
to win over the support of the Angolans and restructuring their military to a
lighter force that could keep up with the insurgents better. (Beckett 2001, 13-15).
In Algeria, the French tried to hold power from 1954 until 1962 when they left.
One particularly relevant lesson is the effectiveness of the Morice Line at
cutting off the insurgents in Algeria from outside support. (Beckett 2001, 6-9).
The discussion of each case will focus in particular on the means that yielded
either particular success or important lessons.
The following is an explanation of the different methods of counterinsurgency
that will be studied later. While all the counterinsurgency campaigns mounted
contained a social-operations part to win the hearts and minds of the native
inhabitants, the Portuguese and the British conducted theirs with considerable
success. Social operations included providing better services, such as medical
care and education, to righting past wrongs with the goal of gaining loyalty.
All imperial powers used police to combat the insurgents; however, the British
and, to a lesser scale, the Portuguese deployed police to not only enforce laws
but to show their presence as a good thing to the locals. The Portuguese
significantly retrained and reequipped their military when the fighting in
Angola began in an effort to make their soldiers less abrasive towards the local
population. The French were the only power to build a defensive line, which cut
off the insurgents inside Algeria from outside support. The British and, to a
reduced degree, the Portuguese used a large number of small patrols in an effort
to make contact with the insurgents in order to hunt them down. The following
chart shows the five methods on a graph ranging from low coercion to high
coercion.
Low Coercion High Coercion
Social Operations Police Retrained Military Defensive Line Heavy Patrolling
Social operations rank as low coercion; there is little force involved since it
concentrates on winning the support of the local population by improving their
standard of living and granting more rights (Cann 1997, 145). Police are next on
the continuum because, while they do employ force in some situations, in most
circumstances it is much less overwhelming than that of the military. The police
enforce the laws and normally try to arrest people, not kill them (Newsinger
2002, 41). Retrained military is in the middle of the continuum because the
soldiers have been taught to interact in a friendly manner with the civilians
and to try to avoid civilian casualties as much as possible (Cann 1997, 71). The
defensive line ranks next on the scale because it is designed to stop insurgents
from infiltrating the country at the border and cut off those insurgents inside
the country from outside support. To accomplish this, what essentially is a wall
is built and garrisoned by a number of soldiers (Horne 1987, 262). The most
coercive is heavy patrolling, which has the goal of hunting down and killing all
of the insurgents. Many small patrols are sent out to find the insurgents so a
larger force can be sent in to destroy the base.
Britain in Malaya, 1948-1960
Historical Background
Beginning about 1400, a city in Malaya - Melaka - became increasingly important
in controlling the spice trade due to its close proximity to the shipping
routes. This success attracted traders from all over the world and the attention
of the Europeans. The Portuguese, who were the first Europeans to arrive, seized
Melaka in 1511. Their dominance was assured by a series of Papal Bulls that drew
an imaginary line near the Cape Verde Island and gave all the land to the east
to Portugal while the west went to Spain. In 1641, the Dutch took the land from
the Portuguese and soon after dominated all the trade in the area (Andaya and
Andaya 1982, 57-74).
The Dutch in 1824 surrendered all of Malaya to the British, who before long had
either direct or indirect control over the peninsula. To increase their revenues
from Malaya, the British expanded tin mining and in the late 1800s brought in
rubber trees from Brazil. A number of Chinese workers were imported to operate
the plantations and mines (Andaya and Andaya 1982, 121-137). The Japanese seized
Malaya in 1942 and held onto it until the end of the war. During the Japanese
occupation, the main resistance came from the Malayan Communist Party (MCP),
which was one of the few, well-structured organizations in prewar Malaya.
Interestingly, the overwhelming majority of the MCP members were not Malayans
but actually part of the sizeable Chinese population living in Malaya. A number
of non-communist Malayans were drawn to the MCP to fight during the Japanese
occupation. These recruits were gladly taken in by the MCP, which converted many
to its cause by war's end (Short 1975, 19-24). The MCP, which was supported by
and had a number of leaders trained by the British during the war, received
airdrops of weapons and supplies from the Allies. Practical considerations such
as aircraft range, however, meant that little was delivered until the final year
of the war. By the time the fighting ended, the MCP had built up a considerable
arsenal of weapons, including a great many taken from the surrendering Japanese;
some were turned over to the British when they returned, but many others were
hidden away (Leary 1995, 9-12).
In September 1945, the British began to return to Malaya and were greeted with
much enthusiasm by the Malayans, who hoped for a return to the order and the
prosperity that was present before the Japanese invasion. However, these
unrealistic expectations that the war-torn land would soon be the way it had
been before would not happen because of inept British policies, a lack of
personnel, and a shortage of funds (Stubbs 1989, 10-14). Overall, the immediate
postwar years were not easy for Malaya with differences in wages and large-scale
labor unrest throughout the territory, including countless strikes. While the
British were in the process of giving up some of their other areas of control,
including India and Palestine, Malaya was exceedingly important for economic
reasons. Britain was all but bankrupt after World War II, and Malaya earned more
money each year in rubber and tin sales than Britain did in exporting goods. The
British realized that eventually they would have to give Malaya independence;
however, many thought that this was perhaps twenty to twenty-five years down the
line and, even then, it was assumed that Malaya would remain under strong
British influence (Newsinger 2002, 40-42). The new government proved its
ineptitude by managing to alienate nearly every segment of the population one
time or another through police harassment, poor economic planning, a rice
shortage, and a high cost of living. This, coupled with the poor economic
situation, led to increasing civil discontentment in the years after World War
II (Stubbs 1989, 36-38).
Malayan Insurgency
By early 1948, a number of local communist cells began a grass-roots terrorism
campaign without approval from the Malayan Communist Party hierarchy. The MCP
was not a well-organized insurgent movement; the local commanders often had
infrequent contact with their superiors. The MCP was the political branch of the
insurgency while the military wing was the Malayan Races Liberation Army, a
misleading name since nearly all of its members were ethnic Chinese. In the
first six months of 1948, over one hundred murders and abductions were
attributed to the communist forces; its local commanders, many of whom felt they
should have never given the British a chance to return after the Japanese
surrendered, essentially forced the MCP into a conflict. The MCP planned to
target some British government employees and businessmen for assassination and
use fear to drive out the others (Leary 1995, 9-12).
On July 19, 1948, the British declared a state of emergency following the
killing of three estate (plantation) owners a few days earlier. However, the
killings were merely the final excuse for declaring the Emergency, which gave
the British significantly more latitude in arresting and detaining suspects; the
British government had been under increasing pressure to take retaliatory action
against the escalating violence. Both the British and the MCP realized war was
coming, but the actual declaration of the Emergency caught the communists by
surprise before a number of them could go underground, and some were
subsequently arrested (Stubbs 1989, 60-62). While the MCP had experience in
guerrilla operations previously, likewise the British had a good deal of
background in combating guerrilla movements. Since World War I, they had fought
numerous insurgencies: Ireland (1919-1921), Iraq Revolt (1920), Arab Revolt
(1936-1939), and Palestine (1945-1948); they also were involved in the Greek
Civil War (1945-1949) (Beckett 2001, 28-30).
To fight the communists initially in 1948, the British Colonial Government in
Malaya could marshal a force of about 10,000 policemen, who were mostly Malay,
and a total of ten infantry battalions, which were a mixture of British, Gurkha,
and Malayans totaling 7,000 men, although only 4,000 were riflemen. Facing the
British, the MCP could initially call upon a force of somewhere between 3,000
and 23,000; although 5,000 is a common and reasonable number, it is believed
that even the communists did not accurately know the size of their own forces
(Leary 1995, 12-13).
The initial strategy implemented by the British proved to be clumsy and
ineffective against the guerrillas and, in fact, drove a number of people into
the arms of the MCP. There are several instances of the military burning down
entire villages that were only briefly occupied by, or had aided, the
guerrillas; additionally, the army had a propensity to shoot people who were
acting suspiciously. Neither of these actions helped the British win friends.
Furthermore, company-sized patrols in the jungle were both common and
ineffective. However, in late 1948 the MCP withdrew deeper into the jungle to
train and regroup, thereby giving the British some much-needed time to reform
(Stubbs 1989, 66-93).
In March of 1950, a new British commander was assigned to Malaya. General Briggs
soon implemented a different plan to defeat the MCP by recognizing the
underlying problem of the insurrection as a political one. The new priority was
to eliminate the massive political support the MCP drew, mainly from the Chinese
population. Nearly five hundred new villages were created to separate the
numerous Chinese squatters from the insurrectionists; at the same time, ethnic
communities (including the Chinese) gained more rights, including citizenship.
The new villages for squatters had hospitals as well as schools, and those who
lived there were given the deeds to the land they farmed in 1951 (Beckett 2001,
27-28).
The changes introduced by General Briggs proved to be critical in defeating the
MCP. By 1953, the guerrillas were clearly losing ground and on the defensive.
The continued patrols, combined with political changes, created a situation
where the MCP was unable to replace their losses. Malaya was given independence
from Britain in 1957 with the multiracial Alliance Party coming to democratic
power. Surviving MCP members were continually pushed further into the jungles
while becoming even more removed from their support. In July 1960, the Emergency
was declared over while a small number of insurgents remained in remote jungle
areas (Beckett 2001, 143-145).
When the British arrived in Malaya in 1824, they expanded tin mining and created
rubber plantations using Chinese labor. However, when Malaya fell to the
Japanese during World War II, the only real resistance came from a communist
group that, at the time, the British supported. When the British returned to
Malaya after the war ended, they were in desperate need of the revenue that
could be produced; to the dismay of the population, the postwar years did not
bring stability and wealth. In 1948, the communist insurgents began their
campaign but soon withdrew into the dense jungle. By 1953, the British clearly
had the upper hand, and in 1957 Malaya was given independence. The Emergency
ended in 1960 with the hunting down of nearly all the insurgents. The British
campaign against the MCP was helped in large part by the tactics employed. The
two notable items that will be studied further are the British use of police and
also the switch from a few large patrols to many smaller ones.
Counterinsurgency in Malaya
British Employment of Police
Background
It should be remembered that at the start of the Emergency it was the police
force that was largely responsible for the failure to maintain law and order
since 1945. The British quickly set about trying to dramatically increase the
size of the police force, in part because additional military forces would not
be as available as the British liked due to a downsized, postwar military and
commitments elsewhere. In two years, the regular police force tripled in size
from a little over 10,000 to nearly 30,000, a level where it stayed throughout
the Emergency. Most of the new police recruits were Malayan with the Chinese
constantly being underrepresented because of a general unwillingness to serve.
In early 1949, nearly five hundred new officers arrived from outside Malaya;
most were former policemen in Palestine, although some came from India and Hong
Kong. While their experience was helpful, they brought a number of problems with
them, notably the lack of speaking either Malayan or Chinese that was compounded
by little knowledge of the local customs and culture. There were always more
police in Malaya than soldiers; especially after 1950 when the military spent
much of its time in the jungle, the police became the public face of the British
government to the local inhabitants.
Police Action by the British
Within days of the Emergency being declared, the police swept into action
detaining 600 communists and suspected-communist sympathizers; by the end of
August, nearly 4,500 leftists were imprisoned. Because of the state of
emergency, trials were not always necessary and many suspected MCP members were
held without charges. The initial crackdown was successful in that several key
leaders of the Communist movement were captured because they were surprised by
the sudden declaration of the Emergency and did not have time to retreat into
the jungle. By the time reality sank in, the MCP was then in a full-scale
guerrilla war for which they were not entirely prepared. With many of their
members and supporters arrested, the MCP was then forced into a number of
piecemeal raids from their jungle bases, instead of a series of coordinated
attacks all through Malaya that would have been preferable. Besides putting the
MCP in a tactically poor situation, the initial police action also helped to
seal the communists off from the urban areas. A quarter of the Malayan
population lived in cities at the time, including a significant number of ethnic
Chinese who were essentially the only members of the MCP. The police helped to
cut off the insurrectionists from a number of possible recruits (Newsinger 2002,
41-43).
For the first several months of the Emergency, the fighting consisted of a
number of erratic firefights in which the police forces were often involved.
Several police stations were raided, and patrols were ambushed while the police
struggled to keep informants and civilian collaborators from meeting an early
demise. By the end of 1948, the communists withdrew deeper into the jungles to
regroup and retrain, which bought the British much-needed time to bring in
reinforcements and create an intelligence network that they had been previously
lacking (Newsinger 2002, 41-45).
Additionally, the large police force helped the military by taking over many of
its guard duties, especially in the first several years of the insurrection. By
replacing the military, who were manning various security posts by guarding
bridges, road junctions, checkpoints and the like, the police freed up more
soldiers to patrol the jungles for the MCP. However, the downside of this was
that the police, who were not trained for heavy combat, often suffered
noticeably higher casualties than the guerrillas in raids on these posts and in
ambushes where the army suffered less in the same circumstances (Short 1975,
210-214).
The state of emergency that the British imposed on Malaya was very much akin to
a police state, and the British did not waste the power. By 1950, 8,500 were
being held in detention camps; most people never had a trial or were even
formally accused of a crime. Additionally, the British did not hesitate to
deport opponents, mostly ethnic Chinese - the group that the MCP drew its
membership from; about ten thousand were deported in 1949. Additionally, the
death penalty was made available for crimes such as possessing a firearm or
explosives; by the end of the Emergency, 226 communists had been hung. While
mass arrests and deportations were not popular with the ethnic Chinese, the rest
of the Malayan population remained largely unaffected by them, so they were not
largely concerned with the arrests. To be sure, many of the powers given and
used by the British were rather draconian and perhaps unnecessarily so,
especially concerning the expanded crimes for which one could be executed.
However, there is generally little doubt that these measures helped to play a
major role in weakening the communists, first by imprisoning several leaders and
a number of members and later by weakening the base of support for the MCP by
literally removing them from the country (Newsinger 2002, 44-46).
The police also played a critical role beginning in 1952 with the so- called
?hearts and minds? attempt to reduce support for the MCP by offering support and
aid to those who helped the government. As part of this, police replaced
soldiers in many local Chinese villages because it would be easier to build a
dialog with the locals by having police who were stationed there permanently,
instead of soldiers whose units would be rotated out of the villages. To make
the police better at their new, more public roles, many were retrained from the
paramilitary role they played earlier to that of a more typical police force.
The police became less on edge; the fear of guerrilla attacks weakened in 1953
as the shooting war became much quieter, which in turn made the police not as
ill-disposed to the public at large. The Malayan government mounted several
public relations exercises with the police to show them as servants of the civic
sector who were there to protect the civilians. These factors had a positive
impact as far as the British were concerned; the Chinese civilians began to
trust the police, and communication between the two groups increased (Stubbs
1989, 155-164).
Conclusion for Police Employment
Due to a lack of available soldiers when the Emergency was first declared, the
police were forced into a paramilitary role to help fight the insurgents. In a
similar manner in Afghanistan, the police are being forced to do more than mere
law enforcement and are often exposed to considerable danger. Because there are
not enough international soldiers present in Afghanistan to protect the entire
country thoroughly and the Afghan National Army is currently pitifully small and
still undergoing training, the Afghan police often help guard American bases and
patrol roads (Rohde 2003).
The police in Malaya were successful in arresting a number of MCP members when
the Emergency was first declared. After using the broad powers granted them by
the Emergency, the police detained significant numbers of suspected communist
sympathizers. The American forces made sweeps of Afghan villages looking for
suspects but had a habit of arresting anyone who seemingly got in their way.
Unfortunately, a lack of adequate translators tends to put many people in this
category. These untargeted arrests of local Afghanis are normally short-lived
with the detainees often released later that day. However, these often-unwarranted
arrests tend to upset the local Afghan villagers, thereby further straining
relations with the international forces (Gall 26 April 2003).
Heavy Patrolling
Background
When the Emergency began in 1948, the ten battalions of British infantry were
spread rather thinly throughout Malaya trying to put down a guerrilla movement
the size of the MCP. The British Army initially began to conduct operations in
line with the traditional method of ?Imperial Policing,? which called for large-scale
infantry sweeps of suspected guerrilla camps. However, given that Malaya was
about fifty thousand square miles and four-fifths was covered by dense, tropical
rain forests, which were ideal hiding places, it should not come as much of a
surprise that these sweeps met with little success. The MCP would receive word
from local sympathizers that a large number of Malayan government soldiers were
approaching the area and, as the soldiers were still moving into position, the
guerrillas would be fleeing (Newsinger 2002, 44-47).
Additionally, these large patrols - normally company size (about 100 men) to
battalion size (700 men) - won few friends from the civilian populace near the
towns where they operated. There were numerous incidences where, after an
unsuccessful search of the jungle, soldiers would take out their frustrations on
some of the nearby, uncooperative Chinese villagers. The worst such incident
occurred in December 1948 when British soldiers massacred twenty-four Chinese
villagers who apparently had little, if any, loyalty to the MCP and were merely
at the wrong place at the wrong time (Newsinger 2002, 47-49).
It was only a matter of months until the British Army realized that the tactics
they were employing netted little in the way of results. In late 1948, the
British began a campaign to drive the MCP out of the jungles and into the open
where conventional forces could annihilate them. They timed several large-scale
sweeping operations hoping to catch as many communists as possible. The first
week ended with no discernible results; the British called for artillery and air
strikes into the jungle to help dislocate the MCP. However, the shells and bombs
struck only an empty jungle; the operation was soon called off and could be
considered nothing but a dismal failure (Jones 2001, 81-89).
New Tactics
With the Greek Civil War winding down in early 1949, some of the British Special
Air Service (SAS) commandos were withdrawn since they were no longer needed. The
SAS was looking for a reason to justify their continued existence out of the
very real fear that they would be shut down by conventional Army officers, who
believed the SAS were glory hounds and unnecessary. As the British in Malaya
were requesting more forces, a small number of SAS men arrived with hopes of
proving themselves useful in addition to the six infantry battalions that were
recently deployed. Soon after, the SAS men were given permission to set up the
Jungle Guerrilla Force, which was commonly known as Ferret Force. This new force
was essentially a duplicate of the raiding forces the SAS had organized in
Greece with the goal of locating and destroying insurgents. The Ferret Force was
composed of four groups with about eighty men each. Nearly a third of the men
were Chinese, who were important for their language ability; there were also a
number of local trackers. The Ferret Forces were deployed in the jungle for up
to three weeks while small teams would search for the MCP (Jones 2001, 88-91).
The Ferret Forces soon began to prove that the small-unit patrolling tactics
they employed had a great deal of value. The British, who still continued to
perform company and battalion-sized sweeps in accordance to standing policy,
searched for the MCP but had negligible results. Many local army commanders,
however, began to conduct smaller patrols, often squad to platoon size. Instead
of searching a wide area, it became common to conduct ?saturation patrolling?
where a number of small parties intensively patrolled a limited area for several
days on end. While contacts with the MCP in the jungle were still limited due to
poor intelligence on enemy locations, these new tactics did help the British
take the fight to the MCP (Jones 2001, 96-99).
Through 1950, the British continued to mount battalion-sized operations into the
jungle, although even the most stubborn officers began to conduct small-unit
patrols as well. The effectiveness of these patrols was increased when the
British set up a school for teaching jungle warfare (Jones 2001, 109). By 1951,
it became commonplace for small detachments, often SAS troops, to spend up to
six weeks in the jungle being re-supplied occasionally by aircraft and for small
patrols from conventional infantry units to last there upwards of a month.
Abandoning large-infantry sweeps, these patrols essentially became the only way
the British deployed their forces. Since the local Malayans had little contact
with these patrols, it caused them little duress while the MCP was seriously
hampered. From the latter part of 1953, when the MCP was obviously being
weakened, until the end of the Emergency in 1960, the general tactics employed
by the military remained very much the same. Patrols were usually small by
conventional British standards, ordinarily only about fifteen men, and they were
generally in the jungle for two weeks. The SAS would be used in an area
suspected of having large numbers of enemy units and were, in some cases, on
patrol for three months at a stretch. Helicopters, which saw their first
widespread use in Malaya in 1953, made resupplying and deploying patrols in
remote parts of the country possible (Jones 2001, 125-137). As the MCP lost
ground to the British, they also lost the ability to recruit new members and
could not replace their casualties, thereby causing them to give up more ground.
This cycle continued until the MCP was almost completely hunted down by 1960
(Newsinger 2002, 57-59).
Conclusion for Heavy Patrolling
The large-scale-company to battalion-sized patrols the British initially
preferred in Malaya met with little success. The MCP was largely able to avoid
these slow and cumbersome sweeps by the military, due in part to warnings
provided by sympathetic villagers. Unfortunately, it seems that the United
States Army is determined to use large sweeps in an effort to hunt down the
Taliban remnants. In one instance, an American battalion conducted a three-week
operation conducting a village-by-village search over a hundred-mile-long
valley. In the end, this operation involving hundreds of American soldiers
netted little; the Taliban leader, who was the main target, is thought to have
slipped away along with his family, and only a handful of suspected militants
were killed (Gall 5 March 2003).
The British used SAS teams and Ferret Forces on extended patrols to find the
insurgents and then engage them. These missions in extreme cases could last up
to three months but up to six weeks was more commonplace. American Army Special
Forces are well-trained to carry out this kind of mission, but they are
understrength as a unit and their skills of dealing with locals are needed
elsewhere. When the Special Forces do mount a patrol, it is often by jeep with
the goal of visiting a nearby village. However, these routes are predictable
and, in at least one case, resulted in a Taliban ambush killing two American
soldiers (Gall 15 April 2003).
The British Experience in Malaya: A Summary
The British victory against the Malayan Communist Party in Malaya was not due to
any one tactic employed; rather, it was a result of a number of factors. Arrests
made by the police, along with their active role in patrolling key areas in the
first year of the Emergency, helped to buy time for the British to receive
reinforcements and to develop more-effective plans. One of the most successful
tactics was heavy patrolling in areas of suspected MCP presence. These patrols,
especially ones conducted by the SAS, would last several weeks while searching
for trails of the MCP in remote areas of the jungle. The police and patrols
eventually began to deny the MCP from various parts of the country; this kept
the insurgents from gaining new recruits, which further weakened them until 1960
when the last remnants were hunted down.
Portugal in Angola, 1961-1974
Historical Background
Between 1961 and 1974, Portugal was forced to mount three simultaneous
counterinsurgency campaigns in the African lands of Guinea, Angola, and
Mozambique. The Angolan guerrilla movement was the first and largest; therefore,
in the following section it will be more discussed than the other two countries.
However, the tactics and programs which occurred in one of the three regions
were, in nearly every case, being used in the other two as well. Portuguese
forces were routinely rotated between the three areas as the demands changed.
The Portuguese history in sub-Saharan Africa is a lengthy one and accurately
described as the ?first in and last out.? The Portuguese first reached the area
in 1443 with the goal of obtaining slaves, gold, and other valuables for the
European market and were the first Westerners to make any significant
penetrations below the Sahara. The commerce was made into a crown monopoly where
individuals could obtain contracts to run their enterprises. The crown
strengthened the position of its monopoly by signing a number of treaties with
African sovereigns and other European states. Eventually, a series of Papal
Bulls drew an imaginary line near the Cape Verde Island and gave all the land to
the east to Portugal while the west went to Spain. Spain and Portugal received
the right to colonize as a reward for their efforts in spreading Christianity.
For a time, no Catholic country would violate this for it had the force of law,
and Protestant countries did not dare violate it out of fear. By the early
seventeenth century, slave trading had become so profitable that few Portuguese
traders concerned themselves with other commodities. Nevertheless, over the
course of the century the Portuguese slowly lost most of their slave-trading
ports to the Dutch (Newitt 1981, 1-10).
The first three centuries of trade with Africa helped to play a role in leaving
both Portugal and her territories underdeveloped. The relationship between
Portugal and Africa was not equitable; Portugal would bring in goods while
taking away resources and, oftentimes, people. However, unlike many other
nations that traded with Africa, for the most part Portugal was not selling its
own products. By the eighteenth century, the Portuguese had invested little in
the future development of its lands; instead, it chose to transport other
nations' goods to sell in its territories, which in turn meant it never
developed industry as other European nations did (Newitt 1981, 11-15).
When the slave trade was finally abolished in 1836, the Portuguese were forced
to find another ?resource? which could be profitable in their lands. To do this,
the Portuguese would have to penetrate the interior of the continent, a process
that they had only halfheartedly tried before, each time ending in failure.
However, by this point, the other European countries had cut up Africa in the
Berlin Conference, and Portugal could do little to compete with the industrial
powers when it was hardly developed (Humbaraci and Muchnik 1974, 87-93). This
process was to prove to be a lengthy one, since nearly every time the Portuguese
advanced, the local African tribes would mount a counteroffensive of their own;
resistance was not fully put down in most cases until the 1930s. During the
First World War, the Portuguese fought off several large-scale German offensives
in Angola and Mozambique (Beckett 2001, 193-194).
The Portuguese claimed that Africans could obtain full citizenship, but this was
a rare occurrence. Compounding this situation were the exploitative economic and
social policies that kept the African in a poor position. If an African was
somehow able to earn citizenship, it could not be passed to his children, who
would then have to go through the process themselves. These factors helped to
contribute to the eventual insurgent movements in Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique
(Humbaraci and Muchnik 1974, 109-112).
Insurgency in Angola
The guerrilla movements in all three countries have much in common, including
the fact that they were formed and led by the tiny middle class of Africans who
were educated enough to realize the unfairness of their situation and were all
nationalists. While there had been some talk of fighting the Portuguese imperial
system beginning in the 1930s, the first clandestine groups began to form in
Angola in 1953, and in 1956 the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola
(MPLA) was formed (Humbaraci and Muchnik 1974, 109-120). The MPLA was strongly
Marxist and eventually had some of its members trained in Bulgaria and the
Soviet Union. The Portuguese put down the MPLA, which began its uprising in
early 1961, with excessive brutality (Beckett 2001, 76-77). The Angolan National
Liberation Front (FNLA) drew much of its support from tribes located near the
border with the recently freed Belgium Congo; this allowed the FNLA to use that
land as a staging ground. The FNLA launched its first offensive in Angola in
March of 1961 relying on sheer numbers. Its people were very poorly trained,
even by guerrilla standards, and showed a great unwillingness to engage the
Portuguese security forces under any condition, including a favorable one (Cann
1997, 21-23).
When the uprisings in 1961 began, Portugal had only eight thousand soldiers in
Angola, a modest number for a country of about five million people. While the
MPLA?s initial effort was a dismal failure, beginning in March the FNLA had
success in destroying a number of plantations while butchering the owners and
overrunning a number of government outposts, relying on a concentration of force
to overcome any resistance. However, the FNLA could not maintain its momentum;
by October 1961, the reinforced Portuguese Army had forced the FNLA to give up
its land. This bloody series of events shocked the Portuguese public and helped
to harden them for a protracted campaign to maintain law and order in the
territories. Adding to the trauma of the Angola uprising was the loss of the Goa
colony to Indian forces in December of that year (Cann 1997, 25-31).
With a lull in the fighting towards the end of 1961, the Portuguese wasted
little time in formulating plans for fighting what they correctly believed would
be a drawn-out conflict. They had been studying the lessons learned from
previous counterinsurgency campaigns, especially the British in Malaya. The
government immediately set about enlarging the size of the military, including
locally recruited forces in the colonies. The army also began retraining its
forces from a more conventionally trained infantry to a lighter force ready for
extended patrols (Cann 1997, 49-51). While the military was gearing up for the
expected campaign, the government also moved to reform the administration and
fix some of the shortcomings of which it was accused. The Portuguese campaign
for the ?Hearts and Minds? was quite effective in the long run (Newitt 1981,
228-230).
While the war in Angola continued, it was never to become an extremely intense
and bloody conflict after the atrocities committed by all parties in the
beginning. The MPLA and FNLA drew the majority of their support from a few
tribes that were mostly located on the border; as such, the war stayed almost
exclusively on the frontier. By 1964, the Angolan insurgents were forced to
operate out of neighboring countries because of intense, Portuguese pressure.
Casualties remained relatively low, and the war rarely affected the daily lives
of civilians, in either Portugal or the colonies. Both sides were noted for
treating each other's prisoners well. When fighting broke out in Guinea in 1963
and in Mozambique the following year, it followed the general pattern of Angola
by not having heavy combat zones. Guinea was the most heavily contested, largely
because the small size of the country made contacts between the army and
guerrillas much more likely. One Portuguese officer commented that the war was
one of ?rockets and mines versus helicopters,? referring to the habit of the
guerrilla groups to fire rockets occasionally at Portuguese bases and place
mines on roads, while the Portuguese would often use helicopters to attack them
(Newitt 1981, 229-232).