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Finding the Elusive Keys to Ending Pervasive Insurgencies
Scott Stewart June 28th 2012
Stratfor
In recent weeks, insurgent forces in several countries have been forced
to withdraw from territories they once held. Somalia's al Shabaab, which was
pushed out of Mogadishu in October 2011, was ejected from Afmadow on May 30.
The group now runs the risk of losing its hold once again on the port city of
Kismayo, an important logistical and financial hub for al Shabaab.
In Syria, the Free Syrian Army and other rebel groups were forced out of
the city of Idlib and Homs' Baba Amr district in March. They also withdrew from
Al-Haffah on June 13.
Meanwhile in Yemen, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has been
forced to retreat from towns it took control of last year in southern Abyan
province, including Jaar, Shaqra and Zinjibar. The organization controlled the
area it seized from the government through its Ansar al-Sharia front
organization. AQAP was able to capitalize on the infighting that began in Yemen
in 2011 and successfully diverted the government's focus away from AQAP and
other militant groups. But in February, the election of new Yemeni President
Abd Rabboh Mansour Hadi allowed the rift created by the infighting to be slowly
healed. As a result, a combination of Yemeni soldiers and local tribesmen,
backed by U.S. intelligence and fire support, have been able to push back AQAP
and Ansar al-Sharia in recent weeks.
Losing these cities will immediately and significantly affect AQAP's
ability to reach its goal of establishing an emirate based on Sharia law in
southern Yemen. However, the loss of this territory will not mean an end to the
group, just as losses of territory by militants in Somalia and Syria do not mean
those insurgent groups have been defeated definitively. The reason for this
rests in the very nature of insurgent warfare. To insurgent groups, the loss of
territory is a setback, but is only one episode in what they intend to be a
very long war.
Ebbs and Flows
One of the basic tenets of modern Western warfare, as articulated by
theorists such as Carl von Clausewitz, is the desire to destroy the enemy in
quick, decisive battles that break the enemy's ability -- and will -- to fight.
In contrast, one of the basic doctrines of insurgent warfare, as articulated by
theorists such as Mao Zedong and Vo Nguyen Giap, is to decline decisive battle
when the odds are not favorable and to live to fight another day. The insurgent
wants to prolong the battle and create a drawn-out, grinding war that will
gradually wear down the stronger enemy while insurgent forces build up enough
strength to fight a conventional war and defeat their opponents. Western
military leaders, then, seek to quickly resolve a war, while insurgents seek to
prolong it by any means -- even if this means ceding control of territory until
they can amass the strength to take it back.
In the modern jihadist context, this strategy was seen clearly in
Afghanistan. The Taliban, when faced with overwhelming U.S. airpower in 2001,
declined combat and permitted Northern Alliance ground forces to take control
of Afghanistan's cities, rather than stand and fight until they were destroyed.
The Taliban then launched a classic rural-based insurgency from the mountains
using Pakistan as a haven for logistics and training. Iraqi government forces
also took this approach when confronted by U.S. forces during the 2003
invasion.
Similarly, following the December 2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia,
Islamist militants from the Supreme Islamic Courts Council -- many of whom
would later go on to form al Shabaab -- declined to fight decisive battles and
instead took to harassing the Ethiopian army's extended supply lines. This
forced the Ethiopians to pull back from key cities they had captured, like
Kismayo, and allowed the militants to regain control of large portions of
southern Somalia. It is not unusual, then, for insurgent forces to take
territory, only to surrender it and reclaim it again later.
For insurgents, the operational concept is that if the enemy attacks in
force, they retreat; if the enemy stays in place, they conduct harassing
attacks; if the enemy tires, the insurgents press the attack; and if the enemy
retreats, the insurgents pursue. The idea is to apply prolonged pressure, both
physical and psychological, and to create a mounting number of casualties over
time. At the same time, the insurgent organization works to strengthen its own
organizational support base and military capability. The basic doctrine of
counterinsurgency is to deny insurgents the ability to establish and strengthen
their support base and improve their capability.
The support base is a critical element for any insurgency. By gaining
the sympathy of the population -- the human terrain -- the insurgents can rely
on the population not only for material support, recruits and shelter, but also
for intelligence. It blurs the human terrain, making it more difficult to
distinguish insurgents from the population. This is why the political element
of the insurgent effort was stressed so heavily in the theories of men like Mao
and Giap, who viewed their actions in terms of the people's war.
They also believed that a population's long-standing grievances give the
people the ability to endure suffering and heavy losses. The people therefore
have a stronger will to fight than the privileged government combatant or the
foreign imperialist invader. Having favorable human terrain also permits
insurgents to apply pressure to the enemy by using unconventional warfare in
rear areas with operations like sniper attacks, improvised explosive device
attacks, assassinations and kidnappings.
Controlling Territory
It requires far more resources and effort to control and govern
populated cities and towns than it does to conduct an insurgent campaign from
the jungles or mountains. Maintaining control of a city requires many people to
provide security while meeting the population's need for food, water,
electricity and medical care. Such demands would use up many of the resources
an insurgent organization would require to fight a protracted war of attrition,
so it is not unusual for insurgents to abandon cities and foist the
responsibility of caring for their populations upon the government. The goal in
this approach is to force the government to expend its resources in order to
meet the needs of the population, including security.
The insurgents can then come back to the cities with a small force to
conduct harassing attacks on security forces or those cooperating with security
forces, thus causing the government to invest even more resources in protecting
the cities and reducing the number of forces available to pursue and fight
insurgents in the countryside. Simply put, conducting insurgent attacks or
terrorist attacks against the government's power center takes far less
resources and manpower than it does to secure a town or city.
Because of this, withdrawing from a city or town allows a militant group
to actually increase the resources it has available to conduct attacks. But
though there are benefits to harassing attacks, insurgents must be careful to
avoid too many civilian casualties, because a high civilian death count can
turn the population against the group, as happened with the umbrella militant
organization Islamic State of Iraq in 2007.
Although there have been numerous urban guerilla movements -- and
indeed, there is an entirely separate doctrine for urban guerilla organizations
-- most insurgencies are based in rugged, ungoverned spaces. In such areas,
fighters can seek refuge, build bases and train. Such ungoverned spaces have
played an important role in the current insurgencies in Afghanistan, Somalia,
Yemen and Mali.
Another important consideration in many insurgent refuge spaces is the
insurgents' ability to use an international border to keep the government from
attacking them. This use of the borders was famously evidenced by the Viet
Cong's use of Cambodia and Laos. More
recently, this tactic has been utilized in the Taliban's use of Pakistan, the
Iraqis' use of Syria and Iran, the Tuaregs' use of Libya and other Sahel
countries, and the Syrian rebels' use of Turkey and Lebanon.
State sponsors can also provide significant help to insurgents. This was
seen in the Soviet and Chinese help given to the Viet Cong and Viet Minh; and
in more modern examples like the Iranian support for Iraqi insurgents, the
Eritrean support for al Shabaab or the U.S., Turkish and Arab support for
Syrian insurgents.
The real key in counterinsurgency is drying up the insurgents' base of
support. Once that happens, the insurgents lose their ability to use the
population as camouflage and as a source of recruits and material support, and
the intelligence advantage is tipped toward the government. It is also helpful
when the terrain available for insurgents to operate in is limited because it
can allow counterinsurgents to systematically maneuver their armed forces in a
way that forces the insurgents into open conflict.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, for example, waged an insurgency
against the Sri Lankan government from 1983 to 2009. The Sri Lankan government
defeated the insurgents after India and then China provided material, money and
advisers to government forces. That Sri Lanka is an island also served to
constrict the Tigers' movements and forced them to try to hold territory, which
ultimately led to their failure. Another successful suppression of insurgency
occurred in Malaya from 1948 to 1960, when the British army used forced
migration to separate the insurgents from their population and economic base.
This eventually forced the Malayan Races Liberation Army to fight in order to
attain necessary resources that are usually provided by the local population.
This alienated the insurgents from the population and eventually led to British
success.
Undercutting an insurgent group's support is normally quite difficult,
especially when the group has access to large areas of rugged terrain. In
Yemen, AQAP has been able to pull back from the towns it controlled to the
harsh and desolate hinterlands where it was born. In the wild, tribally
controlled areas of Yemen, the combination of hostile physical and human
terrain will make it difficult to find and kill insurgents. There have been
jihadists in Yemen since the late 1980s. They have long found shelter with the
conservative tribes from which many of the jihadists originally hailed and to
which they returned after fighting in places like Afghanistan. Many of the
foreign jihadists in Yemen and Pakistan have married into influential tribes to
increase their local support.
Syria's demographic situation and its long history as an
Alawite-dominated police state have cultivated a great deal of hostility
against the regime. It will be very difficult for the government to undercut
foreign or domestic support for the insurgents. As with Syria's past
insurgencies, Damascus will have to threaten and coerce the Sunni population
into submission to maintain its grip on power.
Somalia is a confusing jumble of competing clans that have withstood
attempts to govern them since the early 1990s. Even if al Shabaab becomes
severely damaged as an organization, clan-based Islamist militancy of one form
or another will persist in the region for the foreseeable future.
The insurgent strategy of fighting a long, protracted war means that
insurgents' recent withdrawals from cities and towns in Yemen, Syria and
Somalia do not necessarily mean that the wars in those regions will end anytime
soon.
Scott Stewart writes for Stratfor, from where this article is adapted.
