Insurgent’s Handbook T.O.C
by Stan Goff
I want to begin this section by thanking Ken Lawrence and Kristian Williams for the excellent pamphlet The New State Repression (Tarantula Press). We don’t use pamphlets enough any more. From The New State Repression:
Today’s political repression differs fundamentally from the repression practiced around the world in the past. The most basic difference is on the level of strategy — the general approach of the state, the outlook of the ruling class.
Their belief is that insurgency is not an occasional, erratic idiosyncrasy but a constant occurrence — permanent insurgency, which calls for a strategy of permanent repressionas the full-time task of the security forces.
In preparing to examine the validity of this claim, let’s go to the source: the US government.
DEFINITION OF INSURGENCY
1-1. An insurgency is organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict. It is a protracted politicomilitary struggle designed to weaken government control and legitimacy while increasing insurgent control. Political power is the central issue in an insurgency. (from FMI 3-07.22 , the US Army’s latest field manual on “counterinsurgency”, October 2004)
This could have been written by Mao Zedong.
It does not say simply armed conflict. It says subversion and armed conflict.
This particular field manual was written to incorporate the lessons of Iraq. In a very real sense, the tail was wagging the dog, since rather than reformulate their basic premises about insurgency and counter-insurgency (I/CI), they reformulated their experiences in Iraq to fit with their preconceptions about I/CI. Welcome to the American government.
The American way of war includes mass, power, and the use of sophisticated smart weapons. However, large main force engagements that characterized conflict in World War II, Korea, and Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom in the Middle East have become the exceptions in American warfare. Since the American Revolution, the Army has conducted stability operations, which have included counterinsurgency operations. Over the past half-century alone, the Army gained considerable experience in fighting insurgents in Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Philippines), Latin America (Colombia, Peru, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua), Africa (Somalia), Southwest Asia (Afghanistan), and now the Middle East (Iraq). Dealing with counterinsurgency since the Vietnam War has fallen largely on SOF [special operations forces]; however, conventional forces have frequently come into contact with insurgent forces that seek to neutralize the inherent advantages of size, weaponry, and conventional force TTP [techniques, tactics, and principles]. Insurgents use a combination of actions that include terror, assassination, kidnapping, murder, guerrilla tactics such as ambushes, booby traps, and improvised explosive devices aimed at US and multinational forces, the host country’s leaders, and ordinary citizens.
While this introductory statement is self-consciously inclusive of the recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan (neither of which has been adequately or accurately interpreted), it does freely admit that US special operations forces were involved in places where the US had heretofore denied they were actually participating, i.e., Colombia, Peru, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, the first four in which I personally participated in US military missions between 1983-92. I was in Vietnam, as an infantryman, in 1970-71.
Nowhere does this document acknowledge directly that the conventional capacity of US armed forces makes asymmetric warfare (which they selectively call terrorism, depending on the political content of specific actions) more likely, though this can be easily inferred. The most remarkable thing, however, about this doctrine (FM’s represent doctrine), is the utter inability to differentiate between, say, Colombia, Nicaragua, and Iraq. What this tells us is that either (1) they don’t know any better, or (2) acknowledging the differences carries too high a degree of political risk in the indoctrination of military officers. In either case, the implication is the same for our purposes here: they are hobbled by their own doctrine. To this we shall return.
Counterinsurgency is those military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency. It is an offensive approach involving all elements of national power; it can take place across the range of operations and spectrum of conflict. It supports and influences an HN’s IDAD [host nation’s internal defense and development] program. It includes strategic and operational planning; intelligence development and analysis; training; materiel, technical, and organizational assistance; advice; infrastructure development; tactical-level operations; and many elements of PSYOP [psychological operations]. Generally, the preferred methods of support are through assistance and development programs. Leaders must consider the roles of military, intelligence, diplomatic, law enforcement, information, finance, and economic elements (MIDLIFE) in counterinsurgency. (emphasis added)
Here we have to make a conceptual leap. The US Department of Homeland Security is, at its very base, a counter-insurgency organization, imperial references to “host nations” notwithstanding.
We cannot start the history of the I/CI bias of the US state with 9-11. That pivotal event was used merely to accelerate a process already in motion, and to author a massive government reorganization that would consolidate a higher level of executive power and simultaneously bust the government workers’ union (American Federation of Government Employees — AFGE). This makes more sense than many realize, because ever since the Vietnam occupation, when US domestic security adopted a I/CI model for population control, breaking mass organizations like unions — already a part of I/CI doctrine abroad — has been integral to the I/CI doctrines.
The most infamous of the US state’s domestic counterinsurgency operations was the FBI-directed counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO), a massive, often extra-legal covert operations campaign directed at a whole range of social activist organizations and individuals in the 1960s and 70s.
The original adoption of I/CI doctrine by domestic state security forces in the US was a panicked reaction to the social upheavals of the 1960s, most especially the Black Freedom Movement (BFM). The anti-war movement that emerged toward the end of this decade was largely facilitated by the ruling class disruptions caused by the BFM and the culture of resistance that was in its wake.
The Southern BFM, under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ella Baker, E. D. Nixon, and others, basing itself on a composite strategic approach of Ghandian non-violence and the unique Black culture of prophetic Prostestantism, succeeded in forcing an end to legal Apartheid in the US South. This disruption was so profound that the white, male ruling class in the US was forced to employ its own troops to resolve the fracture within that class. King’s 1968 assassination — likely with collaboration from elements within the federal government — decisively provoked the end of the non-violent strategic orientation that has so disoriented the US ruling stratum; but it created a new situation where the center of political gravity within the BFM shifted to militant Black nationalism, based in large cities, even in the North, and open urban rebellions — called race riots — accelerated after breaking out across the country in 1967. The mostly white, student-based anti-war movement, shortly after King’s assassination and the urban insurrections in reaction to it, were publicly attacked in a police riot during the Chicago-based convention of the Democratic Party.
More and more, the nation watched newsreels where American cities had more military uniforms in evidence than police uniforms. It was inevitable that the US white, male ruling class would begin to see their situation — the potential destabilization of power — as a state of war.
There was one country that had already accumulated experience in domestic, imperial warfare, and that was Great Britain in Northern Ireland. The theorist of that British “local” occupation and of several distant ones (Kenya 1953-5, Malaya 1957, Cyprus 1962-4) was General Frank Kitson. He termed these multi-modal forms of resistance subversion and insurgency (S&I), and developed a doctrinal philosophy for confronting them: low-intensity operations, later to be reformulated by the US as low-intensity conflict (LIC). Kitson published this philosophy as a book in 1971, Low Intensity Operations - Subversion, Insurgency, and Peacekeeping (Faber & Faber, 1971). This was to differentiate it from the high-intensity conflict, as described in the excerpt above from the Army’s new field manual.
Paul Brennan, a member of the Irish resistance who has escaped from Long Kesh Prison and is in hiding, noted in 1993 that:
Northeast Ireland is the Central America of Great Britain. It is a population-control laboratory for the British military /constabulary/intelligence community to try to test the theories of General Frank Kitson. All present British policy, both political and military, can be found in his book “Low Intensity Operations”. The late general would be well pleased with the model northeast Ireland has become in providing a unique testing ground for his philosophies.
Brennan’s characterization of LIC (or I/CI doctrine) as being fundamentally based on the exercise of “population control” is an extremely important insight into this doctrine, particularly as it relates to domestic operations in the US. Obviously, population control has always been a preoccupation of the state. But I/CI makes some fundamental assumptions that shape population control practices.
“Their belief is,” again quoting Lawrence, “that insurgency is not an occasional, erratic idiosyncrasy but a constant occurrence — permanent insurgency, which calls for a strategy of permanent repression as the full-time task of the security forces.”
Kitson explicitly theorized two key aspects of the current approach: (1) that power automatically creates resistance, and that resistance is always a potential state of insurgency, even when things seem perfectly calm and stable, and (2) that in order to control the real enemy (the population), false enemies had to be employed to implant the state’s paranoia in the minds of the population in order to counter that latent resistance.
Ian Buckley, writing about Kitson, explains the latter.
It was…General Frank Kitson… who first thought up the concept that was later used in the formation of Al Qaeda. He called it the ‘pseudo gang’ - a state sponsored group used to advance an agenda, while discrediting the real opposition. The strategy was used in both Kenya and Northern Ireland. In the case of Northern Ireland, most of the violence that was attributed to ‘Loyalists’ was in actuality not their handiwork, but the result of the activities of the death squads affiliated to the British secret state.
Christian Parenti, who has done extensive research and writing on the US prison system — one of the key arms of US population control — explained in an interview:
I chart the rise of the emerging anti-crime police state in the United States from the 1960s to the present. The first wave of this current buildup that we’re experiencing, a wave that starts in the 1960s, can be seen in many ways as counterinsurgency by other means there’s no better example of this than [Nixon’s aide] H. R. Haldeman’s quote in his diary when discussing Nixon’s war on drugs: he tells that the president says the real issue is the blacks, and the solution is to devise a system of control that acknowledges this while not seeming to. That is their description of the war on drugs: a way of controlling insurgent populations and insurgent neighborhoods. By the 1980s the politics shift to some extent because there isn’t the same level of insurgency in America that there was in the ’60s and ’70s.It’s still very much about class and racial control…
The World Communist Conspiracy was replaced by the War on Drugs as a place-marker until the Global War on Terror could be constructed. This is classic Kitson.