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STRATEGIC

STUDIES

INSTITUTE

The Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) is part of the U.S. Army War 

College and is the strategic-level study agent for issues related to 

national security and military strategy with emphasis on geostrategic analysis.

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External Research Associates Program

RESOLVING INSURGENCIES

Thomas R. Mockaitis

June 2011

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ii

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ISBN 1-58487-495-3
iii

FOREWORD

Counterinsurgency remains the most challenging 

form of conflict conventional forces face. Embroiled in 

the longest period of sustained operations in its history, the U.S. Army maintains a fragile peace in Iraq and 

faces a chronic insurgency in Afghanistan. In much of 

Africa, Asia, and Latin America, active insurgent conflicts continue and potential ones abound. The United 

States may become involved in some of these conflicts, 

either directly or by providing aid to threatened governments. Understanding how insurgencies may be 

brought to a successful conclusion is, therefore, vital 

to military strategists and policymakers.

The author, Dr. Thomas Mockaitis, examines in 

great detail how past insurgencies have ended and 

how current ones may be resolved. Drawing upon a 

dozen cases over half a century, the author identifies 

four ways in which insurgencies have ended. Clearcut victories for either the government or the insurgents occurred during the era of decolonization, but 

they seldom happen today. Recent insurgencies have 

often degenerated into criminal organizations committed to making money rather than fighting a revolution, or into terrorist groups capable of nothing more 

than sporadic violence. In a few cases, the threatened 

government has resolved the conflict by co-opting the 

insurgents. After achieving a strategic stalemate and 

persuading the belligerents that they have nothing 

to gain from continued fighting, these governments 

have drawn the insurgents into the legitimate political 

process through reform and concessions. This mono-
iv

graph concludes that such a co-option strategy offers 

the best hope of success in Afghanistan and in future 

counterinsurgency campaigns.

 

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute 
v

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THOMAS R. MOCKAITIS is Professor of History 

at DePaul University. He team-teaches terrorism and 

counterterrorism courses internationally with other 

experts through the Center for Civil-Military Relations at the Naval Post-Graduate School. He was the 

2004 Eisenhower Chair at the Royal Military Academy 

of the Netherlands. He has also lectured at the NATO 

School, the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff 

College, and the Canadian Forces Staff College, and 

presented papers at the Pearson Peacekeeping Center (Canada), the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst 

(UK), and the Austrian National Defense Academy. 

A frequent media commentator on terrorism and security matters, Dr. Mockaitis has provided commentary on Public Television, National Public Radio, BBC 

World News, all major Chicago TV stations, and various local radio programs. He appears regularly as a 

terrorism expert for WGN-TV News. He is the 2008 

recipient of the DePaul Liberal Arts and Sciences 

Cortelyou-Lowery Award for Excellence in Teaching, 

Scholarship, and Service. Dr. Mockaitis is the author 

of Iraq and the Challenge of Counterinsurgency (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), The “New” Terrorism: Myths 

and Reality (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), The Iraq 

War: Learning from the Past, Adapting to the Present, and 

Preparing for the Future (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies 

Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2007), Peacekeeping 

and Intrastate Conflict: the Sword or the Olive Branch? 

(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), British Counterinsurgency in the Post-Imperial Era (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 1995), and British Counterinsurgency: 1919-1960 (London, UK: Macmillan, 1990). 
He co-edited Grand Strategy and the War on Terrorism

with Paul Rich, (London, UK: Frank Cass, 2003) and 

The Future of Peace Operations: Old Challenges for a New 

Century with Erwin Schmidl (a special issue of Small 

Wars and Insurgencies, London, UK: Taylor and Francis 

2004). He is an editor of Small Wars and Insurgencies

and has also published numerous articles on unconventional conflict. His most recent book, a biography 

of Osama bin Laden, was published by Greenwood 

in early 2010. Dr. Mockaitis earned his B.A. in European history from Allegheny College, and his M.A. 

and Ph.D. in modern British and Irish history from the 

University of Wisconsin-Madison.

vi
vii

SUMMARY

The study of counterinsurgency (COIN) has 

focused disproportionately on its operational and 

tactical aspects at the expense of larger strategic 

considerations. Foremost among these neglected considerations is the vexing problem of how insurgencies 

actually end. Most studies presume that insurgencies, 

like conventional wars, conclude with a clear-cut victory by one side or the other. Preoccupation with the 

anti-colonial insurgencies following World War II has 

reinforced this thinking. However, consideration of a 

broader selection of conflicts reveals that most did not 

end in such a clear, decisive manner. 

This monograph examines 12 insurgencies clustered in four groups based upon how they ended: conflicts in which the insurgents won; conflicts in which 

the government won; insurgencies that degenerated 

into mere terrorism or criminality; and insurgencies 

resolved by co-opting the insurgents into legitimate 

politics through a negotiated settlement and reintegrating them into normal social life. The author argues 

that Group 4 insurgencies provide the best examples 

from which to derive lessons relevant to the United 

States acting in support of a state threatened with insurgency. From these lessons, a political strategy of 

co-option can be developed—a strategy combing diplomatic, informational, military, economic, financial, 

intelligence, and law enforcement assets in a unified 

effort. However, such a strategy can only work when 

there is sufficient political will to sustain the protracted effort necessary for it to succeed.

The monograph concludes with consideration of 

the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Based on conclu-
sions derived from the 12 case studies, it argues that 

the United States has devised the correct strategy for 

resolving the Iraq War, and that sufficient political 

will exists to see the conflict through to a successful conclusion. The prognosis for Afghanistan is far 

less optimistic. The United States adopted the correct strategy for that war only in 2009, long after the 

conflict had become a chronic insurgency in which 

the Taliban fund their operations through the opium 

trade and exercise shadow governance over much of 

the country. The conflict has also spread to Pakistan, 

which has proven to be a most reluctant ally. Under 

these circumstances, the chances of a clear-cut victory are remote. Even achieving a compromise peace 

through co-option will be difficult. The United States 

must consider that it might have to withdraw without a satisfactory resolution to the insurgency. In that 

case, it will need to engage whoever governs Afghanistan to hold them accountable for terrorism launched 

from Afghan territory.

viii
1

RESOLVING INSURGENCIES

INTRODUCTION 

Upon assuming command of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus announced to his 

troops that “we are in this to win.” Any commander 

taking over after the removal of his predecessor amid 

a storm of controversy and growing concern about a 

timetable for withdrawal would, of course, be expected to make such an assertion. However, the general’s 

remarks raise a nagging question that has plagued operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. What exactly 

does winning a contemporary counterinsurgency 

(COIN) campaign mean—destruction of the insurgent organization, elimination of insurgent leaders, 

creation of a peaceful stable state that can defend itself, or some kind of negotiated settlement? Difficulty 

answering this question stems from a disconnect between military and political strategy.

U.S. Military doctrine focuses on the use or threat 

of force to support a COIN campaign. It also calls for 

America’s armed forces to lend their considerable assets (transport, logistics, medical, etc.) to the nonkinetic aspects of the campaign. Based upon this doctrine, 

the Pentagon devises a strategy for bringing its assets 

to bear on the insurgents. However, since kinetic operations form but one part of a comprehensive COIN 

strategy, neither military doctrine nor the planning 

that flows from it can (nor should) devise such a strategy, which must come from the political leadership. 

Unfortunately, that leadership frequently relies on the 

military to solve political problems: “In case of emergency dial, 1-800 CALL ARMY.” As one commentary 

incisively put it, “There is a studied lack of acknowl-
2

edgement on the part of the U.S. Government that the 

Long War cannot be fought via conventional warfare 

or through a superficial recasting of insurgency and 

counterinsurgency.”1 Even when they do recognize 

the need for economic and political reforms, policymakers often subordinate these efforts to the military 

effort.

While the situation has improved over the past 

3 years with the adoption of new approaches to the 

conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the challenge of 

devising a comprehensive COIN strategy remains. 

Nowhere is this challenge more clearly articulated 

than in the U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Guide. 

Produced under the direction of the Military Affairs 

Bureau of the State Department in 2009, this interagency publication identifies the three components of 

an effective COIN campaign: security, economic development, and information operations. These three 

components, it insists, should be integrated through a 

political strategy “providing a framework of political 

reconciliation, genuine reform, popular mobilization, 

and governmental capacity-building around which all 

other programs and activities are organized.” The ultimate goal of this comprehensive strategy is “to enable 

the affected government to control its environment, 

such that the population will, in the long run, support 

it rather than the insurgents.”2

 However, it is precisely 

the formulation of this integrative political strategy 

that is so often missing from U.S. COIN campaigns. 

More often than not, the government deploys the 

military in hopes of producing a purely kinetic solution to a complex political problem and only belatedly 

develops a comprehensive plan for employing other 

elements of national power. Even then, economic and 

political strategies often operate independently of or 
3

only loosely connected to the military effort. Such was 

the case for the first few years of the COIN campaigns 

in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Failure to devise a political strategy before beginning a campaign may owe something to how COIN 

has been studied. Despite repeated lip-service paid 

in so many analyses to winning hearts and minds 

and to the primacy of politics, researchers have concentrated disproportionately on the military dimension of COIN, focusing in particular on operational 

and tactical matters at the expense of larger strategic 

considerations. Foremost among these neglected considerations is the vexing problem of how precisely 

insurgencies end. Many academics, and more policymakers, appear to operate on the assumption that victory consists in defeating the insurgents by killing or 

capturing their leaders and destroying their organizations. This limited notion of end-state arises from the 

selection of COIN campaigns upon which many military and academic researchers have usually focused. 

In his 2006 article on subversion, William Rosenau 

commented on the concerted effort to mine historical examples for answers to contemporary problems. 

“Scholars and practitioners have recently reexamined 

19th- and 20th-century COIN campaigns waged by 

the United States and the European colonial powers,” 

he observed, “much as their predecessors during the 

Kennedy administration mined the past relentlessly 

in the hope of uncovering the secrets of revolutionary 

guerrilla warfare.”3

 The problem with much of this research, however, is that while some past campaigns 

are sufficiently analogous to contemporary conflicts to 

provide useful lessons, others are not. David Kilcullen 

sounded a note of caution about the enthusiasm with 

which analysts embrace the “‘proven’ COIN methods” 
4

of classical COIN campaigns. “Today’s insurgencies 

differ significantly—at the level of policy, strategy, 

operational art, and tactical technique—from those of 

earlier eras,” he concluded.4 Preoccupation with the 

anti-colonial insurgencies following World War II in 

particular has reinforced the notion that the destruction of the insurgent organization is the best and most 

feasible outcome for a COIN campaign. 

A new and growing body of literature has moved 

beyond study of the classic insurgencies, but a great 

deal more work remains to be done. Ben Connable 

and Martin C. Libicki, in How Insurgencies End, offer a detailed quantitative analysis of over 70 cases 

based upon outcome considered within the context of 

variables such as control of territory and outside support.5

 However, the sheer number of cases precludes 

detailed analysis of any of them, and some such as 

the Bosnia war were not even insurgencies. Still the 

work provides a very useful macro view of insurgent 

trends and patterns to inform more focused studies, 

and it does offer very good conclusions. Victory has a 

Thousand Fathers by Christopher Paul, Colin P. Clarke, 

and Beth Grill exams 20 different approaches to COIN 

based on 57 variables applied to 30 cases divided into 

two categories, wins and losses for the government. 

It divides campaigns into phases, each of which it 

considers based upon 19 factors. The study concludes 

by identifying best COIN practices.6

 It also examines 

conflicts such as Bosnia that are not insurgencies, and 

it employs a very complex quantitative model. However, it too contains a wealth of good information 

leading to an incisive conclusion identifying good approaches to COIN.
5

This monograph builds upon these and other recent works but takes a different approach.7

 It examines 

only 12 cases in order to focus on each in greater depth 

and explores a single variable, how the conflicts were 

ultimately brought to a conclusion. It argues that those 

cases resolved by a strategy of co-option are most relevant today and concludes with recommendations on 

how to develop such a strategy and its implications 

for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

APPROACH

This monograph examines past insurgencies 

grouped into four broad categories based on their 

outcome: cases in which the insurgents won a clearcut victory, cases in which the government decisively 

defeated the insurgents, cases in which the insurgency 

degenerated into mere terrorism or criminality, and 

cases in which the government resolved the conflict 

by co-opting the insurgents. It focuses on the last category, whose examples bear the closest resemblance 

to the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and 

probably to future insurgencies as well.

Cases were selected based upon factors that heighten their relevance as examples in each category. The 

most important factor is the presence of an outside 

power in all 12 of them. In each case, the threatened 

government was either an occupying nation trying to 

set up and support an indigenous government, or a 

foreign power intervening to aid an ally threatened by 

insurgency. The United States currently offers COIN 

support to two threatened governments, and it will 

undoubtedly come to the aid of threatened states in 

the future. The campaigns span just shy of 60 years, 

beginning with the Zionist insurgency against British 
6

rule in Palestine (1945-47) and ending with the conflict 

in Sierra Leone (1991-2002). While earlier campaigns 

still offer valuable tactical and operational lessons, 

they occurred under circumstances sufficiently different from those of today as to render their value as 

strategic examples highly questionable. The cases in 

this monograph also include insurgencies motivated 

by diverse ideologies (secular nationalism, Marxism, 

ethnocentrism, and religious nationalism). While all 

insurgencies arise from popular dissatisfaction with 

social and economic conditions, the ideology that harnesses this discontent varies with time and place. No 

ideology seems to offer any particular advantage to 

insurgent or counterinsurgent. Marxists have won 

and lost as have nationalists.

INSURGENCY 

Clearly defining insurgency has been almost as 

problematic as combating it. The U.S. Department of 

Defense defines insurgency as “An organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict.”8

Although strictly accurate, this definition is too broad 

to be helpful, and it leaves out vital characteristics. Insurgency is a hybrid form of conflict in which a clandestine organization seeks to gain control of a state from 

within through a combination of subversion, guerrilla 

warfare, and terrorism.9 William Rosenau notes the 

lack of an agreed upon definition of subversion, but 

points out that the term generally applies to a wide 

range of activities employed to weaken a country by 

attacking key institutions with means short of armed 

conflict.10 The U.S. Government Counterinsurgency 

Guide, add two other components to the definition of 
7

insurgency: propaganda and political mobilization.11

Insurgents spread their ideological message through 

various media and organize people to support their 

cause. Mobilization usually involves a combination 

of persuasion and intimidation. However, a concrete 

biological analogy may be more useful in conveying a 

sense of what insurgency is than any number of academic definitions. Insurgency is like a virus: It tries to 

take over the body it inhabits (a country) and transforms that body to suit its own needs.

From a legal as opposed to a military perspective, 

insurgency is equally problematic. Insurgents have 

always had an ambiguous status in international law. 

Since the 1899 Hague Convention, the laws of war 

have granted belligerent rights to irregular forces, 

provided that they are under the command of a person responsible for their conduct, wear some type of 

recognizable emblem, carry arms openly, and obey 

the “laws and customs of war.”12 The 1949 Geneva 

Convention afforded the same recognition to irregular 

forces. Neither accord, however, addressed the status 

of part-time insurgent guerrillas who work by day and 

conduct military operations by night. In an effort to address the status of combatants and noncombatants in 

noninternational conflicts, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) recently issued guidance 

on the subject. The ICRC maintains that all persons 

not members of state forces or organized groups are 

“entitled to protection against direct attack unless and 

for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.”13

Military personnel have been quick to point out that 

this guidance affords insurgents a “revolving door of 

protection” as they move from their civilian occupation to belligerent activity and back, and that it is for 

this reason unworkable.14
8

Academic models and legal niceties offer little 

practical help to soldiers, who require a functional 

rather than a theoretical definition. Such a definition 

may be derived from discussing the characteristics 

of insurgency, a phenomenon more easily described 

than precisely defined. Insurgencies arise from bad 

governance. A sizable segment of the population, often regionally concentrated, grows increasingly frustrated with the failure of government to perform its 

basic functions or angry at it for consistently exploiting them. Sometimes discontent is primarily political, 

especially when people see the government as the tool 

of a foreign power or when an ethnic minority has 

been oppressed by the majority. In most cases, however, social, economic, and political issues intertwine. 

Discontent alone, however, is insufficient to produce insurgency. For centuries, popular rage has 

caused sporadic peasant revolts as renowned for their 

intense violence as for their utter failure to achieve any 

results. Insurgencies require an ideological catalyst 

to mobilize discontent and focus it on an achievable 

objective, what historian of revolution George Rudé 

calls “a common vocabulary of hope and protest.”15 To 

be effective, revolutionaries require a certain level of 

popular literacy and a means of disseminating their 

ideology. These requirements make insurgency a decidedly modern phenomenon. 

In addition to ideology, insurgencies require an 

organization to direct their campaign against the 

government. The organization plans and conducts all 

aspects of the insurgency. It trains and equips insurgent guerrillas and decides when and where to deploy them. Traditional insurgent organizations have 

usually employed some form of the hub-and-spoke 

model. A central committee (the hub) connects to a 
9

series of cells, which vary in size and may be functionally organized for finance, logistics, etc.16 Usually 

only one member of each cell serves as a link to the 

hub (the spoke). This model provides excellent security for clandestine organizations. Apprehension of 

any single insurgent usually compromises no more 

than one cell. Modern communications, especially 

mobile telephones and the Internet, have allowed for 

more complex organizations. Decentralized networks 

with a large number of nodes, some consisting of a 

single individual, and considerable redundancy, have 

increased security and made targeting insurgent organizations even more difficult.

Guerrilla warfare is a potent weapon of insurgency. The term “guerrilla,” Spanish for “small war,” 

dates to Napoleon’s Peninsular Campaign. Spanish irregulars harassed French supply lines and ambushed 

small units, melting away in the face of superior forces. 

Guerrilla tactics are intended not only to wear down 

the government’s conventional forces, but to provoke 

them into conducting reprisals against the general 

population, which they rightly or wrongly perceive as 

aiding the insurgents. As U.S. forces in both Iraq and 

Afghanistan have repeatedly encountered, insurgent 

guerrillas fire from occupied houses and mosques, and 

have no qualms about using human shields. They understand that the families of those killed and maimed 

will blame the security forces who return fire rather 

than the insurgents who initiate the attack.

Besides guerrilla warfare, insurgents also employ 

terror to achieve their objective of gaining power. 

Terror is a weapon or tactic that can be employed by 

many actors, each of whom uses it very differently. 

Its goal is to spread fear and create a sense of helplessness among those who witness a terrorist attack. 
10

States, especially totalitarian regimes, use terror to 

keep their own people in line. Criminal organizations 

also use terror to intimidate rivals and cow their own 

members. Extremist organizations like al-Qaeda use 

terror widely and indiscriminately as part of their war 

against the West. Insurgents, on the other hand, use 

terror more selectively to avoid alienating the people 

whose support they wish to gain.17 They use “enforcement” terror to instill fear in wavering supporters and 

employ “agitational” terror against representatives 

of the government and those who support it.18 To be 

effective, enforcement terror has to be somewhat predictable. People need to know what behaviors will 

make them targets and what sort of compliance will 

keep them safe. Insurgents may, however, be far more 

willing to use agitational terror, whose limits may 

be determined by their capabilities. The situation in 

Iraq from late 2003 to 2007 illustrates the difference 

between insurgency and terrorism. Sunni insurgents 

fought to gain control of their country, using violence 

to that end. Al-Qaeda in Iraq wanted to keep Iraq in 

a state of perpetual turmoil as part of the global jihad 

against the West.

CHRONIC INSURGENCY AND SHADOW 

GOVERNANCE 

Traditional insurgents fought to win. They understood that victory might take years to achieve, but 

they never lost sight of their ultimate objective, seizing power. A new form of insurgency has emerged in 

the post-Cold War world. Some insurgents recognize 

their inability to seize power and opt instead to carve 

out living space for themselves. They gain control of 

an area and exercise alternative or “shadow gover-
11

nance” over it, at times doing a better job than the official state. The weakening of state sovereignty in Asia, 

Africa, and Latin America has led to the proliferation 

of “spaces on the globe that are, for practical purposes, 

outside the formal international system.”19 Insurgents 

who carve out living space pay lip service to the idea 

of ultimate victory, but they fight to maintain the status quo rather than to win. Chronic insurgencies can 

drag on indefinitely.

COUNTERINSURGENCY 

As the prefix “counter” indicates, counterinsurgency consists of those measures taken by a threatened state and its supporters to defeat an insurgency. 

Volumes have been written on this subject, but most 

good works recognize the same broad principles for 

conducting an effective COIN strategy.20 The key to 

COIN is removing the root causes of unrest on which 

the insurgency feeds. Often referred to as “winning 

hearts and minds,” this aspect of COIN consists of 

providing good governance. As Bernard B. Fall observed in the 1960s, a state that loses an insurgency 

is “not out-fought but out-governed.”21 What constitutes good governance may vary considerably with 

time, place, and culture. In some cases, people simply 

wish to be left alone and will fight anyone (insurgent 

or government) who threatens their traditional way of 

life. An ethnic minority may rebel against a government dominated by those from another group. And 

of course, people frequently rebel against foreign occupation.

Developing an effective COIN strategy requires 

correctly ascertaining the causes upon which the insurgency feeds. This determination in turn necessi-
12

tates listening to local people. Too often an intervening 

power has presumed to know best what the people it 

seeks to help really need. The U.S. emphasis on elections is a case in point. “The West came into Afghanistan under the mantra of freedom is on the march,” 

observed Masood Farviar, manager of an Afghan radio network in a December 2010 interview with National Public Radio, “and elections are the cure-all for 

all the problems, without realizing that the last thing 

Afghans needed at the time was elections. And the 

first thing Afghans needed at the time was security.”22

In its rush to get a government in place—any government—the United States got one with little legitimacy 

or real power. A popular joke in Afghanistan has it 

that Hamid Karzai is supposed to be president but is 

really no more than the mayor of Kabul, and even that 

only until it is dark. 

The same preoccupation with quick elections occurred in Iraq. As Michael Gordon and General Bernard Trainor convincingly demonstrate in Cobra II, 

the White House’s emphasis on elections at the expense of reconstruction and security not only allowed 

the insurgency to develop but has hampered efforts 

to counter it ever since.23 An incident following the 

Second Battle of Fallujah graphically illustrated the 

problem with this approach. Following recapture of 

the city, a member of the Interim Governing Council 

told a group of its citizens that they had been liberated 

and could now have elections. Ignoring his proclamation of this good news, they demanded to know when 

the electric and water service would be restored, when 

trash would be collected, etc.

The reaction of the citizens of Fallujah illustrates 

another important point about winning hearts and 

minds. According to Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy 
13

of needs,” security comes well ahead of “self actualization,” which includes political participation.24

While most people do not expect their government to 

meet all or even most of the basic needs Maslow defines, they do want it to safeguard and even facilitate 

their ability to acquire the necessities of life through 

their own efforts. Economic grievances have been a 

major cause of most insurgencies, even those that purported to be about something else. Road building in 

Afghanistan illustrates how good governance should 

work. Roads link villages to towns and cities, providing people access to markets for their produce. Hiring 

local people to build the roads also creates jobs, and, 

because it benefits them directly, the locals will also 

defend the road from Taliban attack.25

Politics does, of course, matter. People who already 

have the necessities of life but lack political rights may 

rebel if they feel excluded from or marginalized in the 

political life of the nation. Only by creating avenues 

for legitimate political participation can such a state 

prevent people seeking an alternative through insurgency. When a foreign power intervenes to remove an 

oppressive government, free and democratic elections 

should be held as soon as possible. To hold them before providing adequate security and restoring basic 

government services, however, may be ill-advised.

While it addresses roots causes of unrest, a COIN 

campaign must also combat insurgent guerrillas and 

terrorists. Deadly force plays an important but limited 

role in COIN. A threatened state must, however, make 

sure its use of force remains focused and proportional, 

or it risks alienating people and driving them into the 

arms of the insurgents. The security forces, consisting 

of police and military, protect vulnerable targets and 

attack insurgent fighters and the organization they 
14

represent. In so doing, they create a shield behind 

which the hearts-and-minds campaign occurs.

Using force in a focused, appropriate manner requires good intelligence. Only by knowing who the 

insurgents are can the security forces target them 

without causing unnecessary casualties among the 

general population in which the insurgents hide. The 

best intelligence comes not from covert operations or 

coerced testimony of captured insurgents, but from 

voluntary cooperation of people persuaded that the 

government can protect them, is capable of reform, 

and will serve them better than the insurgents. Some 

intelligence must be operationally generated through 

a process that turns “background information into 

contact information.”26

Since insurgents rarely operate in large groups, 

large conventional military formations do not function 

well in combating them. Platoons and even section are 

far more effective at COIN than companies and battalions. For this reason, junior officers and senior noncommissioned officers (NCOs) must be trained and 

equipped to fight insurgents and encouraged to take 

initiative in doing so. The U.S. military describes this 

approach as “empowering the lowest levels,” what in 

conventional war the Germans call “auftragstaktik.”27

Traditional COIN literature speaks of the need to educate and train “strategic corporals,” NCOs who understand the nature of COIN and the impact tactical 

actions have on strategy. 

COIN requires the use of all elements of national 

power, what U.S. doctrine calls the DIMEFIL: diplomatic, information, military, economic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement.28 Achieving unity of 

effort among the disparate government departments, 

the military, and the police implementing these ele-
15

ments of strategy is very important but extremely difficult. Using these elements to support a threatened 

government which the supporting power does not 

control is even harder, but such is the role the United 

States currently plays and is likely to play for the foreseeable future.

HISTORICAL ANALYSIS: FOUR DIFFERENT 

OUTCOMES

Group 1: Insurgent Victories.

The period 1945-70 saw the highest concentration 

of insurgencies to date. The prevalence of these conflicts derived from a unique set of circumstances following World War II. In 1945, European powers still 

controlled most of Africa and much of Asia. However, 

the war had weakened them, and the Japanese had 

proven that Western armies could be defeated by nonWestern ones. Nationalist movements gained strength 

as European power waned. Efforts to reassert colonial 

control met with stiff resistance. Nationalist insurgencies drove the French from Indochina, the Dutch 

from Indonesia, and the Belgians from the Congo. 

This string of victories led some observers to conclude 

that insurgency was an irresistible form of warfare.29

Other analysts attributed the insurgents’ success to 

the “soft” colonial governments they opposed.30 These 

writers argued, correctly as it turned out, that in the 

future insurgents would have a much more difficult 

time.

Three conflicts in particular commend themselves 

as good examples of decisive insurgent victories. From 

1944-47, Zionist insurgents drove the British from Palestine and established the state of Israel. From 1954 
16

to 1962, nationalist insurgents forced the French from 

Algeria. Both conflicts blended urban with rural guerrilla warfare. In each case, the insurgents won, not by 

defeating the government militarily but by making the 

cost of continuing the struggle unacceptably high. International opinion also played a role in deciding each 

conflict as did outside support for the insurgency. The 

third case occurred in the recent past. From 1997 to 

1999, the Kosovo Liberation Army conducted an effective insurgency against the government of Yugoslavia 

(by then reduced to Serbia and Montenegro). In this 

case, however, the insurgents did not persuade the 

hated government to abdicate, but instead induced a 

coalition of powers to intervene on its behalf, producing the same result, independence for the province.

Palestine. Britain gained control of what became 

the states of Jordan and Israel as part of the peace 

settlement that ended World War I. The newly created League of Nations granted them the territory as 

a Mandate, an area to be governed and developed by 

the United Kingdom (UK) under loose supervision 

by the League of Nations. To further complicate matters, Britain had to reconcile its colonial ambitions 

with commitments made to Arabs and Jews during 

the war. The McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 

1915-16 had promised the sons of Hussein, the Sharif 

of Mecca, Arab kingdoms as a reward for revolting 

against Britain’s enemy, the Ottoman Empire.31 In 

1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour 

issued the famous Balfour Declaration promising 

the “establishment of a national home for the Jewish 

people in Palestine.”32 While making these conflicting promises, the British government entered into the 

Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), dividing the Middle 

East with France.33
17

Britain resolved its commitment to the Sharif of 

Mecca with the less than satisfactory expedient of setting up his first son, Feisal, as King of Iraq (another Ottoman territory acquired from the Turks) and his second son, Hussein, as Emir (later king) of Transjordan 

(carved out of the eastern part of the Mandate of Palestine), both British client states. To honor its pledge to 

the Zionists, the British agreed to facilitate Jewish immigration to Palestine through the Jewish Agency, the 

official Zionist organization created for that purpose. 

The influx of Jewish immigrants angered Palestinian 

Arabs, produced intercommunal conflict, and led to 

a full-scale Arab Revolt from 1936 to 1939. The British suppressed the revolt but promised to limit further 

Jewish immigration to 75,000 over the next 5 years, after which no more Jews would be allowed to enter the 

Mandate without Arab approval.34 The Zionists considered this decision tantamount to handing Palestine 

to the Arabs. They bided their time until World War II 

ended, and even fought alongside the British to defeat 

Germany. Then they revolted against British rule.

The Zionist confronted Britain with a complex insurgency perpetrated by three organizations clandestinely linked to the official Jewish Agency. The Irgun 

Haganah Ha’ivrith Be Eretz Israel (Hebrew Defense 

Organization in Palestine), or “Haganah” for short, 

had formed in 1921 to protect Jewish settlements from 

Arab attack and was tacitly allowed by the colonial administration, and may even have received arms from 

the British.35 A second, more militant group, the Irgun 

Zvei Lumi (National Military Organization) broke with 

the Haganah in 1931 and conducted reprisals against 

the Arabs during the 1936-39 Arab Revolt.36 The third 

group, Lochmei Heruth Israel (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), better known as the “Stern Gang” for 
18

its founder, Avram Stern, was the most militant. The 

Haganah numbered 45,000; the Irgun, 1,500; and the 

Stern Gang, 300.37

The three groups cooperated to conduct a highly 

effective insurgency against the British Army. They 

sabotaged rail lines, assassinated members of the security forces, and bombed government buildings, most 

notably the King David Hotel in July 1946. The British 

replied with tried-and-true colonial methods. They 

promulgated emergency regulations that allowed 

them to detain suspects without trial, conducted massive cordon-and-search operations, and imposed economic sanctions on the Jewish community.38 While 

these measures had a salutary effect on the security 

situation, they proved unsustainable. In the end the 

insurgents won, not by defeating the security forces, 

but by persuading the British government that nothing in Palestine warranted the continued expenditure 

in British blood and treasure necessary to retain the 

territory. 

Insurgent victory derived from the failure of the 

British government to win any support among the Jewish population of Palestine. Nothing short of a Zionist 

state would satisfy them, and Britain could not deliver 

on this demand given its commitments to the Palestinian Arabs and to other Arab states. Without this political offer to win some degree of popular support, the 

security forces could not garner the intelligence necessary for them to defeat the insurgents. “The reason 

we catch no terrorists,” concluded then Commanderin-Chief Middle East Land Forces General Sir Miles 

Dempsey, “is that the people of this country take no 

action either directly or in giving evidence.”39 Repression alone might have sufficed had the insurgency 

been isolated. However, the Zionists had a powerful 
19

ally in the person of President Harry Truman. Eager to 

secure the Jewish vote in major states like New York 

during the 1946 midterm elections, Truman pressured 

the British to allow Holocaust survivors to immigrate 

to Palestine and to relax security measures within the 

Mandate. Increasingly dependent on U.S. aid to recover from World War II, Britain had no choice but to 

comply. 

Algeria. The French encountered a similar colonial 

dilemma in Algeria. Acquired in 1830 and governed 

by its European population as a Department of France 

with representatives in Paris, the North African territory became the centerpiece of the country’s colonial 

empire. By the middle of the 20th century, approximately 1 million French Algerians (known as Colons 

or Pied Noir, Black Feet) dominated a population of 

8 million indigenous people.40 Nationalism developed 

in Algeria as it did throughout the colonial world 

during the first decades of the 20th century. Despite 

their desire for independence or at least greater political rights, however, many indigenous Algerians 

supported France during World War II, expecting to 

be rewarded for their loyalty. France answered their 

demand for inclusion with a proposal to grant citizenship to a small percentage of native people based on 

a merit system. Nationalists answered this proposal 

with a large-scale protest in 1945, which the French 

suppressed with considerable loss of life. In 1954, 

various resistance groups united to form the National 

Liberation Front (NLF), which launched an insurgency leading to independence following a bloody 8-year 

struggle. However, NLF success owed more to French 

COIN and the political crisis it created at home than 

it did to insurgent prowess. The French military won 

most of the battles but in the process lost the war.
20

From 1954 to 1957, the NLF enjoyed considerable 

success. The organization recruited 40,000 fighters 

for its military wing, the National Liberation Army 

(NLA).41 It benefited from a wave of nationalism 

sweeping the Middle East and Africa. When its neighbors, Tunisia and Morocco, received independence, 

the insurgents enjoyed safe havens on their territory 

and a source of supply. Although it enjoyed little 

popular support at the outset, the NLF employed the 

classic insurgent tactic of provoking the government 

into over-reacting to its attacks. The NLA assassinated pro-French Muslims and murdered Colons. The 

French Army gave the civilians weapons to protect 

themselves, which led inevitably to them conducting 

reprisals against Algerian Muslims innocent of any 

wrongdoing. These reprisals widened support for 

the insurgents as did the NLF’s own campaign of intimidation and coercion.42 The situation deteriorated 

as France poured in more and more troops, which 

reached a total of 500,000, most deployed in static defensive positions.43

Beginning in 1957, the security forces reversed the 

deteriorating situation, systematically degrading the 

NLF and NLA and maintaining the military initiative 

until the end of the war. Contrary to popular perceptions, the French COIN campaign consisted of far 

more than systematic brutality, though security force 

excesses did cost the army its legitimacy and ultimately lost it the war. The army divided rural Algeria into 

operational areas, relocated threatened villages, and 

conducted extensive and long-lasting sweeps to disrupt the NLA. While living conditions in most regroupment areas were poor, at least some French officials 

tried to use the process as an instrument of economic 

and social development.44 The army placed compa-
21

nies of soldiers within threatened villages, where they 

bonded with local people, and created indigenous defense forces. They also constructed along the Tunisian 

border a defensive line backed by artillery and mobile 

forces. 

None of these effective measures or any combination of them, however, could offset the damage to 

French legitimacy done by the brutal tactics of the 

army. Nowhere were these excesses more clearly 

demonstrated than in the infamous Battle of Algiers. 

Beginning in January 1957, forces under the command 

of General Massau moved to destroy the NLF network in Algiers. They conducted a detailed census of 

all households, divided the Muslim areas into sectors, 

imposed population movement controls, and rounded up thousands of suspects. Through the systematic 

use of torture, the army gained precise intelligence on 

the insurgent order of battle, assembling a detailed 

organizational chart called an organogram. This operation destroyed the NLF in the capital in a matter of 

weeks, although a second follow-up operation had to 

be mounted to disrupt efforts to rebuild it.45

The war in Algeria led to a major political crisis in 

metropolitan France. The Fourth Republic fell over its 

failure to bring the conflict to a successful conclusion. 

Charles de Gaulle returned to power in May 1958 amid 

expectations by the army that he would support strong 

measures against the insurgents. The new French constitution strengthened the office of president, perhaps 

in the hope that doing so would enable de Gaulle 

to end the crisis. However, rather than continue the 

war, de Gaulle conducted a referendum in which the 

Algerians voted for independence. Some generals attempted a coup in April 1961, and when that failed, 

they formed a clandestine organization and conduct-
22

ed their own terrorist campaign. The French people, 

however, had become more upset by the conduct of 

their own army than they were with the behavior of 

the insurgents and would not support continuing the 

war. The Evian Accords negotiated with the NLF gave 

Algeria independence in March 1962.

Kosovo. While most insurgent successes occurred 

during the era of decolonization, a more recent campaign illustrates that insurgents can occasionally 

achieve decisive victory even in the contemporary 

world. The insurgency conducted by Kosovar Albanians against the government of Yugoslavia (by 

then reduced to Serbia and Montenegro) resulted in 

intervention by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which forced Yugoslavia to withdraw 

and led to independence for the Province. As with the 

campaigns in Palestine and Algeria, the insurgents 

could not hope to defeat the government militarily, 

but once again, they did not have to do so. Like the 

NLF in Algeria, the Kosovo insurgents provoked the 

Yugoslav government into a policy of brutal reprisals 

that cost it what little legitimacy it had left, produced 

international criticism, and provoked outside intervention.

The Kingdom of Serbia acquired Kosovo following the second Balkan War in 1913. Despite its fertile soil and considerable mineral wealth, it was the 

poorest province of the former Yugoslavia. By 1991, 

the year of the last Yugoslav census, ethnic Albanians 

comprised 82 percent of the population; Serbians, 10 

percent; and Roma and others, the remaining 8 percent.46 Most Kosovar Albanians practiced a relaxed 

form of Islam, which along with language and ethnicity separated them from their Slav orthodox Serbian 

neighbors. While most Serbians lived in small islands 
23

amid a sea of Albanians, they formed the majority in 

the region north of the city of Mitrovica. 

A decade before its own insurgent movement 

struggled for independence, Kosovo had played a 

pivotal role in the breakup of Yugoslavia. In 1989, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic spoke at the historic 

site of the 1389 battle of Kosovo Polje (Field of Black 

Birds) and declared the province to be the cradle of 

Serbian civilization. He revoked Kosovo’s autonomy 

and began a policy of removing Albanians from key 

positions in local government and the economy, relegating them to the status of a permanent underclass. 

Fear of such Serbian domination encouraged separatist movements in other parts of Yugoslavia. The 

declaration of independence by Slovenia, followed 

by wars in Croatia and Bosnia, kept the international 

community occupied for much of the next decade, and 

Kosovo fell off the front page. 

Isolated geographically and with little outside support, Kosovar Albanians had few options. With open 

resistance out of the question, Ibrahim Rugova led a 

nonviolent movement to create a parallel state providing health, education, and welfare benefits for Kosavars.47 The situation changed dramatically in 1997. 

The government in neighboring Albania collapsed following a financial crisis, losing control of some of its 

military arsenals in the process. Contraband weapons 

poured into Kosovo, enabling a fringe group to form 

in 1993 (the Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA]) and to 

mount an armed struggle against the Serbian regime. 

Beginning in the fall of 1997, the KLA launched an assassination campaign against Serbian police, government officials, and Albanian collaborators, which in 

turn provoked the kind of reprisals against the general Albanian population the insurgents desired and 
24

Rugova feared.48 In February 1998, the Yugoslav army 

and Serbian paramilitaries launched an offensive in 

the Drenica region, which killed 51 people, including 23 women and 11 children; in the ensuing weeks, 

another 85 Kosavars were murdered.49 As many as 

250,000 people fled the Drenica Region, sparking international fears of a new wave of ethnic cleansing.50

The United States and its NATO allies were unwilling to witness a repeat of the Bosnian tragedy. 

Amid escalating violence, the United States led the alliance in a 78-day air campaign that ultimately forced 

Serbian withdrawal from the province. After several 

years in political limbo as a United Nations (UN) and 

NATO protectorate, Kosovo became an independent 

nation in 2008. The insurgency had achieved its objective. The new country will require economic support 

and security assistance for years to come, but renewed 

fighting seems unlikely.

How Insurgents Can Win. These three cases clearly 

indicate the circumstance under which insurgents 

might achieve a decisive victory. In each case, the 

government was seen by the majority of people as an 

occupying power with little legitimacy, and the COIN 

methods it employed further damaged its cause. The 

League of Nations Mandate put a fig leaf of decency 

over colonial rule in Palestine. Algeria’s status as a Department of metropolitan France did not alter the fact 

that a minority of French Colons governed a native 

majority who had few political rights. Although it had 

been an autonomous province of Serbia in old Yugoslavia, Kosovo lost its political status when Milosevic 

came to power. Its Albanian majority then suffered 

discrimination similar to that endured by colonial subjects. Historical and contemporary examples thus support J. Bowyer Bell’s conclusion that insurgents have 

been most successful against “soft” colonial targets.51
25

However, the unpopularity of a colonial or neocolonial government alone, no matter how oppressive, does not guarantee an insurgency’s success. Despite facing stiff resistance over a decade, the Russian 

Federation eventually crushed the Chechen separatist 

movement. China has had little difficulty suppressing opposition from its Uyghur minority. In these 

cases, two conditions absent in Palestine, Algeria, and 

Kosovo explain the insurgents’ failure: political will 

and lack of outside support. Both the Russian Federation and China consider maintaining control over 

the threatened areas vital to their national interest. 

Chechnya’s location in the oil rich north Caucasus region makes it too valuable a piece of real estate to lose. 

If China allowed one minority population to secede, 

others might follow. Both governments thus have had 

ample political will to continue the struggle whatever 

the cost. Besides facing a determined, powerful state, 

the insurgents could count on neither direct support 

nor international pressure to help them. Humanitarian groups might condemn the repression, but no state 

or coalition considered intervening even covertly in 

the internal affairs of either Russia or China.

In the cases of Palestine, Algeria, and Kosovo very 

different circumstances prevailed. Neither the British 

government nor its public considered retaining control over Palestine crucial to the survival of the empire, 

never mind the state. Nothing the territory offered was 

worth the cost in blood, treasure, and international illwill of fighting to keep it. The Zionists also benefited 

from outside support. The Holocaust generated great 

sympathy for their cause, and they received financial 

support from the American Jewish community. The 

Democratic Party needed Jewish votes in key states 

like New York in the 1946 congressional and 1948 
26

presidential elections. Britain needed American aide 

to rebuild its economy and was amenable to pressure 

from the Truman administration to allow more Jewish 

refugees into Palestine.

While the French Army considered the loss of Algeria unacceptable, the French public did not. Contrary to what Francois Mitterrand asserted, Algeria 

was not France. Having suffered persecution under 

Nazi occupation, ordinary French people deplored 

the brutal measures being used to keep the territory. 

International opinion condemned French colonialism, 

but it is unclear what if any role such condemnation 

played in the decision to withdraw. The Algerian insurgents also enjoyed a safe haven across the Tunisian 

and Moroccan borders. In the final analysis, the cost to 

France of remaining in Algeria in blood, treasure, and 

perhaps moral capital as well became unacceptably 

high. Under these circumstances, the time had come 

to go.

In Kosovo, the insurgency followed a different 

course. Serbia had both the political will and the military power to retain control of its southern province 

indefinitely. However, in this conflict, international 

disapproval led to direct intervention. The KLA provoked the Yugoslav police, military and Serbian paramilitaries into heavy handed tactics, including the use 

of rape and ethnic cleansing as had been perpetrated 

in Bosnia. By 1999, the international community in 

general and the West in particular had enough of 

such gross human rights violations. NATO, led by the 

United States, launched a 78-day air campaign to force 

Serbian withdrawal from the province. For the next 

decade, Kosovo remained in limbo as talks over its 

status continued. Finally, in February 2008, it declared 

independence and was recognized by the United 

States and some of the NATO allies.
27

The circumstances under which insurgents win 

outright victories are thus quite specific. The government they oppose is seen as a foreign occupier, which 

lacks popular support and faces international criticism. Domestic opinion in the occupier’s home country wanes as the cost of colonial or neocolonial control 

rises. The insurgents enjoy material support from outside the contested territory and/or a safe haven in a 

neighboring country. In some cases, a foreign power 

or coalition intervenes on behalf of the insurgents. A 

confluence of such circumstances rarely occurs, which 

is why insurgent victories outside the era of decolonization have been few.

Group 2: Government Victories. 

If outright insurgent victories seldom occur, unequivocal government triumphs are equally rare. At 

the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. Army defeated 

an insurrection in the Philippines. In the 1950s, U.S. 

forces returned to the Philippines to help its government defeat the Communist Hukbalahap revolt. In the 

1960s, the Bolivian government defeated an abortive 

Communist insurgency led by Cuban revolutionary 

hero, Che Guevara. However, three other cases commend themselves as the best examples of the highly 

favorable conditions under which a threatened government can win: the Malayan Emergency (1948-60), 

the Greek Civil War (1946-49), and the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka (1983-2009).

Malaya. The Malayan Emergency has long been 

hailed as the textbook case of effective COIN. From 

1948 to 1960, the British defeated a well-armed and 

organized Communist insurgency. While the exact 

number of insurgents will never be known, the British 
28

estimated around 6,500 active fighters with perhaps 

as many as 50,000 supporters from a total population 

of just over 4.3 million.52 The insurgent guerrillas had 

been trained by the British to fight the Japanese and 

knew the terrain very well. While the insurgency remained confined to the ethnic minority Chinese, this 

group still comprised 38 percent of the Malayan population.

After a few years of trial and error, the British 

employed effective COIN methods they had developed during a century of policing their empire. They 

based their strategy on four broad principles: winning 

the hearts and minds of disaffected people, keeping 

the use of force against the insurgents limited and 

focused, decentralizing command and control, and 

achieving unity of effort between the civil and military sides of the operation.53 At the same time, they 

trained and equipped the Malayan police and military 

to take over security operations after Britain granted 

the colony independence and continued to lend it support for years to come.

The British strategy was dubbed the Briggs plan for 

the Director of Operations, Sir Harold Briggs. Briggs 

and his staff understood that the key to victory lay in 

separating the insurgent cadres operating in the jungles from their supporters among the Chinese population living in squatter villages along the jungle fringe. 

The squatters had a low standard of living, lacking 

both Malayan citizenship and title to the land they occupied. Discontent reinforced by intimidation encouraged them to support the insurgents. The Briggs plan 

relocated the squatters away from the jungle fringe to 

“new villages,” which could be more easily protected. 

Because the new villages usually offered better housing, running water, schools, clinics, and other ameni-
29

ties, most Chinese willingly moved to them. Those 

who refused to move, the British relocated by force.54

The program proved so successful, that all but six of 

the 480 new villages survived as permanent communities after the war.55

The Briggs plan laid the foundation for successful 

COIN in Malaya. Relocation, Briggs noted, was not in 

itself a solution, but it did provide “that measure of 

protection and concentration which makes good administration possible.”56 Controlling the population 

allowed the security forces to reduce the insurgents’ 

food supply. It also improved intelligence gathering, 

as people are more likely to talk if the government can 

protect them. Improved intelligence allowed the army 

to use force in a more focused manner.

Effective COIN requires unity of effort. At the local level, three key officials (the police chief, the army 

battalion commander, and the District Commissioner) 

had to work closely together. To facilitate cooperation, 

the British created a system of emergency committees from District to State to Federation level. The appointment of General (later Field Marshall) Sir Gerald 

Templer as both High Commissioner and Director of 

Operations (DO) achieved unity of effort at the top, 

which had been lacking under Briggs, who held only 

the DO position. Templer energized the campaign. 

He insisted that every District Emergency Committee 

meet at least once a day, “if only to have a whiskey 

and soda in the evening.”57

The final ingredient of successful COIN was decentralization of command and control, what the U.S. 

military now calls “empowering the lowest levels.”58

Large conventional formations are worse than useless 

in pursuing guerrillas who melt away before them. 

Platoons or even sections can hunt them far more ef-
30

fectively. However, small unit operations can only 

succeed if senior commanders delegate responsibility, 

which British commanders proved willing to do. “The 

only thing a divisional commander has to do in this 

sort of war,” quipped one brigadier, “is to go around 

seeing that the troops have got their beer.”59 To further 

enhance effectiveness of small unit tactics, the British 

used “framework deployment,” assigning a battalion 

to a single area for an extended period of time so that 

soldiers could get to know its terrain and people.

Impressive though the Malayan campaign was, 

it would be a mistake to overlook British advantages in waging it. Malaya was a valuable piece of real 

estate worth defending for its resources and strategic location. Rubber production funded much of the 

COIN campaign. The insurgency remained confined 

to the minority Chinese population, who could be 

won over with offers of citizenship and land. Despite 

their Communist affiliation, the insurgents received 

no outside support, nor did they enjoy a safe haven, 

since Malaya’s one land border (with Thailand) was 

too remote and inhospitable to provide access to sanctuary. As colonial masters, the British could also use 

draconian measures that would be unacceptable to a 

democratic state in today’s climate of transparency. 

Together with its allies, Britain saw the campaign as 

an anti-Communist crusade, not colonial oppression. 

Furthermore, internal conflict did not end with British 

withdrawal. Malaysia faced a decade more of strife, 

which included insurgency in North Borneo, a cross 

border war with Indonesia, and the amicable split 

with Singapore. These advantages notwithstanding, 

the British approach to COIN has much to commend 

it and continues to be worth studying.

Greece. Although the United States had no formal empire, it did control territory in the Pacific and 
31

behaved in a paternal manner towards the governments of small nations in the Caribbean and Central 

America, its self-proclaimed sphere of influence. From 

1900 to 1940, it faced insurgent conflicts in these areas. 

Unfortunately, much of the wisdom gained in these 

operations was lost when the military developed into 

a massive conventional force to fight World War II. 

During the Cold War, American forces once again engaged in COIN, supporting states threatened by Communist revolution. 

The first such conflict occurred in Greece (1946-

49), where a Communist insurgency with more than 

50,000 fighters vied for control of the country amid the 

chaos at the end of World War II. The British liberated the country from the Axis, attempted to disarm 

all guerrilla bands, and supported a pro-Western government. However, fiscal constraints forced Britain 

to end its support of the Greek government in March 

1947. With Communist governments controlling Yugoslavia, Albania, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, 

Greece looked to be the last bastion of democracy in 

southeastern Europe. 

Determined that the country should not fall, 

President Harry Truman provided $723.6 million 

in aid plus 800 military and 700 civilian advisors.60

The Americans pursued a conventional approach to 

COIN, insisting that the infantry move in to fix the 

enemy so that artillery could destroy them, although 

they also criticized Greek forces for indiscriminate 

firing, which killed innocent civilians.61 This conventional approach, which under different circumstances 

would have cost the government popular support, 

succeeded largely because of insurgent mistakes and 

fortuitous circumstances. Much of the fighting occurred in remote mountainous areas where excesses 
32

went largely unnoticed. In addition, the insurgents 

accepted battle on terms favorable to the government. 

Believing that the time was right for large-scale operations, they reorganized their forces from small bands 

of 50 to 100 into “brigades” and “divisions.”62 These 

larger formations could be more easily targeted by the 

Greek Army supported by the Americans. The following year, the Communist government of Yugoslavia 

quarreled with the Kremlin and closed its border to 

the insurgents, depriving them of the safe havens and 

supply bases they had enjoyed. Finally, the kidnapping of thousand of Greek children to be “educated” 

in Communist countries cost the insurgents popular 

support. Thus, with minimal attention to winning 

hearts and minds, the Greek government achieved a 

conventional military victory over an unconventional 

foe. From this “success” story, the U.S. military drew 

the mistaken conclusion that conventional methods 

could counter unconventional threats.

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The third example 

of a clear-cut government victory occurred in Sri Lanka, where the Singhalese-led government fought a 26-

year war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam 

(LTTE). The Tamils are a Hindu ethnic group from 

Southern India who comprise 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s 

21 million people. The majority Singhalese population 

considered that the Tamils had collaborated with the 

British, who ruled the island as Ceylon.63 They thus discriminated against the Tamils when the colony gained 

independence in 1948. The new state made Singhalese the official language (excluding Tamil) and disenfranchised Tamil migrants from India. In response 

to this discrimination, Velupillai Prabhakaran created 

the LTTE (successor to another insurgent group, the 

Tamil New Tigers) in 1976 to campaign for a Tamil 
33

homeland. The conflict began in 1983 when the LTTE 

ambushed an army convoy, killing 13 soldiers; 2,500 

Tamils died in subsequent retaliatory riots.64

The LTTE soon gained control of large areas in 

northern and eastern Sri Lanka. In the process, Prabhakaran eliminated other Tamil resistance leaders and 

imposed tight control over the Tamil community. The 

LTTE became a parallel state, exercising shadow governance in the territories it controlled. It developed 

police, judicial, and economic institutions and ran its 

own schools.65 The Tigers also had perhaps the most 

impressive financial network of any insurgent group. 

Most of its money came from the 600-800,000 member 

Tamil diaspora community through a combination of 

voluntary contributions and extortion. North Korea

may also have supplied the LTTE with arms and training. Even when international efforts led to a 70 percent decline in foreign funding, the organization still 

managed to raise $200-300 million per year from its 

licit and illicit businesses.66

These resources allowed the LTTE to create an impressive military force. At its height, the insurgents 

could field as many as 15,000 fighters, of whom 7,000 

were combat trained.67 It had an impressive arsenal of 

weapons, including long-range artillery, and captured 

armored vehicles as well as mortars and small arms.68

The LTTE even had a small naval wing, the Sea Tigers. 

With its formidable arsenal and extensive resources, 

the LTTE proved capable of defending most Tamil areas. 

The insurgents also took the fight to the government and its allies through a highly effective terrorist campaign. They assassinated several high-ranking 

officials, including Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, whose troops had intervened against the Tamils 
34

(1991), Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa 

(1993), and the Sri Lankan Industry and Foreign Ministers (2000 and 2005). The LTTE proved particularly 

adept at suicide operations, developing a dedicated 

cadre, the Black Tigers, specifically for the purpose. 

The Black Tigers pioneered the suicide vest, a garment 

packed with plastic explosives and shrapnel (often 

ball bearings).69 They frequently used women as suicide bombers; the women could carry a larger payload 

by feigning pregnancy, knowing men would be reluctant to search them.

Like the Greeks, the Sri Lankans took a largely 

conventional approach to their unconventional conflict. Wining hearts and minds proved extremely 

difficult once the violence escalated. Besides limited 

local autonomy, a threatened state has little to offer 

an ethnic separatist movement that wishes to dismember the nation. Had the 1948 constitution granted the 

Tamils even limited local autonomy and use of their 

language, however, the insurgency might never have 

occurred. By the 1980s, these concessions no longer 

satisfied Tamil aspirations. The Singhalese would 

not compromise the territorial integrity of the state, 

and the LTTE had the resources and popular support 

to defend and even govern its enclaves. Under these 

circumstances, the conflict consisted of periods of intense fighting interspersed with uneasy truces amid 

a steady stream of terrorist attacks. Indian intervention in the mid-1980s accomplished nothing on the 

ground, but did provoke the assassination of Indian 

Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. Both the government and the insurgents, meanwhile, racked up a long 

list of human rights violations.

Over time, however, circumstances changed in favor of the government. The LTTE had never garnered 

support or legitimacy outside Sri Lanka and its own 
35

diaspora community. Tolerance for terrorism in any 

form plummeted after September 11, 2001 (9/11), and 

concerted attacks upon terrorist financing hurt the Tigers. More importantly, heavy handed tactics began 

to erode the LTTE’s support base in the Tamil population, especially as the Singhalese government became 

more attentive to human rights and more willing to 

engage in meaningful reform. An insurgency that uses 

more terror to keep its own people in line than it does 

in fighting the government is on its way to defeat. The 

LTTE also suffered from the fatal weakness of over-reliance on a charismatic but dictatorial leader. During 

the first decade of the new century, the government in 

Colombo exploited these weaknesses, working with 

dissident groups in the Tamil community. More and 

more Tamils fled south to Singhalese territory to escape Prabhakaran’s brutal rule. 

A July 2009 interview with a top LTTE commander who defected in 2006 reveals growing problems 

within the organization. Colonel Karuna Amman had 

been one of Prabhakaran’s body guards and advanced 

to second-in-command of the organization’s armed 

forces. As commander of the Tigers’ eastern enclave, 

Karuna led a force of 6,000 Tamil fighters. When he 

disbanded his troops and defected to the government, 

he left the province vulnerable to capture by the Sri 

Lankan Army in 2007. A mixture of Prabhakaran’s 

rigid rules and personal cowardice (he always stayed 

away from the fighting), disillusioned Karuna as did 

the leader’s intransigence. Karuna said he had opposed the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi because it 

brought international condemnation on what had 

been until then a Tamil liberation movement. Finally, 

he explained, despite growing signs that the LTTE 

could never win a military victory, Prabhakaran refused to seriously pursue a political settlement.70
36

The dénouement came with the Sri Lankan Army’s northern offensive of 2008-09. In January 2009, 

the army captured the LTTE “capital” of Kilinochchi. 

They squeezed the remaining Tigers into a smaller 

and smaller area in the Northeast, which they systematically decimated with artillery. Human rights 

groups and the UN condemned the Sri Lankan army 

for indiscriminate shelling but were equally critical 

of the LTTE for using the trapped population as human shields. The LTTE fighters shot civilians trying 

to flee the combat zone. In May, the Sri Lankan Army 

killed Prabhakaran and several of his associates as 

they sought to escape. Other LTTE leaders committed 

suicide. The remaining Tigers laid down their arms, 

and the 26-year conflict came to a close. 

Defeating Insurgents. Drawn from different times 

and regions, the three cases in this group offer some 

compelling conclusions. Governments win outright 

victories over insurgents only under very favorable 

circumstances. All three insurgencies occurred in geographically isolated areas. Malaya is a peninsula with 

dense jungles along its only land border. Sri Lanka 

is an island. Greece is a peninsula that became a virtual island for the insurgents once Yugoslavia closed 

its borders to them. Insurgent disadvantages and/or 

outright mistakes further contributed to government 

success. The Malayan Peoples Liberation Army was 

confined to the Chinese minority community as the 

LTTE was to the Tamil. Greek insurgents accepted 

battle on terms favorable to the Greek Army, trained 

and equipped by the United States. All three insurgent 

groups exploited people in the areas they controlled. 

The LTTE was exceptionally brutal, and the Greek 

insurgents kidnapped thousand of Greek children 

whom they sent to Communist countries for “educa-
37

tion.” The LTTE had the added disadvantage of reliance on a charismatic leader, who could not be easily 

replaced. Threatened governments can seldom count 

on such favorable circumstances. Thus while the three 

cases in this group yield valuable operational and tactical lessons, they are not suitable models for contemporary COIN strategists.

Group 3: Degenerate Insurgencies.

Insurgency has a shelf life—it succeeds, fails, or 

degenerates into something else. As previously noted, 

most unconditional insurgent victories belong to the 

era of decolonization, and the few clear-cut government victories occurred under a very specific combination of circumstances that seldom occur. Insurgent 

movements that fail to achieve their goals and yet 

avoid defeat sometimes degenerate into mere extremist organizations, capable of carrying out terrorist attacks but of doing little else, or they morph into criminality. The Basque separatist organization, Fatherland 

and Liberty, illustrates the former case, while Peru’s 

Shining Path and Colombia’s narco-insurgency, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), illustrate the latter. 

The Basque Separatist Movement. The Basque separatist movement (ETA) began in much the same way as 

the LTTE. The 20,664 square kilometer Basque region 

straddles the Pyrenees. Approximately two-thirds of 

this territory and most of the region’s 3 million people 

are part of Spain; the remaining people and territory 

belong to France. Because the Basques backed the 

Republicans in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the 

fascist dictator Francisco Franco systematically oppressed them when he came to power, banning their 
38

language, suppressing their culture, and arresting 

their intellectuals.71

Discouraged by the failure of nonviolent protest 

to achieve reform, the Basques launched an insurgency against the Spanish government. ETA’s active 

strength probably numbered in the hundreds during 

its heyday, with thousands more supporters.72 The 

ability of the organization to rapidly replace losses 

suggests that its active deployment reflected the optimum number of fighters for the combat environment 

rather than limits on its ability to recruit. Beginning in 

the 1960s, ETA attacked police and other government 

employees, first in the Basque region itself and then in 

the Spanish capital of Madrid. The group achieved its 

most dramatic success by assassinating Franco’s handpicked successor, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, with 

a bomb placed under his car in 1973. Many Spaniards 

quietly approved the killing, sharing the joke that the 

admiral was Spain’s first astronaut.

The insurgents’ greatest achievement also started 

a chain of events that led to its decline. Franco never 

found another suitable successor. Following his death 

in 1975 and restoration of the monarchy, democracy 

returned to Spain. A new constitution (1978) addressed most Basque grievances, granting the region 

limited autonomy, allowing use of the Basque language for official purposes, and restoring cultural institutions. However, these concessions did not satisfy 

ETA, which continued its campaign of violence. With 

the authoritarian regime removed, the movement 

launched its most intensive wave of attacks after reform had progressed considerably.73 ETA’s deadliest 

year was 1980, during which it killed 76 people.74 The 

pattern of attacks also changed. Previously the group 

had targeted police, military, and government officials 
39

in classic insurgent fashion. Now it targeted innocent 

civilians. In its most infamous attack, ETA bombed a 

Barcelona shopping mall in 1987, killing 21 people. 

The Franco regime had seen no need to mount a 

COIN campaign. Repression kept ETA in check and, 

while the group garnered sympathy, it had no real 

support outside the Basque provinces. The restoration of democracy weakened the oppressive instruments of state control and necessitated a more sophisticated response to the insurgency. Concessions to 

Basque nationalism formed a major part of the new 

approach. Madrid granted the province limited local 

autonomy, restored universities and cultural institutions, and permitted use of the Basque language. The 

government also went on the offensive. ETA had long 

benefited from its safe haven in the French Basque region. During the Franco era, Republican France had 

been disinclined to cooperate with fascist Spain. The 

situation did not improve significantly after Franco’s 

death, so the Spanish resorted to extra-legal covert 

operations. The Grupo Antiterrorista de Liberación (Anti-terrorist Liberation Group, or GAL) assassinated 

suspected terrorists in the Spanish and French Basque 

regions, killing 27 people in 25 attacks.75 GAL, one of 

several such groups, turned out to be sponsored by 

the Spanish Interior Ministry.76 Although GAL death 

squads drew widespread criticism, they did encourage France to abandon its policy of tacitly allowing 

ETA to operate within its territory. Paris and Madrid 

signed an extradition treaty depriving ETA of its safe 

haven in Basque territory across the Pyrenees. They 

later agreed to allow hot pursuit of suspects by French 

and Spanish police 60 kilometers on either side of the 

border. Within Spain, a government crackdown reduced the organization’s effectiveness. ETA declared a 
40

ceasefire in 1998, and many considered the insurgency 

over. The Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004, 

raised the disturbing possibility that a new generation 

of ETA members had cooperated with al-Qaeda. However, no evidence of such a connection has ever been 

produced. ETA violence has been reduced to sporadic 

attacks within the Basque Province.

Most analysts now consider ETA to be a localized 

terrorist organization. Autonomy and reform have removed most of its popular support. Absence of a corresponding movement in the French Basque region 

has kept independence an unrealized and unrealizable dream. For a small cadre of extremists, however, 

the struggle defines who they are, so they will continue their campaign of violence no matter how futile 

it has become.

Shining Path. The second case of a degenerate insurgency occurred in South America. From 1980 to 

2009, Peru engaged in a bitter internal struggle, which 

left 70,000 dead amid widespread atrocities committed by all parties. The People’s Communist Party of 

Peru, more commonly known as Sendero Luminoso

(Shining Path), began in the late 1960s as a student 

movement led by Abimael Guzmán, who taught at the 

San Cristóbal of Huamanga University in the province 

of Ayacucho. In an environment of social inequality, 

labor unrest, and racial discrimination experienced by 

the indigenous population of the Peruvian highlands, 

Guzmán prepared for armed struggle, building an insurgent organization to fight the government. Shining 

Path adopted the Maoist model of protracted people’s 

war, seeking to liberate rural areas out of which to 

expand and eventually overwhelm the cities.77 At its 

peak, Shining Path had around 10,000 active members 

and a much larger number of supporters.78 Guzmán 
41

declared the insurgents’ goal to be “removing all the 

political authorities and landlords, rubbing out all 

functionaries. The rural areas should be thrown into 

confusion, the land cleansed before we sow and build 

up revolutionary bases of support.”79 Shining Path 

assassinated police, other government officials, and 

large landholders.

Local police lacked the resources and training to 

handle the deteriorating situation, so the government 

sent in the military. The Peruvian army made the same 

mistakes common to all conventional forces faced with 

insurgency, conducting large-scale sweeps through civilian areas. The operations netted few insurgents but 

produced widespread human rights abuses. Minister 

of War General Luís Cisnero admitted that soldiers 

and special police units would kill 60 people of whom 

perhaps three were insurgents.80 From 1982 to 1989, 

the Peruvian Attorney General’s Office reported 3,200 

cases of “enforced disappearances,” probably perpetrated by the security forces.81 These heavy-handed 

tactics, combined with a draconian anti-terrorism law 

applied stringently to declared “emergency zones,” 

and allegations of torture to obtain intelligence, cost 

the government support and benefited the insurgency, which expanded out of its base into other rural 

areas and into the cities of Cuzco and Lima. In the 

upper Huallaga Valley, the insurgents developed a 

patronage-client relationship with coca growers, who 

provided Shining Path the economic resources to expand its campaign.82

Fortunately for the Peruvian state, Shining Path 

began to lose the support of the people it purported 

to represent. It proved to be just as brutal as the army 

in forcing the peasant population to comply with its 
42

wishes. In 1989 alone, the insurgents carried out 1,298 

assassinations and murdered another 1,116 “subversives.”83 Shining Path forced farmers to supply its cadres and forbade them to sell their produce to the cities. 

These measures significantly reduced the peasants’ 

quality of life. In one town, insurgent measures created a food shortage that reduced average per capita 

consumption to one meal per day.84 Peasants may have 

initially welcomed the insurgents but quickly grew to 

resent their oppression. Resentment prompted organized resistance as local villages, often with government help, formed civil defense committees to resist 

the insurgents. 

Popular resistance was but one element in a series 

of circumstances that turned the tide of the conflict in 

favor of the government. In the mid-1980s, another 

Marxist group, Túpac Amaru, entered the struggle 

against the Peruvian government. Rather than work 

together, the two groups fought one another to the 

detriment of both. At the same time, the Peruvian 

military improved both its human rights record and 

its COIN tactics. British advisors helped to train the 

army based on the British experience in Malaya, 

Oman, and Northern Ireland. The government began 

a hearts-and-minds campaign, including a crop substitution program in the coca growing areas. The British stressed the importance of intelligence in defeating 

Shining Path.85 In 1990, the government created a Special Intelligence Group.86 The emphasis on intelligence 

paid a handsome dividend in 1992 with the capture 

of Guzmán. The police searched the trash from a suspected safe house and found skin cream used to treat 

psoriasis from which they knew the insurgent leader 

suffered. Based on this intelligence, they raided the 

safe house and captured Guzmán, along with several 
43

of his associates. Deprived of its charismatic leader, 

Shining Path began to decline. It also suffered from 

strategic over-reach. Success in rural areas and even 

in some cities led the insurgents to believe that they 

could move more aggressively against the government. This mistake allowed the state to use its superior resources to good effect.87

Having won the military struggle, however, the 

government of Peru failed to win the ensuing peace. 

Rather than consolidate its success by improving conditions in rural areas and pursuing the small remnant 

of the insurgency that survived, the government reverted to its policy of neglect. As a result, Shining Path 

has revived in a remote region of the Andes, where 

it has become a major coca producer. It now figures 

significantly in the region’s thriving narcotics trade, 

having forged links with its Brazilian and Colombian 

counterparts. By 2008, the group was strong enough to 

attack a military convoy in the Huancavelica Region. 

It continues to carry out small scale attacks against 

police often in response to coca eradication and other 

anti-narcotics operations. While it seems unlikely to 

return to being a viable insurgency, at least in the near 

future, Shining Path will remain as a criminal organization for a long time to come.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC) was formed 

in the aftermath of a long period of political violence. 

The country’s two main parties had fought a 17-year 

civil war, la violencia (1948-65), in which as many as 

400,000 people died.88 Unhappy with the peace settlement and unwilling to support either political party, 

Marxists formed the FARC, as well as several other 

insurgent groups, including the National Liberation 
44

Army and the Popular Liberation Army; another revolutionary group, M-19, had no clear ideology.89 Over 

time, the FARC emerged as the most important insurgent group.

In addition to its pervasive insurgency, Colombia 

also faced a serious threat from large-scale narcotics trafficking organizations. In the 1970s and 1980s, 

the Cali and Medellín cartels developed a near vertical monopoly on the cocaine trade, controlling coca 

growing and refining in Colombia and cocaine distribution throughout much of Europe, Africa, and North 

America. Ordinary crime, corruption, and poverty 

compounded the country’s security problems. 

The FARC established base camps in remote jungle areas and along the borders of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. Those countries have proven unable 

or, in the case of Venezuela, unwilling to expel them. 

Poor peasants gave the insurgents a source of recruits 

and a base of support, while coca provided a ready 

source of cash to buy weapons. However, in the first 

few decades of the insurgency, narcotics-trafficking 

was a means to an end, not an end in itself. During 

the 1990s, the FARC expanded out of its rural bases to 

operate within Colombia’s cities, including the capital 

of Bogota. Rural groups cooperated with urban networks and increased their revenue through extortion, 

kidnapping, and money laundering.90 The conventional tactics of the Colombian armed forces proved 

ineffective against the insurgents. Corruption, human 

rights violations, and gross economic inequality exacerbated the problem.

In 1999, Colombian President Andrés Pastrana 

joined forces with U.S. President Bill Clinton to launch 

Plan Colombia, a concerted effort funded largely by 

the United States, to deal with narco-terrorism. Many 
45

assessments have been scathingly critical of the plan, 

noting its emphasis on a purely military solution and 

its failure to address the chronic social and economic 

problems that underlay both the insurgency and the 

narcotics trade.91 Corruption siphoned off millions of 

dollars of U.S. aid and human rights abuses abounded, 

the dirty work farmed out by the Colombian armed 

forces to right-wing paramilitaries. In many respects, 

the Plan made a bad situation worse. Widespread 

fumigation of coca growing areas and sweeps by the 

army increased migration to the cities, swelling the 

ranks of the urban poor and increasing crime.

Plan Colombia actually helped the FARC by dividing the attention of the Colombian armed forces 

between drug cartels and insurgent groups, while 

failing to address the obvious connection between 

narcotics and insurgency. Military aid came with 

restrictions, allowing, for example, helicopters to be 

used for drug interdiction but not for COIN.92 In fact, 

while it engaged the drug cartels with force, the Colombian government negotiated with the FARC. Pastrana recognized the insurgent organization as a legitimate political party and ceded them 40 percent of 

Colombia as a demilitarized zone in the southern part 

of the country. This zone provided the FARC a secure 

area in which it created a shadow government and a 

narcotics-based economy.93

The anti-narcotics program also contributed to the 

FARC’s degeneration from an insurgent organization 

into a drug cartel by restructuring the cocaine trade. 

Destruction of the Cali and Medellín cartels in the 

1990s and the further disruption of narcotics trafficking organizations through Plan Colombia eliminated 

much of the FARC’s competition in the cocaine production business. By 2001, the Plan had resulted in the 
46

destruction of 818 coca base labs, the aerial spraying 

of 84,000 hectares of coca growing land, and the extradition of 21 drug kingpins.94 The FARC capitalized on 

the disruption of traditional drug cartels by expanding 

its own narcotics operations. However, as the FARC 

transitioned to a predominantly criminal enterprise, 

the Colombian government intensified its campaign 

against the insurgents. Alvaro Uribe Velez won the 

2002 presidential election, promising to deal with the 

FARC, whose unwillingness to negotiate in good faith 

strengthened popular support for a purely military 

solution to the insurgency.95 True to his word, Uribe 

launched a sustained offensive against the insurgents. 

At the same time, he disarmed right-wing militaries, 

increasing the legitimacy of his own armed forces. 

This military campaign achieved striking results. 

From 2003 to 2009, the Colombian military claimed to 

have killed 10,806 members of the FARC and captured 

26,648; another 11,615 demobilized of their own accord.96 Estimates of current FARC membership range 

from 7,000-10,000, half of its peak strength of 17-20,000 

in 2000.97

Despite these heavy losses, the FARC has proven 

remarkably resilient. It has coped with the new situation by decentralizing its command and control, abandoning large-scale operations for guerrilla tactics, 

making excellent use of land mines, and rebuilding 

its base of support in remote areas among indigenous 

people.98 In the process of adapting to a less friendly 

security environment, however, the FARC has become less like a revolutionary insurgency and more 

like a narcotics cartel, or perhaps like a series of smaller criminal outfits. It is a major player in the cocaine 

industry, thanks to the restructuring of the drug trade 

inadvertently caused by the U.S.-backed drug war. 
47

This effort destroyed the cartels, which had enjoyed a 

vertical monopoly of the cocaine trade from production through distribution. They have been replaced by 

a series of smaller groups controlling various aspects 

of the process. The Mexican criminal organizations 

have benefited from the disruption of Caribbean trade 

routes, gaining control of land smuggling through 

Central America and building a vast distribution network in the United States.99The FARC, which had previously taxed coca growing and processing, now controls these stages directly.100 The role of middlemen in 

the operation, those refining the coca paste and feeding it into the Mexican distribution system, has been 

taken over by 200-400 “new illegal armed groups” or 

“baby cartels.”101

The Colombian government has reduced the 

FARC’s strength, perhaps even to the point where it 

no longer threatens survival of the Colombian state. 

However, the insurgents have carved out a living 

space in which they exercise shadow governance. 

Dislodging them from that niche has proven very difficult. FARC groups continue to be well armed, organized and funded by drug money. Barring some significant change in these circumstances, they are likely 

to remain a permanent fixture in the Colombian underworld, along with a host of other nefarious groups. 

Why Insurgencies Degenerate. Insurgencies have a 

shelf life. They succeed, fail, or degenerate into mere 

terrorism or criminality. In most cases, this degeneration occurs when the government wins the military 

struggle but fails to win the peace that follows. If insurgents are not reintegrated into legitimate society 

and politics, they will continue the struggle in the 

hope (however forlorn) of one day restoring their fortunes and winning the war. In those cases in which 
48

the criminal activity that once funded the insurgency 

proves extremely lucrative, they may engage in criminality as an end in itself. 

Group 4: Success Through Co-Option.

Understanding how and why insurgencies degenerate suggests a strategy for resolving them more 

effectively. Insurgencies that cannot be decisively 

defeated by a traditional COIN strategy may be resolved through co-option. A threatened government 

must fight the insurgents to a standstill and then find 

a way to draw them into the legitimate political process. Three campaigns commend themselves as useful examples of victory achieved through co-option: 

Northern Ireland (1969-2005), El Salvador (1979-92), 

and Sierra Leone (1991-2002). 

Northern Ireland. The longest insurgency Britain has 

ever faced began innocently enough as a civil rights 

movement. Northern Ireland remained part of the UK 

when the rest of Ireland gained independence in 1921. 

The Province’s Protestant majority systematically subjugated the Catholic population through institutionalized discrimination and the use of draconian emergency laws. Gerrymandered election districts kept 

Catholics under-represented, even on the councils of 

local communities in which they were the majority. 

Protestants received a disproportionate share of public housing, and Catholic unemployment exceeded 

Protestant by a factor of 2.62 to 1 in 1971.102 To enforce 

this system of apartheid, the authorities made extensive use of the 1922 Civil Authorities (Special Powers) 

Act, which gave them extraordinary powers of arrest 

and detention without trial. The almost exclusively 

Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the UK’s 
49

only armed police force, could call upon its paramilitary reservists the “B Specials” to handle unrest.

Inspired by the nonviolent civil rights movement 

in the United States, Catholic students at Queens University, Belfast, created the Northern Ireland Civil 

Rights Association and began demonstrating to protest discrimination. Their protests turned violent during the summer of 1969, when demonstrators clashed 

with members of Protestant Orange Lodges during 

marches to commemorate the 1689 siege of Derry. Rioting spread throughout the province, and on August 

14, the hard-pressed police asked London for troops. 

What began as a temporary deployment soon turned 

into a COIN campaign that would last almost 40 years.

Despite having more COIN experience than any 

other army in the world, the British spent 3 years of 

trial and error, making many mistakes that would 

hamper their effort for the remainder of the conflict. 

Many of these errors arose, however, because the 

troops operated in support of a provincial government that used them to defend the Protestant ascendency. The government in Westminster compounded 

the problem by declaring Catholic neighborhoods in 

Belfast and Londonderry “no-go areas,” pulling back 

the army and police in hopes that doing so would 

quell unrest. This strategy had exactly the opposite effect. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), 

which split from the main organization that had 

fought for Irish independence in 1919-21, moved in to 

fill the void, transforming the civil rights movement 

into an armed struggle to expel the British and unite 

Northern Ireland with the Irish Republic. PIRA grew 

dramatically, increasing from 100 members in January 1970 to 800 by December, and began to attack the 

army and police with sniping and bombs.103 The insur-
50

gents enjoyed widespread support among Catholics. 

The number of active fighters at any given moment 

arose from a strategic decision on optimal deployment 

rather than from lack of volunteers. PIRA also had a 

safe haven across the border in the Irish Republic. The 

conflict continued to escalate as security force actions 

made a bad situation worse. The army conducted 

massive searches in the Lower Falls Roads area of 

Belfast, turning a “sullen Catholic population into a 

downright hostile one.”104 Large-scale internment of 

Catholic suspects, most of whom were innocent, further alienated the population, as did “interrogation in 

depth,” the controversial tactics (hooding, wall standing, sleep deprivation, etc.) that have caused so much 

controversy at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. 

The downward spiral culminated in the January 1972 

incident known as Bloody Sunday in which British 

paratroopers opened fire on demonstrators in Derry, 

killing 13.

By the end of 1972, the conflict had settled into a 

familiar pattern. The security forces hunkered down 

for a long struggle, and PIRA reorganized itself into a 

hub-and-spoke cell system, whose hub (the “general 

staff”) resided safely across the border in the Irish 

Republic. Tit-for-tat killings took the lives of numerous Catholics and Protestants, as PIRA and Protestant 

paramilitaries such as the Ulster Defense Association 

murdered ordinary Catholics and Protestants. The 

British military deployed its elite Special Forces unit, 

the Special Air Service (SAS), to support its 12 infantry battalions and the RUC. The SAS soon became 

embroiled in controversial killings, which added 

more fuel to the flames of unrest. For its part, PIRA 

began bombing targets in England. Meanwhile, the 

insurgents received financial support from the Irish- 
51

American community and weapons from the government of Libya, which also allowed PIRA to train on its 

territory. 

Meanwhile, the British government undertook 

much needed political and social reform in the province. It began by revoking provincial autonomy, ruling 

Northern Ireland directly from Westminster. London 

poured billions of pounds sterling into improving living conditions in Catholic neighborhoods in hopes of 

undermining support for the insurgents. By 1992, the 

Northern Ireland Housing Authority had built 17,000 

new homes in Belfast and another 1,800 in Londonderry.105 The differential in unemployment, especially in 

the public sector, improved somewhat after the British 

passed strong anti-discrimination legislation. Equality 

had hardly been achieved, but living conditions for 

Catholics improved significantly.

The summer of 1989 saw the 20th anniversary of 

what both sides refer to as “the Troubles.” Two decades of fighting had produced a military stalemate. 

The British Army could not destroy the PIRA, but the 

PIRA could do little more than persist in its desultory 

struggle.106 It had failed to accomplish the one thing 

essential to victory: persuading the British public that 

the cost of retaining Northern Ireland had become too 

high. The conflict had not been an issue in any of the 

British General Elections since 1969. Under such circumstances, stalemate worked against the insurgents 

as ordinary Catholics and Protestants grew weary of 

the incessant conflict. Under such circumstances, the 

door for a negotiated settlement opened wide. As historian Richard English concludes, the insurgents realized that “their own violence was going neither to win 

the war, nor to improve upon a bargaining position 

that offered both definite results and the prospect of 
52

increasing rewards achieved through political process.”107

Washington and Dublin supported peace talks, as 

did London. However, because Conservative Prime 

Minister John Major depended on 12 Protestant Members of Parliament from Northern Ireland to maintain 

his slim majority, he had limited negotiating room. 

Major did achieve a temporary ceasefire in 1994, but a 

peace accord would have to await the Labour Party’s 

1997 landslide victory. Tony Blair achieved what none 

of his predecessors could, a lasting peace leading to 

a power-sharing agreement that brought insurgent 

leaders into a Northern Ireland government via their 

political party, Sinn Fein. The Good Friday Accords 

signed in 1998 provided both immediate peace and a 

continuing peace process that would bear fruit over 

the next decade, thanks in no small measure to the 

9/11 attacks, which discredited all forms of terrorism. 

It was no accident that Jerry Adams announced decommissioning of PIRA’s weapons right after al-Qaeda’s July 2005 bombing of the London Underground. 

The power-sharing executive still does not function 

very well, but renewal of the insurgency seems unlikely. Ordinary Catholic men and women are heartily 

sick of war.

El Salvador. The Salvadoran civil war (1979-92) 

provides another good example of how to resolve an 

insurgency through a combination of military force, 

political reform, and diplomacy, all supported by an 

outside power (the United States). However, none of 

the parties to the conflict anticipated or wanted such 

an outcome. The insurgents were determined to overthrow a corrupt and brutal regime that was equally 

determined to crush them. The United States, under 

the leadership of its staunchly anti-communist Presi-
53

dent Ronald Reagan, paid lip service to human rights 

but was far more interested in defeating the Marxist revolutionaries. Only the confluence of fortuitous 

circumstances and a change in the U.S. approach, 

perhaps brought on by the election of George H. W. 

Bush and the end of the Cold War, made possible success through co-option, a resolution to the conflict by 

drawing the insurgents into the legitimate political 

process within a reformed state. 

In 1979, El Salvador was one of the poorest countries in Latin America and one of the most undemocratic. Fifteen families controlled an economy in 

which 1 percent of the population (approximately 4.7 

million) owned 70 percent of the land.108 The military 

routinely intervened to prevent reform, suppress rebellion, and support the oligarchs. When the army 

blocked land reform in 1979, opposition turned violent. In 1980, various resistance groups united to form 

the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), 

named for a Communist Labor leader and organizer. 

The movement enjoyed considerable support among 

the country’s rural peasants and urban poor, which 

increased as the army and paramilitary death squads 

(composed of off-duty soldiers) conducted reprisals 

against those even suspected of supporting the insurgents. The FMLN fielded 12,000 fighters supported by 

a much larger group of noncombatants.109

From 1980 to 1983, the insurgents had the upper 

hand against a conventional army filled with demoralized conscripts. The FMLN enjoyed support from 

Cuba, the new Communist Sandinista government in 

Nicaragua, and, indirectly through these intermediaries, from the Soviet Union. They had safe havens in 

remote border areas of Honduras and Guatemala. The 

insurgents became strong enough to overrun the Air 
54

Force’s main airbase, destroying most of its aircraft on 

the ground, which enabled them to operate in large 

columns and engage substantial army formations. As 

large areas of the country fell under FMLN control, 

U.S. military advisors warned that, without substantial support, the Salvadoran government would lose 

the war.110

The Reagan administration responded with a massive infusion of economic and military aid. However, 

the experience of Vietnam was too fresh for the American public to sanction direct intervention by U.S. forces. The new approach to COIN, known as the Nixon 

Doctrine, promised “foreign aid for internal defense,” 

including deployment of small Special Forces teams to 

advise and train the host nation’s military. However, 

the horrible human rights record of the Salvadoran 

armed forces made it difficult for the United States to 

justify even this limited assistance. In the most infamous incident, the American-trained Atlacatl battalion massacred almost the entire village of El Mazote in 

December 1981. All told, the security forces murdered 

approximately 50,000 unarmed civilians, most during 

the early 1980s.111

The Reagan administration did, of course, care 

about human rights, but not as much as it cared about 

fighting communism. The Salvadoran military correctly deduced that the United States would not make 

aide contingent upon improving its human rights 

record, so it resisted pressure to do so. Equipment, 

training, and money allowed the military to stem but 

not reverse the FMLN tide. Airplanes and helicopters 

forced the insurgents to rely less on large-scale operations in favor of traditional guerrilla tactics and to 

concentrate on attacking economic targets rather than 

the Salvadoran army.112 However, it still retained the 
55

ability to mount a major operation. In November 1989, 

the FMLN launched an offensive against the capital 

San Salvador, occupying some of its wealthiest neighborhoods. While the offensive did not threaten the 

survival of the state, it made a mockery of Salvadoran 

military claims that the FMLN would soon be defeated. To make matters worse, members of the army 

murdered six Jesuit priests, along with the wife and 

daughter of a custodian at the University of the Americas. The FMLN and the Salvadoran armed forces had 

reached a stalemate.

This stalemate, along with drastically altered political circumstances, made both parties amenable to 

a negotiated settlement. The fall of the Berlin Wall 

lead to diminished support for both parties to the 

conflict.113The government and the insurgents both 

moderated their demands. The FMLN backed off its 

insistence on power sharing and much of its social 

agenda, while the government proved amenable to 

reducing the size, power, and influence of the army. 

A ceasefire followed by almost 2 years of negotiations 

under the auspices of the UN facilitated by the United 

States led to the signing of peace accords in January 

1991. 

The accords began by restructuring the security 

sector. The army would be reduced by 50 percent 

(by 1993) and confined to defending national sovereignty from external threats. The National Guard, 

Treasury Police, and National Police, which had been 

under military control, would also be disbanded and 

replaced with a new civilian police force. Some former FMLN guerrillas were integrated into the new 

police force; the rest were demobilized. The accords 

called for a National Restructuring Plan, which provided land grants to 47,500 veterans from both the 
56

Salvadoran Armed Forces and the FMLN.114 The constitution was amended to expand the electorate and 

institute other reforms. As a result, the FMLN became 

the second party of the country. On March 15, 2009, 

its candidate, Mauricio Funes, became President of El 

Salvador. Despite this electoral victory by the former 

insurgents, El Salvador remains a U.S. ally.

While the American intervention in El Salvador 

can hardly be called an unqualified success, it nonetheless provides useful lessons for resolving insurgencies. The conflict killed 75,000 of El Salvador’s 5.3 

million people (1990), most of them innocent civilians. 

The United States invested $3.2 billion in economic 

and $1.1 billion in military aide trying to destroy the 

FMLN.115 Only when military victory seemed improbable, and in the face of vastly altered circumstances, 

did it settle for the second-best solution of a negotiated settlement. El Salvador remains an impoverished 

country with a grossly inequitable distribution of 

wealth. However, current economic conditions and 

the cost of the conflict in blood and treasure aside, the 

accords have produced a remarkably durable peace. 

Both parties have seen that they can accomplish their 

goals through a political process that has a high degree of integrity. The case of El Salvador suggests 

that sometimes the best outcome to a conflict is one 

in which both sides believe they have won. Had the 

United States pursued such a compromise solution 

from the outset, the same result might have been accomplished with far less bloodshed. 

Sierra Leone. The tiny West African nation of Sierra 

Leone provides the third example of insurgency resolved through co-option. When it received independence from the British in 1961, the country possessed 
57

a decent infrastructure, a trained professional civil 

service, and a lucrative resource—diamonds. However, deep ethnic divisions and a culture of corruption eroded these advantages. Poverty, inequitable 

distribution of wealth, and political repression fueled 

unrest.

In 1991, the country had a population of 4.27 million, 99 percent of them Africans belonging to 13 different tribes. Per capita annual income was $325, literacy 21 percent, and life expectancy was 42 years.116

For 6 years, the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) 

governed the country. In 1967, the All People’s Party 

(APP) narrowly won elections, and Siaka Stevens became prime minister. Three military coups, based in 

part on tribal considerations, rocked the country over 

the next year. After the restoration of order, Stevens 

resumed his office and in 1971 transformed Sierra 

Leone from a parliamentary democracy to a republic with himself as President, an office he would hold 

until 1985. In 1978, he amended the constitution and 

made the country a one-party state. 

Although Stevens sowed the seeds of insurgency, 

his hand-picked successor, Joseph Momoh, would 

reap them. Under mounting international pressure, 

Momoh set up a constitutional review committee to 

consider political problems, but he had little incentive to restore real democracy. Revolution offered the 

only alternative to continued one-party rule. In 1991, 

a group of students and other dissidents led by Foday 

Sanko formed the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) 

and launched an insurgency against the Momoh government. RUF operated from safe havens in neighboring Liberia, also in a state of civil war, and enjoyed the 

support of Liberian strongman Charles Taylor, as well 

as the assistance of mercenaries from neighboring 
58

Burkina Faso.117 The RUF soon gained control of some 

of the country’s diamond mines, giving the insurgents 

a lucrative source of revenue to buy weapons and support its operations. Because “blood diamonds” could 

not be sold on the open market, the insurgents laundered their rough diamonds through Ivory Coast and 

other willing neighbors.118

The success of RUF put Sierra Leone on a roller 

coaster of violence inflicted first by the insurgents, 

then by the government. Momoh was replaced by 

a coup and fled the country. The new government 

could not halt the advance of RUF, which by 1995 was 

poised to overrun the capital of Freetown. To prevent 

the defeat, the military leadership hired mercenaries 

from the South African company Executive Outcomes 

(EO), who helped stem the RUF tide. Free elections 

in 1996 led to a ceasefire, which collapsed after yet 

another coup. The following year, troops of the Economic Organization of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) restored civilian government 

and enforced a ceasefire. Peace Accords were signed 

in 1999, to be implemented by a UN mission with 6,000 

troops, and RUF joined a coalition government. However, peace ended with the withdrawal of ECOMOG 

troops in April 2000. In May, violence broke out in the 

capital. The UK sent troops to evacuate British subjects and restore order. A new ceasefire held. Elections 

in 2002 saw the SLPP win a decisive victory, while 

RUF failed to gain a single seat. From 2002 to 2006, 

the British and UN gradually withdrew their troops as 

rebel forces demobilized. The peace has held, thanks 

in no small measure to the United States ending the 

civil war in neighboring Liberia.

As in the cases of El Salvador and Northern Ireland, resolution of the conflict came as a result of mili-
59

tary stalemate. Without external support from EO, 

ECOMOG, the British Army, and the UN, the insurgents would have won. However, while each of those 

forces restored civilian rule, none of them was willing and/or able to destroy the RUF. By staying long 

enough to maintain order, though, the UN and the 

British convinced the insurgents that they could not 

win in the foreseeable future. The end of the Liberian 

civil war and mounting international pressure made 

it clear to the RUF that they could accomplish little by 

continuing the armed struggle. These circumstances 

paved the way for a viable peace through a process 

of demobilizing and reintegrating insurgent fighters 

into civil society, while including their political wing 

in legitimate politics.

The 1999 Lomé Peace Accords created the framework for conflict resolution, though a lasting ceasefire did not occur until 2002. The accords granted an 

amnesty for combatants and provided for “transformation of the RUF/SL [Sierra Leone] into a political 

party,” participating in a coalition government. The 

Accord also dealt with security, allowing former insurgents to join Sierra Leona’s new armed forces 

“provided they meet established criteria” for doing 

so. The new armed forces would also reflect the ethnic 

makeup of the nation as would the legislature, which 

had seats designated for tribal chiefdoms. Those insurgents who did not serve in the new armed forces 

would be cantoned, demobilized, and reintegrated 

into society in a manner to be determined and with 

outside financial support.119

 The UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) oversaw implementation of the peace accords. In 2003, it 

reported that, although the security situation was stable, border areas remained a problem, especially the 
60

Liberian border because of the civil war in that country.120 Two years later, the situation had improved 

considerably with the end of the Liberian conflict. The 

biggest security problems were delay in implementing 

reintegration programs for former fighters due to lack 

of funds and high unemployment, especially among 

young people.121 UNAMSIL came to an end 6 months 

later. By the fall of 2010, the situation had improved 

so much that the new UN Peace Building Commission 

focused on ordinary crime, corruption, and narcotics 

trafficking rather than political violence as the most 

serious security problems.122

The sad episode of Sierra Leone is hardly one of 

which the international community can be proud. 

Only after the country had become a virtual failed state 

did the UK and the UN intervene. Nonetheless, they 

successfully resolved the conflict through a combination of co-option and development. ECOMOG, and 

later the British, fought the insurgents to a stalemate, 

creating circumstances for a negotiated peace accord, 

whose implementation was overseen by the UN. Economic and social development continues, albeit at a 

slow pace, but renewed civil war seems unlikely for 

the foreseeable future. Had it not been for international intervention to force a negotiated settlement, RUF 

might have become like FARC, a criminal enterprise 

controlling Sierra Leone’s lucrative diamond trade.

Winning through Co-option. The three cases examined suggest that the best resolution for insurgency is 

one that allows both sides to believe they have won. 

Living conditions for Catholics in Northern Ireland 

have improved dramatically, and the institutions of 

government, especially law enforcement and justice, 

function more equitably that at any time since partition. Power-sharing remains problematic, but neither 
61

side wishes to resume violent conflict. The FMLN succeeded in making El Salvador a functioning democracy, even if they fell far short of achieving a just economic order. Development in Sierra Leone continues 

slowly, but the political system has been reformed to 

accommodate ethnic divisions that contributed to the 

outbreak of civil war. 

LESSONS

The four groups of insurgencies examined in this 

monograph yield definite lessons that may inform 

not only the conduct of COIN campaigns by the U.S. 

Army, but the larger political question of what American intervention to support a threatened state can 

realistically accomplish. To being with, the six campaigns in Groups 1 and 2 clearly indicate that only under very unusual circumstances do insurgencies end 

in clear cut victory for one side or the other. Insurgents may win if the government they oppose enjoys 

little support or even tolerance by its own people, if 

they have a source of supply and a safe haven across 

a friendly border and/or external support, and if the 

threatened government is not supported by a friendly 

power that considers the cost in blood and treasure 

of a protracted intervention worthwhile. With few exceptions, such favorable circumstances occurred only 

during the 20-year period of decolonization following 

World War II.

Complete government victories have been almost 

as rare as insurgent triumphs. A threatened government can win if it can address the root causes of social 

and economic unrest on which the insurgency feeds 

while isolating the insurgents from outside support, 

and provided it enjoys support from a friendly power, 
62

or at least the acquiescence of the international community as it suppresses the insurgents. The British 

victory over Malayan Communists occurred on a 

peninsula with a virtually impenetrable northern border, defeat of LTTE occurred on an island, and the 

U.S.-backed Greek government won after Yugoslavia 

closed its border and isolated the insurgents. 

Unfortunately, the examples in Group 3 represent 

a large and growing category of degenerate insurgencies that plague the world today. The longer a conflict drags on, the more likely that the insurgents will 

degenerate into mere terrorists, capable of carrying 

out limited attacks but of doing nothing else, or that 

the insurgent organization will transform itself into 

a criminal enterprise with or without the ideological 

cover of legitimate revolution. Groups like ETA that 

degenerate into small terrorist organizations can probably be eliminated or reduced to insignificance over 

time as popular support for them wanes if the government considers it cost-effective to destroy rather than 

just contain them. Insurgencies that become criminal 

enterprises are far more problematic, especially if 

they have access to a lucrative resource like narcotics. 

The Colombian government has reduced the FARC’s 

strength and constrained its operating space to the 

point where it no longer threatens survival of the state. 

In the process, it has inadvertently aided the group’s 

transition to a criminal enterprise. Shining Path has 

undergone a similar transition owing to failure of the 

Peruvian state to consolidate its success in the 1990s 

through economic and social development in the areas in which the insurgency enjoyed support.

The best way to prevent insurgencies degenerating into chronic problems is to resolve them before 

they reach that point. The cases in Group 4 suggest 

the most promising approach to achieving such reso-
63

lution. In each case, the threatened government settled on a strategy of co-option only after prolonged 

efforts to defeat the insurgents failed. Only when they 

reached military stalemate, a situation in which both 

sides realized that they could not decisively win a military contest, did the belligerents resolve their conflict 

through negotiation and compromise. Achieving such 

a stalemate is costly in blood and treasure. However, 

had co-option been the goal from the outset, the same 

result might have been achieved earlier with less loss 

of life. On the other hand, PIRA, the FMLN, and RUF 

had to be convinced that they could achieve little by 

continuing armed struggle before they would negotiate in good faith. Thus, while the period of military 

conflict may be shortened, it probably cannot be eliminated. The insurgents must be fought to a stalemate.

In each Group 4 case, intervention by an outside 

power proved crucial to resolving the insurgency. 

Northern Ireland is, of course, part of the UK, but the 

government in London behaved much like an intervening power in the province. Certainly the Catholic 

population and even many Protestants perceived it as 

a foreign entity. By 1998, however, London had come 

to be seen less as an occupier and more as an honest broker. Its position on Northern Ireland was clear. 

Any change in the political status of the province required approval of the majority of Northern Irish men 

and women. Until then, it must be governed fairly 

through some sort of power-sharing arrangement. In 

El Salvador, the United States provided the military 

and economic aid necessary for the Salvadoran government to fend off the FMLN. After the 1989 insurgent offensive, the United States pushed its ally to the 

negotiating table, making aid contingent upon reform 

and an improved human rights record. In Sierra Le-
64

one, EO, ECOMOG, Britain, and the UN intervened to 

prevent RUF from seizing power. However, none of 

these entities could or would engage in a protracted 

campaign to defeat the insurgents completely. Intervention combined with growing international pressure on the blood diamond trade may have prevented 

RUF from becoming an African FARC. At the end of 

the day, it had more to gain from negotiations than it 

did from continued violence. In each of these cases, 

the intervening power(s) also remained engaged after 

peace accords had been signed, providing advice and 

material assistance during the delicate process of demobilization and reintegration of combatants.

A STRATEGY OF CO-OPTION

The U.S. Army’s strategic thinking on COIN 

should be based upon two premises. First, during the 

foreseeable future, the Army’s only COIN role will 

be to support a threatened state. Second, based upon 

the preceding analysis of past campaigns, insurgencies can best be brought to a successful conclusion 

through a strategy of co-option. While it involves the 

use of military force, such a strategy is first and foremost political. The following broad recommendations 

might provide guidance in developing a strategy of 

co-option:

1. Develop a Comprehensive Strategy Before Deploying. 

Any time American forces deploy to invade a country 

or act in support of a threatened state, policymakers 

should devise a comprehensive strategy for all contingencies, including a protracted COIN campaign and/

or a significant nation building effort. This strategy 

should integrate diplomatic, informational, military, 

economic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement 
65

components into a unified political strategy rather 

than treating nonmilitary elements as ancillary to a 

predominantly military campaign. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been more costly in lives and 

treasure than they might have been had policymakers 

developed a contingency plan for a protracted COIN 

campaign before the conflicts began. 

Several Army officers and some policymakers 

pushed for such a plan in the immediate aftermath of 

the invasion, but the Pentagon blocked their efforts, 

wishing to withdraw troops as soon as possible. Richard Haass, who served as the Bush administration’s 

coordinator for the future of Afghanistan, wanted 

a post conflict stability operation. “I pressed for a 

U.S. military presence of some 25,000–30,000 troops 

(matched by an equal number from NATO countries),” 

he reported. These troops would have been “part of 

an international force that would help maintain order 

after the invasion and train Afghans until they could 

protect themselves.” His suggestion got a cool reception. “My colleagues in the Bush administration had 

no interest in my proposal.” 123 Administration policymakers had the same reaction to suggestions about a 

follow-on mission in Iraq. As early as March 19, 2003, 

the Special Operations Force staff officer working on 

Phase IV (post-conflict) plans urged preparation for a 

protracted COIN campaign. He was explicitly told not 

even to mention the word “counterinsurgency.”124

2. Intervene sooner rather than later. Insurgencies are 

like fires. The sooner they are spotted, the easier they 

are to put out. Governments have been slow to recognize and respond to insurgent threats and even slower 

to request outside help. Delay gives insurgents time 

to widen their base of support among a disaffected 
66

population. COIN requires not only a timely response 

but an appropriate one, a response that does not overrely on conventional military means, which usually 

make a bad situation worse. Since governments, like 

individuals, have a hard time recognizing their own 

problems, a supporting nation like the United States 

should advise its allies about the internal threats it recognizes and encourage them to ask for help in a timely 

manner. 

3. Steepen the Learning Curve. Almost every COIN 

campaign begins with a period of trial and error as 

conventional armed forces adjust to unconventional 

war. Even when the military in question has had extensive COIN experience, a period of adjustment still 

occurs. Despite half a century of imperial policing and 

COIN, the British army took about 3 years to get it 

right in Northern Ireland, the same amount of time 

the United States needed to develop an appropriate 

strategy for Iraq. While some period of adjustment is 

probably inevitable, it need not be as long as it has 

been to date. By preserving both contemporary experience and the learning institutions that teach it to new 

recruits, such as the Human Terrain Mapping System, 

the Leadership Development and Education Program, 

and other such education and training programs, the 

U.S. Army can steepen the learning curve for future 

campaigns and reduce the adjustment period. 

4. Keep the U.S. Foot Print as Small as Possible. The 

larger the U.S. force deployed to aide a threatened ally 

and the longer it remains, the more it will look like 

an army of occupation. Under such circumstances, the 

insurgents may then be able to transform the conflict 

into a nationalist struggle against the hated foreigner, 
67

winning even more support for their cause. U.S. advisers and supporting forces must make the host nation 

fight its own war. Keeping the American or coalition 

presence as small as possible is the best way to accomplish this goal. A handful of advisers in El Salvador 

accomplished a great deal, especially during the last 

phase of the war. The doctrinal guidance under which 

they operate still has much to commend it today. Field 

Manual (FM) 100-20, Military Operations in Low-Intensity Conflict (1990) warned that deploying too many U.S. 

troops would “Americanize” the conflict, “destroying 

the legitimacy of the entity [the threatened government] we are attempting to assist.”125

5. Make U.S. Aide Contingent upon Political Reform 

and Regard for Human Rights. A threatened government that refuses to become more responsive to the 

needs of its own people deserves to lose. The highly 

desirable outcome of the Salvadoran Civil War might 

have been achieved sooner and with far less loss of 

life had the Reagan administration taken the same 

approach as its successor. The real threat of a reduction or cut off of U.S. aid encouraged the Salvadoran 

government to negotiate with the FMLN. The inability or perhaps unwillingness of the United States and 

its allies to pressure the Karzai government to reduce 

corruption sufficiently to regain its legitimacy is seriously undermining the COIN effort in Afghanistan.

However, making aid contingent upon reform is 

much easier said than done. If a threatened government realizes its importance to the United States, it 

can resist pressure, knowing it will still get aid. The 

Salvadoran government understood this fact as does 

the Karzai regime. Reforming in the middle of a con-
68

flict may also make a government more vulnerable to 

subversion. Under such circumstances, a willingness 

to engage in political reform and a long-term plan 

for doing so, coupled with some highly visible first 

steps, may be the most that can be done in a crisis. It 

is also important to remember that “reform” does not 

mean creating a Western-style democracy, but rather 

increasing the legitimacy of a government in the eyes 

of its own people based upon their needs and expectations. A demonstrated willingness to compromise and 

to negotiate with insurgents is, however, crucial to the 

success of a co-option strategy.

While engaging in political reform is a tortuous 

process that takes time, avoiding human rights violations can and must be done immediately. The correlation between repression and government defeat is very 

high.126 Indiscriminate use of force against innocent civilians, torture of suspects to gather intelligence, and 

other human rights violations undermine government 

legitimacy and usually lead to defeat. The communications revolution has made every person with a cell 

phone a potential reporter and increased transparency 

to such a degree that knowledge of abuses rapidly becomes public.

6. Harmonize COIN and Anti-Crime Efforts. Insurgencies develop in an environment of weak governance. In such an environment, much of the economy 

is grey or black, and organized crime often thrives. A 

government threatened by insurgency usually faces 

significant criminality as well. Given the nexus that 

often develops between these two threats, a strategy 

to fight one must also tackle the other. Focusing on 

COIN while ignoring organized crime (or vice versa) 

may have the undesirable effect of diminishing the one 
69

problem while exacerbating the other. Insurgents may 

join criminal enterprises and/or insurgent groups 

may become criminal organizations themselves. 

The link between insurgency, organized crime, 

and narcotics trafficking is particularly problematic. 

FARC and Shining Path funded their insurgencies 

with money from the cocaine trade. Both have transformed themselves into criminal enterprises. Opium 

production funds the Taliban and al-Qaeda; enriches 

members of the Afghan government, including President Karzai’s own brother; and provides a subsistence 

living for many poor farmers. Eradication efforts have 

focused on the farmers, who make little money and 

are often forced by the Taliban to grow poppies. Depriving these farmers of their cash crop without giving them an alternative and providing them the security in which to grow it helps the insurgents, not the 

government. 

7. Win the Peace. Every time U.S. forces deploy, the 

American public asks, “When will the troops come 

home?” Political discourse around missions often reduces to a single, most unhelpful question: “Should 

we stay or should we leave?” The answer is “neither,” 

if staying means becoming a permanent occupier and 

leaving means withdrawing all U.S. forces by a fixed, 

pre-determined date. The key to successful COIN lies 

in remaining engaged with the threatened government in the appropriate way for each stage of the protracted conflict. The period after the end of hostilities 

is crucial. Shining Path has revived in Peru because the 

Peruvian government failed to consolidate its success 

against the insurgent organization with economic and 

social development in the areas where the insurgents 

enjoyed popular support. The Iraqi insurgency broke 
70

out largely because the United States lacked the troop 

strength and the determination to maintain law and 

order, and did not have a viable reconstruction plan 

following the fall of Baghdad. Better planning and 

preparation might have prevented the looting and 

concomitant damage to infrastructure that occurred, 

and perhaps the insurgency would never have gotten off the ground. At the very least, the lawlessness 

would have been less widespread. 

The U.S. Army does not, of course, get to pick its 

wars, and so it cannot insist that the above conditions 

be met before it deploys. For example, U.S. advisors 

understood the importance of respecting human rights 

in winning the Salvadoran conflict, but they were powerless to pressure Salvadoran officers who knew that 

Washington cared more about fighting Communism 

than it did about preventing abuses. To reaffirm an 

often quoted but frequently ignored truism of Clausewitz, “war is an instrument of policy,” and policy is 

made by civilians. Civilian politicians must answer to 

voters impatient for results. Only when the very survival of the nation is at stake will the American people 

support substantial expenditures in blood and treasure over an extended period of time. Intervening to 

support an ally threatened by insurgency is rarely a 

popular mission.

While the military does not (and should not) make 

policy, military officers are frequently asked their 

views on policy issues. At such times, they can and 

must raise the difficult concerns discussed in this analysis. Foremost among these concerns should be the 

question of whether the U.S. Government can sustain 

political will for a protracted COIN campaign abroad, 

a question that must be asked before it deploys U.S. 
71

forces. If it does not seem likely that political will can 

be sustained, the intervention should be seriously reconsidered. 

IMPLICATIONS FOR IRAQ AND 

AFGHANISTAN

An analysis of this nature would be incomplete 

without consideration of its implications for the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars 

have been underway for 7 and 9 years respectively, 

and it is, of course, neither possible to correct mistakes 

made early in each nor to foresee precisely how each 

will end. Nonetheless, the conclusions herein do allow for assessment of the U.S. effort to date in each 

case and for commentary on the direction each mission seems to be heading. The assessment bodes well 

for the Iraq mission but raises serious concerns about 

operations in Afghanistan.

For its first 3 years in Iraq, the United States made 

every mistake that can be made in an unconventional 

operation. To begin with, American forces entered 

Baghdad without a plan to conduct a protracted 

COIN campaign. In the aftermath of Vietnam, the 

Army had subsumed COIN into broad task groups 

such as “Low-Intensity Conflict,” “Operations Other 

than War,” and “Stability and Support Operations,” 

catch-all categories for missions that it did not want 

to perform and preferred to relegate to Special Forces. This decision left the vast majority of the regular 

forces unprepared for a protracted COIN campaign. 

While several military manuals published after Vietnam reveal this dislike of unconventional conflict, two 

in particular illustrate the limited role the U.S. military 

expected to play in COIN.127 FM 100-20: Military Opera-
72

tions in Low-Intensity Conflict (1990) asserted that “U.S 

military support to insurgencies . . . will normally center on security assistance program administration efforts that complement those of other U.S. Government 

agencies.”128Joint Publication (JP) 3-07: Doctrine for Joint 

Operations in Low-Intensity Conflict echoed this theme, 

asserting that U.S. support for COIN would usually 

be limited to “furnishing suitable material, training, 

services, and advisors.”129

While lack of training for and experience with 

COIN hurt the campaign, the overwhelming failure 

lay in the realm of political strategy. The Bush administration deployed too few troops for the task at hand. 

Many senior officers, including Army Chief of Staff 

General Eric Shinseki and the former Central Command Commander General (retired) Anthony Zinni 

had argued for a more robust invasion force with a 

follow-on peace and stability mission. However, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ignored this advice on the size of the invasion force and dismissed 

the need for a post-conflict stability operation. As a 

result, the Army and Marines invaded with more than 

enough troops to defeat the Iraqi armed forces but 

far too few to occupy and maintain order in a country more than twice the size of Idaho, with 26 million 

people. The troops they did have lacked the training, 

equipment, and experience for an internal security operation, which the administration had determined beforehand not to perform. Many observers complained 

that the Pentagon “seemed to be more concerned 

with persuading the U.S. electorate that invading Iraq 

would not lead to a Vietnam-style quagmire than it 

was with the vagaries of post-war nation building.”130

The conflict took a turn for the better with a change 

of course in 2007. In late 2006, a bipartisan Study 
73

Group warned that the situation in Iraq was deteriorating.131 Contrary to popular belief, the new “surge” 

strategy adopted by the coalition involved much 

more than the deployment of 20,000 to 30,000 additional U.S. troops. Under General David Petraeus, 

the United States took greater advantage of the “Anbar Awakening,” a spontaneous, ad hoc movement 

among Sunni Iraqis in Anbar province. The Awakening began in 2005 when leaders from the Abu Mahal 

tribe approached the Americans, asking for help to 

fight al-Qaeda in Iraq, which threatened their historic 

position in Anbar. Petraeus recognized that since both 

the Americans and the Iraqis hated the foreign mujahedeen, he could make strategic use of this grassroots movement, which by the end of 2007 numbered 

65,000 to 80,000 (many of them former insurgents). 

Concerned Local Citizens Councils (CLCs) facilitated 

cooperation between the Sunni Tribes and coalition 

forces.132 Supported by funds from the Commanders 

Emergency Response Program, CLCs produced the 

kind of cooperation that yielded good intelligence so 

that the military could use force in a focused, effective 

manner with minimal collateral damage.133 This willingness to work with local Iraqis, including former 

insurgents, has been very effective. Along with improved programs to train Iraqi soldiers and police, the 

new strategy allowed the United States to reduce its 

troop strength to 55,000 during the summer of 2010. 

The new U.S. COIN approach is exactly the sort of 

co-option strategy, albeit on a much larger scale, that 

worked in Northern Ireland, El Salvador, and Sierra 

Leone. The United States began as an occupation force 

but gradually transitioned to the role of a supporting 

power. In that role, it has pushed for reintegration of 
74

former insurgents into legitimate politics and social 

life. Despite sporadic intercommunal violence, Iraq 

continues on a path towards peace and stability. The 

United States will need to remain engaged with and 

supportive of the Iraqi government for years to come, 

but there is every reason to believe that doing so will 

produce the desired result: an independent, democratic and stable Iraq capable of defending itself from 

internal and external threats.

The situation in Afghanistan is far less encouraging. The war unfolded in a very different manner 

than the invasion of Iraq and under circumstances far 

less favorable to establishing peace and stability. The 

United States also missed a window of opportunity 

to defeat the insurgents decisively, a window which 

may not open again. A U.S.-backed offensive by the 

Northern Alliance of non-Pashtun tribes toppled the 

hated Taliban regime and installed the government 

of Hamid Karzai. However, the Bush administration 

had no interest in a protracted nation-building mission. Instead of aggressively pursuing the Taliban and 

al-Qaeda following Operation ANACONDA (March 

2002), it handed over security responsibility to NATO’s International Stabilization Force (ISAF), refused 

to commit a larger U.S. presence, and prepared to invade Iraq. The UN and a host of nongovernmental, 

international, and private volunteer organizations 

descended on Afghanistan to engage in development 

and capacity building.

ISAF and its civilian counterparts not only failed 

to improve significantly security and living conditions for ordinary Afghans, but they may have made 

the situation worse. “The International Community’s 

lukewarm response to Afghanistan after 9/11,” declared one regional expert, “has been matched only by 
75

its incompetence, incoherence, and conflicting strategies.”134 This statement may be overly harsh, but it 

does correctly identify lack of a unified effort among 

the myriad nations, agencies, and organizations as an 

impediment to success of the polyglot mission. The 

Rumsfeld Pentagon also applied the wrong approach 

to internal security. For 6 years, the United States 

treated the Taliban as “mere terrorists,” a threat that 

could be countered by killing or capturing key leaders 

in each group. Only in 2007 did the Pentagon begin 

to appreciate what units on the ground had known 

for some time: The Afghan government faced an intractable insurgency that would take years to resolve. 

By that time, both the Taliban and al-Qaeda had regrouped, using bases in the Federally Administered 

Tribal Area of neighboring Pakistan. 

Although the Army had correctly diagnosed the 

problem by 2008, a change of course would have to 

wait for the results of that year’s presidential election. 

Addressing cadets at the U.S. Military Academy on 

December 1, 2009, President Barak Obama announced 

a new strategy for Afghanistan. He would deploy an 

additional 30,000 troops to augment the 32,000 already in country. At the same time, he promised that 

the United States would “begin” to withdraw those 

troops in 18 months (summer 2011).135 American forces 

meanwhile transitioned from a failed counterterrorism strategy to a COIN strategy. “Clear” would be 

replaced by “clear and hold” as the new guidance for 

troops on the ground. At the same time, the United 

States and its NATO allies would improve training 

for Afghan security forces (army and police), placing 

greater emphasis on preparing them for COIN operations. The United States also pressured its ally, Pakistan, to be more aggressive in combating the Taliban 
76

and al-Qaeda on its side of the border. Furthermore, 

the United States increased strikes by predator drones 

against insurgent and terrorist leaders, even targeting 

these leaders on Pakistani soil. While the government 

in Islamabad formally condemned the drone attacks, 

it informally approved them, in some cases even providing the necessary targeting intelligence. 

Based on the conclusions of this monograph, the 

new strategy employs the correct COIN approach, including efforts by the Karzai government to negotiate 

with the Taliban. However, without the political will 

to sustain a lengthy campaign, even the best strategy 

alone will not produce victory. Support for the war in 

the United States is waning, while it has all but disappeared in Europe, especially since President Obama 

now speaks of a 2014 end date for the mission with a 

continued, albeit reduced, presence after that. Despite 

some recent successes, things have not gone well, concluded a recent CBS News Report:

The situation in Afghanistan largely deteriorated in 

2010, and an endgame—one that involves the United 

States and its allies departing a stable Afghanistan 

with a minimal terror threat and the capacity to handle its own security—is as elusive as ever.136

A number of factors have contributed to the difficult situation in Afghanistan. First and foremost, the 

conflict has already degenerated into a chronic insurgency. The Taliban controls large areas of the country 

and their sphere of control seems to be expanding. 

While they do use intimidation and terror, their success results in no small measure from their ability to 

exercise effective shadow governance in the territories 

they control. The Taliban collects taxes, provides security, and dispenses justice. In 2008, they ran 13 “guer-
77

rilla courts,” hearing civil and criminal cases based on 

their version of shari’a law, often with greater fairness 

(at least in the eyes of local Pashtuns) than the official 

courts.137 The Taliban funds their activity by taxing 

all phases of opium production from poppy cultivation to refinement through smuggling.138 As long as 

this situation persists, the insurgents do not have to 

win an outright victory. They can pursue an “exhaustion strategy,” wearing down ISAF until it withdraws 

and the Karzai government collapses.139 This strategy 

shows every sign of working. At the November 2010 

NATO summit, troop contributors reluctantly agreed 

to extend their deployment to 2014 and to maintain 

a training mission beyond that date. In a deliberately 

vague statement, NATO Secretary- General Fogh Rasmussen stated that he did not “foresee (allied) troops 

in a combat role beyond 2014, provided, of course, 

that the security situation allows us to move into a 

more supportive role.”140 President Karzai also wants 

foreign troops out of his country and supports the 

2014 withdrawal date.

Afghanistan’s neighbors further compound its security problems. Iran, one of the most implacable of 

U.S. enemies, allows aid to flow across its border to 

the insurgents. Pakistan, however, presents the greatest challenge. The Pashtun community to which the 

insurgents belong extends across the ill-defined and 

almost completely porous border between the two 

countries. The Pakistani government exercises little 

meaningful sovereignty over the Federally Administered Tribal Area along its northwest frontier, a buffer 

zone created to protect British India, out of which the 

Taliban and al-Qaeda operate. Islamabad plays a double game, publically backing the United States, while 

privately aiding the Taliban whom it understandably 
78

believes may yet win the war. Objectionable as such 

duplicity may be, it makes sense given Pakistan’s geopolitical situation. The United States and its allies will 

leave sooner or later, while Afghanistan will remain 

indefinitely as a neighbor and a security concern. Before the U.S.-led occupation, Islamabad had backed the 

Taliban as part of its defense-in-depth strategy against 

India, reasoning that a radical Islamist government 

in Kabul would have nothing to do with New Delhi. 

Only under extreme pressure did it reluctantly agree 

to support the United States, a decision which remains 

widely unpopular among the Pakistani people.

These disadvantages notwithstanding, the United 

States can still get an acceptable outcome from the Afghanistan mission, provided it understands that “acceptable” does not mean “ideal.” Resolving Afghanistan’s chronic insurgency requires replacing Taliban 

shadow governance with legitimate state sovereignty. 

The complexity of the situation, the number of state, 

non-state, and quasi-state actors precludes any simple 

solution to this problem. Any successful strategy will 

take several years to implement and longer to bear 

fruit. Such a strategy might seek complete victory, but 

all available evidence suggests that the conflict will be 

more easily resolved through negotiation and compromise, just like the Group 4 cases discussed herein.

The Afghan government, supported by the United 

States and ISAF, might continue its no-compromisewith-terrorists-or-insurgents policy. This approach 

would require maintaining ISAF troop strength at least 

at current levels and spending billions of dollars in aid 

over at least the next decade. Such aid would have to 

be delivered according to a unified plan that strengthened rather than weakened Afghan sovereignty. For its 

part, the Karzai government would have to eliminate 
79

or at least seriously reduce corruption and commit to 

truly democratic reform. These measures would probably not succeed, however, unless the government of 

Pakistan committed to a determined, sustained effort 

to eradicate Taliban and al-Qaeda safe havens on its 

side of the border. Given the sympathy for the Taliban 

within Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Department and even the Pakistani army, the fragile nature of 

the Pakistani state and the growing anti-Americanism 

among the Pakistani population, such whole-hearted 

cooperation seems unlikely. Asking the Karzai administration to clamp down on corruption engaged in by 

the President’s own family seems an equally tall order. Meanwhile, U.S. public support for the sustained 

effort necessary to defeat the Taliban also seems to be 

waning. Thus while an all-out-victory strategy would 

produce the most desirable result, it is also the most 

costly and the least likely to succeed.

As an alternative, the Afghan government, supported by the United States and its allies, could adopt 

a strategy of co-option, inviting the Taliban into a 

power-sharing agreement. Power sharing might involve dividing up government offices and/or some 

sort of federalized division of the country. This approach presupposes willingness on the part of the Taliban to negotiate such an arrangement. However, the 

experience of Northern Ireland suggests that power 

sharing only becomes possible when both sides reach 

a military stalemate and see no value in continuing 

the armed struggle. Given its revival and expansion into Pakistan over the past 4 years, the Taliban 

has every reason to believe that it is winning. At this 

point, it has little to gain from compromise. In addition, the Taliban leadership seems to have absorbed 

al-Qaeda’s mission of continuing jihad, making them 
80

very unwilling to negotiate with infidels and heretics. 

Whether these sentiments are genuine or merely rhetoric to help them gain outside support in the struggle 

for power in Afghanistan remains to be seen. 

As a third option (a variation of the co-option strategy), the Afghan government, backed by the U.S.-led 

coalition, might fight the Taliban to a stalemate and 

then reach an accommodation with it, recognizing 

Taliban control of some Afghan territory. Such an accommodation might be the basis for a ceasefire and 

negotiations. It also might result in a de facto partition 

of Afghanistan and might encourage the Taliban to 

create “Pashtunistan” by uniting with Pashtun tribes 

in Pakistan. Creating a Pashtun state (de facto or de 

jure) could, however, cause Pakistan to implode and 

become the world’s first nuclear failed state.

A fourth option would be to divide and rule, not 

from the top down, but from the bottom up. This approach would require exploiting the same cleavages 

within tribal society that the Taliban have used so 

successfully against the Afghan government. David 

Kilcullen estimates that 90 percent of Taliban supporters within Afghanistan are “actually or potentially 

co-optable,” though he insists that co-option would 

have to be done from a position of strength.141 For such 

a strategy to work, the Karzai administration would 

have to engage in meaningful reform to eliminate corruption and re-incorporate disaffected tribal leaders 

into local power structures, perhaps removing some 

of his patronage appointees. It would also require reversing the shift of power promoted by the Taliban 

from Maliks (tribal leaders) back to Mullahs (religious 

leaders) in local communities and fostering sustainable grassroots development projects to improve the 

quality of Afghan life. Finally, the poppy eradication 
81

effort would need to be brought into harmony with 

the COIN campaign instead of being implemented in 

its current haphazard, often unfair, manner, which 

hurts small farmers while leaving large drug traffickers untouched.142 None of these measures will be possible without security, which means more ISAF and 

Afghan troops to engage the Taliban and protect local communities. At the same time, the government 

of Pakistan must eliminate or at least reduce Taliban 

sanctuaries in its country. This approach offers the 

best chance of success, but it is a tall order to fill and 

will require a sustained commitment from the United 

States and its allies for several years.

The United States is pursuing this sort of bottomup strategy while leaving open the door to a negotiated settlement. “You really have to take it a district 

at a time—and maybe even more local areas than 

that,” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told National 

Public Radio in December 2010, “and diversify your 

strategy depending on the local conditions, in terms 

of whether presence contributes to security or detracts 

from security. And that may differ from one valley 

to the next.”143 At the same time that it employs this 

grassroots strategy, the U.S.-led coalition continues to 

pressure the Karzai government to diminish corruption and the Pakistani government to move more aggressively against Taliban safe havens on its territory, 

especially those in North Waziristan. Meanwhile, 

training of Afghan security forces continues. While 

the current strategy contains the right combination of 

activities, time seems to be working against it. “We 

are breaking the momentum of the enemy and will 

eventually reverse it,” Gates added during a December 2010 trip to Afghanistan. “It will be a while, and 

we will suffer tougher losses as we go.”144 However, 
82

“a while” may be more time than the United States 

has. Canada will withdraw its troops in July 2011, and 

British Prime Minister David Cameron hinted during 

his December 2010 visit to Afghanistan that he might 

begin to bring British troops home at about the same 

time, well ahead of the 2014 withdrawal date already 

announced.145 Loss of these two NATO allies, the ones 

whose troops have been most willing to fight the Taliban, would be a serious blow to the U.S.-led coalition.

Richard Haass, a member of the Bush administration foreign policy team, proposes a different version 

of the grassroots strategy. Arguing that nothing the 

United States is likely to achieve is worth the $100 

billion a year being spent on Afghanistan and the increasing number of U.S. lives being lost in the conflict, 

he proposes paying less attention to the Afghan government and supporting local leaders instead. This 

“decentralization” strategy would, he maintains, restore the historic political balance in a country long 

characterized by local autonomy and weak central 

government. Instead of partition, this approach might 

produce a “patchwork” quilt.146 However, as the UN 

plans for Palestine (1947) and Bosnia (1993) have 

shown, political quilts do not work very well in ethnically divided war zones.

There is, of course, a distinct possibility that the 

conflict cannot be brought to a satisfactory conclusion 

at an acceptable cost in blood and treasure no matter 

what strategy the United States employs. The White 

House and Pentagon should develop a worse-case 

exit strategy, but even such an undesirable scenario 

will require U.S. engagement with Afghanistan and 

its neighbors. Some conflicts need to be contained 

and managed rather than won. If the Taliban does 

return to power and refuses to reach an accommoda-
83

tion with Washington, the United States might revive 

the old Northern Alliance as a foil for Kabul, although 

this would probably result in de facto partition of the 

country. The United States might also make clear that 

it would hold any government in Kabul accountable 

for terrorist attacks launched from Afghan soil, threatening to strike the country with stand-off weapons in 

retaliation, a tactic that would put no U.S. service personnel at risk. 

CONCLUSION

For almost 30 years following the Vietnam War, 

the U.S. Army and many academics considered COIN 

part of a receding colonial past, unlikely to trouble 

them in the foreseeable future. Two protracted internal 

wars have disabused everyone of that illusion. Insurgency and counterinsurgency are here to stay. While 

no one in the U.S. military any longer doubts this fact, 

how best to prepare for future COIN conflicts remains 

problematic. The American military must maintain its 

readiness to fight a conventional war anywhere in the 

world while continuing to develop its unconventional 

capability, struggling to educate and train that critical 

commodity, the two-speed soldier—an effective war 

fighter who can also meet the challenges of COIN. As 

it meets this challenge, the United States must look to 

its own experience and to that of other nations. The 

road to the future lies through the past, via a careful 

analysis not of a narrow selection of colonial COIN 

campaigns, but through consideration of a broader selection of cases such as those presented in this monograph. 
84

ENDNOTES 

1. Mark T. Burger and Douglas A. Border, “The Long War: Insurgency, Counterinsurgency and Collapsing States,” Third World 

Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2007, p. 199.

2. U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Guide, Washington, DC: 

Department of State, 2009, p. 17.

3. William Rosenau, “Subversion and Terrorism: Understanding and Countering the Threat,” The MIPT Terrorism Annual, 2006, 

Oklahoma City, OK: MIPT, 2006, p. 53.

4. David Kilcullen, “Counterinsurgency Redux,” Survival, Vol. 

48, No. 4, December 1, 2006, p. 1. 

5. Ben Connable and Martin C. Libicki, How Insurgencies End, 

Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2010.

6. Christopher Paul, Colin P. Clarke, and Beth Grill, Victory 

has a Thousand Fathers, Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2010.

7. This monograph grew out of my paper, “How Insurgencies 

End,” presented to the Rand Insurgency Board in March 2008. 

8. DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, available 

from www.dtic.mil/doctrine/dod_dictionary/. 

9. Thomas R. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency: 1919-1960, 

London, UK: Macmillan, 1990, p. 3.

10. Rosenau, pp. 55-58. 

11. U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Guide, p. 6.

12. Convention (II) with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War on 

Land and its Annex: Regulations Concerning the Laws and Customs of 

War on Land, The Hague, July 29, 1899, Annex I, Chap. 1, Sec. 1, Art. 

1, translated and available on the International Committee of the 

Red Cross website, www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/150?OpenDocument.
85

13. Nils Melzer, Interpretive Guidance on the Notion of Direct 

Participation in Hostilities under Humanitarian Law, Geneva, Switzerland: International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 2009, 

p. 20.

14. William Boothby, “Direct Participation in Hostilities: Perspectives on the ICRC Interpretive Guidance: ‘And for Such Time 

As’: The Time Dimension to Direct Participation in Hostilities,” 

New York University Journal of Law and Politics, No. 741, Spring 

2010, online edition, available from www.lexisnexis.com.ezproxy1.

lib.depaul.edu/hottopics/lnacademic/.

15. George Rudé, Revolutionary Europe, 1783-1815, New York: 

Harper, 1964, p. 74.

16. For a discussion of organizational structure, see Christopher Harmon, Terrorism Today, London, UK: Frank Cass, 2000, pp. 

96-101.

17. For a discussion of terror and those who use it, see Thomas R. Mockaitis, The “New” Terrorism: Myths and Reality, Westport, 

CT: Praeger, 2007, pp. 2-9.

18. Thomas P. Thornton, “Terror as a Weapon of Political Agitation,” Harry Eckstein, ed., Internal War: Problems and Approaches, 

New York: The Free Press, 1964, pp. 72-73.

19. Robert Cribb, “Introduction,” Eric Wilson, ed., Government 

of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty, New York: 

Pluto Press, 2009, p. 1.

20. For British approach to COIN on which this discussion is 

based, see Thomas Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency and British Counterinsurgency in the Post-Imperial Era, Manchester, UK: 

Manchester U. Press, 1995.

21. Bernard B. Fall, quoted in David Kilcullen, The Accidental 

Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One, New York: 

Oxford, 2009, p. 88.

22. Jackie Northan, “As Afghan Conflict Escalates, What Went 

Wrong?,” “All Things Considered,” National Public Radio, De-
86

cember 9, 2010, available from www.npr.org/2010/12/09/131940690/

As-Afghan-Conflict-Escalates-What-Went-Wrong.

23. Michael R. Turner and General Bernard M. Trainor, Cobra 

II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, New York: 

Vintage Books, 2006. 

24. A. H. Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review, Vol. 50, No. 4, 1943, pp. 370-396.

25. David Kilcullen, “Road Building in Afghanistan,” Small 

Wars Journal, online edition, April 24, 2008, available from smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2008/04/political-maneuver-in-counteri/.

26. Frank Kitson, Bunch of Five, London, UK: Faber and Faber, 

1977, p. 298.

27. Field Manual (FM) 3-24: Counterinsurgency, Washington, 

DC: Department of the Army, 2006, pp. 1-26.

28. National Military Strategy for the War on Terrorism, Washington, DC: Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2006, p. 13.

29. See Robert Taber, The War of the Flea: A Study of Guerrilla 

Warfare Theory and Practice, New York: Potomac Books, 2002; 1st 

Ed., 1965.

30. J. Bowyer Bell, The Myth of the Guerrilla: Revolutionary Theory and Malpractice, New York: Knopf, 1971, challenges Taber’s 

argument.

31. McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, July 14, 1915, to 

March 10, 1916, available from Middle East Website, www.mideastweb.org/mcmahon.htm.

32. Letter of Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, Sunday 

Times, UK, November 9, 1917, available from TIMESARCHIVE, 

archive.timesonline.co.uk/tol/viewArticle.arc?articleId=ARCHIVEThe_Times-1917-11-09-07-010&pageId=ARCHIVE-The_

Times-1917-11-09-07.
87

33. Sykes-Picot Agreement, May 15-16, 1916, available from 

WWI Document Archive, wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Sykes-Picot_

Agreement.

34. 1939 (MacDonald) White Paper, available from avalon.law.

yale.edu/20th_century/brwh1939.asp.

35. John Marlowe, The Seat of Pilate, London, UK: 1959, pp. 

171-172. Haganah leader and later Israeli Defense Minister Moshe 

Dayan insists that they received only shotguns from the British 

and smuggled in better weapons. Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life, 

An Autobiography, New York: Sphere Books, 1976, p. 33.

36. David Charters, The British Army and the Jewish Insurgency 

in Palestine, London, UK: Macmillan, 1989, p. 41.

37. Ibid., pp. 43, 46, 48.

38. For analysis of the British response, see Mockaitis, British 

Counterinsurgency, pp. 101-111.

39. General Miles Dempsey to the War Office, November 16, 

1946, Imperial War Museum, Bernard Law Montgomery Papers, 

BLM/211/2.

40. Lieutenant Colonel Philippe Francois, “Waging Counterinsurgency in Algeria: A French Perspective,” Military Review, 

September-October 2008, p. 59.

41. Ibid., p. 60.

42. Colonel Giles Martin, “War in Algeria: the French Experience,” Military Review, July-August 2005, p. 53.

43. Ibid.

44. Keith Sutton, “Administration Tensions over Algeria’s 

Centres de Regroupment, 1954-1962,” British Journal of Middle East 

Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2, November 1999, pp. 243-270.

45. Francois, pp. 66-67.
88

46. UNHCR et al., Kosovo Atlas, Pristina, Kosovo: UNHCR, 

2000, p. vi.

47. Howard Clark, Civil Resistance in Kosovo, London, UK: 

Pluto Press, 2000, pp. 95-121.

48. Miron Rezun, Europe’s Nightmare: The Struggle for Kosovo, 

Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001, pp. 40, 45-46.

49. Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2000, p. 27.

50. Rezun, p. 44.

51. This argument is the premise of Bowyer Bell, Myth of the 

Guerrilla. 

52. R. W. Komer, The Malayan Emergency in Retrospect: Organization of a Successful Counterinsurgency Effort, Santa Monica, CA: 

Rand, 1972, pp. 2-3.

53. For a detailed discussion of the British approach to COIN, 

see Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919-1960.

54. For a discussion of the Briggs Plan, see ibid., pp. 115-116.

55. Anthony Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malay, 1948-

1960, London, UK: Muller, 1975, p. 403.

56. “Director of Operations, Malaya Directive No. 13: Administration of Chinese Settlement,” February 26, 1951, PRO, CO 

1022/132.

57. David Lloyd Owen, Assistant to Gerald Templer, to Lewis 

J. Hankings, April 15, 1969, National Army Museum, UK, Accession No. 8011-132.

58. FM 3-24, pp. 1-26.

59. Quoted in Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: the Lessons of Malaya and Vietnam, London, UK: Chatto and 

Windus, 1966, p. 61.
89

60. Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, COIN, and Counter-Terrorism, 1940-1990, New York: 

Pantheon Books, 1992, p. 12.

61. Andrew J. Birtle, U.S. Army COIN and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942-1976, Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center for 

Military History, 2006, p. 47-48.

62. Ibid., p. 52.

63. Preeti Bhattacharji, “Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, aka 

Tamil Tigers, Sri Lanka, separatists, ” Council on Foreign Relations “Backgrounder,” updated May 20, 2009, available from 

www.cfr.org/publication/9242/liberation_tigers_of_tamil_eelam_aka_

tamil_tigers_sri_lanka_separatists.html.

64. Jayshree Bajoria, “The Sri Lankan Conflict,” Council on 

Foreign Affairs, “Backgrounder,” updated May 18, 2009, available from www.cfr.org/publication/11407/sri_lankan_conflict.html#.

65. For discussion of Tamil governance, see Kristian Stokke, 

“Building the Tamil Eelam State: Emerging State Institutions and 

Forms of Governance in LTTE-Controlled Areas in Sri Lanka,” 

Third World Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 6, 2006, pp. 1021-1040.

66. Details on LTTE fundraising from K. Alan Kronstadt and 

Bruce Vaughn, Sri Lanka: Background and U.S. Relations, Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, June 4, 2009, p. 10.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid.

69. Bhattacharji.

70. Andrew Hosken, Interview with Colonel Karuna Amman, 

BBC Today, May 5, 2009, available from news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/

today/newsid_8033000/8033150.stm.

71. “Who are ETA?” BBC Online, November 17, 2008, available from news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3500728.stm.
90

72. Available from www.fas.org/irp/world/para/eta.htm.

73. Jan Oskar Engene, Terrorism in Western Europe: Explaining 

the Trends since 1980, North Hampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2004, 

p. 133.

74. ETA killed 474 people between 1967 and 1995. Ibid., p. 129.

75. Ibid., p. 130.

76. Ibid.

77. Lewis Taylor, “Counter-Insurgency Strategy, the PCPSendero Luminoso and the Civil War in Peru, 1980-1996,” Bulletin 

of Latin American Research, Vol. 17, No. 1, January 1998, p. 41.

78. Kathryn Gregory, “Shining Path, Túpac Amaru, (Peru, 

leftists),” Council on Foreign Relations, August 27, 2009, available from www.cfr.org/publication/9276/shining_path_tupac_amaru_

peru_leftists.html. 

79. Ibid., p. 41.

80. Angela Cornell and Kenneth Roberts, “Democracy, Counterinsurgency, and Human Rights: The Case of Peru,” Human 

Rights Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 4, November 1990, p. 536.

81. Ibid., p. 540.

82. Robert B. Kent, “Geographical Dimensions of Shining 

Path Insurgency in Peru,” Geographical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4, October 1993, p. 449.

83. Ibid., p. 541.

84. Ibid., p. 449.

85. For a discussion of British influence on the Peruvian COIN 

campaign, see Taylor, “Counter-Insurgency Strategy, the PCPSendero Luminoso and the Civil War in Peru.”
91

86. Ibid., p. 51.

87. Ibid.

88. James Zackrison, “Colombia,” Yonah Alexander, ed., Combating Terrorism: Strategies of Ten Countries, Ann Arbor: University 

of Michigan Press, 2002, p. 118.

89. Ibid.

90. Ending Colombia’s FARC Conflict: Dealing the Right Card, 

Washington, DC: International Crisis Group, 2009, p. 4.

91. See, for example, Stephen Flynn, U.S. Support of Plan Colombia: Rethinking the Ends and Means, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2002. 

92. Luis Nagle, Plan Colombia: Reality of the Colombian Crisis 

and Implications for Hemispheric Security, Carlisle, PA: Strategic 

Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2002, p. 8.

93. Ibid., p. 9.

94. Ibid., p. 7.

95. Ending Colombia’s FARC Conflict, p. 5.

96. Ibid., p. 7.

97. Ibid.

98. “Improving Security Policy in Colombia,” Policy Briefing, 

Bogotá: International Crisis Group, 2010, pp. 3-6.

99. Flynn, p. 5.

100. War and Drugs in Colombia, International Crisis Group: 

2005, p. 10.

101. Ibid., p. 11.

102. Tom Wilson, Ulster: Conflict and Consent, London, UK: 

Basil Blackwell, 1989, p. 107.
92

103. Michael Dewar, The British Army in Northern Ireland, London, UK: Arms and Armour Press, 1985, p. 47. 

104. Ibid.

105. “Building on Success: the Story of Northern Ireland 

Housing since 1970,” Background Brief, London, UK: Foreign and 

Commonwealth Office, 1992, p. 1.

106. This is the premise of the article by J. Bowyer Bell, “An 

Irish War: The IRA’s Armed Struggle, 1969-1980, Strategy as History Rules OK,” Small Wars and Insurgencies, Vol. 1, No. 3, December 1990.

107. Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA, 

New York: Oxford, 2003, p. 315.

108. Benjamin Schwartz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine 

and El Salvador: the Frustrations of Reform and the Illusions of National Building, Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1991, p. 9.

109. Ibid., p. 103.

110. William Dean Stanley, “State Building Before and After 

Democratization: 1980-1995,” Vol. 27, No. 1, 2006, p. 102.

111. Ibid.

112. Schwartz, p. 103.

113. Charles T. Call, “War and State-Building: Constructing 

the Rule of Law in El Salvador,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 

Vol. 35, No. 4, November, 2003, p. 831.

114. Ricardo Córdova Macías, “Demilitarizing and Democratizing Salvadoran Politics,” Margarita S. Studemeister, El Salvador 

Implementation of the Peace Accords, Washington, DC: U.S. Institute 

of Peace, 2001, p. 128.

115. Call, p. 831.
93

116. Demographic details from World Fact Book, Washington, 

DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 1991, pp. 1089, 1092.

117. Anyu D. Ndumbe, “Diamonds, Ethnicity, and Power: the 

Case of Sierra Leone,” Mediterranean Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 4, Fall 

2001, p. 94.

118. Ibid., p. 99.

119. Text of Lomé Accords, available from www.sierra-leone.

org/lomeaccord.html. 

120. “Seventeenth Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone,” UN Document S/2003/321, 

March 17, 2003.

121. “Twenty-Seventh Report of the Secretary-General on 

the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone,” UN Document 

S/2005/777, December 12, 2005.

122. “Review of the Outcome of the High-level Special Session of the Peacebuilding Commission on Sierra Leon,” PBC4/

SLE/3, October 10, 2010.

123. Richard N. Haass, “We’re Not Winning. It’s Not Worth 

It,” Newsweek, July 18, 2010, online edition, available from www.

newsweek.com/2010/07/18/we-re-not-winning-it-s-not-worth-it.html.

124. Colonel (Ret.) Timothy Heinemann, “Memorandum for 

US SOCOM Historian,” observations on his role in Operation 

IRAQI FREEDOM, September 14, 2004. 

125. Field Manual (FM) 100-20: Military Operations in Low-Intensity Conflict, Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 1990, 

p. 2-15.

126. Paul, Clarke, and Grill, Victory has a Thousand Fathers, p. 

97.

127. Thomas R. Mockaitis, “Counterinsurgency Doctrine: the 

U.S. Experience,” Jan Angstrom and Isabelle Duyvesteyn, Modern 

War and the Utility of Force: Challenges, Methods, and Strategy, London, UK: Routledge, 2010, pp. 142-158.
94

128. FM 100-20, p. 2-15.

129. Joint Publication (JP) 3-07: Doctrine for Joint Operations in 

Low-Intensity Conflict, Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, 1994, p. 

II-5.

130. Burger and Border, “The Long War: Insurgency, Counterinsurgency and Collapsing States,” p. 198.

131. James A. Baker III and Lee Hamilton et al., Report of the 

Iraq Study Group, Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2006, 

p. 6.

132. Details on the origin and growth of the “Anbar Awakening” from Alissa J. Rueben and Damien Cave, “In a Force for 

Iraqi Calm, Seeds of Conflict,” The New York Times, online edition, 

December 23, 2007, available from www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/

world/middleeast/23awakening.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all.

133. Thomas R. Mockaitis, Iraq and the Challenge of Counterinsurgency, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008, p. 143.

134. Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and 

the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central 

Asia, New York: Penguin, 2008, p. 21.

135. Transcript of President Barak Obama’s Speech Delivered 

at West Point, December 1, 2010, available from abcnews.go.com/

Politics/full-transcript-president-obamas-speech-afghanistan-deliveredwest-point/story?id=9220661.

136. Brian Montopoli, “In Afghanistan War, No Clear 

End in Sight,” CBS News Online, November 15, 2010, available from www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20022855-503544.

html?tag=cbsnewsMainColumnArea.

137. David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small 

Wars in the Midst of a Big One, New York: Oxford, 2009, p. 76.

138. For a discussion of the opium trade, militias, and Taliban funding, see Gretchen S. Peters, “The Taliban and the Opium 

Trade,” Antonio Giustozzi, ed., Decoding the Taliban: Insights from 

the Afghan Field, London, UK: Hurst, 2009, pp. 6-22.
95

139. Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla, p. 81.

140. Christi Parsons and Paul Richter, “NATO Hedges Afghan Pullout,” Chicago Tribune, November 21, 2010, Sec. 1, p. 31.

141. Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla, p. 78.

142. Ibid., p. 94. 

143. Quoted in Rachel Martin, “Gates Visits Afghanistan 

Ahead of War Review,” December 7, 2010, National Public Radio 

online, available from www.npr.org/2010/12/07/131882442/gatesvisits-afghanistan-ahead-of-war-review.

144. The Associated Press, “Gates Sees Hard-Won Success in 

East Afghanistan,” National Public Radio online, available from 

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131868579.

145. “Wikileaks ‘will not damage UK-Afghan relations’,” BBC 

online, December 7, 2010, available from www.bbc.co.uk/news/ukpolitics-11933476?cid=dlvr.it.

146. Haass.
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General Gregg F. Martin

Commandant

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STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE

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