The second lesson the strategists learnt was that you must use puppets or surrogate armies. You must not introduce a foreign army of occupation. You must get the people of the same nation to fight the government you want to destabilise. Angolans must fight Angolans and Mozambicans must fight Mozambicans. In countries like Guatemala, EI Salvador, the Philippines and South Africa, LIC is a kind of divide and rule strategy that prevents an effective revolution from the left.
Every possible means is used to get the poor to begin fighting one another.
It then becomes possible for the government to pose as the neutral peacemaker. Today the most sophisticated use of LIC to destabilise the left and the communities that might support them is being planned and executed in South Africa. Their links with other military strategists from Chile to Israel are well known. By 1989 it had become abundantly clear that these strategies were not working. More subtle forms of counter-insurgency would have to be worked out.