Abstract
This book by the renowned British historian David French offers some novel insights. The author essentially sets out to dismantle the tropes and the truths that previous studies on the subject of the British special affinity for counterinsurgency have encouraged. The book explores the British period of colonial divestment after World War II, from 1945 to 1967. David French is Professor Emeritus of University College London and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. The author is a bona fide subject expert on the British Army’s history, having authored among others, the seminal work, The British Way in Warfare 1688-2000. French is also an award-winning author as he has been awarded both the New York Military Affairs Symposium Book Award in 2000 and the Templer Medal Book Prize in 2005. In this recent book, the author’s aim is to determine to what extent British soldiers, policemen, colonial civil servants, and politicians undertook the kind of counterinsurgency practices that authors like Robert Thompson, Frank Kitson, and Thomas Mockaitis attributed to their operations during that period.
For example, did the British generally embrace the “hearts-and-minds” and “minimum force” tenets that some have extolled and prescribed as the solutions to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Previous works on this subject by social scientists and practitioners did tend toward extrapolating good and bad practices for the reasons of crafting better approaches to counterinsurgency. And, indeed, generalizing is the bane of more than a few historians. French is certainly a good historian of repute, but it would be naive not to construe a modest subagenda here, one to reign in the prophets and proponents of best practice counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. To explore this topic and time period, French has organized the book into eight chapters with themes that range from “Gangsters, Thugs, and Bandits” to “Britain’s Dirty Wars” to “Varieties of Coercion,” “Hearts-and-Minds,” and “Problems of Sustainability.” The book incorporates a considerable body of primary source and archival material to draw insights from ten British counterinsurgencies in Aden, Oman, Cyprus, Palestine, the Canal Zone, Malaya, Borneo, British Guiana, Nyasaland, and Kenya.
For this review, French’s scrutiny of the “hearts-and-minds” shibboleth, the principle of the minimum use of force, and the notion that the British institutions involved in these counterinsurgencies were learning organizations merit amplifying. The term winning hearts and minds, through misuse and overuse, has lost much of what currency it had enjoyed simply because it was rather a poor description. Counterinsurgency is about winning the war of perceptions and it is more about convincing the preponderance of the population that the government’s cause is more legitimate and more credibly capable of success than that of the insurgency. It requires matching lethal and nonlethal actions with a genuine and convincing narrative that the counterinsurgents are serious about meeting the expectations and addressing the grievances of the population. French explains that British counterinsurgency methods during this period did include coercion and lethal force aimed at the insurgents and their supporters. He also correctly illumines that in most of his cases, the British did ultimately have to offer to end colony status to address the grievances of the relevant populations.
The author also argues that the principle of the minimum use of force, though theoretically admirable, was in practice ill defined and very imperfectly and inconsistently manifest in practice. The British government and its army did espouse, codify, and aspire to the minimum use of relevant force for intrastate emergencies, at least since the impetus of the Amritsar massacre that its forces perpetrated in 1919. However, the frictions, passions, and variegated discipline of Britain’s counterinsurgent forces across these cases did make compliance with the principle vary from good to very imperfect. To be certain, the social scientists that stipulated the principle of minimum force as a key principle in counterinsurgency simply benchmarked it as a best practice from worse practices. Finally, while French seems to want to refute the claim that the British institutions undertaking these counterinsurgencies were learning organizations, in the end he does admit that learning and adapting was manifest among the British army units.
The British Way in Counterinsurgency achieves its aim of ascertaining how the British civilian and security services acquitted themselves in the course of ten counterinsurgencies as Britain relinquished its empire. However, the answers to French’s questions reveal an uneven history of counterinsurgency practice. In some instances, population security and persuasion worked but the British also employed lethality and coercion to compel portions of the populations to support the governments’ causes. In some cases, the British reverted to coercion, lethal methods, and the displacement of populations, along with the destruction of properties. This work highlights some imperfections during the purported halcyon years of British counterinsurgency. It stands in some contrast to the works of Robert Thompson and Frank Kitson, where the blemishes and warts of British counterinsurgency in practice are rather understated because those works tended to focus on those practices worthy of emulation.
This critical and relatively unprecedented look at British counterinsurgency points the way for a new range of scholarly analyses that might explore fewer cases in a bit more depth to glean insight on what the author uncovers only superficially. The large number of cases he covers within the limitations of a single book precludes that kind of depth. In elaborating the more lethal and coercive aspects of the British counterinsurgency practices, this book further underscores the inanity of those who falsely distinguish counterinsurgency aimed at the people (population-centric) and from counterinsurgency aimed at the insurgents (enemy-centric) by using the silly and meaningless suffix “centric.” What this book does correctly underline is that counterinsurgency must always be about countermobilizing the population by protecting many, coercing some, and killing and capturing fewer. Counterinsurgents must also display moral rectitude. Moral rectitude, however, proved exceedingly chimerical, given the context of British colonial subjugation of these populations during that period.