This paper at the Army War College's Carlisle Barracks Web site is an examination of the controversial Phoenix counterinsurgency program during the Vietnam War: From the Ashes of the Phoenix: Lessons for Contemporary Counterinsurgency Operations by Kenneth Tovo 03/18/05 (*.pdf file)
As the title may suggest, it is an attempt to find useful lessons in the experience of that program. Tovo "blips" over the many problems of that effort by saying that "unfortunately, decentralized operations in an uncertain, ambiguous environment did lead to abuses." But it's clear from other comments (see below) that he recognizes that the negative and problematic sides were very real.
But it seems to be a careful and serious analysis of the program, with some important observations about the difference between counterinsurgency warfare and the conventional variety. He also argues plausibly that despite the failures and "abuses" of the program, "Phoenix was the U.S. government's largest and most systematic effort [in the Vietnam War] to destroy the insurgency's political and support infrastructure - a critical element in a counterinsurgency campaign." So it's worth examining for practical lessons, both positive and negative.
Here is an example of some of the basic considerations involved, considerations that seem to have largely been neglected in the Iraq War:
Vietnam was a classic example of a mass-oriented insurgency. The VC sought to discredit the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government in the eyes of the population through a protracted campaign of violence, while offering its own parallel political structure as a viable alternative to the ‘illegitimate’ government.42 The ‘battlefield’ in a mass-oriented insurgency is the population – both the government and the insurgents fight for the support of the people.
As [Larry Cable] has suggested, both sides in this type of conflict have two tools in the struggle for control and support of the populace: "…popular perceptions of legitimacy and a credible power to coerce."43 He goes on the note that the target of coercion, the populace, defines the threat’s credibility, not the employer of the threat.44 Consequently, conventional military power does not necessarily equate to credible coercive power. The conventional force may possess state of the art weaponry and overwhelming destructive power. Nevertheless, if the populace believes it will not or cannot be used against them, it has limited coercive value - particularly if the insurgent is able to punish noncompliant members of the populace and reward supporters.
Tovo's suggestion that the international jihadist movement be viewed essentially as a single insurgency in some important sense is flawed, at least insofar as he merges the guerrilla wars in Afghanistan and Iraq into the same concept.
The jihadist movement certainly promotes insurgencies. But the Afghan and Iraqi insurgencies are certainly not identical to the jihadist movement. So an anti-jihadist strategy would have to be distinct from counterinsurgency in those particular situations.
But Tovo's approach to the jihadist movement includes some valuable observations that are quite different from the conventional wisdom (or, more accurately, the daily Party line) of the Republican Party. For instance, Tovo writes of the international jihadists, "A militant Islamic insurgency, no 'terrorism' is the enemy." And he explands on the idea in his conclusion:
The current militant Islamic insurgency [i.e., the international jihadist movement] directly threatens vital U.S. national interests - potentially the most vital of its interests, national survival. The United States must recognize and identify this threat in order to defeat it. Words matter; when the National Security Strategy for Combating Terrorism identifies a technique, terrorism, as the enemy, it can only lead to strategic and operational confusion.
And one of the lessons he draws from the negative side of the Phoenix program is the following:
Legal and moral issues are of paramount concern in a counterinsurgency. These issues have the potential to wield considerable influence on the population’s perception of legitimacy. Operations must stand the long-term scrutiny of world and U.S. popular opinion. Negative perceptions of Phoenix drew intensive scrutiny from Congress and the media and weakened the legitimacy of the governments of the U.S. and South Vietnam. South Vietnam’s inability to house, process, and adjudicate the large numbers of detainees the Phoenix Program generated dramatically hampered its overall effectiveness. In many cases, the system became a revolving door, with hard-core VCI released prematurely. In other cases, lengthy detainment of innocents abetted the enemy’s recruitment effort. Detainee interrogations provided the best source of targeting information; however, accusations of inhumane treatment weakened the regime’s legitimacy.
**
This, by the way, is one reason I have so little patience with the blowhard white guy version of war talk. Here is a serious military analyst taking a serious look at strategies to deal with the urgent problem of dealing with insurgencies, and drawing on the American military experience in Vietnam to do so. And he's writing things like, "Legal and moral issues are of paramount concern in a counterinsurgency," the kind of things our superpatriotic blowhards quickly as wimp talk, as they scratch their behinds and swagger about how great it is to have wars where someone else does the killing, dying and torturing.
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