Counter-Insurgency: From Latin America To Afghanistan

The US COIN program has its origins in the decades long US interventions - secretive and not so - in its own southern hemisphere. And the war in Afghanistan (and in Iraq) takes on the same state terror versus insurgent terror attributes of that long era of violence

By Pablo Behrens.
First Published 2010-08-19
Courtesy Of "Middle-East-Online"

In recent decades there have been only one or two precedents in which the United States and the United Kingdom could analyze directly the use of guerilla warfare by insurgents, and the response by government authorities. In the US' case it was the urban guerilla movement and the ‘threat’ of progressive political parties in South and Central America and the State terror it unleashed during the 1970s. In the case of the UK, it was the IRA mainland attacks of the 1980s.

Their experience in those two conflicts cannot be underestimated and in one form or another lessons learnt by both re-surfaced in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is unthinkable that US government agencies such as the Pentagon, the CIA and the NSA has not applied the lessons learned in Latin America, when less than twenty years later the White House would be directly involved in a war against insurgency.

In the case of the UK, it was a source of pride for their military cadres to freely admit that British commanders were applying "lessons learnt in Belfast" in their war against the urban insurgency in Basra.

At some point, the Global War on Terror of 2001 turned into a War on Insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the nations that signed up for those wars did not imagine is that one day they would be using the same tactics as the enemy they were trying to destroy.

Terror attack takes various forms. A bomb from nowhere, kidnap or arrest without trial, renditions, assassinations, secret prisons, improvised explosive devices, drone attacks, summary executions and torture. Anything goes. Terror is a State tactic as well as an insurgency tactic. It is borne from a need to produce results quicker than more conventional warfare or legal means. The difference is that one side is condemned by the law of the land while the other acts with impunity and is above the law.

The methods of recruitment, command, control and attack used by the urban guerillas in the big cities of South America in the past are very similar to the methods insurgents use today in Baghdad, Basra, Kandahar or Kabul -- with the exception of suicide attacks and that Latin American guerillas generally targeted government forces as per the Cuban model. But for any insurgent anywhere in the world it's still the same old Che Guevara tactic of “bite and flee” (muerde y huye). In its simplest form it’s a small arms attack by a group of guerillas and then back to the shadows. By the time government forces are able to respond they find only the dust settling and a few dead bodies.

The authority in Iraq and more so now in Afghanistan is none other than the US occupation army. As such it responds the only way it knows: an iron fist that smashes anything that moves -- it’s the ‘kill today, ask human rights questions tomorrow’ method. The reasoning is simple: If Che Guevara and his urban cohorts had been dealt with that way, why not Osama bin Laden's irregulars?

There is no other recent learning curve in either the United States or the UK than their respective experiences in Latin America and Northern Ireland. Except Vietnam, but that was a war the United States lost.

Thanks to the passage of time we now know how military juntas in Latin America dealt with guerillas or political threats. Torture was widespread as well as mass arrests; paramilitary elements organized political assassinations via death squads; illegal flights across frontiers were used to transport kidnapped dissidents or insurgency suspects for torture. During this period, a permanent, widespread presence of US intelligence operatives maintained contact with local military agencies, advising and protecting.

All the above was 'stock in trade' in Latin America between the early 60s and the mid 80s. A kind of 'operations manual' for counter-insurgency success was being drawn up for future conflicts by research elements in the US state security establishment. The preferred chapter was the use of violent attack against anybody deemed a suspect on the flimsiest of evidences. Insurgency was stamped out in Latin America by the sheer force of the bloodbath committed by State terror. Only human rights organizations bothered then as they still bother today and only one or two Western countries batted an eye as the horror was unleashed.

All Latin American military juntas of the period were supported by successive US administrations through generous loans, arms and training of military, police and intelligence cadres. That campaign is still today considered an unmitigated military success by US security.

That’s why we should not be surprised if in the last few years a similar counter-insurgency strategy was apparently applied by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hallmark was the same: rendition flights of suspects, arrests without trial and rumors of torture in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and Abu Ghraib in Iraq. There were also secret assassination squads, trigger happy soldiers and CIA-run secret prisons.

In the War on Insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq what was happening was just the recycling of a tried and tested formula first applied “successfully” years earlier in Latin America.

The main difference between a war on insurgency in Latin America and counter-insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan is that in the former case, the human rights violations were carried out by the military juntas of each country concerned and US involvement was kept out of the limelight. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the equivalent military power is nonexistent or unreliable, so the United States has to carry out the repression by itself. Their heavy handed modus operandi -- the only one they know -- is confirmed in a number of leaks over the years and published by newspapers like the Washington Post, by the WikiLeaks web site, or by denunciations from organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

So now the counter-insurgency manual is found faulty, as the power exercising the repression, the United States, has been caught red-handed and there is no one else to blame. It was easy to claim "plausible deniability" when violations were carried out by well known South American military butchers like Garrastazu Medici in Brazil, Videla in Argentina, or Pinochet in Chile. It is more difficult to apply it when the only military game in town is the United States.

State terror has its limits. It can kill some of the people all the time. It can even kill all the people some of the time. But it cannot kill all the people all the time. Some wars are better lost.

Pablo Behrens is a Uruguayan freelance journalist based in London, England. Between 2005-2008 Pablo was London correspondent for La Republica covering the terrorist attacks in the London Underground, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and general national and international policy of the British government within the War on Terror framework.

Copyright © 2010 Pablo Behrens – distributed by Agence Global