New Categories
If we employ [nuclear weapons] on the enemy, we invite retaliation, shock, horror, and a cycle of retaliation with an end that is most difficult to foresee… We are flung into a straitjacket of rationality, which prevents us from lashing out at the enemy… Warfare must be returned to its traditional place as politics pursued by other means.
William Kaufmann, RAND analyst, 19551
There used to be only one kind of war. It was conducted by states, it involved armies, and it had strategies which served political ends. There were other kinds of violence as well, from popular revolts to mere banditry, but the distinction was clear. And then suddenly, after 1945, there were three kinds of war: the nuclear wars that all great powers had to prepare for but never fight, the guerrilla wars and terrorism that have captured and held the public’s attention for the past 75 years – and, of course, the ‘conventional’ wars continuing to flourish beneath and beyond the nuclear stalemate.
The category of ‘conventional war’ did not exist before 1945, because all wars were conventional. For the great powers, it should have virtually vanished after 1945, because nuclear weapons made war between them even by traditional means – armies fighting other armies, taking and holding territory – unthinkably dangerous. Yet the great powers still dwelt in an international system that took the possibility of war as a given, and each government was served by large and powerful institutions whose purpose was to prepare for and, if necessary, fight wars. It was an insoluble dilemma, so they never solved it.
The two victorious countries that emerged from the Second World War as ‘superpowers’, the United States and the Soviet Union, divided Europe, the centre of world power for the previous three centuries, into spheres of influence whose borders ran roughly along the line where their armies had halted in 1945. They then identified each other as enemies and entered into a long and dangerous military confrontation. That was perfectly normal, as was the fact that they emphasised their ideological differences to explain, justify and reinforce a hostility that would have happened anyway. It’s unlikely that either superpower ever intended to attack the other, but on average they would then have been about half a century away from the next world war. Depending on how you define a world war.
Shuffling the Pack
We normally count only the two great wars of the 20th century as ‘world wars’, but they were really just the same old thing with better weapons technologies. Politically, a ‘world war’ is one in which all the great powers of the time are involved. Between 1600 and 1950 all the great powers – that is to say those able to project serious force at a significant distance from their own borders – were European, and they happened to have globe-spanning empires so their wars in this period were fought all over the planet. But geography is not the decisive criterion. What makes it a world war is that all the great powers join together in two great rival alliances, and that the war ends up being about practically everything. At the end of it, the outstanding disputes between the great powers go into the pot and get sorted by the peace settlement.
By this criterion, there have been six world wars in modern history: the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–48, the War of the Spanish Succession in 1702–14, the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars of 1791–1815 and the two that actually bear the name of World War, in 1914–18 and 1939–45. At the time people saw these wars as having ‘settled’ things conclusively, and having defined the relative status of the great powers in the ensuing period of relative peace. What they didn’t often notice (because most of them were only alive for one of these events) was that the ‘world wars’ were coming along roughly every half-century.
Apart from the long 19th-century gap, the great powers have gone to war with each other about every fifty years throughout modern history – and even the ‘long peace’ of the 19th century is deceptive. Between 1854 and 1870, right on schedule, every great power fought one or several others: Britain, France, and Turkey against Russia; France and Italy against Austria; Germany against Austria; and then Germany against France. Because all of these wars except the first ended in a decisive victory in no more than six months, they didn’t expand in the usual way to include all the great powers. (The longer a war between any two great powers lasts, the likelier it is to drag in the others.)
Nevertheless, this series of smaller wars brought about changes in the international distribution of power just as significant as those normally wrought by world wars. A united Italy and a powerful German empire emerged in the heart of Europe, while the relative decline of Austria was confirmed and France lost its position as the greatest continental power. The great power system then settled into a long period of peace: the Treaty of Frankfurt in 1871, like the Congress of Vienna in 1815, was followed by four decades in which no European great powers fought each other.
What made this pattern so cyclical? Why did the great powers all go to war roughly every fifty years?
Each world war reshuffles the pack, and then the peace treaty freezes all the border changes and defines the rank of the great powers in the new international pecking order. Peace settlements reflect the real power relationships in the world at the time when they are signed. They are easily enforceable, because the winners have just beaten the losers in war. But as the decades pass, the wealth and population of some powers grow fast while others decline. After half a century, the real power relationships in the world are very different from those prescribed by the last peace settlement. This is when some rising power, frustrated by its allotted place in the existing international system, or some frightened country that fears it is losing too much ground, kicks off the next reshuffle of the pack.
There is no magic in the figure of fifty years. It’s simply how long it takes for the realities of power to part company with the relationships reflected by the last peace. Our ability to see the normal historical rhythm is hampered because World War II came only twenty years after World War I, but that is probably due to the fact that the latter was the first total war. It therefore ended in a particularly draconian peace treaty, since even the winners had suffered so greatly that they were unnecessarily vengeful. ‘Tremendous victories make bad peaces,’ as Guglielmo Ferrero remarked, and indeed the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, with its extreme terms, was an unsustainable distortion of the real power relationships in the world. Germany lost the war, but it was not going to remain inferior in power to France for the next fifty years.
World War II ended in an equally tremendous victory, but the subsequent peace between the great powers has already lasted almost four times as long. The post-1945 settlement did break down more or less on schedule, at the end of the 1980s – but it was replaced peacefully, and there is still no new world war in sight. So why didn’t the Cold War end in World War III after fifty years or so?
Foolish or desperate?
War is nothing more than the continuation of policy by other means.
Karl von Clausewitz2
Great states have no permanent friends, only permanent interests.
Lord Palmerston3
Over the millennia, a large body of beliefs has accumulated about the merciless environment in which states operate. Those who rise to positions of political power know that quarrels settled by law when occurring within a state are frequently settled by war when they occur between states, there being little international law and no international law enforcement. And those who served in the armed forces, even in the late 20th century, were obliged to believe simultaneously that nuclear weapons had rendered war unthinkable, and that it was still possible.
For more than four decades, an entire working lifetime for a generation of soldiers, there was a sustained attempt to turn Central Europe into a game park where the great powers could preserve an endangered species, conventional war, because the alternative was a return to total war. And it would be a nuclear total war, next time. But the line they drew between conventional and nuclear war was an artificial distinction, and a pretty flimsy one.
It has always frightened me to death, ever since I was to command a division in Germany in the late Fifties and the nuclear weapon appeared for the first time as a cotton-wool cloud on the sand table. The assumption that you can control a nuclear war is pure fantasy… [The] one thing you can count on is that there will be a very high probability of early and steep escalation into the strategic all-out exchange that nobody wants. So you mustn’t use the things.
Gen. Sir John Hackett
The Soviet acquisition of a nuclear capability roughly comparable to that of the United States should have ended the period when Washington saw nuclear strikes as a usable military tool, since both countries would effectively be destroyed in such a war. Yet both sides continued to modernise their conventionally armed troops along the ‘Central Front’ (the East-West German border), and even elaborated theories for how ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons might be used in circumstances short of all-out nuclear war.
There is no such thing as a pre-planned escalation which necessarily must follow in steps, so that it would be first a conventional war and then a nuclear war. This would be very much against our philosophy of flexible response. Flexible response means that the enemy faces a completely incalculable risk. It might even be that we use nuclear weapons from the outset. If the political decision is made for that, the military is prepared to do it.
Gen. Ferdinand von Senger und Etterlin, commander-in-chief, Allied Forces Central Europe, 1982
Despite the general’s fighting words, the doctrine of flexible response was really an attempt by NATO to keep a war in Europe at a ‘conventional’ World War II level for at least a little while, before both sides went nuclear – and in practice the Soviets had adopted the same policy by 1970. Both sides hoped that, even after the first relatively low-yield nuclear weapons had been used in Europe – probably to stop a breakthrough somewhere – they could still limit escalation beyond ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons for at least a few more days before the ‘strategic’ nukes started destroying cities in the Russian and American homelands.
Were the soldiers who devoted their lives to this enterprise foolish or just desperate? Some had not yet grasped the truth that Bernard Brodie articulated in 1945 – that their function now was to avert war, not wage it – but the better informed knew that nuclear weapons had ‘changed everything’. However, they were soldiers with orders to guard a border, so they did the best they could. If the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function is the mark of a first-rate intelligence (as F. Scott Fitzgerald proposed), then they passed the test.
A ‘limited’ nuclear war on the Central Front would not only have destroyed most of the armies that were engaged; it would also have killed millions or tens of millions of civilians in central Europe in a matter of days. Perhaps it would have provided a last brief opportunity for reflection and second thoughts before the opponents moved on to ‘strategic’ nuclear weapons and the devastation of the entire Northern Hemisphere. And perhaps not.
In Wintex ’83, one of the last annual NATO command and staff exercises before the Cold War began to shut down, the script had the Warsaw Pact forces crossing the border into West Germany on 3 March. On 8 March, NATO’s commanders requested authority to use their nuclear weapons to stop the Soviet breakthrough, and the first nuclear strike against the Warsaw Pact was ordered on 9 March. The conventional war, in this exercise, lasted six days.
Rehearsing for Armageddon: British troops on NATO’s exercise Lionheart in Germany, 1984
Not So Conventional
The obsession with nuclear weapons during the Cold War obscured another new reality that had been creeping up on the soldiers, and continues to do so today: even a purely conventional war fought with state-of-the-art weapons has become problematic. The latest generation of weapons – battlefield surveillance systems, weapons with a ‘one-shot kill capability’, swarms of drones and the like – are transforming conventional war, and some theorists even talk about a ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’. There is such a thing, no doubt, but not in quite the sense they intend. The real RMA has been the huge increase in the rate of loss of combat systems in battle, partly because the new weapons have become so complex and expensive to build that there are far fewer of them, and partly because they are so lethally good at destroying each other.
Israeli tank crossing the Suez Canal during Arab-Israeli war, October 1973
The last time evenly matched modern armies fought a serious conventional war was almost half a century ago, in the 1973 Middle East war between Israel and two of its Arab neighbours, Egypt and Syria. In that war, the Israelis lost close to half their total stock of tanks to wire-guided anti-tank missiles in less than a week. Similarly, the Israeli Air Force lost over one hundred aircraft out of a total stock of 390 warplanes in the first four days of the war, to Russian-built surface-to-air missiles. Happily for Israel, the United States began a massive airborne resupply operation in the eighth day of the war, flying in many hundreds of tanks, combat aircraft, artillery pieces and TOW anti-tank weapons. Few other countries, however, have instant access to a similar resupply service in the event of war.
Since the Second World War there has also been a drastic shrinkage in the average size of national armed forces worldwide, except where there is an particularly high level of perceived threat, and the main reason is money. There is no point maintaining armies with more manpower than you can afford to equip with state-of-the-art weapons, and most nations cannot justify producing very large numbers of those weapons in peacetime. Virtually unlimited money would become instantly available if the great powers found themselves at war with each other, but it would take time to expand weapons production significantly. A war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact on the ‘Central Front’ in Europe in the 1980s would have been (as soldiers said at the time) a ‘come as you are’ war: both sides would immediately have started losing their major weapons systems like tanks and aircraft at a rate they could not hope to replace.
To grasp the scale of the escalation in cost of military hardware, consider the Spitfire, probably the best fighter in the world when it entered service with the Royal Air Force in 1939. It then cost £5,000 to build: equivalent to the average annual income of about 30 British adults. When its early 1980s replacement, the air defence version of the Tornado, entered service with the Royal Air Force, each one cost £17 million (total annual income of 3,750 Britons). The RAF’s most recent acquisition, the American-built F-35B, which carried out its first operational missions in 2019, costs £190 million a copy including engines and electronics (6,785 Brits’ annual income) To put it another way, after allowing for inflation an F-35B is 225 times as expensive as a Spitfire. No country is 225 times richer than it was at the beginning of World War II, so far fewer weapons can be built. At the height of the Battle of Britain in 1940, Britain was building just over 100 fighters each week. Today the total fighter strength of the RAF is about 120.
The current generation of fighters is much better than those of World War II, of course. They can fly four times as fast and carry five or six times the weight of munitions; they can detect and attack an opponent at a hundred times the range a Spitfire could manage, and their weapons are far more accurate and lethal. But that just makes the problem worse: not only can air forces afford fewer aircraft, but they are going to lose them at a faster rate.
British Spitfire (left) and American F-35B (right)
More recent conventional conflicts have either been between armies using mostly previous-generation weapons, as in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980–88, or showcasing the abilities of a particular weapon, as with the sea-skimming anti-ship missiles used during the Falklands war between Britain and Argentina in 1982, or hopelessly one-sided fights, as with the two wars between the United States and Iraq (1990–1 and 2003). None of them tells us in any detail what would happen if two large military forces, both equipped and trained to the level of the current US armed forces, were to fight each other.
If war had come to Europe in the 1980s, for example, the NATO commander in Europe would have had around three million military personnel (of whom 400,000 were American) under his command, plus another 1.7 million reserves at high readiness. His Soviet counterpart would have had roughly comparable forces, although with rather more tanks. These were the largest mechanised armies anywhere in the world, but they did not remotely compare with the armies deployed by the great powers in the 20th-century’s two world wars. Each day’s fighting might easily have seen the destruction of a thousand tanks and several hundred aircraft, and neither side would have been able to replace them quickly. The problem of attrition was already paramount.
[There might have been] an extraordinarily short burst of mutual wiping out of first-line equipment, leaving the armies dependent on quite simple weapons – a return to an earlier phase of warfare. We had that in 1914: all the sides had gone to war with stocks quite inadequate for the scale of the fighting that took place, and there was then the famous ‘winter pause’ which was partly to lick their wounds….and very much to gear up the shell factories. Because the inventory of weapons is so much larger [it would now be] a pause for the replacement of almost everything: tanks, aircraft, missiles, missile launchers, armoured vehicles of all sorts….
Sir John Keegan, military historian
All this is assuming, of course, that the ‘conventional’ war lasts considerably longer than the six days of ‘Wintex ’83’.
In the mid-1980s, NATO and the Warsaw Pact together, with a combined population of almost a billion people, had enough first-line conventional weapons to equip fewer than ten million troops: under 1 percent of their population. The end of the Cold War in 1988–89 saw a further rapid decline in the size of the armies, driven mainly by a steep fall in mutual threat perception during the 1990s as Russia became democratic, in a ramshackle sort of way. The return to de facto autocracy in Moscow under Vladimir Putin after 1999 did not lead to a renewed arms race despite the best efforts of the military-industrial complex on both sides, because Russia, shorn of its ‘satellite’ countries and much farther away from the western European heartlands, could no longer be plausibly portrayed as an imminent military threat.
In the mid-1980s the total population of NATO members was about 675 million and the Warsaw Pact’s was around 390 million, but since almost half of NATO’s population was far away across the Atlantic each side did pose a genuine threat to the other, in terms of the strength they had on the ground in Europe. By 2020 the Warsaw Pact was long gone and all the former east European satellites had joined NATO. Even the Soviet Union’s fifteen republics had broken apart, leaving 145 million relatively impoverished Russians alone to face a NATO alliance now drawing on the resources of 870 million people. The NATO-Warsaw Pact population ratio used to be about three-to-two; now the NATO-Russia ratio is more like five-to-one. In terms of wealth it’s around fifteen-to-one.
Russian and NATO generals do what they can to stir up interest in the ‘threats’ they claim to see, but only at the strategic nuclear level, where there is still a rough equivalence between the forces of the two sides, are they really taken seriously. Local and limited clashes here or there are still conceivable, but it is not possible to write a convincing scenario for a full-scale continent-spanning conventional war in Europe today.
There are only two places on the planet where very large and up-to-date military forces still face each other in overtly hostile postures: India’s borders with Pakistan and China, and the Korean peninsula. In both these cases, too, nuclear weapons are to hand. The Taiwan Strait between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan is a third potential candidate, but it’s not there yet.
One must never forget the Middle East, but a military ‘solution’ to the Arab-Israeli conflict is hard to imagine. In military terms Israel is the ‘dwarf superpower’ of the region, and it has never lost a war against the Arabs. Moreover, as the Sunni Arab states, and in particular Saudi Arabia, grow ever more obsessed about the ‘threat’ from Shia Iran, they are coming to view Israel as a potential ally rather than the perpetual enemy. Yet despite the region’s well-earned reputation for frequent, futile and often unwinnable wars, it’s hard to believe in a major conventional war involving all the Shia-ruled countries (Iran, Iraq and Syria, plus possibly Lebanon) versus all the Sunni Arab countries (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the smaller Gulf states) plus Israel and maybe Turkey. It would be like herding cats.
Why does Israel win all its wars?
Israel has access to the latest generation of American weapons. It receives a huge annual subsidy to its defence budget from the United States.
Its population is more educated, more technologically proficient, and more accustomed to large, impersonal bureaucracies and hierarchies.
Thanks to its classic European mobilisation system, Israel has put more troops on the battlefield than its much more populous Arab neighbours in four out of its five ‘conventional’ wars.
It enjoys ‘interior lines’ of communication: it can move troops from the Egyptian border to the Syrian, Jordanian or Lebanese borders literally overnight.
Unlike most of the neighbouring countries, Israel is a democratic and relatively equal society, at least for its Jewish citizens. This fosters a sense of unity, high morale, and resilience in adversity.
It has enjoyed a monopoly of nuclear weapons in the region for the past sixty years.
Most of today’s small conventional wars have reassuringly little to offer military analysts in the way of new tactical and strategic lessons, but they do come along from time to time. In the Armenia-Azerbaijan war of 2020 Turkish-made missile-firing Bayraktar TB2 drones and Israeli-made ‘kamikaze’ drones destroyed the majority of Armenian tanks, artillery, as well as multiple rocket-launch and surface-to-air missile systems, in just six weeks, by which time the Armenians had lost the war. A single new technology can sometimes have a decisive effect when it first appears in combat – but once both sides in a conflict have that new technology in adequate amounts and have absorbed the early tactical lessons on how it is best deployed and employed, the loss rates tend to equalise (if not necessarily decrease).
The world in the early 21st century presents an unfamiliar aspect. Cross-border wars between conventionally equipped armies, the staple of international politics down the ages, have virtually disappeared from the Americas, Europe, Oceania and most of Asia. Measured against an admittedly terrible past, traditional ‘conventional’ war actually seems to be declining – whereas it has been a golden age for guerrilla war and ‘terrorism’.
Everywhere and Nowhere
Guerrillas are not soldiers, and in modern times they generally do not serve a recognised state, but they certainly apply force for political ends: what they do is war, therefore, not random violence.
Wherever we arrived, they disappeared; whenever we left, they arrived. They were everywhere and nowhere, they had no tangible centre which could be attacked.
French officer fighting Spanish guerrillas, 18105
Guerrilla warfare as a form of resistance to foreign occupation gained prominence in the Napoleonic wars, when both the Spanish who gave the technique its name (guerrilla = ‘little war’) and the Germans waged large guerrilla campaigns against French occupying forces. But it was not seen as a potentially decisive military technique even in World War II, when it was widely employed against German and Japanese occupation forces, mainly because it lacked a strategy for final victory.
So long as the guerrillas remained dispersed in the hills, forests, or swamps and indulged in only hit-and-run raiding, they could take a constant but limited toll on the army of the occupying power. They might also carry out what would today be called ‘terrorist’ attacks in the cities – but they couldn’t clear their enemies out of the urban centres of power without coming into the open. And if they ever did engage the occupying forces in open combat, the enemy’s heavy weapons would smash them.
What changed after World War II was that the rural guerrilla technique spread into the European colonial empires. As in the occupied countries of Europe in 1939–45, guerrillas in the French, British, Dutch and Portuguese colonies had no difficulty in mobilising their fellow countrymen against the foreign occupiers. But as in the occupied countries of Europe, they had no way to win a decisive military victory against the well-equipped regular forces of the imperial power in question. It turned out, however, that the guerrillas didn’t need a military victory. If they could make it very expensive for the colonial power to stay, and continue to do so indefinitely, then the colonial power would eventually decide to cut its losses and go home.
The pattern was repeated many times in the two decades after 1945, in Indonesia, Kenya, Algeria, Malaya, Cyprus, Vietnam, South Yemen, and many other places. In most cases, it was the guerrilla leaders themselves who inherited power: Sukarno in Indonesia, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, the FLN in Algeria, and so on. Once the European imperial powers finally grasped their own fatal vulnerability to this technique, the decolonisation process in many of their remaining colonies was completed without need for a guerrilla war.
WHEN GUERRILLA WAR WORKS
At the time, the seemingly irresistible spread of rural guerrilla wars caused great alarm and despondency in the major Western powers, because most post-1945 guerrilla movements followed some version of the Marxist ideology preached by the West’s international rival-in-chief, the Soviet Union. This led to a belief in the West that it was Soviet and/or Chinese expansionism, rather than resentment of foreign rule, that lay behind these guerrilla wars.
In fact, the Asian, African and Arab revolutionary leaders of the 1950s and 1960s learned their Marxism in London and Paris, not in Moscow. The full-scale US military commitment to Vietnam in 1965 was not only made for the wrong reason – to thwart perceived Soviet expansionism acting through the Chinese – but at the wrong time. By 1965 the wave of guerrilla wars in the ‘Third World’ was coming to its natural end: apart from Indochina, only southern Africa and South Yemen were still the scenes of active guerrilla campaigns against imperial rule. In order to win its Asian guerrilla war, the United States, driven by ideology, was willing to spend far more money and sacrifice many more lives (55,000) than the Europeans had been, but the equation worked for the Vietnamese as it had for everybody else: they just had to hang on long enough and not lose, and the American public would rebel against the cost and the casualties and give them a win. That happened in 1968, although the final American withdrawal was not until 1973.
Viet-Cong guerrillas crossing a river in 1966
The former Soviet Union was an autocracy with tight media controls, but by the 1980s it was equally vulnerable on the issue of casualties. Only 15,000 Soviet soldiers were killed during the country’s ten-year military intervention in Afghanistan, but that produced Vietnam-like effects on Russian public opinion and forced Moscow to pull its troops out of Afghanistan in 1989. Indeed, Moscow’s conduct of its post-2015 intervention in the Syrian civil war shows a reluctance to incur major military casualties just as intense as that in Washington.
The disappearance of the colonial/anti-imperial context in which the rural guerrilla technique originally flourished has drastically diminished its utility, because it hardly ever works against a locally based government supported by the most powerful local ethnic group. There is no foreign occupation to attract recruits to one’s cause, and the end-game that delivered victory in anti-colonial struggles no longer applies. A locally based government cannot cut its losses and ‘go home’ if the cost of fighting a counter-insurgency campaign gets too high. Where would it go? The exceptional cases of Eritrea and South Sudan prove the rule: in most of the newly independent countries, separatist groups fighting for independence cannot wear down the will of a locally based government and army.
WHEN GUERRILLA WAR DOESN’T WORK
The one great exception to all these rules was the 15-year rural guerrilla war, eventually growing into a full-scale conventional war, in which the Chinese Communist Party finally seized power from the equally Chinese Kuomintang Party in 1949.
China: the Great Exception
In every battle, concentrate an absolutely superior force, encircle the enemy forces completely, strive to wipe them out thoroughly and do not let any escape from the net.
Mao Tse-Tung, 19476
Mao would never have given that order in the 1930s or the early 1940s, when he was waging a classic guerrilla campaign against the Japanese invaders of China and the Chinese Communist Party’s domestic enemy, the ruling Kuomintang (KMT). Instead, he followed the standard rules of guerrilla warfare: ambush small groups of the enemy, but never stand and fight against their main forces. By 1947, however, the Japanese had surrendered and the KMT were reeling. In just two years the People’s Liberation Army grew fourfold to two million men and came out into the open to beat the corrupt, divided and incompetent KMT government in a series of stand-up battles.
Mao Zedong during the 1930s
Mao achieved the Holy Grail of guerrilla war. With no support from outside and no anti-foreign resentment to help him, he turned his guerrilla soldiers into a real army and beat the existing Chinese government in open battle. It was a brilliant accomplishment, and many other revolutionary groups tried to follow his example. Only two succeeded: Fidel Castro’s little band of brothers who came down from the Sierra Maestre in 1959, and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979. In both cases, the circumstances were very different to China under the Kuomintang. The enemies faced by Castro’s 26th July Movement and the Sandinistas were governments so extraordinarily wicked and incompetent that they made even the KMT look good, and both movements could hold the patriotic high ground by exploiting the anti-American sentiment that ran strongly in those countries after so much US intervention.
And that’s it. There are still rural guerrilla movements hanging on in the more rugged parts of some Third World countries, but they have little hope of success against local governments that can credibly invoke nationalism on their own side. If they ever try to move up from assassinations, car-bombs and hit-and-run raids to more ambitious operations involving large units that will stand and fight, they simply give the government’s army the targets it had been hoping for. By the 1970s it had become clear that rural guerrilla warfare was no longer a promising revolutionary technique.
‘Urban Guerrilla Warfare’
This realisation drove numbers of disappointed Latin American revolutionaries into random terrorism (or rather, ‘urban guerrilla warfare’, as it came to be known). The initial goal of the Latin American originators of this doctrine, notably the Montoneros of Argentina, the Tupamaros of Uruguay, and Brazilian revolutionaries like Carlos Marighella, was to drive the target regimes into extreme repression. It was what French Marxists called ‘la politique du pire’ (the strategy of making things worse).
By assassinations, bank robberies, kidnappings, hijacking, and the like, calculated to inflict maximum embarrassment on the government, the urban guerrillas aimed to provoke the overthrow of democratic governments by tough military regimes, or to drive existing military regimes into even stricter and more unpopular security measures. If the regime resorted to counter-terror, torture, ‘disappearances’ and death squads, so much the better, for the goal was to alienate the population from the government.
It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed conflict by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the political situation of the country into a military situation. That will alienate the masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of things.
Carlos Marighella, Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla7
Alas, urban guerrilla war had the same fatal flaw as rural guerrilla warfare outside the late-colonial environment: it lacked a good end-game. The theory said that when the guerrillas had succeeded in summoning up a brutally repressive regime, the populace would then rise up and destroy its oppressors. But just how was it to accomplish this feat? Armed urban uprisings have rarely succeeded since the 19th century.
In various Latin American countries, the urban guerrillas accomplished step one of their strategy: the creation of thoroughly nasty military regimes dedicated to destroying them. But these governments then proceeded to do precisely that. In every Latin American country where la politique du pire was attempted, most urban guerrillas ended up dead or in exile.
‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ film poster
The faint and even more foolish echoes of these Latin American terrorist strategies were the profoundly unserious terrorist movements that flourished in western Europe and North America during the 1970s and 1980s. Their main ideological guru was the American academic Herbert Marcuse, who wrote of the need to ‘unmask the repressive tolerance of the liberal bourgeoisie’ through acts of creative violence that would force them to drop their liberal disguises and reveal their true repressive nature. This was designer terrorism, as much about ‘attitude’ as about real politics, and although it killed several hundred people and generated several hundred thousand headlines, it never threatened any government anywhere. Leonard Cohen captured the naiveté and narcissism of the developed world’s urban guerrillas in his sardonic song ‘First We Take Manhattan’.
I’m guided by a signal in the heavens.
I’m guided by this birth-mark on my skin.
I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons.
First we take Manhattan. Then we take Berlin.
If the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weathermen in the US, the Japanese Red Army and all the rest had any influence whatever on events, it was chiefly as bogeymen useful to right-wing governments seeking to vilify their legitimate left-wing opponents. Nationalist urban guerrillas operating from a religious or ethnic minority base like the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland and Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) in Spain’s Basque provinces showed greater staying power, but both have now made peace with the governments they fought.
Two terrorist groups did find a way to make an impact on events, however. Both made their mark with international operations; both had political aims that did not require the overthrow of the target governments; and both were Arab.
Palestine
The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was founded by Yasser Arafat in 1964 to coordinate a strategy for the armed groups forming in the refugee camps where large numbers of Palestinians lived. Arafat’s key insight was to realise that while these groups stood no chance of defeating Israel and regaining their homes by direct attacks, their energies might produce results if applied to a different goal.
Arafat and his colleagues understood the importance of re-branding the ‘refugees’ as ‘Palestinians’. So long as they were seen by non-Arabs (and even by some Arabs) as merely generic ‘Arab refugees’, they could theoretically be resettled anywhere in the Arab world. Their only hope of ever going home was to convince the world that there was such an identity as ‘Palestinian’, for to call people by that name is implicitly to accept that they have a legitimate claim to the land of Palestine.
What kind of campaign might convince the world that there really are Palestinians? Not an ordinary advertising campaign, certainly, but if you carry out shocking acts of violence, then the media have to report them – and in order to explain them, they will have to talk about Palestinians. In September 1970 PLO ‘guerrillas’ simultaneously hijacked four airliners, flew them to a desert airfield in Jordan, and destroyed them before the world’s television cameras after the passengers had been removed. Subsequent PLO attacks cost many lives, but this was international terrorism with a rational and achievable objective: not to bring Israel to its knees, but to force the world to accept the existence of a Palestinian people who must be active participants in the discussion of their own fate.
Once that objective was achieved in the late 1980s, the PLO called off the terrorists (though some maverick splinter groups who didn’t understand the strategy continued to make pointless terror attacks on their own). For the next decade the PLO pursued the goal of a negotiated peace with Israel, with the high point being the signing of the Oslo Accords in Washington in 1993. However, Arafat and his key negotiating partner, the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, both found their freedom of action increasingly limited by ‘rejectionist’ forces in their own camps who refused to accept the kinds of concessions on territory and on the right of return for refugees that were necessary for a peace settlement.
After Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Jewish extremist in 1995, Palestinian terrorist attacks resumed, this time in Israel itself in the midst of an election campaign. The authors of these attacks were not the PLO, but the rising Islamist movements who rejected any deal that would see a Palestinian state created in just a small part of the former British mandate of Palestine. Here was another terrorist operation with a rational and achievable goal – the goal this time being to thwart Arafat’s ‘two-state’ strategy.
The bombing campaign of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which particularly targeted buses to produce high Jewish casualties, was intended to drive Israeli voters away from Rabin’s successor Shimon Peres, expected to win easily on a sympathy vote after Rabin’s assassination, and into the arms of Binyamin Netanyahu, a closet rejectionist who could be counted on to stall indefinitely on peace negotiations. It worked, and there was virtually no progress on a peace settlement for the next three years. Nor indeed since: the rejectionists on both sides are ‘objective allies’, as the Marxists would describe them, whose shared purpose is to stymie the two-state solution, and they have been successful.
9/11 and Islamist Terrorism
Although terrorism remains powerless to overthrow governments directly, its ability to achieve less ambitious political objectives has grown. An appalling but very effective example of this are the terrorist attacks carried out against the United States by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001.
Hijacked plane strikes the World Trade Centre, September 11th 2001
The Islamist project animating al-Qaeda, Islamic State and their various clones and affiliates starts from the proposition that the current sorry plight of the Muslim countries is due to the fact that they are half-Westernised and lax in their observance of Islam. This situation will only change when Muslims are living their faith as God truly intends it to be lived – or rather, according to the Islamists’ somewhat extreme interpretation of what God’s intentions might be.
Upon this foundation a two-stage project for changing the world is built. In stage one, all existing governments of Muslim countries must be overthrown so that the Islamists can take their places and use the power of the state to bring Muslims back to the right ways of believing and behaving. Then God will help them to unite the whole of the Muslim world in a single, borderless super-state that will take on and overthrow the domination of the West. In the more extreme formulations, this will culminate with the conversion of the entire world to Islam.
Relatively few Muslims accept this Islamist analysis, let alone support the project, but their numbers are greater in the Arab world than elsewhere because it is in these countries that rage and despair at the current situation are strongest. As a result, Islamist revolutionary groups have been active in most of the larger Arab states for at least three decades. To achieve their first goal of overthrowing existing governments and taking power themselves, they frequently resorted to terrorism. Not surprisingly, they failed to win power anywhere. Terrorism didn’t work for the Tupamaros, it didn’t work for the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and there is no reason that it should work for the Islamists either.
What can overthrow a government (apart from a military coup, which is an unlikely way for Islamists to come to power) is a million people in the street – but first you have to get the million people out, and for Islamists they just haven’t come. The mass of people simply don’t like or trust the Islamists enough to risk their own lives to bring them to power. The result in some countries has been a bloody stalemate between Islamists and governments, with most people sitting out the struggle and wishing a curse on both their houses. This deadlock was already well established when Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in Afghanistan at the beginning of the 1990s.
The nations of infidels have all united against Muslims… This is a new battle, a great battle, similar to the great battles of Islam like the conquest of Jerusalem…[The Americans] come out to fight Islam in the name of fighting terrorism.
Osama bin Laden, October 2002
Al-Qaeda’s strategy was not to attack Arab governments, but to go directly after the West. Yet we must assume that the real goal of al-Qaeda and its various Islamist rivals and successors is still to bring about revolutions that will raise Islamists to power in Arab and other Muslim countries, and so begin the reformation of the people in the true path of Islamic observance. How would attacking the West directly help to bring those revolutions any nearer?
Terrorists never advertise their real strategies, but almost certainly Al-Qaeda’s was the politique du pire all over again, this time in an international context. Only a fool would believe that a terrorist attack on the United States, causing three thousand deaths, would make the US government abandon its client governments in the Muslim world. Any sensible person would know that Washington’s reaction would be one or more large, armed incursions into the Muslim world in an attempt to stamp out the roots of the terrorism.
Bin Laden and his associates were neither ignorant or stupid. Their real strategy was to sucker the United States into marching into the Muslim world in big army boots, trusting that America’s actions would drive a great many Muslims into the arms of their local Islamist organisations. Then the longed-for revolts against pro-Western governments might finally come to pass and bring the Islamists to power.
If that was the strategic purpose of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, it has to be admitted that bin Laden had a reasonable return on his investment: within twenty months, the United States had invaded and occupied two Muslim countries containing fifty million people. The images accompanying the invasions caused great distress and humiliation to Muslims, especially in the Arab world, and the inevitable brutalities and mistakes of the subsequent military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq produced a steady flow of further images in the same vein. The anger these caused did push millions of Muslims, especially in the Arab world, into the arms of the Islamist revolutionary organisations, but this has not yet succeeded in bringing extreme Islamists to power in any Muslim country, with the exception of the ephemeral ‘Islamic State’.
The loss of al-Qaeda’s bases in Afghanistan was a nuisance for the organisation but not a disaster, as it was already a highly decentralised network with minor logistical requirements. The logical thing for the United States to do after the end of 2001 was to shift from military mode to a more traditional anti-terrorist operation: terrorists are civilians, not an army, and the appropriate tools for dealing with them are normally police forces, intelligence gathering and security measures, not armoured brigades. Al-Qaeda’s planners could not have anticipated that the United States, instead of concentrating on terrorism, would then invade Iraq as wel as Afghanistan, but it was that blunder which enabled the creation of Islamic State, many of whose founders had banded together in US-run prisons like Camp Bucca in the south of the country.
How big might the ‘international terrorist threat’ get? So far, al-Qaeda is still operating in the same technological universe that the PLO exploited fifty years ago (although with radically different political objectives). It discovered a new use for hijacked airliners by training suicide bombers to become pilots, but there do not appear to be many undiscovered techniques of similar power lying around waiting to be tried. Down to the time of writing, all of al-Qaeda’s subsequent attacks have been thoroughly conventional low-tech bombings and mass shootings causing at the most a couple of hundred deaths and more often only a few. The increasingly common ‘lone wolf’ attacks, carried out by individuals whose only contact with al-Qaeda and its ilk is through visiting their websites, make detection more difficult but also tend to produce lower-casualties.
What strategic purpose do these attacks serve, now that it has been demonstrated that even major Western invasions of Muslim countries do not drive sufficient numbers of Muslims into the arms of the Islamist revolutionaries? None comes to mind: these activities, although they once had a coherent strategic rationale, are now futile and pointless. Why do Islamist activists go on doing it? Because of devotion to the ideology or hatred of the infidel; because it gives meaning to their lives; because they can’t think what else to do. Islamist terrorism will no doubt continue long past its sell-by date, but generational turnover may dispose of it in the end.
Even terrorism with so-called ‘weapons of mass destruction’ does not rise to the level of an existential threat. The Japanese sect Aum Shinrikyo managed to release a sarin-type nerve gas on the Tokyo subway in 1995; only twelve people were killed. The practical problem with both chemical and biological agents is dispersal; the terrorists would get better results for less effort with nail bombs.
A nuclear weapon in terrorist hands would be a far bigger problem, but a single nuclear explosion would be a local disaster comparable in scale to the Krakatoa volcanic explosion of 1883 or the Tokyo earthquake of 1923. We should obviously strive to prevent it, but even a nuclear detonation in some unfortunate city some time in the future would in all likelihood not stampede the world into doing what the terrorists want – and what they almost always want is an over-reaction. Terrorism is a kind of political jiu-jitsu in which small, weak groups use the modest amounts of force at their disposal to trick their far more powerful opponents – usually states – into responding in ways that harm the opponent’s cause and serve the terrorists’ own purposes.
The world lived for forty years with the daily threat of a global nuclear holocaust that could destroy hundreds of cities and hundreds of millions of lives at a stroke. It can live with the distant possibility that a terrorist group might one day get possession of a single nuclear weapon and bring horror to a single city. The point is not to panic, and not to lose patience.
I’m afraid that terrorism didn’t begin on 9/11 and it will be around for a long time. I was very surprised by the announcement of a war on terrorism because terrorism has been around for thirty-five years… [and it] will be around while there are people with grievances. There are things we can do to improve the situation, but there will always be terrorism. One can be misled by talking about a war, as though in some way you can defeat it.
Stella Rimington, former Director General of mi5, September 20028
Notes
1. Kaufmann’s 1955 essays were very influential in shaping the United States army’s thinking on the possibility of restricting war in Europe to conventional weapons. Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, New York: Knopf, 1984, pp. 197–200.
2. Karl von Clausewitz, On War, New York: The Modern Library; 1943.
3. W. Baring Pemberton, Lord Palmerston, London: Collins, 1954, pp. 220–21.
4. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History, New York: Viking, 1983, p.312.
5. Walter Laqueur, Guerilla, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977, 40.
6. Christon I. Archer, John R. Ferris, Holger H. Herwig and Timothy H.E. Travers, World History of Warfare, London: Cassell, 2003, p. 558.
7. Robert Moss, Urban Guerillas, London: Temple Smith, 1972, 198.
8. Sarah Ewing, ‘The IoS Interview’, in the Independent on Sunday, London, 8 September 2002.