5
The Illusion of Tradition
Myths and Paradoxes of British Counterinsurgency
Introducing The US Counterinsurgency Field Manual in 2007, Sarah Sewall contended that “the new U.S. doctrine, embraces a traditional—some would argue atavistic—British method of fighting insurgency. It is based on principles learned during Britain’s early period of imperial policing and relearned during responses to twentieth century independence struggles in Malaya and Kenya.”1 This respect for the British way of conducting COIN seemingly coincided with the British Army’s own high opinion of its capabilities. According to the 1995 Army Field Manual, volume 5, “The British Army has for over 100 years been involved with insurgency of one type or another and from this experience has evolved a doctrine for countering insurgency.”2 The official statement accepted as fact that a tradition of counterinsurgency existed in British military conduct. The British manual proceeded to list the verities of this “doctrine”: the maintenance of political primacy; the development of effective government structures; the utilization of intelligence; the separating of insurgents from any popular base of support; the neutralization of the insurgency; and the creation of a long-term plan.3 Later iterations of the Army Field Manual in 2001 and 2007 reaffirmed these precepts. Meanwhile, the army’s handbook Countering Insurgency, issued in 2009,4 explicitly referenced and endorsed a British “tradition” of counterinsurgency. Recent American and British writing on the subject take this tradition for granted. Thus, British counterinsurgency experience constitutes the historical reference point from which most contemporary COIN theory takes its cue. Whether complimentary or critical, recent commentary assumes that Britain possesses or at least once possessed a venerable COIN tradition.
Yet, in spite of the endorsements of eminent commentators and statements in modern military manuals, should the British Army’s self-proclaimed tradition of counterinsurgency be taken as an accurate appreciation of its experience? The argument in this chapter questions whether such a tradition ever existed. In fact, the idea that the British state in general or the British Army in particular had “evolved a doctrine for countering insurgency” functions as a myth. The invocation of a one-hundred-year-old tradition frames a discourse constructed by commentators and subsequently endorsed by the British Army through the regularization of statements that reaffirm the myth, even while sometimes criticizing aspects of it. A careful dissection of the British “experience” of combating soi-disant instances of insurgency evinces that there is no discrete tradition in the sense of a common pattern of understanding or action. To the extent that the British Army asserts the features of a tradition of counterinsurgency, it is largely a post–Cold War construct that was reified in the mid-2000s following Western Coalition interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Prior to these developments, the British Army itself (as opposed to academic commentators upon its practice) had never identified a particular “British way” of counterinsurgency.
For the purpose of this chapter, we understand myth to be a representation of something that fictionalizes, explains, and mobilizes a coherent structure of meaning.5 A fictionalization of the British historical experience frames the current debate about a distinctive British approach counterinsurgency. If, as we contend, there is no actual pattern of activity that can be distilled into a British approach, then, a fortiori, the invocation of an explicit tradition of counterinsurgency cannot constitute the basis of any perceived British success in military encounters over the past century.
Conversely, the purported decline of a tradition that is in fact a myth cannot account for any recent British military shortcomings in so-called small wars. A persistent mistake made by military commentators and lately by the British Army itself, which the chapter further demonstrates, is to treat “small wars” as a notion reducible to an operational art rather than as an instrument of politics. This treatment reflects a common theme of this volume—namely, the absence of politics from discussions of COIN. The British experience of insurgency over the past century and a half comprises examples of war that no matter how “small” are always acts of policy—British national policy—that cannot be reduced to a technical debate about methods, operations, and tactics. The tradition of a British way in counterinsurgency is a myth because political commitment rather than military technique determines success or failure in military encounters.
Experience Does Not Amount to a Tradition
The 1995 Army Field Manual stated: “It is curious to record, that despite the extensive experience gained by the British Army in counterinsurgency during the Twentieth century, relatively little has been recorded as official doctrine in any military publications.” It added: “A large amount has been written about counter-insurgency unofficially and, partly through this, military doctrine has evolved and developed.”6 The manual elucidated the evolution of its unofficial doctrine via the writings of Charles Callwell, whose book Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, published in 1896, “drew together some doctrinal strands on countering insurgency and rebellion” from previous campaigns, and then it proceeded to reference the army’s experience in the Easter Rising in Ireland of 1916, Charles Gwynn’s Notes on Imperial Policing (1934), and General John Dill’s Notes on the Tactical Lessons of the Palestine Rebellion (1937) in order to establish that Britain had a tradition of fighting insurgencies well before 1939.7
The British Army Field Manual continued this general theme, intimating that its tradition persisted into the post–World War II era and citing “counterinsurgency operations” in India and Palestine in the 1940s and the publication of documents such as the 1949 pamphlet Imperial Policing and the Duties in Aid of the Civil Power: The Conduct of Anti-terrorist Operations in Malaya (1952) and A Handbook of Anti Mau Mau Operations (1954). Despite these and other references, the manual asserted that “very little by way of doctrine was developed” despite operations in Borneo, Cyprus, Radfan, and Aden.8 It observed that, beyond 1969, “in the absence of any official publications on the doctrine of counter insurgency others sought to fill the gap. In the UK, Sir Robert Thompson, General Kitson, General Clutterbuck and Colonel Tugwell all recorded their experiences. In addition, they wrote doctrinal works on how insurgency and terrorism have developed and offered more up to date principles and guidelines on how to defeat these two scourges of the late twentieth century.”9
Embedded in these statements are a set of suppositions that assume Britain has experience in countering insurgency, that counterinsurgency exists as a distinct category of conflict, and that this experience has endowed Britain with a doctrine—a set of standard procedures and understandings—that by the era of decolonization had distilled “three broad fundamentals of policy” to combat the “scourge” of insurgency: “minimum force; civil/military cooperation; and tactical flexibility.” “There are some who consider,” the manual proclaimed, “that by the end of the 1960s the British Army was more effective than they had ever been at countering insurgency.”10
Subsequent commentary readily endorsed this discourse, and in response the Field Manual conflated a diverse range of prior experiences of conflict with a distinct “tradition” of counterinsurgency, albeit an informal one. Rather than interrogating first-order assumptions (such as whether the British Army’s experience amounts to a tradition and whether counterinsurgency exists as a clearly identifiable type of war), later commentators simply reinforced the belief that British conduct regularized a set of underlying principles that “remained cornerstones” of official counterinsurgency doctrine.11 Even negative assessments of recent British military performance have unintentionally reinforced the assumption that Britain possesses a tradition of counterinsurgency. “What has happened to our special skills at this, our particular aptitude at ‘war amongst the people’?” laments Frank Ledwidge in Losing Small Wars, a withering deconstruction of British military shortcomings in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Britain was no stranger, historically, to insurgency and civil war in Iraq,” Ledwidge claims. The “British fought dozens of small campaigns, with greater or lesser degrees of success. They developed techniques, which although sporadically applied, were to become the keynote of a ‘British way’ of ‘counterinsurgency.’ ” Reflecting on his own tours of duty in Helmand and Iraq, Ledwidge recalls: “I asked myself what went wrong. Where was our supposed counter-insurgency ‘inheritance’?”12 What Ledwidge and others might more properly have asked themselves was not whether Britain had lost its inheritance of counterinsurgency, but whether it ever possessed such an inheritance in the first place.
Ledwidge’s Losing Small Wars, in fact, captures and distils the myth of the British Army’s presumed prior expertise in COIN. The book cover depicts a British soldier in Afghanistan in 2009, head in hands, despairing, it would seem, at the futility of it all. The signified content explores the cover signifier, revealing the limitations of British military conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan. The book documents the shortcomings and institutional limitations of the British armed forces, which, in Ledwidge’s assessment, malfunctioned and underperformed. The book is one of a number of revisionist studies that trace, over the best part of a decade, the tale of an army with a venerated reputation for waging small wars now losing its credibility through a mixture of complacency, ineptitude, cost cutting, and laurel gazing. The product description on Amazon crystallizes the argument: “Partly on the strength of their apparent success in ‘small wars’ such as Malaya and Northern Ireland, the British armed forces have long been perceived as world class, if not world-beating. Yet, under British control, Basra [in southern Iraq] degenerated into a lawless city riven with militia violence and fear, while tactical mistakes and strategic incompetence in Helmand province resulted in numerous casualties and a burgeoning opium trade.”13
It gets worse. It appeared that not only were the British armed forces underprepared for their encounters in Iraq and Afghanistan, but, when properly examined, the British Army’s capacity for handling small wars is in fact largely illusory. The new revisionism revealed that what the orthodoxy considered a record of effective counterinsurgency campaigning concealed a legacy of failure and underachievement. More disturbing still, even Britain’s occasional victories or partial successes were not the result of any particular style but more often the product of brute force that covered the full gamut of atrocity from massacres to gulags and even genocide, depending on whom you read.14
British military practice in Iraq and Afghanistan undoubtedly suffered serious limitations. Ledwidge and others rightly expose these shortcomings.15 Our intention in this chapter is not to question either these critical accounts or the new revisionist history that shows British counterinsurgency campaigning in the twentieth century to have been more coercive and brutal than previously recognized. What this chapter argues is that the prevailing scholarship that assumes that a highly regarded tradition of small-war fighting once existed and now lies in ruins is itself recounting a myth.16 It offers a myth because it conflates a number of different and not necessarily related analyses into a single narrative that is neither accurate nor coherent.
Ledwidge and others begin from a premise of Britain’s “apparent success” in “small wars.” Here, the notion of small war elides into the notion of counterinsurgency. First, therefore, it is necessary to establish what the elusive term small wars entails. By “small wars,” commentators invariably mean those military encounters where there is a large element of discretion about whether to fight or not. They are conflicts that reside well below the existential threat that the United Kingdom confronted in World War II, where the choice of not fighting and surrendering threatened the state’s continued political identity. They are wars of choice rather than necessity wherein the political decision is made to invest time and effort in causes that exist beneath this threshold and that largely reside outside national borders. They can be described, therefore, as “small wars.” Counterinsurgency campaigns from the British perspective thus constitute a particular form of “small war” that involves an attempt to confound an armed challenge to established authority.17
Arising from an imperial history wherein British forces found themselves frequently engaged in expeditions to conquer, occupy, or pacify foreign lands, a narrative of assumed expertise easily emerged about Britain’s ability to wage small wars either for territorial gain or to quell attempted insurrections against its colonial authority.18 The blurb for Ledwidge’s book on Amazon reflects this narrative. It claims: “The British armed forces have long been perceived as world class, if not world-beating” (added emphasis here). Problematically, the passive-voice construction fails to inform us who arrived at this perception. A straight answer to this question reveals that the British armed forces prior to the end of the Cold War rarely made this claim to expertise. Instead, it was commentators external to the British military who formed this impression. This diverse group of analysts included former British colonial civil servants, former soldiers, journalists, American academics, and serving U.S. Army officers. Explicit assertions of a distinctive tradition of counterinsurgency campaign cannot, however, be found in any British Army doctrines or documents prior to 1995. If anything, as David Ucko has suggested, the late-twentieth-century British Army eschewed any perceived tradition of counterinsurgency: “The British Army, despite repeated engagement in counterinsurgency, has historically found it difficult to internalize the lessons drawn from these campaigns, necessitating quick adaptation on the ground with each new engagement. There, the individual memory of previous notionally similar operations has flattened the learning curve, but to institutionalize this wisdom has proven an altogether more difficult proposition.”19 As Ucko’s statement indicates, the British Army’s lack of institutional knowledge reveals a logical difficulty in the “Where did it all go wrong?” thesis, which awkwardly conflates a commentariat’s discussion of a British talent for small wars with the erroneous implication that the British armed forces had this perception of themselves. Simply because C. E. Callwell and Charles Gwynn, along with a few others, reflected on the British Army’s experience in its imperial encounters does not constitute an official orthodoxy. There is scant evidence that the British armed forces ever internalized an understanding that they had particular skills in so-called small wars, and the little evidence that does exist is contradictory.
A Narrative, Not a Tradition
So who and what accounts for the tradition of a British proficiency in small wars? Since the end of World War II, the Malaya Emergency represented the locus classicus that influenced subsequent commentary, framing perceptions of a British flair for such encounters. The works of former Malaya Civil Service officer Sir Robert Thompson, in particular Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences from Malaya and Vietnam, provided the initial source for a British way in counterinsurgency.20 This was not because Thompson explicitly articulated a distinctive British approach but because his five “basic principles of counterinsurgency” unambiguously drew on the British Malayan campaign. The success of these principles, moreover, contrasted dramatically with the contemporaneous American effort in South Vietnam, where a seemingly misplaced emphasis on search-and-destroy missions failed to defeat the Viet Cong. Following Thompson’s work, there were remarkably few direct allusions to a distinctive British practice. The only exception perhaps was former army officer Julian Paget’s 1967 account Counter-Insurgency Campaigning.21
In the early 1970s, with a sense of postimperial decline permeating the British national psyche, a different set of challenges arose that undermined any residual sense of achievement in successfully waging small wars. The year 1971 saw the publication of journalist Noel Barber’s stylized account of the Malaya campaign, War of the Running Dogs.22 This book, however, marked the last gasp of a late-imperial nostalgia for wars in faraway places. More significantly, 1971 also saw the publication of serving officer Brigadier Frank Kitson’s Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Peacekeeping, and Law Enforcement,23 which reflected the mood of the times as national gloom descended over the United Kingdom, accompanied by rising levels of industrial unrest and seemingly irreversible economic and political decline. Significantly, Kitson’s work also coincided with the onset of the most violent phase of the Northern Ireland Troubles, culminating in the Provisional IRA’s concerted campaign of violence to achieve a united Ireland. Even so, in both Low Intensity Operations and his later ruminations on the conflicts in Kenya, Malaya, and Cyprus, Bunch of Five,24 Kitson made no claim to a specifically British style of countering insurgency.
Interestingly, in September 1970 Kitson assumed command of 39 Infantry Brigade in Belfast as Northern Ireland descended into chaos. Kitson possessed a fearsome reputation in Irish Republican circles as a result of his experiences fighting in some of Britain’s more prominent twentieth-century wars of colonial disengagement.25 He certainly drew on this prior experience in Northern Ireland, notably his Special Forces initiatives, which were based on his creation of “counter-gangs” in Kenya.26 However, units set up under his direction, such as the Mobile Reconnaissance Force, and the various schemes it sponsored, such as the Four Square Laundry operation, were rudimentary and ephemeral, with later assessments judging such schemes amateurish at best.27 Beyond these early and short-lived initiatives, there is little to suggest that Kitson or, indeed, any other British Army commander in Northern Ireland then or since implemented a systematic COIN plan based on a set of enduring British techniques developed in earlier small-war campaigns.28 And indeed, as John Bew points out, to the extent that the army did employ the key “lessons” from its earlier colonial experiences—internment without trial, curfews, hard-interrogation techniques, and demonstrations of exemplary force—these lessons were associated with the most disastrous period of the army’s experience in Ulster. “Rather than relying on the precedents of the past to guide the path to success,” Bew notes perceptively, “it is more accurate to say the situation in Northern Ireland improved only when the Army unlearned its recent lessons from Kenya and Malaya.”29
Here we may identify the first of a number of myths and misrepresentations about the evolution of a British COIN tradition. Commentators consistently cite the years of the Northern Ireland Troubles as a major source of Britain’s small-wars expertise. Problematically, this view overlooks the fact that in Northern Ireland the army’s role from the mid-1970s was primarily to support the police.30 The army did not assume the burden of a counterinsurgency campaign. That campaign was led largely by intelligence, and the principal agency leading it was not the British Army but the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.31 Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the British Army’s core focus remained planning for major battle against Warsaw Pact forces in central Europe.32 The years of the Northern Ireland Troubles, in fact, witnessed a curious dissonance between British military thinking and the conduct of small war at the time, on the one hand, and later treatment of that thinking and conduct by scholars of counterinsurgency. It is clear that in the course of the later stages of the Cold War, the British Army and British defense thinking in general at the time were far from elaborating, let alone celebrating, some ingrained capability to deal with small-scale conflicts such as Ulster and were instead intent on ignoring or downplaying such conflict. During this period, only one work appeared that even hinted at some generalized British approach to small wars. Former army officer Colonel Michael Dewar’s 1984 publication Brush Fire Wars offered a broad-brush account of Britain’s experience in “minor wars” since 1945. Yet, even here, almost no mention is made of counterinsurgency.33
In sum, from the 1950s through to the end of the Cold War, there was no formulation, articulation, or enunciation in official UK publications, by the army or any other government agency or from any other serving British military figure, of a distinctly British facility for waging small wars. At most, there were hints and intimations of an underlying set of values that might have applied to British conduct in minor wars, but there is little evidence of adherence to a predetermined set of practices when it came to counterinsurgency in a decolonizing context. Paradoxically, it was only after 1990 that a systematic view developed that identified a distinctly British approach. Thus, rather than an accurately discerned historical pattern of British military activity, we have the construction of a narrative—the beginnings of a myth. More paradoxically still, this evolving narrative was created and sustained largely by American writers and thinkers. In effect, the British tradition of small-war expertise was “made in the USA.” How is this paradox to be understood?
Made in America: The British Small-War Tradition
Thomas Mockaitis’s 1990 study British Counterinsurgency, 1919–1960, began the evolution of an American narrative of British counterinsurgency experience.34 Mockaitis produced the first systematic academic analysis of Britain’s colonial campaigns via an explicit counterinsurgency framework. Although he did not propose that the British had developed a small-war-winning formula, he did suggest that the British had, over a long period of tough encounters, evolved a set of practices that accentuated the principles of minimum force and discriminate violence. It was Mockaitis’s contention that the British Army had “much to teach a world increasingly challenged by the problem of internal war.”35 Later, the one hundredth anniversary republication of C. E. Callwell’s classic nineteenth-century tract on the wars of imperial British expansion, Small Wars: Their Principles and Their Practice, in 1996 by the University of Nebraska Press reinforced this interest. The U.S. edition included an extended introduction by Douglas Porch, who noted that Callwell’s tract was a repository of specialist knowledge of what “low intensity conflict” entailed.36 These texts were influential. They provided a powerful narrative that suggested a thread of historical continuity. One consequence was that going into the mid-1990s and explicitly swayed by Mockaitis’s work,37 the British Army also began to tell a story about itself mediated through the lens of a counterinsurgency tradition. For the first time, official manuals now began to claim that the “experience of numerous ‘small wars’ has provided the British Army with a unique insight into this form of conflict.”38
Early in the following decade, as earlier chapters have already discussed, John Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (2002) further embellished the view that the British possessed a unique insight into small war. Nagl’s study extolled the virtues of the British Army as a learning institution that adapted its military methodology in Malaya to suit the needs of the emergency situation.39 Nagl’s thesis appeared at a propitious moment. It struck a chord in American military circles during a period that witnessed the descent of postinvasion Iraq into sectarian strife and a Sunni/al-Qaeda-sponsored uprising against the post-2003 Coalition occupation.40 As the U.S. armed forces debated how to move from an invasion force into an effective occupying power capable of dealing with the complicated conditions of civil insurrection, Montgomery McFate’s work also achieved increasing prominence. McFate, unlike Nagl, drew her inspiration from the British experience in Northern Ireland. In particular, the British Army’s ability to acquire “cultural knowledge” of its enemy in the course of the Troubles impressed her.41 According to McFate, the British “could not have built an effective strategy in Northern Ireland as they did without having a very full understanding of their enemy.”42 This hard-won knowledge, gained over years of trial and error, she maintained, had important lessons for a U.S. military attempting to operate in the complex local environments encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan.43
In other words, U.S. soldier-scholars, military historians, and anthropologists first identified and analyzed a tradition of British military prowess in conducting counterinsurgency. Each of the American analysts discussed so far emphasized an element of practice that they considered central to British success. They either distinguished a particularly British attitude toward small-scale military entanglements (Mockaitis and the principle of minimum force) or identified crucial lessons that could be adapted as best practice by the U.S. military (Nagl and the desirability of a flexible learning institution). British practice further afforded a sophisticated understanding of the challenges, subtleties, and potential opportunities in the specific theaters in which U.S. forces found themselves engaged, especially those characterized by complex tribal interactions (McFate and the importance of acquiring cultural knowledge).
It was this American myth of British counterinsurgency prowess that generated new COIN doctrine as well as a further paradox. Ironically, it was only after the American invention of this tradition that some sections of the British establishment consciously embraced the narrative. The initial Coalition experience in postinvasion Iraq reinforced it. Mounting intercommunal violence and attacks on Coalition forces in Iraq after 2003 seemed to demonstrate a dramatic gap between the more violent American-controlled sectors of the country and the relatively peaceful provinces to the south under British tutelage. The perception grew that the harder, more kinetic American operations created problems rather than solved them, fomenting anti-Coalition hostility and crystallizing local resistance. In comparison, in the South a lower-key British presence, where the army patrolled in soft hats and talked to the locals rather than engaged in firefights, seemed initially to characterize conditions in Basra.
The relative quiescence in the South thus corresponded with what commentators had characterized as a flexible, minimum-force approach. This characterization dovetailed with an evolving self-perception among sections of British official and academic commentary of Britain’s own abilities in a defined sphere of counterinsurgency and in particular a predisposition toward the practice of restraint and the discriminate, careful application of military force. For example, according to Rod Thornton, the “uniqueness of the British approach” re-sided in the Victorian sensibilities of pragmatism, civic policing, and Christian sentiment as well as the romantic norms of chivalry and noblesse oblige inculcated in an officer class educated in public schools (what Americans designate as elite private schools).44 The philosophy of “minimum force” was thus an “idea deeply rooted in the British military psyche.”45
The Iraq Paradox
Before the invasion of Iraq, it was difficult to find any official validation of a distinctive British approach to COIN, minimum force or otherwise. Even the 1995 Field Manual, a somewhat prolix document, did not make clear whether the principles appropriate to counterinsurgency constituted a formal prescription of certain practices. To the extent, moreover, that it did recognize a set of principles, they were anodyne in nature (encompassing such uncontroversial positions as political primacy; coordinated government machinery; intelligence and information sharing; separating the insurgent from his support; neutralizing the insurgent; and longer-term postinsurgency planning).46 The situation changed, however, in 2005. In that year, a House of Commons Defence Committee report on Iraq took evidence from a number of serving and former soldiers, academics, and other commentators. This expert commentary maintained that Britain possessed an inherited knowledge of “postconflict operations.” Explicit references were made to prior experience in Malaya and Northern Ireland, providing insights and lessons from which others (that is, the Americans) might usefully learn.47 The British COIN narrative was thus established and gained some traction in the public sphere and even within sections of the army.
Chief of the General Staff Mike Jackson was the most prominent adherent to the view that the British possessed small-war expertise. Jackson distinguished between the conduct of British forces around Basra and the U.S. military’s harder-edged approach. He rather polemically asserted in 2004 that “we must be able to fight with the Americans. That does not mean that we must be able to fight as the Americans.”48 In 2009, after having left the army, Jackson further argued in the Journal of Strategic Studies that the British military experience of counterinsurgency had roots that extended from its colonial policing encounters. “There is a sense,” he added, “of a real historical thread in this type of operation for the British Armed Forces.”49
For the most part, though, formal British Army statements maintained their established viewpoint, rarely advertizing a particularly British view of counterinsurgency. When British military personnel issued statements, they were notably low key. Crucially, if they came close to acknowledging a British approach, it was invariably implied rather than overtly stated. Thus, although Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster’s celebrated critique of the heavy-handed tactics employed by the United States early in the occupation of Iraq in the U.S. journal Military Review in 2005 is often regarded as the epitome of British superior COIN condescension, it was in fact nothing of the kind. Aylwin-Foster made no specific mention of a British penchant for counterinsurgency.50 Instead, he reiterated John Nagl’s claim in Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife that the American army’s distinctive facility for high-end war fighting arose from its institutional experience and historical origins that emphasized “the eradication of threats to national survival.’ ” Aylwin-Foster contrasted this emphasis with “the British Army’s [purported] history as an instrument of limited war to achieve limited goals at limited cost.” To the extent that Aylwin-Foster promulgated a distinctive British COIN tradition, he did so only indirectly by referring to the American narrative that the British Army’s historical experience created an institutional culture that “encourages a rapid response to changing situations.”51
As a result of such commentaries, the relative tranquility of Iraq’s South began to be perceived in terms of the different military cultures of the British and American armed forces. In this context, assumptions about supposedly established British approaches to counterinsurgency came to constitute one possible explanatory variable that accounted for this apparent difference in operational outcomes. At this point, a worrying tone of self-congratulation crept into official British reports, which increasingly accepted the narrative of a British COIN tradition. The House of Commons Defence Committee report, for instance, declared: “We commend British forces for their approach to counter-insurgency in their areas of operations. We are convinced that their approach has been a contributing factor in the development of the more permissive environment in southern Iraq, which has resulted in relatively little insurgent activity.”52 Meanwhile, a Ministry of Defence report argued that the army’s “positive start in Iraq” reflected prior “counter-insurgency experience from Northern Ireland” and, for good measure though somewhat bizarrely, “the Balkans” as well.53
At this time, official British hubris, now unquestioning in its assumption of a British COIN tradition, heavily discounted the fact that the Americans were compelled to operate in the Sunni badlands of the North rather than in the anti-Saddamite Shia South. The British-controlled areas were initially less hostile to Coalition forces after the ousting of the old regime. Yet here we encounter a further dissonance in the myth of British excellence. It was in the course of 2005 that the British force in Basra encountered serious difficulties as Sadr City fell into the hands of Iranian-backed Shia militia groups.
In this regard, Aylwin-Foster’s widely reported critique of U.S. conduct represented the apogee of the myth of British counterinsurgency. His analysis certainly aroused resentment. Colonel Kevin Benson of the U.S. Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies accused Aylwin-Foster of being “an insufferable British snob.”54 Yet if we disassociate Aylwin-Foster’s criticism of U.S. excesses from any implicit claims of British superiority in COIN (which he did not make), his comments were in the context of the time pertinent. Given the huge problems U.S. forces encountered in securing Fallujah, for example,55 few military professionals would have disagreed with Aylwin-Foster’s main conclusion that the Coalition had “failed to capitalise on initial success” and that Iraq was in “the grip a vicious and tenacious insurgency” or that there was a desperate need to “be better prepared for Irregular Warfare and post conflict stabilisation and reconstruction operations.”56
In fact, Aylwin-Foster’s assessment did not “slam US tactics” or offer a “blistering critique,”57 as headline writers claimed. Inflammatory headlines undoubtedly served a media purpose, creating the misleading impression of British arrogance. However, it is an impression that can be derived from Aylwin-Foster’s article only by ignoring his argument. Even Colonel Benson acknowledged later that Aylwin-Foster’s piece was “pretty powerful stuff” and that “sometimes good articles do make you angry. We should publish articles like this. We are in a war and we must always be thinking of how we can improve the way we operate.”58 Aylwin-Foster’s argument ultimately played an important role in refocusing Coalition military efforts in Iraq after 2005. Such counsel and other critiques like it written by American officers succeeded in realigning U.S. forces, which eventually succeeded in the relative stabilization of the country after 2007, but they did so without any ostensible reference to supposedly superior British techniques. They arose from a careful evaluation of the specific and contingent circumstances in which Coalition forces found themselves after 2005.
Bye-Bye Basra: The Fictional Decline of a Nontradition
One other insight revealed from a close reading of Aylwin-Foster’s article is that it did not make invidious comparisons between the performance of the U.S. and British forces in Iraq or elsewhere. There was, however, no disguising the fact that in the two years after Aylwin-Foster’s critique appeared the British themselves ran into severe difficulties in the occupation of southern Iraq, especially around the city of Basra. It was in this context of the initial success of the invasion and subsequent failure of the occupation that another false narrative affected the discourse of an alleged British approach to counterinsurgency: the myth of the decline of a once proud tradition. Some British defense circles erroneously represented the relative quiescence of the South up to 2005 as exemplifying British competence in counterinsurgency, with commentaries like the one issued by the House of Commons extolling the British Army’s preference for unobtrusive patrolling in berets and their apparent willingness to work with local leaders, affording a practical demonstration of the British facility for counterinsurgency and its tradition of minimum force.
Yet the official rhetoric and the actual reality of British operations in southern Iraq begged the question whether the army was actually practicing anything that could possibly be said to resemble a counterinsurgency program at all in Iraq after 2003. The fact that the British patrolled Basra without hard hats and governed—at first—with the consent of the local population demonstrated that in the aftermath of the invasion southern Iraq was not in a state of insurrection. The unobtrusive approach adopted by the British, therefore, may have been entirely appropriate for the time, reflecting the specific conditions of relative stability on the ground. Why, a skeptic might ask, was any expertise in counterinsurgency required, let alone invoked by official sources and public commentators, when there was no insurgency to counter in this area? It seems more accurate to claim that British forces were engaged at that time in an occupying/peacekeeping effort, and it is this effort that subsequently failed, not any distinctively British counterinsurgency campaign—if, that is, by “counterinsurgency” we mean the attempt to suppress violent subversion.
Furthermore, it can be argued that the political decision to draw down and pull out of southern Iraq in 2007 was largely the result of the well-advertised unpopularity of the war among the British electorate. In other words, Britain never attempted a concerted suppression campaign in southern Iraq.59 The British did not have enough troops to accomplish any such task, and it was clear that the then Labour government had no intention of increasing its commitment. The government took a political decision to reduce British forces and thus attempt to minimize the damage to its political credibility back home. In these circumstances, a counterinsurgency effort was not going to be mounted. Without the political will, there can be no such thing as a counterinsurgency program in any meaningful sense. The question therefore arises, Were the shortcomings evident in the British occupation of Basra indicative of a failure of British counterinsurgency principles or evidence of a declining COIN tradition? Operational shortcomings were certainly revealed, and the (always inaccurate) view of the British Army’s capacity for rapid institutional learning was questioned, but claims that the army’s reputation was jeopardized appear both exaggerated and misplaced. What was ultimately going on was that one questionable narrative was being overtaken by another—namely, that a tradition (with dubious antecedents) was now falling into disrepute.
The Revisionist Challenge
The fact that the Ministry of Defence formally sought to identify a convention of British “minimum-force” counterinsurgency by citing the examples of Northern Ireland—in fact a bruising encounter characterized by a brutal undercover intelligence war60—and even more curiously the Balkans (where nothing resembling a counterinsurgency campaign in any comparable sense took place) illustrated the tenuous official grasp over this supposedly deeply ingrained tradition. In the face of these claims, along with the army’s failure to secure Basra, commentators understandably but misleadingly asserted the erosion of that tradition. Out of this failure grew the “Where did it all go wrong?” school of thought, which accepted the myth in order to show that the tradition had declined. In the wake of this evolving narrative, an even more serious threat to the ostensible tradition of counterinsurgency expertise emerged. This threat assumed the form of a revisionist history of the later British imperial period. The new history demonstrated, often decisively, that the examples from which the canon of inherited counterinsurgency wisdom drew, particularly the legacy of colonial withdrawal, was, as Paul Dixon contended, “actually more violent and coercive than the literature would imply.”61
From the late 2000s, books and articles began to appear that questioned the hearts-and-minds and minimum-force precepts that had supposedly characterized the British approach to small war in places such as Malaya. The questioning of this tradition, though, was not new. In the late 1990s, Karl Hack had first exposed the coercive methods the British employed in “screwing down” the Communists in Malaya in his revisionist account of the Emergency.62 A few years later, in 2002, John Newsinger, from a Marxist historical perspective, identified a broader critique of a brutally repressive tradition of British counterinsurgency.63 In the later 2000s, it was the work of historians such as Huw Bennett and David French, using previously unreleased or neglected official documents, who revealed how British approaches to colonial insurgencies were often fiercely aggressive.64 Bennett’s work on the Mau Mau war in Kenya in the 1950s, for instance, presented compelling evidence that British forces committed atrocities.65
The revelation of draconian measures to combat insurrectionary elements in the context of the wars of decolonization cleared the way for Marxist historians such as Newsinger to contend that the record of British military success in counterinsurgency was a political distortion.66 Rather than winning hearts and minds, British COIN was now considered a notable political failure. In an analogous vein, Douglas Porch argued that the British Army “did not have a particularly exemplary record at COIN or at any warfare, for that matter, at the time of Malaya.” The evidence of “brutal COIN tactics” was sufficient, it seemed, to discount any political successes. Further, to the extent that British forces demonstrated any aptitude for institutional learning, it was a preference for learning “kinetic methods,” disguised under the cloak of hearts and minds, which were “every bit as repressive—even dirty—as the French” had used in Algeria.67
These historians correctly drew attention to the coercive realities of Britain’s imperial encounters. Such historical revisionism, however, does not necessarily undermine any assumed British capability for fighting small wars but merely reframes it in a more negative light. Strategic success, it should be recalled, assumes the attainment of political goals. The fact that the British campaigns were often extremely violent does not ipso facto mean that they failed. It simply means that such victories were just more violent and coercive than the first accounts of these campaigns claimed. What the historical revisionism exposed in its revelations of exemplary and sometimes excessive violence was that the precursor academic and journalistic literature had elaborated a myth of minimum force.
In other words, the new history presented a revised and this time more accurate critique of prior academic and journalistic interpretations of British military practice. But the counterinsurgency narrative was one that the British Army had rarely endorsed officially. Even at the height of proclamations of a British facility for small-war encounters, only a few military figures and the occasional House of Commons or Ministry of Defence report referred to a distinctive British tradition of counterinsurgency achievement based on hearts and minds and minimum force. Besides, when the odd politician and retired general did so, they merely demonstrated their lack of understanding about how the army judged its own performance in these small wars. As Bruno Reis has shown through an extensive study of British military documentation, there is no mention whatsoever of a minimum-force philosophy in British military manuals during Britain’s wars of decolonization.68 Arguably, this nescience arose from the poor institutional memory about the legacy of colonial warfare within the British Army itself, which throughout the years of the Cold War focused almost exclusively on major land battle in central Europe.69 Once again, read in this light, the British legacy of COIN presents itself as a series of myths obscuring contending and contradictory narratives rather than any tried and tested method.70
What the revisionist challenge to the prevailing narrative of a British way in COIN and the subsequent scholarly debate between the detractors and defenders of a minimum-force tradition demonstrates is the highly contested nature of that historical legacy.71 Exemplifying this debate, one of the leading academic journals in the field, Small Wars and Insurgencies, commissioned in 2012 a special edition to discuss “British ways of counter-insurgency.” What emerged from the contributions to that volume was that the British practiced a variety of tactics in their imperial conflicts. Cases of the suppression of colonial insurrection before World War II, from the Indian Mutiny through to the Boer War and the Amritsar massacre, exhibited a preference for a “butcher and bolt” policy, using violence for moral effect.72 Callwell’s work empathized with this approach. Callwell felt that “savage” tribes must be taught “a lesson they will not forget.”73 As Daniel Whittingham remarked, such views should be regarded as “one of exemplary force, even brutality, in a ‘dark age’ before a more enlightened period of ‘minimum force’ ”74 intimated in more emollient works such as Gwynn’s Imperial Policing.75
Even so, the fact that later examples of colonial warfare, for instance in Kenya and Malaya, were subsequently revealed as more pitiless than once assumed led David French to argue that minimum force was an aberration and that “coercion was always the basis of Britain’s counter-insurgency campaigns.”76 By contrast, Thomas Mockaitis, also an essay contributor to the volume, highlighted that attitudes to minimum force changed over time. It would be wrong, he suggested, to set up the notion of minimum force as some absolute standard. Rather, Mockaitis claimed, it would be more accurate to suggest that Britain often achieved greater success in its campaigns in comparison to other colonial powers and that this success can be explained in part as a result of the application of “broad principles flexibly applied.” In that context, he maintained, the “British military enshrined the principle of minimum force in its doctrine and in many circumstances soldiers exercised commendable restraint.”77 Plausibly, if perhaps unfalsifiably, it might be argued thereby that the appreciation of a general precept of minimum force in British practice minimized the scale of potential abuse inherent in fighting wars among the people.78
The debate over the British COIN legacy, veering between the extremes of coercion on the one hand and restraint on the other, arguably suggests the British approach to small war to be somewhat schizophrenic. Ledwidge, in fact, makes this point, observing that the British Army was two armies for most of the post–World War II period: one being the British Army of the Rhine that maintained an aggressive orientation, emphasizing high-intensity force concentration; the other being an army that was evolving a philosophy of minimum force arising out of the prolonged Northern Ireland crisis.79 What the army’s own dual role and split identity as well as the contestable assessments over the meaning of its historical experience illustrate above all, however, is that the British Army itself had no consistent experience of anything. Aggression and coercion coexisted with restraint and minimum force. How can a British tradition exhibit such a total contradiction: on the one hand applying the principle of minimum force and hearts and minds, on the other exhibiting coercion and exemplary force? Which one of these supposed traditions is more historically correct hardly matters (the military evidently applied practices of both restraint and coercion to suit what it saw as the requirements of the strategic situation). The clear inference of the debate, though one rarely made by pundits, is that there is no stable understanding of the British colonial experience of “small wars,” no evidently discernible pattern to British practice, and therefore no coherent tradition of British counterinsurgency.
A Tradition of Political Will, Not Counterinsurgency
Freed from the distorting perspective of COIN, what the British experience of so-called small wars reveals is something altogether more prosaic—namely, the role of contingency. Daniel Whittingham observes that Callwell recognized the highly equivocal definition of the term small war.80 Moreover, to the extent that Callwell’s writings gained “semiofficial” status (via the publication of Small Wars through His Majesty’s Stationary Office), the army made clear—as Chief of the General Staff Sir Neville Lyttleton’s preface to the third edition emphasized—that the volume was “not to be regarded as laying down inflexible rules for guidance,” nor were Callwell’s views an “expression of official opinion.”81 Keith Surridge, meanwhile, noted that in the Boer War “Lords Robert and Kitchener took pragmatic approaches to the guerrilla war based on their notions of what constituted ‘civilised warfare.’ ”82 Even Mockaitis stressed that the minimum-force concept represents a “threshold of violence applied and interpreted in different ways in different times and places.”83 The role of contingency, not tradition, found its modern echo in the 1995 British Army Field Manual itself, which stressed that its broadly drawn principles were to be regarded as ideas to be “applied pragmatically and with commonsense to suit the circumstance peculiar to each campaign.”84
If contingency, pragmatism, and common sense negate prescriptive approaches and therefore invalidate the idea of a tradition of a British approach to counterinsurgency, can anything of analytical value be said to characterize the British experience of “small war”? It is possible to point to one attribute that might constitute an explanatory variable in British practice. This attribute is, however, frequently obscured by both practitioners’ and scholars’ overwhelming concentration on counterinsurgency as a consequence of self-contained military doctrines and practices.85 What is frequently missing in these assessments is the context of war, which is always an extension of political will. Past experience of so-called counterinsurgency campaigns can be comprehended only with respect to British national policy and not just by tactical and operational considerations that may have obtained on the ground. When examined in historical perspective, the British “COIN legacy” reveals that what ultimately determined military success or failure in any theater was political will—that is to say, the political investment in the cause that determined whether the British state stayed the course. Political will provided the time for the learning/adaptation process to occur in each contingent setting. It is this variable that holds the key to understanding the British military experience in so-called small wars. Britain, in fact, possesses no discrete tradition in counterinsurgency, not least because, as chapter 1 pointed out, COIN itself is a disputable category of war. What Britain does possess, though, is an enduring tradition of committing itself long term to a series of external and occasionally internal engagements.
Furthermore, it is possible to identify this process through the history of the British war-making experience: initial mistakes lead to learning and adaptation, which invariably lead to success in terms of the attainment of designated political goals. We can see this process in numerous historical examples from at least the Boer War to Helmand. It is a pattern that is not peculiar to Britain’s small wars. It can be seen even in existential wars such as World War I and World War II.86 The facility for “staying the course” and learning from mistakes is also evident in the cases of military action in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Oman, and Northern Ireland. This practice was at work in Afghanistan as well. Here, initial operational deployments to Helmand Province went badly but were slowly remedied because the political commitment ensured the space for operational improvements to occur. There is no doubt that the original British commitment to Helmand was underresourced and poorly thought through.87 However, British forces did not buckle under pressure and retained their presence. They recovered from their early setbacks and went on to achieve dramatic improvements in operational effectiveness.88 In other words, they learned and adapted.
What gives the armed forces the capacity to learn and adapt is political will. The level of commitment based on considerations of the centrality of vital national interests and the broader prospects of success in contingent circumstances invariably governs the extent to which harsh, coercive measures are tolerated and sanctioned. Surridge makes the acute observation in relation to the Boer War that when Lord Roberts “opted for severe measures[,] he was supported by the British government and was told ‘the new departure had been welcomed.’ ” Surridge shows that, “under Roberts, the British punished civilians for giving help to commandos, real or imagined. Under Kitchener, civilians were swept up and kept as virtual prisoners of war. There was little scope for winning hearts and minds beyond the dubious protection of the concentration camps.” Yet, he continues, “if the attitude of the British generals was harsh then that of British politicians was hardly softer: Lord Salisbury, the prime minister, opined that ‘You will not conquer these people until you have starved them out.’ ”89
In the Boer War, political determination brought strategic success. “In the end,” as Surridge notes, “the British got what they wanted—the end of Boer independence and the security of the British Empire.”90 It is the successful attainment of political objectives that invariably silences any moral qualms about the means employed to reach success. Again, the same considerations were at work in the suppression of rebellion in Mesopotamia in 1920. As Peter Lieb observes in his comparison of British and German responses to insurrections in Iraq and Ukraine, respectively, the British “strategy of collective punishment was never called into question” because it was “seen as a success” despite the fact that the pacification of the Arab tribes had been “more ruthless, more indiscriminate, and more destructive than the German approach in the Ukraine had been two years earlier.”91
The capacity to change, stay the course, and gain results, therefore, has surprisingly little to do with any historically constructed tradition of proficiency in “small wars,” of either a “minimum force” or “coercive” variety. Instead, it has everything do with the political calculations of higher, elected decision makers about where the national interest ultimately resides. If that calculation has concluded that the cost of staying and fighting is worthwhile, the British have often succeeded either in whole or in part in attaining their political objectives. Conversely, where the calculation has gone the other way, an entirely different set of imperatives has come into play, which brings us to the next crucial aspect of the British tradition in small wars—that of running away.
When political will has been lacking and the calculation of the national interest deemed to lie elsewhere, the political decision has invariably been made to minimize losses and quit. Hence, in addition to committing to fighting in numerous external conflicts, which gave Britain its reputed COIN tradition, there is an equally venerable British tradition of cut-and-run withdrawals. Historical examples of this tradition are also numerous. One notable instance is Palestine in the 1940s. It has often been maintained that the “British lost” Palestine to “Jewish insurgents” when, as Matthew Hughes suggests, the British realized that all “they could rely on was force, which did not work.”92 It is possibly more accurate to say that British politicians calculated that they faced an array of forces that inhibited them from applying force in any sustained manner. As David Cesarani makes clear, Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin understood that given the perilous state of the British economy after World War II, they could not crack down on Jewish insurgent groups without alienating American support, on which Britain’s financial stability depended. As a consequence, the “prime minister and the Foreign Secretary constantly held the army in check and forced the high commissioner, Cunningham, to appease rather than suppress the Jewish Agency.”93 In other words, it was not that force did not work; rather, force was, for reasons based on the assessment of the British national interest, never really tried.
Cesarani argues that the “government and the army” considered Palestine “to be a major strategic asset,” but one rendered increasingly unstable by Jewish emigration from Europe, rising tensions between Arabs and Jews, and concerted campaigns of violence by extremist Jewish groups.94 Ultimately, the government probably regarded Palestine as an insignificant appendage. If it really considered Palestine a “major asset,” the calculation of the national interest would likely have been very different. Instead, the government assessed the necessary political investment to retain Palestine (by 1947 a United Nations–mandated territory) and crush violent Jewish subversion to be a disproportionate use of resources given broader considerations of the national interest. Britain consequently had no intention of staying there following the agreement of a United Nations plan to partition the country.95
A similar political calculus leading to withdrawal applied throughout the era of decolonization. The end of the Raj and the partition of India in 1947, when Britain abandoned the jewel in its imperial crown with notable rapidity to avoid involvement in burgeoning intercommunal violence, provide another telling example.96 So too does the Aden campaign (1963–1967). Although the British initially committed their forces to stabilize the South Arabian Federation prior to full independence following the outbreak of an insurrection in 1963, their withdrawal from Aden was hastened through a combination of the effects of the Six-Day War between the Arab powers and Israel; the closure of the Suez Canal by Nasser, which removed any residual strategic value the territory might have possessed; and financial problems at home. As a result, the political reevaluation of the British position caused the Wilson government to conclude that there was little further strategic interest in staying in order to pacify the country.97 The British withdrew from this relatively minor conflagration having lost less than seventy military personnel over the preceding four years.98 Perhaps the most potent example of running away—or, more accurately, staying away—was Britain’s decision not to involve itself on the ground in South Vietnam despite pressure from the Johnson administration in the 1960s.99
The pattern of cutting and running when deemed necessary is observable in more recent conflicts as well. One of the more interesting recent cases involves British participation, or lack of it, in the multinational effort to pacify Lebanon in the 1980s. Although the British have willingly participated in peacekeeping missions, particularly in support of American initiatives, in this instance the British sent only a token force of ninety troops to Beirut. This force was, somewhat unusually, dwarfed by the thousands of American, French, and even Italian peacekeepers committed.100 After a few months, the British government unilaterally withdrew its small force. The government assumed that persisting in a rapidly deteriorating security situation was likely to prove costly.101 It was an astute decision. In 1983, Hezbollah-backed suicide bombers attacked the U.S. Marine and French military headquarters in the city, causing the death of hundreds of troops.102 The attack resulted in a rapid withdrawal of the rest of the multinational force on February 26, 1984.103
It is in light of this alternative British tradition of cutting and running that the supposed failures of British counterinsurgency in Basra should in fact be situated. Few serious analysts consider prudential withdrawals from places such as Palestine, Aden, and Beirut as evidence of the failure of British COIN. There is no suggestion that the British failure to pacify Afghanistan in the mid–nineteenth century or quit India in 1947 demonstrated abject failure in small wars or counterinsurgency. What British external and colonial military engagement since 1945 demonstrates is the contingent character of war that requires frequent political reassessment of the investment of troops, money, and material in a particular cause.104 Thus, alongside a legacy of hard-won and hardnosed success for British forces, there is an equally well-established tradition of strategic withdrawal. Such withdrawal is not necessarily a symptom of weakness or failure. It is, as in the case of Basra, prudential political calculation. Such calculations reflect the contingency of war for which no procrustean counterinsurgency tradition can provide a framework to order Britain’s “small-war” encounters. Further, if there is any wisdom contained in the British experience of contending with small wars, perhaps knowing when not to fight—in other words, when to withdraw—is as important as committing to stay over the long term.
Any survey of the history of the British experience of small wars reveals an extensive and varied legacy of external entanglements and engagements (or in the case of Northern Ireland internal entanglement) ranging from colonial intervention to colonial withdrawal, peacekeeping, and peace enforcement. The outcome of each of these encounters has reflected the degree of political commitment to the particular case. The legacy—from the Boer War through Malaya, Dhofar, Borneo, Oman, and Kenya to Kuwait, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Kosovo, and even Helmand—discloses a remarkable degree of operational effectiveness.105 As Dewar notes, the “most striking feature” of these late-twentieth-century campaigns has been the “degree of success achieved by the British Army in these medium and small-scale operations.”106 No doubt the British armed forces did display at times certain tactical aptitudes that accounted in part for the “degree” of some of these successes. But, more importantly, it was when the British government sought the attainment of definable political objectives that those achievements were gained.107 As Reis has noted, the relative success of the campaigns of decolonization came about because “Britain had a more realistic definition of victory.” Invariably, this definition “allowed Britain to sometimes successfully present the violence of the insurgents as the main obstacle to self-rule, and frame successful counterinsurgency as the best way to secure independence.”108 What constituted notions of “victory” for the British was the product of political calculation, not military prowess. Moreover, whenever politics deemed the price of war too high, analogous calculations were made to withdraw from overseas entanglements if it was considered that no threat to the national interest was thereby incurred.
Thus, finally, we return to the key puzzle identified at the beginning of this chapter: Why have analysts focused on the cases of Basra and Helmand to establish a flawed argument about British operational failure within a manufactured tradition of expertise in counterinsurgency? Unpacking the evolution of this long-standing “tradition” reveals that it was invented elsewhere and for a political purpose.109 Rarely in their historical experience have the British armed forces claimed a specific counterinsurgency expertise. This tradition has invariably been ascribed to them by others. In the United States, commentators who were keen to promote practices of minimum force or rapid institutional learning greatly facilitated the reputation of British effectiveness in “small war.” However, much American commentary was not intended to achieve an accurate appreciation of the British military experience but to generate insights for domestic consumption and policy. British practices, U.S. analysts claimed, offered lessons for the American armed forces. A later generation of (mainly British) scholars came to question the historical validity of a number of these presumed lessons. They maintained instead that coercion rather than hearts and minds accounted for British success.
Such analysis filters past military commitments through the anachronistic and ahistorical lens of present commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan and the mythopoeia of a British tradition of counterinsurgency. These present-minded concerns serve as premises to make arguments that demonstrate the decline of a once unimpeachable reputation. Such an anachronistic propensity reads into the past a hypothetical completion of ideas, concepts, and practices. Purporting to explain what we currently seem to have, such abridgements of understanding are, as Conal Condren explains, “characteristically projected as an available reality and this is used to redescribe surviving evidence, so pre-empting understanding.”110 This metalanguage of explanatory modeling that conflates the past for the purposes of the present possesses a certain ideological appeal. The rhetoric of failure fitted a national mood of decline for a popular audience that possessed neither the time nor the inclination to evaluate the British Army’s longer-term experience of military engagement in so-called small wars. A rigorous longer-term analysis, however, shows that the examples of Helmand (in its early phases) and Basra are exceptions, even aberrations, in relation to the majority of cases of British military intervention in wars of choice over the past fifty years. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the British Army functioned as a junior partner to the United States (though a significant partner in a broader coalition of nations) in an ambitious nation-building project. As chapter 3 demonstrated, the United States, unlike Britain, has a long tradition of armed modernization. It is in the overstretch of resources from such open-ended U.S. commitments that the limitations of late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century British military commitments reveal themselves. Although this overcommitment might demand greater political realism from the United Kingdom’s elected leaders, it does not of itself demonstrate any inherent failure of operational skill or inability to learn and adapt on the part of the British Army.
This chapter has distinguished the various interpretations that have been conflated to sustain the myth of a decline of a presumed tradition of British expertise in counterinsurgency. From a historical perspective, however, the British military experience cannot be categorized as a failed or failing tradition. Instead, it demonstrates great variety. The history, moreover, is a contingent one and not a metanarrative arising from an array of complex challenges that confronted a European power on its ascent and descent from empire over two centuries. This historical experience demonstrates a distinctive practice of frequent military engagement that evolved from the nineteenth-century imperial mission and the Pax Britannica that the mission demanded. The experience of empire placed a premium on acting where possible to deal with problems commensurate with the empire’s perception as a major actor on the global stage, which was expressed postimperially through permanent membership in the United Nations Security Council.111
Over time, what the British small-war tradition demonstrates is political will. Political will determines whether Britain prevailed in its so-called counterinsurgencies. Where the political establishment invested in a cause and pursued it or defended it by force if necessary, the British armed forces stayed and fought. They made mistakes, they learned, they adapted, and more often than not they were successful. Success here means that the British armed forces’ actions assisted in the attainment of political goals determined by democratically elected rulers.112 Without the political will, a decision was often made either to withdraw the military quickly or not to contest the political space at all. Hence, running parallel to a record of prevailing in the small wars Britain chose to fight is an equally well-established tradition of cutting and running in wars where it did not.
Taking into account the multifaceted nature of the British military experience and its political ramifications, this chapter has argued that it is difficult to sustain a narrative of the implosion of a “world-beating” institution. Twentieth-century history demonstrates technical failures of leadership, doctrine, and equipment, especially when the political will to stay the course was lacking, such as the decision to withdraw from the Indian subcontinent in 1947. Nevertheless, it is possible only to claim that a venerable tradition has fallen into decay where there is evidence that the military failed to deliver despite strong political backing. With this understanding in mind, it is certainly possible to document disappointments arising from faltering political will or poor leadership (for instance, the 1956 Suez debacle, the failure to stabilize the South Arabian Federation, and the loss of control of Basra between 2006 and 2008), but it is equally difficult to pinpoint any generic failure when British forces stood and fought when they received full political support. In fact, when the “Where did it all go wrong?” argument is subject to scrutiny, we find that the narrative of a once “world-class” military disintegrating in overstretch derives from a single and, of itself, somewhat questionable case—Basra.
What emerges in fact is a variegated picture of Britain’s presumed expertise in combating insurgency. It is variegated because commentators such as Ledwidge are correct, to a degree, in arguing that the narrative of a British COIN “inheritance” in part reflects the stories that the army has told about itself,113 at various points accepting—or, more accurately, often half-accepting and partially endorsing—the view that it did indeed possess a tradition of counterinsurgency excellence. However, as this chapter has also shown, the British Army internalized an understanding of proficiency in counterinsurgency only after the end of the Cold War. For the most part, the “story” is as much about what others outside the British Army have ascribed to it. This is the case with the minimum-force philosophy: constantly repeated by scholars, commentators, and sometimes politicians, the army, or sections of it, came to believe that it actually possessed a self-evident tradition of counterinsurgency. But for soldiers and scholars alike, trying to separate that “tradition” from the contingent practices arising from the unique circumstances of every conflict was always going to prove elusive. It is too easy for analysts to read back into the past a dialectical structure that offers historical completion whenever tactical similarities present themselves. As John Bew observes in his evaluation of the British Army’s experience in Northern Ireland, it is not that techniques and tactics are insignificant, but the fact that they occur and unfold in deeply dependent, unpredictable, ways. Bew tellingly concludes, “To call this COIN, however, is to look back at a complex history and pluck a method from the madness.”114