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Insurgency, it is said, is the ‘graduate level of war.’ This honorific was earned through the countless traumas experienced by states at the hands of seemingly inferior foes: in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Algeria, and going all the way back to Napoleon’s Peninsular War and beyond. Indeed, insurgency can induce an acute case of helplessness among states; when well led and organized, these movements seem to hold a power that all but nullifies the state’s many advantages. Shortly after the Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger gave voice to the frustration: ‘The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.’1 This war in Southeast Asia, so dark and haunting for the United States, spawned another telling aphorism: responding to a US colonel’s claim that the Americans had never lost a single firefight, his Vietnamese counterpart quipped: ‘That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.’2 On the political plane, the Americans had lost—technology and firepower notwithstanding.
Some decades later, the US military once again confronted the limits of its power in the face of insurgency. Stuck in Iraq, the US Army and Marine Corps published new doctrine to explain the unfamiliar ‘paradoxes’ of counterinsurgency to an increasingly exasperated force; these included insights such as ‘Some of the Best Weapons for Counterinsurgents Do Not Shoot’ and ‘Tactical Success Guarantees Nothing.’3 In Afghanistan, yet another maxim appeared, apparently uttered by Taliban commanders, that further underlined the counterinsurgent’s dilemma: ‘You have the watches. We have the time.’4 The cutting prescience of this aphorism became painfully clear in the summer of 2021, when after 20 years of occupation NATO forces finally withdrew and, in doing so, abandoned the government in Kabul, and the nation of Afghanistan, to the Taliban’s rapid advance.
The maxims that have emerged from such failures are pithy and revealing, but they can also be overly fatalistic, or outright inaccurate, in describing the true power of states—even those confronting a concerted insurgency. Not only do several governments threatened in this manner do quite well; according to some, governments have since the Cold War experienced decisive victories more than thrice as often as their non-state challengers.5 More fundamentally, and very much contrary to Kissinger, in most contemporary cases (seven out of ten for the same time period), the struggles simmer, maybe occasionally rise to a boil, but do not boil over or threaten state collapse.6 In many nations affected by insurgency—places like Nigeria, Colombia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Peru, even Myanmar—the conflict becomes a nuisance, or something to manage, but does not amount to a primary or particularly urgent concern. The government may not be ‘winning,’ or win decisively, but it remains in power and thereby denies the insurgents their own victory.
This trend will strike many as counterintuitive given the high-profile loss in Afghanistan and the other setbacks of the so-called War on Terror. Adopting a broader lens, however, the Taliban’s swift victory in the summer of 2021 emerges as a notable exception to a more general trend of state survival. It is also an exception shrouded by its exceptional circumstances. Though most states threatened by insurgency are weak, few are as artificial and hollow as was the Kabul government that the international community sought to build and legitimize for almost 20 years. Through a half-baked ‘nation-building’ experiment cooked up in the West, with scant regard for Afghan cultural and political norms, a highly centralized national government was created that ran counter to the fragmented nature of the Afghan state. As that government, while also corrupt and criminalized, was then charged with instilling democracy, a liberal economy, and social justice, it could rightly be said that, in this instance, it was the counterinsurgents that were the revolutionaries, seeking as they were to graft a radical political project onto an unwilling body.7 Meanwhile, this was also a case where the insurgents received strong state support, primarily via Pakistan’s military intelligence service. Few other challengers benefit from such a ripe and forgiving context and imitators hoping to export the Taliban’s approach can expect an altogether different result.
Indeed, in broader terms, insurgents are no longer defeating states militarily; most do not even try, and those that do suffer the consequences. The combined track record of recent insurgencies brings the point home: there are exceedingly few cases where they have subdued and successfully replaced their government adversary. For the most part, they have not even secured sufficient military gains to achieve meaningful concessions at the negotiating table. Sure enough, coups and revolutions still occur with some frequency (witness for example the convulsions of the Arab Spring), and those insurgents blessed with the military support of capable states—in Libya, Ukraine, or Afghanistan as mentioned—can often do rather well (though they also struggle—even fail—to consolidate their gains). For most, however, the fight goes on, or simmers, leading to eventual state victory or, at least, its survival.
On this basis, an update on Kissinger may be in order: it is the state that wins by not losing, and the guerrilla that loses by never getting to win. After all, it is the insurgent that must reverse the balance of power—a far more onerous task than hanging on to the status quo. During the Cold War, Mao Tse-tung famously advocated a three-phased approach to insurgency, each involving ever-growing popular and military mobilization. The theory was immensely influential and instrumental in several rebel victories that followed. Today, however, the state’s adversaries become stuck in the phase of harassment and fail to progress. Without a very generous and brazen state sponsor, insurgent organizations rarely acquire the combat capability and lethality of states, and few therefore can—or even seek to—go toe to toe against their armed forces. So long as they remain in the shadows, they may survive to fight another day, and even impose some costs along the way, yet there is no real possibility of victory, at least not by force of arms.
Two recent cases of insurgent defeat bring the point home. The mighty Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) prosecuted a lethal insurgency over several decades, owned its own counter-state in the north and east of Sri Lanka, and developed state-like military capabilities, including a navy and even a modest air force. Yet once the Sri Lankan government decided it had had enough and, in 2006, launched a massive military onslaught, the Tigers were roundly defeated within less than three years. Then, in 2014, the Islamic State emerged in Iraq and Syria as one of the most resourced and threatening insurgent groups the world had ever seen. It attacked both countries conventionally, using tanks and self-propelled artillery, and amassed manpower from across the globe. Yet despite (or because of) its initial successes—in standing up in this manner, in gaining territory and proclaiming a state—ISIS also exposed itself to military counterattack that, again in less than three years, demolished its ambitions and overall plan. It is true that the counteroffensive in this case called upon a vast military coalition of states, all galvanized by the rapid advances of the group, but this in itself signals the hostile global environment for insurgent groups—even those that prove effective during the mobilization stage.
When insurgency reaches a certain level—where it claims territory, usurps governmental prerogatives, and actually threatens the state—it opens itself to a military backlash too powerful for most embryonic proto-states. In counterinsurgency theory, the government would use the space thus created to address the political roots of the conflict, so that the problem of insurgency does not reappear. This rarely happens. Instead, states end up reapplying military force as necessary to suppress rather than ever quite resolve the matter. ‘Mowing the grass,’ as this approach has been termed, is deemed a suboptimal response to political violence, and yet for the insurgent the grass is nonetheless mowed, and the armed struggle must start over—often with great effort.8 Thus, despite pronounced concern about the Tigers rising again from the blood-soaked ashes of Sri Lanka’s final offensive, signs of a rebirth are modest at best. And while ISIS persists with launching terrorist attacks worldwide and strikes targets opportunistically in Syria and Iraq, their efforts must necessarily remain below the threshold of consolidating territory—or at least showing off about it.9
This is a costly approach to business. Some insurgents may conclude that they require the military backing of powerful states, but most cannot expect or easily secure such support. Others may learn not to fight a state power conventionally, but for this reason they will also struggle to impose costs or seize power. Others yet may restrict their use of violence to softer targets than the state, or use mostly terrorism, yet these will confront issues of legitimacy and political isolation, making it difficult to build a new political order. Some may go in another direction altogether, seeking to avoid launching attacks lest they invite ‘unwanted government attention’ and become counterproductive.10 As Jacob Shapiro concludes in his study of violent covert organizations, ‘conducting too many attacks can be as damaging as conducting too few.’11
The need for such awkward compromises represents the insurgent’s dilemma: the difficulty of asserting oneself as a start-up, of challenging authority violently, and establishing oneself sustainably as the new source of power, without suffering devastating retaliation along the way. Because of this dilemma, insurgency—defined broadly as a politico-military campaign against the writ of the state—at once remains the most common form of conflict and yet is also experiencing dwindling returns. But how long can this track record of failure persist? How long can states expect to maintain the upper hand? Clausewitz characterized warfare as the competition of wills, and so adaptation is to be expected.
As it turns out, the balance of power is already being challenged. States have managed well enough by doing just enough, but in the face of continued failure some insurgents are learning to overcome the dilemma laid out above. As a result, while states lament their poor performance in recent counterinsurgency campaigns, greater trouble may lie ahead. Insurgency is being reinvented—it is being tailored to the vulnerabilities of our times and with new strategic salience for tomorrow. As successful approaches are copied, refined, and repurposed, what we think of as counterinsurgency will also need to change.
On this basis, this book seeks to capture emerging trends in insurgent strategy. It asks how pioneering insurgent organizations are moving beyond the traditional model of politico-military overthrow and what avenues they are exploring instead to capture and retain power. By contextualizing insurgency within the social and political norms of today and tomorrow, it maps and explains such adaptation, focusing on the strategic approaches that look most likely to produce viable and sustainable political outcomes.
In short, this book is concerned with the future of insurgency—or with the theories of victory that will guide insurgents’ paths to power. It is a topic that matters for at least three reasons:
•First, insurgent adaptation will seek to undo the military trump card that many states rely upon as a crude but effective way of staying in power. Without this trump card, states will be far more vulnerable to extra-legal and subversive attack. Some of these states may anyway deserve replacement, but a better outcome, even in these instances, is productive engagement with the internal challenge rather than chaotic devolution into violence and war.
•Second, within an increasingly multipolar balance of power globally, state rivals will be looking to foster and fuel insurgencies as one way of undermining their strategic competitors. Much as during the Cold War, insurgency will therefore assume greater meaning as a component of great-power competition. In tandem, state backing will compound the destabilizing effects of internal strife, while insurgency, reinvented for our times, will offer these states more potent ways to undermine their adversaries.
•Third, with democracy in retreat on a global scale, the opportunities for peaceful transfers of power will also shrink. This narrowing of political opportunity leaves the window open for the increased use of subversion, force, and crime to claim and hold on to power, not just in the non-democratic world but also in those countries where democracy is being challenged or even discredited. As contestation blends with conflict, as formal politics mesh with illicit methods, states will be faced with fundamental ethical and strategic problems both of diagnosis and of response. Studying what to expect is one critical way of navigating these murky waters.
If the future of insurgency is an important topic, it is also one rife with methodological challenges. The broad range of the subject matter makes it difficult to generalize and, for this reason, the approaches detailed here are presented neither as entirely distinct nor as exhaustive of other ways that may also be attempted. Similarly, it should be stated up front that none of the adaptive insurgent strategies explored in this book are altogether new. Instead, the treatment of the topic purposely allows the present, even the past, to shape analysis and prognosis. As war theorist Christopher Coker frames his own approach to forecasting, we must in these exercises ‘have an ear attuned to the secret harmonies of everyday life, for the present may persist longer than we think and the future may be more familiar than we expect.’12 The key lies not in pronouncing historical watersheds, but in examining how and why strategic approaches already with us today may be adjusted and used on a far wider scale tomorrow, to mount a strategic threat to democratic norms and stability.
Whether insurgency’s strategic rebirth is a good or a bad thing is of course a matter of political prerogative, or of how we perceive the state’s legitimacy and right to govern. It is an axiom within studies of insurgency that states confronting this challenge already suffered from some major legitimacy deficit to begin with, hence the will and ability of small groups to threaten their writ. Bolstering the state to withstand such efforts can therefore seem perverse, as it reinforces the authority of a government that is misusing its power and position. In response, it should be noted that counterinsurgency theory seeks not a return to a status quo ante—the conditions that obtained before it came to blows—but change to that system, precisely to address the government’s legitimacy deficit and the ‘roots of the conflict.’ Still, this is a topic where strategic and ethical perspectives mesh, making dispassionate academic treatment difficult. Even the terms of the discussion (insurgency, counterinsurgency, never mind terrorism) come with significant baggage.
We will return to this question, but at the most basic level this book is concerned with what to expect from the insurgents of tomorrow; it does not provide a priori judgement of the causes pursued by these groups, the grievances that fuel their struggles, or the moral right of the governments to survive. To the degree that this approach has a normative mission beyond the pursuit of knowledge, it is to obviate violent and subversive challenges by encouraging more enlightened and productive management of political change. Counterinsurgency, after all, is best thought of as ‘armed reform’: beyond its undeniable security component, the heart of the matter is political, or the reasons why so many revolt and accept, even embrace, violent solutions.
Structure and Argument in Brief
With these caveats in mind, the book argues that, for insurgents across the world, military confrontation against the nation-state has become a far less salient road to power, and change is therefore in the air. Chapter 2 lays out the backdrop for this evolution, but it is a discussion that presupposes a decent understanding of what i...
