Time in the Shadows

Confinement in Counterinsurgencies

Laleh Khalili

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804783972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Relations internationales

Detention and confinement—of both combatants and large groups of civilians—have become fixtures of asymmetric wars over the course of the last century. Counterinsurgency theoreticians and practitioners explain this dizzying rise of detention camps, internment centers, and enclavisation by arguing that such actions "protect" populations. In this book, Laleh Khalili counters these arguments, telling the story of how this proliferation of concentration camps, strategic hamlets, "security walls, " and offshore prisons has come to be. Time in the Shadows investigates the two major liberal counterinsurgencies of our day: Israeli occupation of Palestine and the U.S. War on Terror. In rich detail, the book investigates Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, CIA black sites, the Khiam Prison, and Gaza, among others, and links them to a history of colonial counterinsurgencies from the Boer War and the U.S. Indian wars, to Vietnam, the British small wars in Malaya, Kenya, Aden and Cyprus, and the French pacification of Indochina and Algeria.Khalili deftly demonstrates that whatever the form of incarceration—visible or invisible, offshore or inland, containing combatants or civilians—liberal states have consistently acted illiberally in their counterinsurgency confinements. As our tactics of war have shifted beyond slaughter to elaborate systems of detention, liberal states have warmed to the pursuit of asymmetric wars. Ultimately, Khalili confirms that as tactics of counterinsurgency have been rendered more "humane, " they have also increasingly encouraged policymakers to willingly choose to wage wars.

CHAPTER 1

THE FOREBEARS

Imperial and Colonial Counterinsurgencies

Making peace with the Indian is the primary intention of the prince and with it should one begin. . . . In peace the Indian gives vassalage and obedience, and in recognition of it does he give tribute to the prince, though the conquerors . . . are obligated . . . to indoctrinate them. . . . However, in order for these peaces to last, it is most important that the commander knows how to settle and protect them with sagacity.

Captain Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, 1599¹

ASYMMETRIC AND IRREGULAR WARFARE

In lectures given to a Spanish university in 1962, and published as The Theory of the Partisan, Carl Schmitt traces the emergence of modern guerrilla warfare to the Spanish irregular battles against the invading Napoleonic army in the early years of the nineteenth century. Schmitt claims that “[in] this war, a people—a pre-bourgeois, pre-industrial, and pre-conventional nation—for the first time confronted a modern, well-organized, regular army that had evolved from the experiences of the French Revolution. Thereby, new horizons of war opened, new concepts of war developed, and a new theory of war and politics emerged.”² Schmitt defines the four basic characteristics of the partisan as irregularity, mobility, a political aim, and telluric (i.e., tied to the soil) character. He further claims that the Spanish war is the first modern partisan warfare for two reasons. First is the modern nature of the Napoleonic military rather than any specific characteristic inherent to the Spanish guerrilleros themselves.³ Just as important, Schmitt cites the tellurism of the Spanish guerrilla war as inspiring the Romantic nationalism of Fichte and von Herder with their emphasis on the heimat (homeland). By this definitional sleight of hand, those struggles of colonized people against colonizers preceding Spanish guerrilla warfare (most obvious among them the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, but also the white settlers’ partisan warfare against the European colonial powers) are erased, and the emergence of the practice and doctrine of modern irregular warfare is displaced to Europe.⁴

In fact, asymmetric warfare had long served colonial conquest, and it had even been incorporated into manuals of warfare as early as the first major wave of transoceanic colonization. In The Military Revolution, Geoffrey Parker tells us that after their initial catastrophic defeats in pitched battle, the natives of both North and South Americas avoided directly engaging European armies and instead resorted to guerrilla warfare. Parker quotes one New England preacher grumbling, “They doe acts of hostility without proclaiming war; they don’t appeare openly in the field to bid us battle”; another complains that “every swamp is a castle [or fortification] to them, knowing where to find us; but we know not where to find them.”⁵ Their methods of warfare did not go unnoticed by the conquerors who studied these tactics. Bernardo de Vargas Machuca’s The Indian Militia, written at the end of the sixteenth century and quoted at the opening of this chapter, “dismissed the entire pattern of European warfare,” promoted the use of search-and-destroy commando units, and advocated the training of military commanders who “knew as much about planting survival crops and curing tropical ulcers as about laying ambushes and mounting surprise attacks.”⁶ Simultaneously, a vast swath of legal discourse was produced to take account of the anomalous figure of the “Indian,” this obstacle to conquest of the new territories in the Western Hemisphere.⁷

Asymmetric warfare was crucial to the conquest of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. In those places, asymmetry was not necessarily engendered by the numeric superiority of the colonizers, and certainly not in the early years of the conquest. In fact, in most of the colonized places, the colonizers were at first numerically inferior, sometimes dramatically so; what gave them their military advantage was their access to superior arms and often savage methods of warfare, their utilization of divide and conquer in aligning with local factions (often via economic incentives), their cunning use of treaties and laws on which they reneged unscrupulously, their immediate establishment of centralized governance regimes and institutions that codified their system of domination and that in nonsettler colonies were most successful when deployed via local intermediaries or clients, and their capacity for ruthless suppression of any resistance in war or to their new regimes of rule. All that advantage was then veiled in the cloak of “civilization” spun from the weft of law and woof of popular and expert discourse.

COLONIAL WARS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

These colonial wars of conquest—fought most brutally in the second cycle of European imperial expansion in the nineteenth century—were numerous and often came at great cost to the indigenous peoples in blood, treasure, and control over their destinies. Although in a few distinct instances—and in some battles of protracted wars—the indigenous forces defeated the superior arms of the European forces, the overall picture at the end of the nineteenth century pointed to the subjugation of vast numbers of people across the globe by the European empires. Here, I briefly sketch three instances of asymmetric imperial and/or colonial warfare whose traces can be—often very transparently—detected in the subsequent doctrines and practices of the powerful states that fought those wars and where particular carceral or juridical techniques in counterinsurgency practice were innovated or consolidated. These are the French conquest of Algeria, the nascent United States’ wars against Native Americans, and the alternating butcher-and-bolt and policing policies of the British Empire in the northwestern and western frontiers of India.

The French Conquest of Algeria

I have often heard men in France whom I respect, but with whom I do not agree, find it wrong that we burn harvests, that we empty silos, and finally that we seize unarmed men, women, and children. These, in my view, are unfortunate necessities, but ones to which any people that wants to wage war on the Arabs is obliged to submit . . . We shall never destroy Abd el-Kader’s power unless we make the position of the tribes who support him so intolerable that they abandon him.

Alexis de Tocqueville, 1841⁸

These murmurs seem to indicate that the Chamber finds my means too barbaric. Gentlemen, war cannot be waged in the spirit of philanthropy. Once you choose war as an end, you cannot reject any means whatever. . . . I shall always prefer the interests of France to an absurd philanthropy directed towards foreigners who decapitate those of our soldiers who are wounded or taken prisoners.

Marshal Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, 1840⁹

Algeria was the gateway for French conquest in Africa. The subjugation of Algeria between 1830 and 1847 is known best for its utilization of the razzia as a tactic of warfare, the centrality of the military to both fighting and settlement, the establishment of an administrative and intelligence and surveillance arm—Bureaux Arabes—which recruited French Arabic speakers with knowledge of local customs to mediate between the state and the local chiefs or elders, France’s recruitment of fighters from colonized areas into its Armée d’Afrique from 1830 onward, and its establishment of the Foreign Legion in 1831 (whose headquarters were in Sidi Bel Abbes in Algeria until 1962).¹⁰ Their earlier expeditions in 1830 also established a precedent for a degree of colonial violence that was to continue unabated until 130 years later. One of the earlier commanders, Duc de Rovigo, “ordered summary executions on the slightest suspicion, showed ‘unnecessary cruelty’ at places like Belida—sacked in 1831—and ‘swept like a destroying angel over the Metidja.’”¹¹ When after ten years this brutality proved too costly and ineffective in defeating the guerrillas, a change in direction was debated in Paris. Interestingly, Marshal Thomas-Robert Bugeaud—who had fought under Napoléon in the Peninsular War (1808–1814) and who had condoned plunder and rape of the Saragossan civilians by his troops there—was originally opposed to French presence in Algeria, as he saw it undermining France’s European deterrence capabilities. But by 1836, he had begun to see Algeria as “a useful training ground for the French army” and a site of exile for domestic troublemakers. To conquer Algeria, however, he believed that sufficient numbers of troops were required to “strike at the morale of the Arabs everywhere.”¹²

The solution to the problem of raising an army to conquer Algeria was seen as settler colonization, which would allow for the generation of a colonial economy. Bugeaud writes explicitly about the aims of military settlement: it would shift the burden of paying for the conquest to Algeria, where taxation and trade would support further conquest. Roads built by the army would also be used for trade, and the military men could settle in fortified villages they would build through the requisition of native labor. After a year of service these men would be given leave to marry and propagate. Bugeaud advocated the devastation of the bases of Arab economy and community; he claimed there wasn’t much to destroy in any case. Bugeaud asserted that the Arabs “have none of these major centres of government, population and commerce at the heart of a civilized country, nor any of those large arteries that circulate the life of civilized nations: no inland points, no major roads, no factories, no villages, nor farms; all they have are a gun and a horse.”¹³ For the military men to conquer and settle, they must be young and vigorous; they must have made their careers in Africa; and they must “know topography, customs, habits, and, if possible, the language of the country.”¹⁴

Tactically, Bugeaud believed that “we must forget these orchestrated and dramatic battles that civilized people fight against one another, and realize that unconventional tactics are the soul of this war,” and that the basic principles for unconventional warfare were mobility, morale, leadership and firepower.¹⁵ To ensure the defeat of Abd al-Qadir’s guerrilla force and secure the acquiescence of Arabs, Bugeaud “wanted the natives to fear the action of his troops everywhere, thus giving his army a moral prestige which in itself would result in economy in the actual application of material force.”¹⁶ Thus, the razzia, a tactic borrowed from the Algerians themselves but exaggerated and further brutalized, was deployed. In the French version of the razzia in Algeria, the French forces “chopped down fruit trees, burned settlements and crops, and seized livestock. Few of the region’s numerous Arab villages escaped destruction. What once had been hillsides ‘teeming with rich crops’ were transformed into blackened wasteland.”¹⁷ The razzia served mundane functions (the plunder of crops and cattle alleviated logistical problems of supplies), strategic aims (it destroyed the local bases of the economy), provided the French with prisoners who were used as “barter to pressure the tribe in question into submission,” and terrorized the population.¹⁸ When even the razzia was not sufficient, an officer serving Bugeaud ordered his subordinates to “kill all the men over the age of fifteen, and put all the women and children abroad ships bound for the Marquesas Islands or elsewhere. In a word, annihilate everyone who does not crawl at our feet like dogs.”¹⁹

Other repressive measures were disguised in civilizing intent. Bugeaud’s March 6, 1841 edict relocated civilians living near settler colonies into reserved areas and required them to carry identity medallions issued by the French in order to exit their reservations—most often to work for the settlers.²⁰ To ensure order, Bugeaud advocated forced sedentarization of tribes, as well as a system of indirect rule, stating “that any immediate reduction of the traditional prerogatives of tribal aristocracies would only augment the number of the metropole’s enemies,” and putting this into effect by requiring, for example, that the settlers only acquire labor through tribal leaders.²¹ The Bureaux Arabes, consisting of military officers and administrators, served as the intermediaries to the local chiefs, nominated and dismissed chiefs, inspected local populations, commanded auxiliary troops, and aimed to civilize and “improve” the tribes.²² Bugeaud recommended deportation of troublesome tribes, including noncombatants, women, and children, to Martinique, Guadeloupe, or the Marquesas Islands.²³ He gave free rein to his lieutenants, which led to his officers entombing hundreds of intransigent civilians in one instance, asphyxiating with smoke another group numbering in the hundreds that was trapped in a cave, and being praised by Bugeaud in the bargain.²⁴ When Bugeaud was criticized in Paris, he resigned in disgust in 1947 and died two years late...