Strategy and wars of national liberation

In the years following World War II, scores of new states arose, many of them following protracted struggles of national liberation from European powers attempting to maintain their colonial positions. In so doing, a variety of movements and countries waged war against the technologically superior armed forces of the West. These new countries won their independence not by the force-on-force clash of conventional armies and advanced weaponry but through more subtle techniques of subversion, hit-and-run, and, often, use of terrorism.

To be sure, the European powers had faced able opponents in the past, from the indigenous Native Americans to the Marathas (see Maratha Wars) in India during the late 18th and early 19th centuries and Abdelkader in Algeria in the 1830s and to the Boer farmers (see South African War) at the turn of the 20th century. And in many ways the pattern for a successful anti-imperial force appeared shortly after the end of World War I in the form of the Irish Republican Army, which had an important role in convincing the British to end its rule in most of that island. By and large, though, the story of imperial warfare in the period before World War II was of protracted struggle leading to pacification and quiescence. Emilio Aguinaldo succumbed to the American forces in the Philippines in 1901 following a two-year rebellion; the caliph ʿAbd Allāh (successor to al-Mahdī) was swept away by British rifles and machine guns in the Sudan in 1898.

Things changed dramatically after World War II. Zionist rebels made Palestine too much of a burden for British forces there. France yielded Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh’s communists and, even more painfully, Algeria to the National Liberation Front. The Dutch gave up the Netherlands East Indies to a Javanese-led anticolonial movement. Portugal eventually withdrew from the mineral-rich provinces of Angola and Mozambique. Even the United States was stymied by poorly equipped communist forces in Vietnam.

What changed after World War II? In some measure the transformation had occurred in the mind before being felt on the battlefield. The great powers had suffered catastrophic humiliations in Europe and, more important, in Asia during the war; they had lost self-confidence, and their colonial subjects had lost their sense of awe and resignation. In Europe and the United States the legitimacy of overseas rule had suffered a blow from which it could not recover: empire was no longer part of the natural order of things. At the same time, the antiliberal ideologies of Marxism-Leninism and, to a lesser extent, fascism (which lived in odd corners of the postcolonial world) conveyed a long-term optimism about the direction history would take. There was no uniform ideology of national liberation, although politicians might claim one existed. There was, however, a climate of opinion that pointed in the direction of new states emerging from the wreckage of the European empires, clinging with fierce pride to the emblems of independence, from airlines to general staffs, and determined to create strong centralized states that could mobilize hitherto politically inert peoples.

There was also the matter of technique and sponsorship. The greatest exponent of the new form of guerrilla warfare was the Chinese political leader and strategist Mao Zedong, who drew on ancient Chinese practice as well as his own modified form of Marxism-Leninism to articulate a new strategy of revolutionary warfare. This congeries of ideas included careful grassroots political work, patience, guerrilla techniques gradually leading to conventional operations as the opposition weakened, and the selective use of terror. Others would supplement or modify Mao’s thinking, but the basic concepts were given their due by Western military theoreticians, such as Roger Trinquier and Jules Roy of France, who studied revolutionary war from the other side in the 1950s.

Behind the march of revolutionary warriors, however, lay more traditional forms of military power. The Algerian insurgents had the support of Egypt and other Arab states; the Vietnamese turned to the Chinese and Soviets for support; and the anticommunist Muslim guerrillas in the Afghan War gladly took aid from the United States. State sponsorship of such movements, relatively rare in the 19th and early 20th centuries, became far more common, although impressive results (in particular the Indonesian struggle with the Dutch) also came in cases ignored by the great powers.

By the end of the 20th century, though, the post-World War II revolutionary techniques no longer appeared quite as effective as they once had. Communism had collapsed; the dogmas of Marxism-Leninism proved economically impractical, though they had at least promised ultimate victory, and confidence is a precious commodity in a revolutionary struggle. The Kurdish conflicts with Turkey and Iran yielded nothing but misery for the populations of that part of the world; only after the military power of Iraq had been shattered in 1991 was anything remotely resembling autonomy achieved for Kurds in a corner of Iraq. Palestinian guerrillas attacked Israel with increasing ferocity for decades, and again, although they inflicted suffering, it is hard to see that they achieved much that longer-term forces—demographic growth and the Israeli desire for normal state relations with its neighbours—did not. Despite tremendous efforts on both sides, vicious insurgent wars in Central America failed to overthrow a leftist regime in Nicaragua or rightist regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala. Many of the supposed advantages of the guerrilla were neutralized by skilled and even brutal opposition, external support, and above all the tenacity of classes, governments, and peoples that had no place to go.

Revolutionary war started as a rural phenomenon, although, as in Algiers in 1957, it sometimes included particularly vicious bouts of armed struggle in cities. At the end of the 20th century it became more of an urban phenomenon. In countries as different as Uruguay, Algeria, Peru, and Israel, guerrilla war shifted (in many cases, it had not far to go) into pure terror directed against civilian populations. Yet here too the results often disappointed those hoping to overthrow a government or displace a population. Hiding in an apartment block differs greatly from hiding in a jungle or a wooded mountain: nature’s creatures do not spy for, collaborate with, or confess to the forces of order, but human beings do.

Thus, revolutionary war proved an exceedingly powerful—and yet limited—tool. It left, however, a legacy not only in terms of geopolitics—a multiplicity of new states—but also of aesthetics and morality. The guerrilla fighter—clutching a Soviet-designed AK-47 assault rifle—was a stock figure of leftist politics in the second half of the 20th century. The legacy of terror and brutality, of violence directed against civilians as much as and often a great deal more than at soldiers, had the effect of undermining the rules by which the old strategic game had been played. Classical strategy resembled a game of chess in this respect: the pieces might have different weights and potential, but there were rules, breached occasionally but still observed, if only for the sake of convenience . As with the advent of nuclear weapons, the appearance of revolutionary war did not displace old-style militaries—countries, particularly the superpowers, still had vast arrays of tanks, submarines, jet fighters, and rocket launchers—but it raised large questions about their relevance.