1 00:00:00,030 --> 00:00:09,030 Professor Voisin, who is the chair of International University of Reading and has been there since 2007 and 2017, 2 00:00:10,530 --> 00:00:14,969 has been the director of Research in the Military History Research Office of the 3 00:00:14,970 --> 00:00:18,990 Bundesbank and Professor of International Security Studies at King's College, 4 00:00:18,990 --> 00:00:28,050 London. He's recently helped or visiting professor at the University of Paris for the Civil and seven somebody 5 00:00:28,980 --> 00:00:35,820 and has been involved in multi consultancy work for NATO's United Kingdom and Central Asia Commission. 6 00:00:36,600 --> 00:00:40,800 He's published widely. Some can maybe even look at some of the more recent articles that she published. 7 00:00:41,460 --> 00:00:52,650 Her latest book will be out as well, even if that's not really the way no rebels, partisans and guerrillas, asymmetric warfare since antiquity. 8 00:00:52,950 --> 00:00:58,260 Max Boot is going to be knocked off the top shelf to work. 9 00:00:59,250 --> 00:01:06,930 It's coming up. And the other work, which I do my best to ruin the chapter is have edited volume coming in. 10 00:01:07,140 --> 00:01:14,280 I think early next year we brought national style personal experiences with insurgencies and counterinsurgency, 11 00:01:14,280 --> 00:01:17,610 a joint publication with a frame involved and arguments from you. 12 00:01:18,150 --> 00:01:22,560 So thank you, actually. Thank you very much for the very kind introduction. 13 00:01:22,950 --> 00:01:31,950 And I will proceeded by just a couple of words because I would like to use this occasion to invite any PhD students 14 00:01:31,950 --> 00:01:38,790 who are here to come to a little one day seminar that we're going to be doing in Redding on the 26th of June. 15 00:01:38,790 --> 00:01:43,020 Rounding up some of our visiting fellows on the strategy making theory and practice, 16 00:01:43,710 --> 00:01:49,110 and I'm saying this in particular because I was a Dphil student here at Oxford at a time when there 17 00:01:49,110 --> 00:01:54,090 wasn't the changing nature of war programme and seminars like this were very few and far between. 18 00:01:54,450 --> 00:01:57,809 And I got desperately lonely at times, and I found it very sad that I didn't know. 19 00:01:57,810 --> 00:02:00,990 Other people in the country are doing the same sort of research as me, 20 00:02:00,990 --> 00:02:06,959 and I remember accosting people wildly in the Public Records Office, the National Archives, just in order to network with people, 21 00:02:06,960 --> 00:02:10,320 etc. And I would very much welcome it if anybody felt like taking this 22 00:02:10,320 --> 00:02:13,979 opportunity to come to writing on the 26th of June to meet some of our students, 23 00:02:13,980 --> 00:02:18,180 because they're doing some things that are quite similar to some of the things that you're doing here. 24 00:02:18,840 --> 00:02:22,290 So thank you very much for the invitation to come and speak to you today. 25 00:02:22,800 --> 00:02:26,910 And what I'm about to present to you is a bit of a shopping list to which I apologise. 26 00:02:26,910 --> 00:02:30,000 There is no ground methodology, but there is more. 27 00:02:30,020 --> 00:02:34,409 A whole series of points that I have gleaned from looking at this subject for quite a number 28 00:02:34,410 --> 00:02:40,260 of years now and finding that there are certain patterns of moral dilemmas and other dilemmas, 29 00:02:40,260 --> 00:02:47,250 difficult practical dilemmas which seem to have recurred over time in many different cases and throughout history. 30 00:02:48,150 --> 00:02:54,060 So without further ado, let me apologising to what I am looking at. 31 00:02:54,420 --> 00:03:00,540 Namely, that symmetry in warfare has a whole series of different dimensions, one of which is most classically, 32 00:03:00,540 --> 00:03:05,309 obviously, the numerical asymmetry, technical asymmetry, the asymmetry of supplies. 33 00:03:05,310 --> 00:03:06,750 Let me hold that for a second. 34 00:03:07,830 --> 00:03:16,860 Asymmetry of supplies, meaning that one side is likely to find it more difficult than the other to get hold of not only arms, but possibly also food. 35 00:03:16,860 --> 00:03:26,159 Because the whole asymmetry, as I'll explain in a moment, involves normally a group that is not a state actor acting against a state that in 36 00:03:26,160 --> 00:03:31,820 some way has the opportunity to cut the other side off from these supplies there. 37 00:03:32,190 --> 00:03:34,409 There are important consequences flow from this. 38 00:03:34,410 --> 00:03:40,440 And the legal asymmetry, which I'm already almost touched on when saying that there is this asymmetry in one side, 39 00:03:40,440 --> 00:03:47,339 being a state actor, the other is likely not to be a state actor. The many cases will come to mind when you say that it's not that simple. 40 00:03:47,340 --> 00:03:51,990 We're not just talking about state actors, non-state actors. Let's just stick to these few points for the moment. 41 00:03:52,320 --> 00:03:56,010 So let me emphasise this. 42 00:03:56,010 --> 00:04:03,420 We're at the bottom. The insurgents are very often and traditionally refer to banditry. 43 00:04:03,430 --> 00:04:08,050 Now, let me just dwell on the word. The word, if anybody, Italians in the room, 44 00:04:08,070 --> 00:04:15,209 anybody who's interested in the Renaissance tended not to have a negative connotation when you had in the 16th century, 45 00:04:15,210 --> 00:04:19,460 the famous special forces, if you might call them the band. 46 00:04:19,860 --> 00:04:30,870 That was a wonderful military aristocrat known as Germany, the Lebanon Arie, who had his little group of special forces. 47 00:04:30,870 --> 00:04:36,630 And in that context, the word bomb that was still a neutral term, referring through the special unit. 48 00:04:37,590 --> 00:04:43,050 You may or may not know this character from wonderful film I recommend to you, which is called Military Warrior. 49 00:04:44,400 --> 00:04:52,320 The point being that these special units only transmogrified into partisan units without an ideological component, 50 00:04:52,320 --> 00:04:58,260 and then partisan units with an ideological component around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. 51 00:04:58,650 --> 00:05:03,780 And even when this kind. It was done. The word bandit in the Italian context was still neutral. 52 00:05:04,410 --> 00:05:07,920 And we find, for example, a magazine that uses it in a neutral terms. 53 00:05:07,930 --> 00:05:15,690 He talks about my vanity, my my partisans, but it then, of course, gets this negative connotation, which is then, of course, 54 00:05:15,690 --> 00:05:22,079 exploited by counterinsurgency forces to indicate that they're, in fact, criminal actors, 55 00:05:22,080 --> 00:05:26,310 that they are bandits, that they act in much the same way as bandits do. 56 00:05:26,730 --> 00:05:37,050 And if you look at the tremendous and wonderful work the Charles has done on the Spanish Peninsula War and the guerrilla in Spain against the Polian, 57 00:05:37,380 --> 00:05:42,270 you will find that he shows lots and lots of evidence of overlap between practices 58 00:05:42,270 --> 00:05:47,470 and also social provenance of the great heroes who have very often been bandits. 59 00:05:47,850 --> 00:05:55,230 And actually, after the end of their guerrilla, sometimes turn back into integrate into bandits. 60 00:05:55,740 --> 00:06:01,710 And that this was one of the great preoccupations then of the Spanish government to try to regularise them, 61 00:06:02,010 --> 00:06:06,870 because they were not only people who are difficult to control in a disciplinary military sense, 62 00:06:06,870 --> 00:06:11,160 but also difficult to control from the point of view that they had criminal networks. 63 00:06:12,210 --> 00:06:18,510 So a cemetery of supplies, they have the need to draw on criminal networks for their surprise. 64 00:06:18,990 --> 00:06:21,090 They're involved with criminal networks. 65 00:06:21,450 --> 00:06:31,320 And therefore, very often you have, in the context of an insurgency, an element of warlordism and an incentive to keep the conflict going. 66 00:06:31,650 --> 00:06:33,840 And this was something that I came up against, 67 00:06:33,840 --> 00:06:38,520 particularly when I was in NATO and the Yugoslav wars were still going on and the cost of war was starting. 68 00:06:38,520 --> 00:06:45,209 But Bosnia-Herzegovina somehow didn't quite die down because there were so many groups of, in some form, 69 00:06:45,210 --> 00:06:50,800 fighters to use trucks like a neutral term who had become very strongly involved with them in 70 00:06:50,870 --> 00:06:59,489 the criminal side of this whole enterprise and the their own actions in a way they had begun to. 71 00:06:59,490 --> 00:07:06,450 They had many of them had an explicit interest in keeping with conflict going and in prolonging the state of affairs 72 00:07:06,450 --> 00:07:13,020 in which they could make money in a way that had nothing to do with the original ideological aims of the insurgency. 73 00:07:13,830 --> 00:07:17,909 Then please let me remind you that the Italian mafias were created after they were children of 74 00:07:17,910 --> 00:07:24,540 the resort to mental and that they were their lifespan was prolonged or even reinvigorated, 75 00:07:24,870 --> 00:07:30,600 by the way, in which in the end, at the end of the Second World War and immediately after the Second World War, 76 00:07:30,960 --> 00:07:38,160 the Americans used them in order to counteract both fascists and communists in Italy and bring them on to their side. 77 00:07:38,430 --> 00:07:41,370 And the same is true for mafia rings in southern France, 78 00:07:41,370 --> 00:07:46,770 which were practically created by the allies in at the end of the second towards the end of the Second World War, 79 00:07:47,040 --> 00:07:53,279 because it was these were criminal groups that were fed money and arms by the 80 00:07:53,280 --> 00:07:57,210 allies because they were at the same time against Vichy and against the Germans. 81 00:07:57,510 --> 00:08:01,180 So there was this very strong overlay and instead you have a student working on this, 82 00:08:01,260 --> 00:08:09,130 going to be he wants to meet her that would be comfortable with the trade secret due to legal asymmetry and insurgency as the worst crime. 83 00:08:09,170 --> 00:08:14,970 And as much as he goes back clearly to the Middle Ages and even before to to Roman times, 84 00:08:15,450 --> 00:08:25,919 and which is why there has been so much concern to try to regulate both sides and regulate the actions there with a rather feeble 85 00:08:25,920 --> 00:08:35,850 attempt made in the Hague Convention to give them some protection by to recognise them in some way as protected by the laws of war, 86 00:08:36,300 --> 00:08:46,500 and by giving them or by trying to force upon them to rules which they couldn't possibly meet in most contexts. 87 00:08:46,500 --> 00:08:53,700 And those are the ones I tried to convey, namely that they would get protection as militias and voluntary court if they had a fixed, 88 00:08:53,700 --> 00:08:58,439 distinctive emblem recognisable at a distance, and if they carried arms openly. 89 00:08:58,440 --> 00:09:04,559 And any of you who sat at the feet of armed robbers will know that these are the the great problems that you have, 90 00:09:04,560 --> 00:09:07,170 that in the very moment you are distinguishable, 91 00:09:07,170 --> 00:09:12,629 it's very difficult for you to be a an irregular fighter, and it's very difficult for you to work in the resistance. 92 00:09:12,630 --> 00:09:17,970 So the whole point is this is these are the two things that they can't do because they won't survive if they do that. 93 00:09:19,200 --> 00:09:24,020 Now, this was addressed to some extent in the Geneva Protocol in 1977. 94 00:09:24,030 --> 00:09:29,820 Again, I'll spare you the text in its entirety, but I'm trying to guide you to the highlighted parts. 95 00:09:30,420 --> 00:09:34,380 Again, there was this emphasis on the need to distinguish themselves, 96 00:09:34,860 --> 00:09:43,349 but at least there's this attempt to make this more practicable by saying that they have to carry on openly indistinguishable during each military 97 00:09:43,350 --> 00:09:52,710 engagement and during such time as they are visible to the adversary while engaged in military deployment preceding the launching of an attack. 98 00:09:53,850 --> 00:09:59,900 Again, it's not fully practical because the whole point about attacks, if you're a resistance fighters, is that you're trying to replace them. 99 00:10:00,330 --> 00:10:03,410 Secretly and you're trying to pre-school. So trivial. 100 00:10:03,900 --> 00:10:14,340 Oh, thank you very much. So there's still the whole protection scheme, if you like, relies on this idea of distinguished reviewers at the same time. 101 00:10:14,730 --> 00:10:16,650 You all have resonating in your minds, surely, 102 00:10:16,650 --> 00:10:23,170 this idea that the gorilla gets by or the gorilla ever gets by by being the fish in water that blends into the landscape, 103 00:10:23,170 --> 00:10:29,159 the blends into the rest of the population disappears. Otherwise, they would be far too easy to catch for the other side. 104 00:10:29,160 --> 00:10:31,350 That is, in many other ways privileged. 105 00:10:32,610 --> 00:10:39,149 Now, let me just give you a brief glance on the legal situation or the thinking about the right to rise up against the tyrant. 106 00:10:39,150 --> 00:10:44,280 And I'll go back to the Maccabees, not simply because I might go back a long time, 107 00:10:44,550 --> 00:10:50,640 but because this particular issue has been invoked, invoked by Christians throughout centuries and centuries. 108 00:10:52,200 --> 00:11:00,720 For the simple reason that this is a text that seems to condone rising up against the head of state, the legitimate ruler, 109 00:11:01,680 --> 00:11:07,800 who, by the very nature of the fact that he's suppressing religion or a particular practice of religion becomes illegitimate. 110 00:11:08,400 --> 00:11:10,980 This part of the Bible, very fascinatingly, 111 00:11:11,790 --> 00:11:19,140 was admitted by our good Martin Luther in his translation of the Bible into German because it was part of contentious, wasn't it? 112 00:11:19,680 --> 00:11:23,430 So this is not part of the Lutheran half canon of the Bible, 113 00:11:23,730 --> 00:11:32,400 but is referred to by all sorts of other both Catholics and Protestants through the ages as the legitimising text to rise up against in the Civil War. 114 00:11:32,550 --> 00:11:41,730 Charles the first French wars of religion against the last vulnerable rulers, etc. and it becomes the precedent that is always invoked. 115 00:11:42,480 --> 00:11:46,800 Then you have an early notion creeping in. 116 00:11:47,550 --> 00:11:54,840 My friend and colleague Ivan CROMARTIE tells me that this is probably never been absent, but from the 13th century onwards, you get an express notion. 117 00:11:54,840 --> 00:11:57,020 It's not just Locke, but from the 13th century onwards, 118 00:11:57,030 --> 00:12:05,280 you get notion that a ruler owes his place not only to God but also to the people some, and that the word electoral is not mentioned. 119 00:12:05,280 --> 00:12:08,370 But somehow there was this implication that the people have chosen him. 120 00:12:08,760 --> 00:12:11,820 And of course, there were earlier forms of electing rulers. 121 00:12:12,360 --> 00:12:18,659 Therefore, there is actually a long time before Locke a notion of somebody being chosen by a group of people who therefore, 122 00:12:18,660 --> 00:12:23,820 once they are, we have the right to take that choice away again from that person or that potentially one again from that person. 123 00:12:24,120 --> 00:12:32,129 If the person is a tyrant in the 16th century, as I've already mentioned, you have it coming up in a very big way in the French religious wars, 124 00:12:32,130 --> 00:12:37,980 which is in many respects the the laboratory of new thinking about statehood. 125 00:12:38,550 --> 00:12:45,730 And you have it in Grotius, who explicitly said that that in certain circumstances, people should have the right to rise up against the ruler. 126 00:12:45,750 --> 00:12:48,240 And you have a whole paragraph. If he says no circumstance, you can't. 127 00:12:48,930 --> 00:12:54,540 But it's clearly something that is troubling minds from the 16th century onwards and is becoming very articulated. 128 00:12:54,820 --> 00:13:02,520 And if you look at the 18th century, and they saw it in central humanism, if you look at the outlook of they the done on there, 129 00:13:03,060 --> 00:13:12,840 they have a whole article in which it is spelt out that this is a just cause for war to rise up against a an unjust ruler. 130 00:13:13,230 --> 00:13:18,150 And the interesting thing in all of this is that it spells out also the two other revolts. 131 00:13:18,510 --> 00:13:24,569 This is not a 20th century mention. The right to intervene goes back to these texts and particularly from 16th century ones, 132 00:13:24,570 --> 00:13:29,879 where the prince is actually obliged to go and help an oppressed populace of another 133 00:13:29,880 --> 00:13:33,480 prince if that prince is suppressing the righteous religion or the legitimate religion. 134 00:13:33,780 --> 00:13:37,440 So quite interesting. But this is again something with quite long precedent. 135 00:13:39,240 --> 00:13:48,870 And interestingly, the idea that you have only got you can only have peace if you have good governance 136 00:13:49,740 --> 00:13:55,950 is one that is linked to this and also goes back far further than some 2013, 137 00:13:55,950 --> 00:14:00,810 like 21st century all theorists might think if we find it in Machiavelli. 138 00:14:01,230 --> 00:14:08,670 And interestingly, because again, everybody counsels to think of Machiavelli as somebody who will always preach what is convenient for the ruler. 139 00:14:08,670 --> 00:14:18,780 But classically, this is one of the areas where he packages his teaching in forms of it would be in your interest to do this because it would be it 140 00:14:18,780 --> 00:14:25,110 probably is going to work and therefore it would be your interest when in fact what he's selling is what is actually morally preferable. 141 00:14:25,740 --> 00:14:34,620 And this is not the only area where he does this. He has anything he's writes, although he wrote about insurgency and counterinsurgency, 142 00:14:34,980 --> 00:14:42,780 revolves around how it is only in your interest in ways to defuse any tensions created in the state through good governance, 143 00:14:43,080 --> 00:14:48,719 i.e. do prevent apply preventive medicine rather than just cruel suppression once you get to it. 144 00:14:48,720 --> 00:14:56,140 And if you do have to have to suppress an insurgency, you can't do it through fight by killing everybody in the. 145 00:14:56,220 --> 00:14:59,280 You have to practice mildness and. 146 00:14:59,740 --> 00:15:08,649 English cleric called Matthew Sutcliffe, who was a product of the other place and was pretty close to the Earl of Essex, 147 00:15:08,650 --> 00:15:12,160 who was one of Elizabeth's first military leaders. 148 00:15:13,090 --> 00:15:19,059 Also articulated ideas on the subject, very interestingly, inspired himself by Spanish thinkers, 149 00:15:19,060 --> 00:15:23,710 although he really knows the Spanish and the whole kind of his writings to go to war against Spain. 150 00:15:24,580 --> 00:15:31,150 But in that, he actually articulates that you cannot possibly pacify a hostile population unless you could do it by good governance. 151 00:15:31,690 --> 00:15:34,970 Taking his in a way he was adversary would have been done by him. 152 00:15:35,010 --> 00:15:39,309 And those are the same time that 16th century Spaniard does exactly the same thing. 153 00:15:39,310 --> 00:15:44,110 And he also is a fascinating character. I'll stop myself in coming to all about him because there's so much. 154 00:15:44,500 --> 00:15:52,780 But he was, along with the Duke of Alba in the Spanish attempts to quell the Dutch wars of independence, 155 00:15:53,230 --> 00:15:57,580 which, as you may recall, took 80 years and in the end proved unsuccessful. 156 00:15:57,910 --> 00:16:05,350 And Alma was very notorious for the cruelty that he practised and the atrocities that were committed under him. 157 00:16:06,070 --> 00:16:09,129 And Mendoza was strongly against this, 158 00:16:09,130 --> 00:16:17,590 and at the end of his life articulated a whole body of thoughts on this matter in which he said that you cannot practice counterinsurgency by cruelty. 159 00:16:17,590 --> 00:16:24,940 It would work against you. Then the other one of my great heroes, early 18th century parson, 160 00:16:24,940 --> 00:16:31,060 who was a theoretician and a practitioner, he was a practitioner both as a general and as a diplomat. 161 00:16:31,420 --> 00:16:38,820 He sat in peace conferences and also was an administrator of Spanish overseas territories and was heavily involved in the Spanish succession. 162 00:16:39,490 --> 00:16:45,490 Santa Cruz de la Senado spelt out in great detail material about how to pacify an insurgency, 163 00:16:45,490 --> 00:16:52,420 how to prevent it, and if it has broken out, how to pacify it. And it reads as though it was the blueprint for Petraeus, his field manual. 164 00:16:52,430 --> 00:16:59,049 It really does. He's after it's completely forgotten because he writes in such a cumbersome way in the 19th century, 165 00:16:59,050 --> 00:17:01,720 still referred to in the 20th century, nobody talks about him. 166 00:17:02,470 --> 00:17:08,980 But the whole Petraeus approach seems to have been complete reinvention of the wheel that you can find in so many respects in Santa Cruz, 167 00:17:08,980 --> 00:17:17,560 the mass, which is all about taking the isolating the leaders and making the winning hearts and minds bring the population over to your side, 168 00:17:18,010 --> 00:17:25,000 ensuring that they live in a flourishing economy, restructure the economy, give them a vested interest in the new situation, 169 00:17:25,720 --> 00:17:31,660 build a further their commerce, build universities for them, great belief in 18th century fortification. 170 00:17:31,990 --> 00:17:37,750 And it's absolutely wonderful. And you get it again in video and on and on. 171 00:17:37,750 --> 00:17:45,610 There were again, a pacification of an insurgency can only possibly be done by practising what today would be called good governance. 172 00:17:48,340 --> 00:17:51,730 Now there's the other side, which also goes back in the 16th century. 173 00:17:51,780 --> 00:17:56,050 This there was a Frenchman who'd probably look and say, 174 00:17:56,230 --> 00:18:05,469 I think we think he changed his name because he was persecuted and he was a rabid Huguenot who has long parts about 175 00:18:05,470 --> 00:18:11,410 how you should try to be kind to your adversaries unless they really fail to see all the errors of their ways, 176 00:18:11,410 --> 00:18:13,390 in which case you should repress them ruthlessly. 177 00:18:14,680 --> 00:18:22,920 You have the practitioners whom I already mentioned, Alba, in the 16th century in the attempt to repress the Dutch wars. 178 00:18:23,350 --> 00:18:30,670 The Kellerman nasty Alsatian who did really pretty dreadful things in the role in the uprising against the French Revolution. 179 00:18:31,690 --> 00:18:36,040 And you had a very importantly somebody who articulated all this. 180 00:18:36,910 --> 00:18:49,270 The Frenchman visual. These are difficult to see from the back, but these are the bones that were discovered in some of the caves in Algeria, 181 00:18:49,600 --> 00:18:59,460 in which in the thirties and early forties, Peugeot had used a basically a smokestack at the off the mark by putting in smoke, 182 00:18:59,470 --> 00:19:06,610 but like what the Americans did in Afghanistan in 2001, and to smoke them out and basically kill, 183 00:19:06,610 --> 00:19:12,790 suffocate the insurgents in these caves and the stuff in the inside of this case tended to be men, women and children. 184 00:19:12,790 --> 00:19:19,899 And those were the particular things that he became famous for and visual articulated his whole approach in had he'd learned his approach in Santiago, 185 00:19:19,900 --> 00:19:24,700 saw the letters letters he wrote from the Spanish Peninsular War to his sister, 186 00:19:25,000 --> 00:19:30,010 made very interesting reading because it is 1 to 1 an application of that very large 187 00:19:30,010 --> 00:19:34,030 extent that he then practised in Algeria and it was basically these little brutes, 188 00:19:34,030 --> 00:19:39,050 and you go against them in the brutal way and that's what they deserve and it should not go. 189 00:19:39,070 --> 00:19:44,080 I mention that our good friend Caldwell was greatly influenced by Brazil and had a lot of admiration for him. 190 00:19:45,670 --> 00:19:57,250 Caldwell in other places says that he prefers the more the softer approach by that was practised by Clemens predecessor in the Vonda. 191 00:19:58,060 --> 00:20:02,080 But Caldwell also said that outside Europe you couldn't practice the soft approach 192 00:20:02,080 --> 00:20:05,770 and the visual approach was clearly the one that you should admire and emulate. 193 00:20:07,480 --> 00:20:10,630 Now, let us look at insurgencies a little bit more. 194 00:20:11,920 --> 00:20:17,979 I mean, one of the things that tends to be that is in a lot of early 20th century writing, 195 00:20:17,980 --> 00:20:26,050 all the 20th century writers have until the end of the Cold War is that they thought of we were thinking of love and conflict. 196 00:20:26,090 --> 00:20:32,800 And thank you very much. In the light of an East-West confrontation, communism versus the reactionary West or something like that, 197 00:20:33,220 --> 00:20:37,990 while in fact an awful lot of insurgencies always had a religious motive. 198 00:20:38,390 --> 00:20:44,440 And the problem is then that they were recast somehow, depending on your viewpoint, was progressive. 199 00:20:44,440 --> 00:20:49,089 If you were in favour of Protestantism, thought that was a cultural step forward or reactionary. 200 00:20:49,090 --> 00:20:56,499 If it was the people in their own day who were against the atheism of the French Revolution and now, of course, Islamists. 201 00:20:56,500 --> 00:21:01,270 And that's a thing that has in a way very been at the centre of attention. 202 00:21:01,270 --> 00:21:06,670 Much more attention has been given in literature on insurgency to the religious aspect of insurgencies, 203 00:21:07,240 --> 00:21:12,250 where, again, I would question this, a division that is very often taken to progressive and reactionary, 204 00:21:12,250 --> 00:21:15,399 because I think what they all have in common and what the very large number of 205 00:21:15,400 --> 00:21:18,940 them have in common is that they're anticolonial nationalists instead of phobic, 206 00:21:18,940 --> 00:21:22,090 that there is some sort of element of disliking what's outside. 207 00:21:22,100 --> 00:21:29,410 And just to give you the example of this, again, the banville's, the you know, they very they were for above all, 208 00:21:29,860 --> 00:21:36,940 the protection of Catholicism against the French Revolution, which was trying to get the priests to somehow vote with the 92. 209 00:21:37,150 --> 00:21:43,140 But if you look at the guys who are doing this, they're pretty dashing and they're pretty much so this was pretty handsome. 210 00:21:43,330 --> 00:21:47,739 But the point is that they're pretty much in the same spirit as the French revolutionaries, 211 00:21:47,740 --> 00:21:52,809 but in somehow, you know, with a different centre of their loyalty, etc. 212 00:21:52,810 --> 00:21:54,100 But the way they fought, the way they, 213 00:21:54,100 --> 00:21:59,560 they used propaganda and just about everything else was very much in line with what the French Revolution was doing. 214 00:22:01,240 --> 00:22:04,330 Now, that leaves us I'm trying to leave you up to the question, 215 00:22:04,330 --> 00:22:10,870 but one of the interesting things about insurgencies is that we never quite know in advance which side we are. 216 00:22:12,490 --> 00:22:16,030 It seemed there was this big pattern of anti-colonial uprisings, 217 00:22:16,030 --> 00:22:23,530 and it sort of seemed to stand to reason that the colonial empires would be opposed to anti-colonial uprisings. 218 00:22:23,530 --> 00:22:28,059 But of course, they were in the middle of it and practice it themselves and encourage it themselves, 219 00:22:28,060 --> 00:22:33,400 as you will see from this gentleman's rule in the First World War. 220 00:22:33,730 --> 00:22:39,130 So the whole point is that we there isn't a nice clear cut division into, oh, 221 00:22:39,190 --> 00:22:44,319 we are against insurgencies because we're on the side of the state power, which surely must be right. 222 00:22:44,320 --> 00:22:50,879 Or we fought for it and. But with what I've shown you before, I was trying to demonstrate that, in fact, 223 00:22:50,880 --> 00:22:57,060 there's a big tradition that makes both sides or can make both sides legitimate if it puts itself in a particular tradition. 224 00:22:57,900 --> 00:23:00,900 So on whose side are we in? Anti-colonial uprisings. 225 00:23:00,900 --> 00:23:10,139 This has been on both. I'm in the interesting context, of course, of the Second World War, the United Kingdom and France, 226 00:23:10,140 --> 00:23:13,410 depending on which French people you're identifying with at this particular point, 227 00:23:13,950 --> 00:23:18,150 were on the side of the resistance and the resistance fighters throughout Europe, 228 00:23:18,870 --> 00:23:24,329 which led to really interesting points in the context, for example, of Poland or Ukraine, 229 00:23:24,330 --> 00:23:31,230 where you had at times people on the side of the Nazis fighting against the Soviet Union, etc., and the allegiance that. 230 00:23:31,800 --> 00:23:40,200 And there is a very interesting book that I found an eye opener written in the fifties by CNN Blair. 231 00:23:40,560 --> 00:23:44,130 And there was talk about re-editing. It hasn't been done. 232 00:23:44,220 --> 00:23:53,640 But the interesting point about this study is that it was commissioned by the movie, and it comes very much in the context of the late 1940s, 233 00:23:53,640 --> 00:24:01,320 early 1950s politics of Western countries, and particularly United States, Britain and like nature in general, 234 00:24:01,320 --> 00:24:09,899 as you will see from this project that they were prepared to engender uprisings, support uprisings, 235 00:24:09,900 --> 00:24:15,090 not generally support uprisings by anybody who was prepared to rise up if they were 236 00:24:15,090 --> 00:24:19,770 going to do so against the Soviet Union and communist regimes or all of Eastern Europe. 237 00:24:20,130 --> 00:24:21,550 That is what was proclaimed. 238 00:24:21,570 --> 00:24:29,010 That is what was preached practically and replied all the time on Radio Free Europe and all the other missions and Radio Liberty. 239 00:24:29,490 --> 00:24:36,450 But when, of course, it came to the real crunch and uprisings, spontaneous uprisings occurred 1950 3926. 240 00:24:36,840 --> 00:24:44,580 The Western powers stood by. The point is, however, that this book shows the CNN Blair Book on uprisings and insurgencies was more wars, 241 00:24:45,420 --> 00:24:53,280 shows that Western powers were consciously training their own military or trying to educate the military about patterns of insurgencies. 242 00:24:53,280 --> 00:24:59,400 And the book is fascinating in that it shows cases from both camps, if you like. 243 00:24:59,670 --> 00:25:06,020 It shows how insurgent movements against the Germans operated during the Second World War. 244 00:25:06,390 --> 00:25:13,620 But it then went on also to discuss for the same fairness how the Greeks were rising up against the Greek government, the Greek communists, 245 00:25:13,620 --> 00:25:18,930 against the Greek government, the Greek government, the means of being supported by the British and the Americans in the late 1940s. 246 00:25:19,350 --> 00:25:21,149 So it looked at the subject very much, 247 00:25:21,150 --> 00:25:29,160 and there be the introduction or the conclusion of this actually says I'm and I'm writing this so as to educate you on how to do it. 248 00:25:29,880 --> 00:25:38,250 This is how to do an end and an insurgency. So this book was very much written with the idea in mind that the Third World 249 00:25:38,250 --> 00:25:42,120 War might start with insurgencies breaking out spontaneously in Eastern Europe. 250 00:25:42,120 --> 00:25:45,240 And we, the Western powers, Native powers, would, of course, be supporting them. 251 00:25:45,600 --> 00:25:51,929 And you may recall the Gladio was all about preparing NATO's territory for an insurgency. 252 00:25:51,930 --> 00:25:57,750 If the Soviets would actually occupy wing, occupy the territory, and then you have to practice counterinsurgency. 253 00:25:58,260 --> 00:26:04,160 So that's an interesting period of thinking about insurgency and counterinsurgency in Western powers. 254 00:26:04,200 --> 00:26:06,830 And then come the comes the Cold War. 255 00:26:07,200 --> 00:26:16,400 And it's only after that in the sixties and seventies that there is a sort of reflex on the part of major powers to take sides against insurgencies. 256 00:26:16,410 --> 00:26:21,780 Obviously, with the experience of the British in Malaya, the French, Indochina and Algeria, etc., 257 00:26:22,680 --> 00:26:30,000 and all of a sudden writers tend to identify with the governments rather than the insurgents in this context, or rather Western writers. 258 00:26:31,620 --> 00:26:40,080 Then you have the Yugoslav wars, which took a long time to make sense to Western observers myself, 259 00:26:40,110 --> 00:26:44,340 who recall it took a long time for Western countries to take sides anyway. 260 00:26:45,600 --> 00:26:53,040 And then you have the context of in the countries of Iraq and Afghanistan, the confrontation with insurgencies, 261 00:26:53,040 --> 00:26:58,980 where the Western powers are helping the governments they put in place against the insurgents. 262 00:26:59,340 --> 00:27:09,180 And then you have a mix of all different situations with religious there in Mali, one where the NATO countries are taking the side of the insurgents, 263 00:27:09,180 --> 00:27:13,530 Mali, where they threaten besides of the counterinsurgency in Syria where there's no interaction. 264 00:27:13,800 --> 00:27:18,930 So there is no pattern and on or on of on whose side we are, 265 00:27:19,620 --> 00:27:26,999 which I'm underlining because I talk to audiences in countries where people automatically assume that insurgents are good things 266 00:27:27,000 --> 00:27:33,330 and counterinsurgency about things and that this is defined from the beginning and that you have to side with insurgents. 267 00:27:34,080 --> 00:27:38,850 The fact is that Western governments have difficulties in taking sides and deciding on whose side they are. 268 00:27:40,290 --> 00:27:46,080 Now, this is the bit that I'll I'll spare you, because I think we're running out of time. 269 00:27:46,980 --> 00:27:54,030 But if you will, if you ever have time to go onto YouTube and to watch a little bit about the Zen mosque in Afghanistan, 270 00:27:54,030 --> 00:27:57,960 in Charlie Wilson's War, which is one of my favourite books and also films. 271 00:27:58,290 --> 00:28:05,840 And it's a wonderful little story about how well it is a good thing or not that you're supporting somebody can change over time. 272 00:28:05,860 --> 00:28:09,780 It's a little story I'll tell it to you rather than to play around with the technology now. 273 00:28:10,710 --> 00:28:14,700 It's a story about a little boy who's given a horse, and everybody in the military says, How wonderful. 274 00:28:14,700 --> 00:28:20,429 And the Zen master says, Let's see, boy falls from the horse, breaks his leg, and it'll always have a limp. 275 00:28:20,430 --> 00:28:25,379 And everybody says, Poor, poor, poor boys. And master says, Let's see, war comes to the village. 276 00:28:25,380 --> 00:28:29,040 All the young boys are recruited. This boy is not recruited because he can't go to war. 277 00:28:29,340 --> 00:28:32,380 Everybody says, what an enviable situation. Zen master says what? 278 00:28:32,400 --> 00:28:37,290 Let's see. So this is this the wonderful story about them, therefore, 279 00:28:37,290 --> 00:28:42,420 about Western arming of the Taliban and then finding themselves at the receiving end of all this. 280 00:28:43,950 --> 00:28:57,330 Now, there are clearly two approaches that we have now and that create a moral dilemma for us on insurgencies and counterinsurgency, 281 00:28:57,810 --> 00:29:03,030 which is the one approach on which international. On the one hand, on which international law has been built since the 19th century, 282 00:29:03,030 --> 00:29:07,170 namely the state sovereignty and the non-interference of the states internal affairs, 283 00:29:07,500 --> 00:29:15,780 very much against what that tradition that I named, that I spread out for you on interference in case of a tyrannical regime that preached. 284 00:29:16,470 --> 00:29:20,160 And you have on the other side the responsibility to protect. 285 00:29:20,640 --> 00:29:26,460 I've already hinted heavily that there are precedents in this that go back, in fact, to the Crusades, but definitely through the 16th century. 286 00:29:26,790 --> 00:29:34,170 And this idea that princes have a moral obligation to go and help the population against the tyrant, that is an international law ever since. 287 00:29:35,400 --> 00:29:38,850 And you have the practice of the 19th century in which you had liberal 288 00:29:38,850 --> 00:29:44,640 interventionism and you had on behalf of Christian subjects in the Ottoman Empire, 289 00:29:44,940 --> 00:29:48,870 and you had that element and that practice during the World Wars. 290 00:29:49,200 --> 00:29:54,640 So again, something with a long tradition and a long story. Beforehand there was this tension in international law. 291 00:29:54,660 --> 00:29:57,899 Therefore, the idea that you have to respect sovereignty and uphold it because it's in your 292 00:29:57,900 --> 00:30:01,680 own states interest and on the other hand have this and what it actually holds. 293 00:30:04,530 --> 00:30:08,250 What are the factors that played into that in a very big way? 294 00:30:08,280 --> 00:30:14,219 I think it's interesting that Kushner himself, as you know, 295 00:30:14,220 --> 00:30:17,820 he was in the midst of some fanfare and was very heavily involved in this on his own account in 296 00:30:17,820 --> 00:30:22,380 which he gives of how the Mid-South and Tokyo and the world through originals comes into being. 297 00:30:23,070 --> 00:30:31,200 He goes on quite a lot about the the act monarchy, the thing that people did not do, i.e., intervene in Hitler's Germany. 298 00:30:32,370 --> 00:30:36,120 And I think that was something that is an undercurrent in a lot of people's thinking. 299 00:30:36,540 --> 00:30:38,340 And I think it's I think rightly so. 300 00:30:39,840 --> 00:30:46,860 His own account of it is that the thing really got started with the French, with the French doctors in Biafra and then the frontier, 301 00:30:47,400 --> 00:30:52,890 and then the term itself seems to have been coined by Robert Motherwell in 1979. 302 00:30:53,310 --> 00:30:55,590 That's in a way the early period of it. 303 00:30:56,370 --> 00:31:03,720 And then you have further I think there were further things that we failed to do and that have given us the feeling of guilt of Yugoslavia itself. 304 00:31:03,910 --> 00:31:11,160 The famous Ebenezer case is this is emblematic for that and of course the inventor intervention run that didn't take place. 305 00:31:11,520 --> 00:31:20,470 So you get this shift towards a new emphasis within the interpretation of the UN Charter with the Responsibility to Protect, 306 00:31:20,640 --> 00:31:24,330 coined as a term by Gareth Evans, Mohammed Sand and Michael Ignatieff. 307 00:31:25,470 --> 00:31:32,580 Let us go a step back and look at the causes of uprising and how this now represents a dilemma. 308 00:31:32,580 --> 00:31:40,350 In view of what I have outlined as the tension in international law between sovereignties and the responsibility to protect. 309 00:31:41,040 --> 00:31:53,760 If you look at the causes of uprisings, they seem to be very much something that you can see over the centuries as patterns of repeat themselves. 310 00:31:54,750 --> 00:31:59,040 How do you approach those and how do you intervene with them in them? 311 00:31:59,040 --> 00:32:02,519 Because there's clearly in all of those, whether they're religious, ideological, 312 00:32:02,520 --> 00:32:06,389 whether the question of poor governance, unequal distribution of resources, 313 00:32:06,390 --> 00:32:14,100 injustice, the suppression of minority rights, failing or failed states, none of these can be addressed if you strictly uphold sovereignties. 314 00:32:14,170 --> 00:32:23,579 And this idea that you can't intervene in another state to dwell briefly on a dilemma presented by the tendency 315 00:32:23,580 --> 00:32:32,100 since 45 not to declare war so as not to get into the danger of going and having war crimes trials afterwards. 316 00:32:34,500 --> 00:32:44,129 These have certain advantages. The advantage is that you don't get the prosecution war crimes, but that you deny combatant status to insurgents. 317 00:32:44,130 --> 00:32:48,840 But they have the great disadvantages that your actions are outside legal frameworks. 318 00:32:49,020 --> 00:32:51,180 You have no legal protection really for either side, 319 00:32:51,420 --> 00:32:59,880 and you can't condone or you can't exclude killing and collateral damage by military necessity, as you would under the laws of war. 320 00:33:01,020 --> 00:33:04,770 Now there's another problem, which is the limitation of all means, 321 00:33:04,770 --> 00:33:11,249 and you will be surprised to find here a little illustration elimination of the Battle of Britain. 322 00:33:11,250 --> 00:33:16,170 But it is a handy little thing to compare, because on the French side of the Battle of Grain, 323 00:33:16,170 --> 00:33:25,049 you had 7000 people in the combined English and Empires side, 9000 in Asaph in November 2009. 324 00:33:25,050 --> 00:33:31,590 You have 4000 Frenchmen 2012, 9500 British forces. 325 00:33:31,590 --> 00:33:40,920 And the German forces in February 2013 were 4400 and I think something like a 4000. 326 00:33:41,220 --> 00:33:48,480 So the interesting point is that we have this not only a legal dilemma, but we also have limitations of our means, 327 00:33:48,480 --> 00:33:52,770 which actually take us to having a deployable force or a useful force at any one 328 00:33:52,770 --> 00:33:57,330 particular point that is comparable to the restraints that there were in the Middle Ages. 329 00:33:59,160 --> 00:34:08,190 There are many more problems that flow from current restraints on what Western powers can do. 330 00:34:08,220 --> 00:34:18,260 We have the famous coalition of the willing with add ons, with divergent rules of engagement and divergent definitions of the task and preferences. 331 00:34:18,270 --> 00:34:25,589 And I would like to I'd like to recommend an article to you that I found in a publication of 332 00:34:25,590 --> 00:34:31,590 this International Committee of Military Historians that was produced on a wonderful volume. 333 00:34:31,590 --> 00:34:39,800 Actually, that's the best volumes ever produced, as far as I'm concerned, on insurgency and in fighting on counterinsurgency where I am. 334 00:34:40,060 --> 00:34:44,370 The last Danish officer speaking from firsthand experience, 335 00:34:44,820 --> 00:34:49,890 was apparently given the permission to say what he and his colleagues were feeling about this. 336 00:34:50,220 --> 00:34:56,070 And it has wonderful insight into the problems of working with allies who have divergent, 337 00:34:56,070 --> 00:35:01,979 different views of the past by virtue of preferences, by virtue of intelligence, and where you have to rely on part of them and less so. 338 00:35:01,980 --> 00:35:07,240 That's a. Marvellous article to look at this and the problems there, 339 00:35:07,240 --> 00:35:13,420 obviously being the absence of any centralised native planning for strategy in the first place. 340 00:35:13,810 --> 00:35:21,880 But also as long as I've been following this and I must say that I've been taking I took my ball of this at of last year. 341 00:35:22,180 --> 00:35:30,879 But as far as I know there still isn't a common need to manual on or off field handbook anything like that on insurgency because 342 00:35:30,880 --> 00:35:38,800 the Japanese have been blocking it and it goes to the point where I had great fun and there is the Germans couldn't produce one, 343 00:35:38,950 --> 00:35:46,360 but there was an English translation of an unofficial German one on the website, while the Germans officially denied to me that they had won. 344 00:35:46,720 --> 00:35:55,240 So yeah, okay. I'm getting back to the problems of the the causes of insurgencies. 345 00:35:56,500 --> 00:36:02,920 And there is another big moral dilemma underlying this, which is the constantly when you are trying to address the causes, 346 00:36:02,970 --> 00:36:12,880 causes of insurgencies, just the tactic of these all of these involve the intervention in some way in that society itself. 347 00:36:13,210 --> 00:36:20,020 And the the effect of it is that you're going to be accused of being of practising cultural imperialism, 348 00:36:20,590 --> 00:36:23,380 that you are trying to export Western democratic structures, 349 00:36:23,500 --> 00:36:30,549 Western legal structures, Western economic structures, etc., and the which is part of the state building. 350 00:36:30,550 --> 00:36:36,880 And of course, the accusation will be that some of these actually account anomalies could be applied to cultures which are very different. 351 00:36:37,450 --> 00:36:41,620 And all these things will also be called into question, in question. 352 00:36:41,620 --> 00:36:50,860 And I find it very interesting how there is seems to be a predominant tendency in the debates in Western society that seems to say, 353 00:36:51,370 --> 00:36:56,380 oh, human rights don't really apply to all human beings in the same way because they should be culturally specific. 354 00:36:56,710 --> 00:37:05,290 And obviously all these things that we think are the key of Western culture and that have been in some ways accepted into you and documents here. 355 00:37:05,290 --> 00:37:09,520 And there are something that we can just throw overboard because we don't really believe in them. 356 00:37:09,700 --> 00:37:17,290 So there's a huge problem in applying them because you're constantly being criticised for not doing something that is appropriate for the area. 357 00:37:18,490 --> 00:37:27,720 Then the next big moral dilemma is the question of the innocent combatants. 358 00:37:27,750 --> 00:37:30,879 Let me just reemphasize where the word comes from. 359 00:37:30,880 --> 00:37:37,510 The knock era is to harm the innocent non-combatants of should, of course, be the people who can't do any harm. 360 00:37:38,110 --> 00:37:43,419 And this is a line that goes through international law which says you must kill and you mustn't harm people. 361 00:37:43,420 --> 00:37:44,740 You can't do you any harm. 362 00:37:45,130 --> 00:37:54,790 But the question is that there are a lot of people around who can do you harm, although they should be really protected from other points of view. 363 00:37:55,180 --> 00:37:59,979 And one of the recent things I found that in the Israeli debate about the operation 364 00:37:59,980 --> 00:38:05,060 of recent operations in Gaza was that they tried very hard to say we're not that 365 00:38:05,080 --> 00:38:09,700 the large number of casualties that was inflicted on people who were not technically 366 00:38:11,080 --> 00:38:17,050 combatants included a lot of people who were not innocent non-combatants. 367 00:38:17,260 --> 00:38:22,540 They were doing harm to the Israeli state and therefore could not be seen as innocent among combatants. 368 00:38:22,720 --> 00:38:28,390 And therefore the triggers they gave for collateral damage were much lower than those put forward by the Palestinians. 369 00:38:29,200 --> 00:38:36,489 This whole issue, I could go on for one hour and I would just to to point out that this is an enduring problem that 370 00:38:36,490 --> 00:38:41,170 we have when we're looking at all those who in some way supporting the war effort of others. 371 00:38:41,170 --> 00:38:45,459 And we're looking at democracies where people vote governments into power that will do things like go to 372 00:38:45,460 --> 00:38:51,790 war and to what extent they can therefore be seen as being totally divided from the war effort itself, 373 00:38:52,090 --> 00:38:55,510 an issue that has been troubling us for the entire 20th century or even before. 374 00:38:55,990 --> 00:38:59,379 The problem with that is then how to isolate the leaders from the rest. 375 00:38:59,380 --> 00:39:01,660 Who is the rest, and to what extent are they truly neutral? 376 00:39:03,220 --> 00:39:07,630 You have varying degrees, obviously, of population involvement depending on the different insurgency. 377 00:39:08,500 --> 00:39:12,579 But there is that problem of draining the swamp and killing all the pond life, 378 00:39:12,580 --> 00:39:17,080 which is going to be the continuing dilemma that faces that particular issue. 379 00:39:19,360 --> 00:39:26,049 We're dealing with divergent timeframes. One of the crop dilemmas that arises in insurgencies, 380 00:39:26,050 --> 00:39:35,620 in counterinsurgency is the question of whether it is the predominant concern of the powers that are involved in the operation, one side or the other, 381 00:39:36,150 --> 00:39:44,020 and to thought the crises are out and is it going to be simply before political imperatives at home dictate certain things, 382 00:39:44,830 --> 00:39:49,239 or is it going to be probably sorting out the crisis in that area for good, 383 00:39:49,240 --> 00:39:55,420 which tends to mean addressing the major root causes and tends to mean producing mental shifts among all the players. 384 00:39:55,420 --> 00:40:01,900 And the conflict tends to mean a long term military engagement looking at how organisations work. 385 00:40:02,850 --> 00:40:06,630 You have very different time frames there and time concerns there. 386 00:40:07,680 --> 00:40:14,430 You have people, particularly in the postings, where they have the decision making capacity thinking normally in times of two years, 387 00:40:15,300 --> 00:40:18,600 up to five, four or five, depending on elections. 388 00:40:19,470 --> 00:40:24,209 One On the whole, I think people would say that the time to needed to effect cultural change and we've 389 00:40:24,210 --> 00:40:30,300 seen that in Iraq and Afghanistan tends to be 50 plus years generally from change, 390 00:40:30,540 --> 00:40:35,100 etc. So this is something that where we tend to find that the two are heavily out of sync. 391 00:40:36,720 --> 00:40:43,350 You have the famous story of that occupation. Fatigue works against any counterinsurgency. 392 00:40:43,400 --> 00:40:46,830 You have the time on the side of the insurgents, and you find that there is, 393 00:40:46,830 --> 00:40:53,730 in fact fatigue among the not only the local population, but also the population at home. 394 00:40:54,270 --> 00:41:02,730 And you have the decrease in morale among the same forces to contend with when there is no feeling that any military ends can be met very easily. 395 00:41:03,270 --> 00:41:07,919 And the overall prediction that a number of people come up with that there is 396 00:41:07,920 --> 00:41:11,030 going to be less and less willingness on the part of Western powers to intervene. 397 00:41:11,040 --> 00:41:21,959 Serious tends to be cited as the example of that. There was a widespread reluctance to get engaged in COIN in the early in the late in the 1990s 398 00:41:21,960 --> 00:41:27,780 in the early 2000s which was seen was drawn from particular experiences of particular countries. 399 00:41:27,780 --> 00:41:28,649 But interestingly enough, 400 00:41:28,650 --> 00:41:36,690 on some documents or texts going back even to the very early 19th century where people commented on the fact that this was not popular, 401 00:41:36,690 --> 00:41:40,590 not the popular form of war with people, military people who wanted to make a big career. 402 00:41:41,380 --> 00:41:48,240 And what we do see now is an abandonment of a one size fits all approach to one's own military. 403 00:41:48,250 --> 00:41:55,860 There is more and more emphasis on the idea that you have to have a military that is able to do things different from protecting the full back up. 404 00:41:57,720 --> 00:42:02,580 All second and third rate powers have the enormous problem that they can't really afford that sort of specialisation, 405 00:42:02,670 --> 00:42:06,180 but really they haven't got enough personnel to train for completely different 406 00:42:06,180 --> 00:42:11,040 missions with the overall effect that the tends to be concerned now whether people 407 00:42:11,100 --> 00:42:16,430 are still competent to wage regular war and if everything's not do extremely 408 00:42:16,460 --> 00:42:22,050 don't add up to the concentration on counterinsurgency and the irregular war. 409 00:42:23,460 --> 00:42:29,220 And there's the old story of how to hand over to the locals and how would you really 410 00:42:29,220 --> 00:42:33,690 want to do is you want a force to give the subject back to the local forces, 411 00:42:34,500 --> 00:42:41,160 which builds on a very long tradition of employing locals to fight locals, which of course goes back to Roman times, 412 00:42:41,580 --> 00:42:47,040 but which has a very long tradition still with the French Foreign Legion and the British use of indigenous forces. 413 00:42:47,850 --> 00:42:50,729 You will recall that Lawrence was famous for and he said that was much better, 414 00:42:50,730 --> 00:42:55,889 that the locals take a long time and make many mistakes while doing something rather than giving it to them on the plateau. 415 00:42:55,890 --> 00:42:58,950 But at least they have the ownership and then they feel that that's their achievement. 416 00:42:59,460 --> 00:43:04,530 And the problem that you immediately have from this is that the regime that you've 417 00:43:04,530 --> 00:43:09,599 put into power will be very desperate to avoid being seen as a puppet regime, 418 00:43:09,600 --> 00:43:15,209 of which it, of course, will be accused and therefore will probably do things just despite you just don't want 419 00:43:15,210 --> 00:43:19,950 to be seen as independent when you would be advising them to do things differently. 420 00:43:19,950 --> 00:43:30,120 And I think that's something that's been observed many times in Afghanistan in particular, you have the another moral dilemma which comes into this, 421 00:43:30,120 --> 00:43:37,800 which is that in tribal societies are societies where there is a tribal element, all there is some element of minorities, ethnic minorities. 422 00:43:38,220 --> 00:43:39,180 Time and again, 423 00:43:39,900 --> 00:43:49,410 groups have been mobilised against the insurgents who had an interest in cooperating with the counterinsurgent power because they were a minority, 424 00:43:49,410 --> 00:43:57,110 because they were different, and that tended to lead to them being sacrificed when the whole counterinsurgency effort collapsed. 425 00:43:57,120 --> 00:44:01,230 You have that with the French. He's not here. You have the Montana and you're trying to Vietnam. 426 00:44:01,950 --> 00:44:05,909 The Kurds have sacrificed number of times at the moment. They seem to be thriving, I think, for their plight, that is. 427 00:44:05,910 --> 00:44:12,090 And I think that's going to continue because the next thing this might happen is that they will be sacrificed again, 428 00:44:12,090 --> 00:44:18,299 as they have been before, to some greater political skill, more moral dilemmas. 429 00:44:18,300 --> 00:44:24,870 Who is the opposition? Who are the leaders? Is there a central leadership and do we actually know enough about them and how 430 00:44:24,870 --> 00:44:30,449 they're going to develop by or through cooperating with traditional leaders? 431 00:44:30,450 --> 00:44:38,069 Are we actually reinforcing the authoritarian social structures? This to me was the Achilles heel, some extent of the Petraeus field manual, 432 00:44:38,070 --> 00:44:41,880 where you will recall that the anthropological element was very strongly stressing 433 00:44:42,060 --> 00:44:46,889 that you should cooperate with local powers in order to further your own interests, 434 00:44:46,890 --> 00:44:48,240 but therefore you're reinforcing them. 435 00:44:48,240 --> 00:44:52,800 And, of course, these people might not be the sort of enlightened Democrats that you were hoping for in the end, 436 00:44:53,280 --> 00:44:56,940 and you're actually building more barriers for democratisation. 437 00:44:57,780 --> 00:45:02,400 Are you driving out the devil with Beelzebub? You know, are you both bolstering as I. 438 00:45:02,470 --> 00:45:05,800 I mentioned before criminal networks, the mafia's in the Second World War. 439 00:45:06,310 --> 00:45:13,870 Are you bolstering a vendetta culture? Are you protecting the people from whom tomorrow's insurgents are going to spring? 440 00:45:14,530 --> 00:45:18,340 And to what extent is social engineering and cultural transformation possible? 441 00:45:18,610 --> 00:45:25,179 Process possible, particularly as we operate in an environment which is increasingly emphasising that you have to have 442 00:45:25,180 --> 00:45:28,930 cultural heterogeneity and that you should not be forcing your culture down somebody else's route. 443 00:45:29,830 --> 00:45:38,050 So what is the right moral stance today to take and go back and draw here on again, very old tradition. 444 00:45:39,820 --> 00:45:43,930 The one of the Gulf War conditions going back to kindergarten, at least is that. 445 00:45:43,930 --> 00:45:47,499 And in fact, Cicero is it is immoral to fight it there. 446 00:45:47,500 --> 00:45:53,479 There's no chance of success. How can you predict how much success you're going to be? 447 00:45:53,480 --> 00:45:56,620 Is always been the logical problem or the philosophical problem with that stance. 448 00:45:56,630 --> 00:45:59,930 How can you actually evaluate how things are going to pan out? 449 00:46:00,860 --> 00:46:07,459 It goes back to this trying to say it is also immoral to stand by and allow atrocities to happen as Western powers 450 00:46:07,460 --> 00:46:13,040 or as whatever enlightened people who stand by the U.N. Charter and by the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. 451 00:46:13,370 --> 00:46:18,559 We are caught in the horns of this particular dilemma as an epilogue with the distress that, of course, 452 00:46:18,560 --> 00:46:28,520 there's been huge debates in West Point and elsewhere about a new strategy and where should take us and where the Petraeus strategy has gone wrong. 453 00:46:29,150 --> 00:46:34,180 The neorealist question, if you like, is being asked by Americans in particular is going to we've done all this. 454 00:46:34,190 --> 00:46:40,400 What's in it for us? Why have we bothered to do this? For which, for me, a real is the question, not simply for the greater good of humanity. 455 00:46:40,790 --> 00:46:44,890 And that is why how has the United States benefited from it? 456 00:46:44,900 --> 00:46:50,299 And I would like to draw your attention to the junk countless book on this, 457 00:46:50,300 --> 00:46:56,750 the strategy of tactics which as this war the frustration with the Petraeus handbook brought together. 458 00:46:57,410 --> 00:47:03,469 Some of you might want to Google the Colonel Tunnell text from 2010, 459 00:47:03,470 --> 00:47:10,640 where a practitioner in the field brought out all of his concerns about how the Petraeus handbooks work. 460 00:47:10,640 --> 00:47:17,150 Wasn't operating well, and it wasn't wasn't it wasn't applicable to the situation in Iraq in Afghanistan. 461 00:47:18,020 --> 00:47:20,680 Is liberal interventionism on the wane, therefore? 462 00:47:21,270 --> 00:47:29,780 And we have this one particular, of course question in Europe, where the whole idea of intervention seems across a number of cultures very alien. 463 00:47:30,200 --> 00:47:38,900 And you have very much still this fortress Europe thinking that is going on in many ministries, which is outside Europe. 464 00:47:39,080 --> 00:47:41,210 Let there be the deluge. We don't really care. 465 00:47:42,230 --> 00:47:49,760 The only two states which seem to be willing in Europe systematically to take a different position, being Britain and France. 466 00:47:49,760 --> 00:47:53,270 But even there you see that this very much tied up, this particular interest as well. 467 00:47:53,690 --> 00:47:55,160 So thank you very much for your attention.