Professor Voisin, who is the chair of International University of Reading and has been there since 2007 and 2017,
has been the director of Research in the Military History Research Office of the
Bundesbank and Professor of International Security Studies at King's College,
London. He's recently helped or visiting professor at the University of Paris for the Civil and seven somebody
and has been involved in multi consultancy work for NATO's United Kingdom and Central Asia Commission.
He's published widely. Some can maybe even look at some of the more recent articles that she published.
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.
Max Boot is going to be knocked off the top shelf to work.
It's coming up. And the other work, which I do my best to ruin the chapter is have edited volume coming in.
I think early next year we brought national style personal experiences with insurgencies and counterinsurgency,
a joint publication with a frame involved and arguments from you.
So thank you, actually. Thank you very much for the very kind introduction.
And I will proceeded by just a couple of words because I would like to use this occasion to invite any PhD students
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.
Rounding up some of our visiting fellows on the strategy making theory and practice,
and I'm saying this in particular because I was a Dphil student here at Oxford at a time when there
wasn't the changing nature of war programme and seminars like this were very few and far between.
And I got desperately lonely at times, and I found it very sad that I didn't know.
Other people in the country are doing the same sort of research as me,
and I remember accosting people wildly in the Public Records Office, the National Archives, just in order to network with people,
etc. And I would very much welcome it if anybody felt like taking this
opportunity to come to writing on the 26th of June to meet some of our students,
because they're doing some things that are quite similar to some of the things that you're doing here.
So thank you very much for the invitation to come and speak to you today.
And what I'm about to present to you is a bit of a shopping list to which I apologise.
There is no ground methodology, but there is more.
A whole series of points that I have gleaned from looking at this subject for quite a number
of years now and finding that there are certain patterns of moral dilemmas and other dilemmas,
difficult practical dilemmas which seem to have recurred over time in many different cases and throughout history.
So without further ado, let me apologising to what I am looking at.
Namely, that symmetry in warfare has a whole series of different dimensions, one of which is most classically,
obviously, the numerical asymmetry, technical asymmetry, the asymmetry of supplies.
Let me hold that for a second.
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.
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
some way has the opportunity to cut the other side off from these supplies there.
There are important consequences flow from this.
And the legal asymmetry, which I'm already almost touched on when saying that there is this asymmetry in one side,
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.
We're not just talking about state actors, non-state actors. Let's just stick to these few points for the moment.
So let me emphasise this.
We're at the bottom. The insurgents are very often and traditionally refer to banditry.
Now, let me just dwell on the word. The word, if anybody, Italians in the room,
anybody who's interested in the Renaissance tended not to have a negative connotation when you had in the 16th century,
the famous special forces, if you might call them the band.
That was a wonderful military aristocrat known as Germany, the Lebanon Arie, who had his little group of special forces.
And in that context, the word bomb that was still a neutral term, referring through the special unit.
You may or may not know this character from wonderful film I recommend to you, which is called Military Warrior.
The point being that these special units only transmogrified into partisan units without an ideological component,
and then partisan units with an ideological component around the time of the Napoleonic Wars.
And even when this kind. It was done. The word bandit in the Italian context was still neutral.
And we find, for example, a magazine that uses it in a neutral terms.
He talks about my vanity, my my partisans, but it then, of course, gets this negative connotation, which is then, of course,
exploited by counterinsurgency forces to indicate that they're, in fact, criminal actors,
that they are bandits, that they act in much the same way as bandits do.
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,
you will find that he shows lots and lots of evidence of overlap between practices
and also social provenance of the great heroes who have very often been bandits.
And actually, after the end of their guerrilla, sometimes turn back into integrate into bandits.
And that this was one of the great preoccupations then of the Spanish government to try to regularise them,
because they were not only people who are difficult to control in a disciplinary military sense,
but also difficult to control from the point of view that they had criminal networks.
So a cemetery of supplies, they have the need to draw on criminal networks for their surprise.
They're involved with criminal networks.
And therefore, very often you have, in the context of an insurgency, an element of warlordism and an incentive to keep the conflict going.
And this was something that I came up against,
particularly when I was in NATO and the Yugoslav wars were still going on and the cost of war was starting.
But Bosnia-Herzegovina somehow didn't quite die down because there were so many groups of, in some form,
fighters to use trucks like a neutral term who had become very strongly involved with them in
the criminal side of this whole enterprise and the their own actions in a way they had begun to.
They had many of them had an explicit interest in keeping with conflict going and in prolonging the state of affairs
in which they could make money in a way that had nothing to do with the original ideological aims of the insurgency.
Then please let me remind you that the Italian mafias were created after they were children of
the resort to mental and that they were their lifespan was prolonged or even reinvigorated,
by the way, in which in the end, at the end of the Second World War and immediately after the Second World War,
the Americans used them in order to counteract both fascists and communists in Italy and bring them on to their side.
And the same is true for mafia rings in southern France,
which were practically created by the allies in at the end of the second towards the end of the Second World War,
because it was these were criminal groups that were fed money and arms by the
allies because they were at the same time against Vichy and against the Germans.
So there was this very strong overlay and instead you have a student working on this,
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.
And as much as he goes back clearly to the Middle Ages and even before to to Roman times,
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
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,
and by giving them or by trying to force upon them to rules which they couldn't possibly meet in most contexts.
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,
distinctive emblem recognisable at a distance, and if they carried arms openly.
And any of you who sat at the feet of armed robbers will know that these are the the great problems that you have,
that in the very moment you are distinguishable,
it's very difficult for you to be a an irregular fighter, and it's very difficult for you to work in the resistance.
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.
Now, this was addressed to some extent in the Geneva Protocol in 1977.
Again, I'll spare you the text in its entirety, but I'm trying to guide you to the highlighted parts.
Again, there was this emphasis on the need to distinguish themselves,
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
engagement and during such time as they are visible to the adversary while engaged in military deployment preceding the launching of an attack.
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.
Secretly and you're trying to pre-school. So trivial.
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.
You all have resonating in your minds, surely,
this idea that the gorilla gets by or the gorilla ever gets by by being the fish in water that blends into the landscape,
the blends into the rest of the population disappears. Otherwise, they would be far too easy to catch for the other side.
That is, in many other ways privileged.
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.
And I'll go back to the Maccabees, not simply because I might go back a long time,
but because this particular issue has been invoked, invoked by Christians throughout centuries and centuries.
For the simple reason that this is a text that seems to condone rising up against the head of state, the legitimate ruler,
who, by the very nature of the fact that he's suppressing religion or a particular practice of religion becomes illegitimate.
This part of the Bible, very fascinatingly,
was admitted by our good Martin Luther in his translation of the Bible into German because it was part of contentious, wasn't it?
So this is not part of the Lutheran half canon of the Bible,
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.
Charles the first French wars of religion against the last vulnerable rulers, etc. and it becomes the precedent that is always invoked.
Then you have an early notion creeping in.
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.
It's not just Locke, but from the 13th century onwards,
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.
But somehow there was this implication that the people have chosen him.
And of course, there were earlier forms of electing rulers.
Therefore, there is actually a long time before Locke a notion of somebody being chosen by a group of people who therefore,
once they are, we have the right to take that choice away again from that person or that potentially one again from that person.
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,
which is in many respects the the laboratory of new thinking about statehood.
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.
And you have a whole paragraph. If he says no circumstance, you can't.
But it's clearly something that is troubling minds from the 16th century onwards and is becoming very articulated.
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,
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.
And the interesting thing in all of this is that it spells out also the two other revolts.
This is not a 20th century mention. The right to intervene goes back to these texts and particularly from 16th century ones,
where the prince is actually obliged to go and help an oppressed populace of another
prince if that prince is suppressing the righteous religion or the legitimate religion.
So quite interesting. But this is again something with quite long precedent.
And interestingly, the idea that you have only got you can only have peace if you have good governance
is one that is linked to this and also goes back far further than some 2013,
like 21st century all theorists might think if we find it in Machiavelli.
And interestingly, because again, everybody counsels to think of Machiavelli as somebody who will always preach what is convenient for the ruler.
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
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.
And this is not the only area where he does this. He has anything he's writes, although he wrote about insurgency and counterinsurgency,
revolves around how it is only in your interest in ways to defuse any tensions created in the state through good governance,
i.e. do prevent apply preventive medicine rather than just cruel suppression once you get to it.
And if you do have to have to suppress an insurgency, you can't do it through fight by killing everybody in the.
You have to practice mildness and.
English cleric called Matthew Sutcliffe, who was a product of the other place and was pretty close to the Earl of Essex,
who was one of Elizabeth's first military leaders.
Also articulated ideas on the subject, very interestingly, inspired himself by Spanish thinkers,
although he really knows the Spanish and the whole kind of his writings to go to war against Spain.
But in that, he actually articulates that you cannot possibly pacify a hostile population unless you could do it by good governance.
Taking his in a way he was adversary would have been done by him.
And those are the same time that 16th century Spaniard does exactly the same thing.
And he also is a fascinating character. I'll stop myself in coming to all about him because there's so much.
But he was, along with the Duke of Alba in the Spanish attempts to quell the Dutch wars of independence,
which, as you may recall, took 80 years and in the end proved unsuccessful.
And Alma was very notorious for the cruelty that he practised and the atrocities that were committed under him.
And Mendoza was strongly against this,
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.
It would work against you. Then the other one of my great heroes, early 18th century parson,
who was a theoretician and a practitioner, he was a practitioner both as a general and as a diplomat.
He sat in peace conferences and also was an administrator of Spanish overseas territories and was heavily involved in the Spanish succession.
Santa Cruz de la Senado spelt out in great detail material about how to pacify an insurgency,
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.
It really does. He's after it's completely forgotten because he writes in such a cumbersome way in the 19th century,
still referred to in the 20th century, nobody talks about him.
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,
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,
ensuring that they live in a flourishing economy, restructure the economy, give them a vested interest in the new situation,
build a further their commerce, build universities for them, great belief in 18th century fortification.
And it's absolutely wonderful. And you get it again in video and on and on.
There were again, a pacification of an insurgency can only possibly be done by practising what today would be called good governance.
Now there's the other side, which also goes back in the 16th century.
This there was a Frenchman who'd probably look and say,
I think we think he changed his name because he was persecuted and he was a rabid Huguenot who has long parts about
how you should try to be kind to your adversaries unless they really fail to see all the errors of their ways,
in which case you should repress them ruthlessly.
You have the practitioners whom I already mentioned, Alba, in the 16th century in the attempt to repress the Dutch wars.
The Kellerman nasty Alsatian who did really pretty dreadful things in the role in the uprising against the French Revolution.
And you had a very importantly somebody who articulated all this.
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,
in which in the thirties and early forties, Peugeot had used a basically a smokestack at the off the mark by putting in smoke,
but like what the Americans did in Afghanistan in 2001, and to smoke them out and basically kill,
suffocate the insurgents in these caves and the stuff in the inside of this case tended to be men, women and children.
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,
saw the letters letters he wrote from the Spanish Peninsular War to his sister,
made very interesting reading because it is 1 to 1 an application of that very large
extent that he then practised in Algeria and it was basically these little brutes,
and you go against them in the brutal way and that's what they deserve and it should not go.
I mention that our good friend Caldwell was greatly influenced by Brazil and had a lot of admiration for him.
Caldwell in other places says that he prefers the more the softer approach by that was practised by Clemens predecessor in the Vonda.
But Caldwell also said that outside Europe you couldn't practice the soft approach
and the visual approach was clearly the one that you should admire and emulate.
Now, let us look at insurgencies a little bit more.
I mean, one of the things that tends to be that is in a lot of early 20th century writing,
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.
And thank you very much. In the light of an East-West confrontation, communism versus the reactionary West or something like that,
while in fact an awful lot of insurgencies always had a religious motive.
And the problem is then that they were recast somehow, depending on your viewpoint, was progressive.
If you were in favour of Protestantism, thought that was a cultural step forward or reactionary.
If it was the people in their own day who were against the atheism of the French Revolution and now, of course, Islamists.
And that's a thing that has in a way very been at the centre of attention.
Much more attention has been given in literature on insurgency to the religious aspect of insurgencies,
where, again, I would question this, a division that is very often taken to progressive and reactionary,
because I think what they all have in common and what the very large number of
them have in common is that they're anticolonial nationalists instead of phobic,
that there is some sort of element of disliking what's outside.
And just to give you the example of this, again, the banville's, the you know, they very they were for above all,
the protection of Catholicism against the French Revolution, which was trying to get the priests to somehow vote with the 92.
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.
But the point is that they're pretty much in the same spirit as the French revolutionaries,
but in somehow, you know, with a different centre of their loyalty, etc.
But the way they fought, the way they,
they used propaganda and just about everything else was very much in line with what the French Revolution was doing.
Now, that leaves us I'm trying to leave you up to the question,
but one of the interesting things about insurgencies is that we never quite know in advance which side we are.
It seemed there was this big pattern of anti-colonial uprisings,
and it sort of seemed to stand to reason that the colonial empires would be opposed to anti-colonial uprisings.
But of course, they were in the middle of it and practice it themselves and encourage it themselves,
as you will see from this gentleman's rule in the First World War.
So the whole point is that we there isn't a nice clear cut division into, oh,
we are against insurgencies because we're on the side of the state power, which surely must be right.
Or we fought for it and. But with what I've shown you before, I was trying to demonstrate that, in fact,
there's a big tradition that makes both sides or can make both sides legitimate if it puts itself in a particular tradition.
So on whose side are we in? Anti-colonial uprisings.
This has been on both. I'm in the interesting context, of course, of the Second World War, the United Kingdom and France,
depending on which French people you're identifying with at this particular point,
were on the side of the resistance and the resistance fighters throughout Europe,
which led to really interesting points in the context, for example, of Poland or Ukraine,
where you had at times people on the side of the Nazis fighting against the Soviet Union, etc., and the allegiance that.
And there is a very interesting book that I found an eye opener written in the fifties by CNN Blair.
And there was talk about re-editing. It hasn't been done.
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,
early 1950s politics of Western countries, and particularly United States, Britain and like nature in general,
as you will see from this project that they were prepared to engender uprisings, support uprisings,
not generally support uprisings by anybody who was prepared to rise up if they were
going to do so against the Soviet Union and communist regimes or all of Eastern Europe.
That is what was proclaimed.
That is what was preached practically and replied all the time on Radio Free Europe and all the other missions and Radio Liberty.
But when, of course, it came to the real crunch and uprisings, spontaneous uprisings occurred 1950 3926.
The Western powers stood by. The point is, however, that this book shows the CNN Blair Book on uprisings and insurgencies was more wars,
shows that Western powers were consciously training their own military or trying to educate the military about patterns of insurgencies.
And the book is fascinating in that it shows cases from both camps, if you like.
It shows how insurgent movements against the Germans operated during the Second World War.
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,
against the Greek government, the Greek government, the means of being supported by the British and the Americans in the late 1940s.
So it looked at the subject very much,
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.
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
War might start with insurgencies breaking out spontaneously in Eastern Europe.
And we, the Western powers, Native powers, would, of course, be supporting them.
And you may recall the Gladio was all about preparing NATO's territory for an insurgency.
If the Soviets would actually occupy wing, occupy the territory, and then you have to practice counterinsurgency.
So that's an interesting period of thinking about insurgency and counterinsurgency in Western powers.
And then come the comes the Cold War.
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.
Obviously, with the experience of the British in Malaya, the French, Indochina and Algeria, etc.,
and all of a sudden writers tend to identify with the governments rather than the insurgents in this context, or rather Western writers.
Then you have the Yugoslav wars, which took a long time to make sense to Western observers myself,
who recall it took a long time for Western countries to take sides anyway.
And then you have the context of in the countries of Iraq and Afghanistan, the confrontation with insurgencies,
where the Western powers are helping the governments they put in place against the insurgents.
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,
Mali, where they threaten besides of the counterinsurgency in Syria where there's no interaction.
So there is no pattern and on or on of on whose side we are,
which I'm underlining because I talk to audiences in countries where people automatically assume that insurgents are good things
and counterinsurgency about things and that this is defined from the beginning and that you have to side with insurgents.
The fact is that Western governments have difficulties in taking sides and deciding on whose side they are.
Now, this is the bit that I'll I'll spare you, because I think we're running out of time.
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,
in Charlie Wilson's War, which is one of my favourite books and also films.
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.
It's a little story I'll tell it to you rather than to play around with the technology now.
It's a story about a little boy who's given a horse, and everybody in the military says, How wonderful.
And the Zen master says, Let's see, boy falls from the horse, breaks his leg, and it'll always have a limp.
And everybody says, Poor, poor, poor boys. And master says, Let's see, war comes to the village.
All the young boys are recruited. This boy is not recruited because he can't go to war.
Everybody says, what an enviable situation. Zen master says what?
Let's see. So this is this the wonderful story about them, therefore,
about Western arming of the Taliban and then finding themselves at the receiving end of all this.
Now, there are clearly two approaches that we have now and that create a moral dilemma for us on insurgencies and counterinsurgency,
which is the one approach on which international. On the one hand, on which international law has been built since the 19th century,
namely the state sovereignty and the non-interference of the states internal affairs,
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.
And you have on the other side the responsibility to protect.
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.
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.
And you have the practice of the 19th century in which you had liberal
interventionism and you had on behalf of Christian subjects in the Ottoman Empire,
and you had that element and that practice during the World Wars.
So again, something with a long tradition and a long story. Beforehand there was this tension in international law.
Therefore, the idea that you have to respect sovereignty and uphold it because it's in your
own states interest and on the other hand have this and what it actually holds.
What are the factors that played into that in a very big way?
I think it's interesting that Kushner himself, as you know,
he was in the midst of some fanfare and was very heavily involved in this on his own account in
which he gives of how the Mid-South and Tokyo and the world through originals comes into being.
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.
And I think that was something that is an undercurrent in a lot of people's thinking.
And I think it's I think rightly so.
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,
and then the term itself seems to have been coined by Robert Motherwell in 1979.
That's in a way the early period of it.
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.
The famous Ebenezer case is this is emblematic for that and of course the inventor intervention run that didn't take place.
So you get this shift towards a new emphasis within the interpretation of the UN Charter with the Responsibility to Protect,
coined as a term by Gareth Evans, Mohammed Sand and Michael Ignatieff.
Let us go a step back and look at the causes of uprising and how this now represents a dilemma.
In view of what I have outlined as the tension in international law between sovereignties and the responsibility to protect.
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.
How do you approach those and how do you intervene with them in them?
Because there's clearly in all of those, whether they're religious, ideological,
whether the question of poor governance, unequal distribution of resources,
injustice, the suppression of minority rights, failing or failed states, none of these can be addressed if you strictly uphold sovereignties.
And this idea that you can't intervene in another state to dwell briefly on a dilemma presented by the tendency
since 45 not to declare war so as not to get into the danger of going and having war crimes trials afterwards.
These have certain advantages. The advantage is that you don't get the prosecution war crimes, but that you deny combatant status to insurgents.
But they have the great disadvantages that your actions are outside legal frameworks.
You have no legal protection really for either side,
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.
Now there's another problem, which is the limitation of all means,
and you will be surprised to find here a little illustration elimination of the Battle of Britain.
But it is a handy little thing to compare, because on the French side of the Battle of Grain,
you had 7000 people in the combined English and Empires side, 9000 in Asaph in November 2009.
You have 4000 Frenchmen 2012, 9500 British forces.
And the German forces in February 2013 were 4400 and I think something like a 4000.
So the interesting point is that we have this not only a legal dilemma, but we also have limitations of our means,
which actually take us to having a deployable force or a useful force at any one
particular point that is comparable to the restraints that there were in the Middle Ages.
There are many more problems that flow from current restraints on what Western powers can do.
We have the famous coalition of the willing with add ons, with divergent rules of engagement and divergent definitions of the task and preferences.
And I would like to I'd like to recommend an article to you that I found in a publication of
this International Committee of Military Historians that was produced on a wonderful volume.
Actually, that's the best volumes ever produced, as far as I'm concerned, on insurgency and in fighting on counterinsurgency where I am.
The last Danish officer speaking from firsthand experience,
was apparently given the permission to say what he and his colleagues were feeling about this.
And it has wonderful insight into the problems of working with allies who have divergent,
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.
That's a. Marvellous article to look at this and the problems there,
obviously being the absence of any centralised native planning for strategy in the first place.
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.
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
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,
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.
So yeah, okay. I'm getting back to the problems of the the causes of insurgencies.
And there is another big moral dilemma underlying this, which is the constantly when you are trying to address the causes,
causes of insurgencies, just the tactic of these all of these involve the intervention in some way in that society itself.
And the the effect of it is that you're going to be accused of being of practising cultural imperialism,
that you are trying to export Western democratic structures,
Western legal structures, Western economic structures, etc., and the which is part of the state building.
And of course, the accusation will be that some of these actually account anomalies could be applied to cultures which are very different.
And all these things will also be called into question, in question.
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,
oh, human rights don't really apply to all human beings in the same way because they should be culturally specific.
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.
And there are something that we can just throw overboard because we don't really believe in them.
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.
Then the next big moral dilemma is the question of the innocent combatants.
Let me just reemphasize where the word comes from.
The knock era is to harm the innocent non-combatants of should, of course, be the people who can't do any harm.
And this is a line that goes through international law which says you must kill and you mustn't harm people.
You can't do you any harm.
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.
And one of the recent things I found that in the Israeli debate about the operation
of recent operations in Gaza was that they tried very hard to say we're not that
the large number of casualties that was inflicted on people who were not technically
combatants included a lot of people who were not innocent non-combatants.
They were doing harm to the Israeli state and therefore could not be seen as innocent among combatants.
And therefore the triggers they gave for collateral damage were much lower than those put forward by the Palestinians.
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
we have when we're looking at all those who in some way supporting the war effort of others.
And we're looking at democracies where people vote governments into power that will do things like go to
war and to what extent they can therefore be seen as being totally divided from the war effort itself,
an issue that has been troubling us for the entire 20th century or even before.
The problem with that is then how to isolate the leaders from the rest.
Who is the rest, and to what extent are they truly neutral?
You have varying degrees, obviously, of population involvement depending on the different insurgency.
But there is that problem of draining the swamp and killing all the pond life,
which is going to be the continuing dilemma that faces that particular issue.
We're dealing with divergent timeframes. One of the crop dilemmas that arises in insurgencies,
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,
and to thought the crises are out and is it going to be simply before political imperatives at home dictate certain things,
or is it going to be probably sorting out the crisis in that area for good,
which tends to mean addressing the major root causes and tends to mean producing mental shifts among all the players.
And the conflict tends to mean a long term military engagement looking at how organisations work.
You have very different time frames there and time concerns there.
You have people, particularly in the postings, where they have the decision making capacity thinking normally in times of two years,
up to five, four or five, depending on elections.
One On the whole, I think people would say that the time to needed to effect cultural change and we've
seen that in Iraq and Afghanistan tends to be 50 plus years generally from change,
etc. So this is something that where we tend to find that the two are heavily out of sync.
You have the famous story of that occupation. Fatigue works against any counterinsurgency.
You have the time on the side of the insurgents, and you find that there is,
in fact fatigue among the not only the local population, but also the population at home.
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.
And the overall prediction that a number of people come up with that there is
going to be less and less willingness on the part of Western powers to intervene.
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
in the early 2000s which was seen was drawn from particular experiences of particular countries.
But interestingly enough,
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,
not the popular form of war with people, military people who wanted to make a big career.
And what we do see now is an abandonment of a one size fits all approach to one's own military.
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.
All second and third rate powers have the enormous problem that they can't really afford that sort of specialisation,
but really they haven't got enough personnel to train for completely different
missions with the overall effect that the tends to be concerned now whether people
are still competent to wage regular war and if everything's not do extremely
don't add up to the concentration on counterinsurgency and the irregular war.
And there's the old story of how to hand over to the locals and how would you really
want to do is you want a force to give the subject back to the local forces,
which builds on a very long tradition of employing locals to fight locals, which of course goes back to Roman times,
but which has a very long tradition still with the French Foreign Legion and the British use of indigenous forces.
You will recall that Lawrence was famous for and he said that was much better,
that the locals take a long time and make many mistakes while doing something rather than giving it to them on the plateau.
But at least they have the ownership and then they feel that that's their achievement.
And the problem that you immediately have from this is that the regime that you've
put into power will be very desperate to avoid being seen as a puppet regime,
of which it, of course, will be accused and therefore will probably do things just despite you just don't want
to be seen as independent when you would be advising them to do things differently.
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,
which is that in tribal societies are societies where there is a tribal element, all there is some element of minorities, ethnic minorities.
Time and again,
groups have been mobilised against the insurgents who had an interest in cooperating with the counterinsurgent power because they were a minority,
because they were different, and that tended to lead to them being sacrificed when the whole counterinsurgency effort collapsed.
You have that with the French. He's not here. You have the Montana and you're trying to Vietnam.
The Kurds have sacrificed number of times at the moment. They seem to be thriving, I think, for their plight, that is.
And I think that's going to continue because the next thing this might happen is that they will be sacrificed again,
as they have been before, to some greater political skill, more moral dilemmas.
Who is the opposition? Who are the leaders? Is there a central leadership and do we actually know enough about them and how
they're going to develop by or through cooperating with traditional leaders?
Are we actually reinforcing the authoritarian social structures? This to me was the Achilles heel, some extent of the Petraeus field manual,
where you will recall that the anthropological element was very strongly stressing
that you should cooperate with local powers in order to further your own interests,
but therefore you're reinforcing them.
And, of course, these people might not be the sort of enlightened Democrats that you were hoping for in the end,
and you're actually building more barriers for democratisation.
Are you driving out the devil with Beelzebub? You know, are you both bolstering as I.
I mentioned before criminal networks, the mafia's in the Second World War.
Are you bolstering a vendetta culture? Are you protecting the people from whom tomorrow's insurgents are going to spring?
And to what extent is social engineering and cultural transformation possible?
Process possible, particularly as we operate in an environment which is increasingly emphasising that you have to have
cultural heterogeneity and that you should not be forcing your culture down somebody else's route.
So what is the right moral stance today to take and go back and draw here on again, very old tradition.
The one of the Gulf War conditions going back to kindergarten, at least is that.
And in fact, Cicero is it is immoral to fight it there.
There's no chance of success. How can you predict how much success you're going to be?
Is always been the logical problem or the philosophical problem with that stance.
How can you actually evaluate how things are going to pan out?
It goes back to this trying to say it is also immoral to stand by and allow atrocities to happen as Western powers
or as whatever enlightened people who stand by the U.N. Charter and by the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.
We are caught in the horns of this particular dilemma as an epilogue with the distress that, of course,
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.
The neorealist question, if you like, is being asked by Americans in particular is going to we've done all this.
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.
And that is why how has the United States benefited from it?
And I would like to draw your attention to the junk countless book on this,
the strategy of tactics which as this war the frustration with the Petraeus handbook brought together.
Some of you might want to Google the Colonel Tunnell text from 2010,
where a practitioner in the field brought out all of his concerns about how the Petraeus handbooks work.
Wasn't operating well, and it wasn't wasn't it wasn't applicable to the situation in Iraq in Afghanistan.
Is liberal interventionism on the wane, therefore?
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.
And you have very much still this fortress Europe thinking that is going on in many ministries, which is outside Europe.
Let there be the deluge. We don't really care.
The only two states which seem to be willing in Europe systematically to take a different position, being Britain and France.
But even there you see that this very much tied up, this particular interest as well.
So thank you very much for your attention.