"Frank Kitson in Northern Ireland and the ‘British way’" Topic

… of counterinsurgency

"Recent developments have focused attention on the nature of British counterinsurgency as ‘dirty war', not only in Northern Ireland but also in several other anti-colonial struggles after World War II. In 2012 the British high court found that British troops perpetrated the Batang Kali massacre in Malaya in 1948. In 2013 Britain's foreign secretary, William Hague, apologised and accepted that its security forces had tortured, mutilated and raped Mau Mau fighters, agreeing to compensate as many as 8,000 and to build a memorial in Nairobi. As a result of both of these investigations, an archive of colonial documents from Malaya, Kenya, Aden, Cyprus and other places of controversy, hitherto kept secret in breach of Britain's Freedom of Information Act and amounting to 200 metres of shelving, was discovered. Meanwhile, the Saville Report (2010) into Bloody Sunday and the de Silva Report (2013) on collusion with loyalist paramilitaries led to two further ‘unconditional' British apologies for the behaviour of its security forces in Northern Ireland. In November 2013, a BBC ‘Panorama' investigation into British counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s revealed that members of a special covert operations unit known as the Military Reaction Force (MRF) admitted to the murder of suspects and unarmed Catholic civilians. These admissions by the state or its agents confirm previous claims by critics dating back many decades. Such abuses were not merely low-level tactical excesses by undisciplined and racist troops but were institutional, systematic, and approved or covered up at the highest levels. Yet these conflicts were consistently interpreted almost universally by British academics as exemplifying the best practice of counterinsurgency. Even as the new revelations about atrocities were being made, new publications by British historians and political scientists were uncritically extolling the British ‘model' or ‘way' of counterinsurgency, asserting that the many positive lessons to be drawn, especially from Northern Ireland, should be applied in Iraq and Afghanistan. This conclusion is also drawn by the British military's Operation Banner report (2006) into its role in the North, and the claim informs the new JDP 3-40 (2010) counterinsurgency doctrine for the British Army. To term a 30-year-long war that ended in military stalemate and political compromise a ‘success' is by any benchmark delusional…"

link

Armand

Yet these conflicts were consistently interpreted almost universally by British academics as exemplifying the best practice of counterinsurgency … To term a 30-year-long war that ended in military stalemate and political compromise a ‘success' is by any benchmark delusional

It was certainly successful for
-career military personnel who needed combat experience to get promoted
-career intelligence personnel
-makers of weapons and other military equipment at all levels
-politicians on all sides who needed causes

Counter-insurgency isn't primarily about military outcomes. I don't think that it ever has been (looking at you, Julius Caesar and Thutmose III).

Classic Marxist soap-boxing:

- Pick holes in the process
- Allude to holes in the administration (I note that Thatcher got shoe-horned into his argument [NB she was a chemist, not a soldier])
- Don't bother suggesting better solutions

The number of atrocities is few, and the ratio of atrocities to conflicts is very, very low.

Britland conducted it's colonial policing on the cheap – that's why nasty people like Kitson are required – they provide value.

Thanks

Armand