Revolutionaries (30 page)

But if the guerrilla force is an amalgam of outside cadres and
local recruits, it will nevertheless have been entirely transformed. It will not only have unprecedented cohesion, discipline and morale, developed by systematic education (in literacy as well as military techniques) and political training but unprecedented long-range mobility. The ‘Long March' transferred Mao's Red army from one end of China to the other, and Tito's partisans achieved similar migrations after similar defeats. And wherever the guerrilla army goes, it will apply the essential principles of guerrilla war which are, almost by definition, inapplicable by orthodox forces: (
a
) To pay for everything supplied by the local population; (
b
) not to rape the local women; (
c
) to bring land, justice and schools wherever they go; and (
d
) never to live better than, or otherwise than, the local inhabitants.

Such forces, operating as part of a nationwide political movement and under conditions of popular support, have proved themselves extraordinarily formidable. At their best they simply cannot be defeated by orthodox military operations. Even when less successful, they can be defeated, according to the calculations of British counter-insurgency experts in Malaya and elsewhere, only by a
minimum
of ten men on the ground for every single guerrilla; that is to say, in South Vietnam by a
minimum
of something like a million Americans and puppet Vietnamese. (In fact, the 8,000 Malayan guerrillas immobilized 140,000 soldiers and policemen.) As the United States is now discovering, orthodox military methods are quite beside the point; bombs don't work unless there is something other than paddies to make craters in. The ‘official' or foreign forces soon realize that the only way to fight guerrillas is by attacking their base, i.e. the civilian population. Various ways of doing this have been proposed, from the old-fashioned Nazi method of treating all civilians as potential guerrillas, through more selective massacre and torture, to the presently popular device of kidnapping entire populations and concentrating them in fortified village compounds, in the hope of depriving the guerrillas of
their indispensable source of supplies and intelligence. The American forces, with their usual taste for solving social problems by technological means, appear to have a preference for destroying everything over large areas, presumably in the hope either that all guerrillas in the area will be killed along with the rest of the human, animal and vegetable life, or that somehow all those trees and underbrush will be vaporized, leaving the guerrillas standing up and visible, where they can be bombed like real soldiers. Barry Goldwater's plan to defoliate the Vietnamese forests by nuclear bombs was no more grotesque than what is actually being attempted along these lines.

The difficulty with such methods is that they merely confirm the local population in their support of the guerrillas, and provide the latter with a constant supply of recruits. Hence the anti-guerrillas devise plans to cut the ground from under the enemy's feet by improving the economic and social conditions of the local population, rather in the manner of King Frederick William I of Prussia who is reported to have run after his subjects in Berlin, beating them with his tick and shouting: ‘I want you to love me.' But it is not easy to convince people that their conditions are being improved while their wives and children are being drenched in burning oil, especially when the people doing the drenching live (by Vietnamese standards) like princes.

Anti-guerrilla governments are more likely to talk about, say, giving peasants the land, than actually doing it, but even when they carry out a series of such reforms they do not necessarily gain the gratitude of the peasants. Oppressed peoples do not want economic improvement alone. The most formidable insurrectionary movements (including very notably the Vietnamese) are those that combine national and social elements. A people who want bread and
also
independence cannot be conciliated merely by a more generous distribution of bread. The British met the revolutionary agitation of the Irish under Parnell and Davitt in the 1880s by a combination of coercion and
economic reform, and not without success – but this did not forestall the Irish revolutionary movement which threw them out in 1916–22.

Nevertheless, there are limitations to a guerrilla army's ability to win a war, though it usually has effective means to avoid losing one. In the first place, guerrilla strategy is by no means applicable everywhere on a national scale, and that is why it has failed, or partly failed, in a number of countries, e.g. Malaya and Burma. Internal divisions and hostilities – racial, religions, etc. – within a country or a region may limit the guerrilla base to one part of the people, while automatically providing a potential base for anti-guerrilla action in another. To take an obvious case; the Irish revolution of 1916–22, essentially a guerrilla operation, succeeded in the twenty-six counties but not in Northern Ireland, despite a common frontier and active or passive help from the south. (The British government, by the way, never made this sympathy an excuse to drop bombs on the Shannon barrage in order to force the Dublin government to cease its aggression against the free world.)

Again, there may be peoples so inexperienced or so lacking in effective cadres as to allow large-scale and wide-based guerrilla insurrections to be suppressed, at least for some time. That is perhaps the case in Angola. Or the geography of a country may facilitate local guerrilla action, but make coordinated guerrilla warfare remarkably difficult (as perhaps in some Latin American countries). Or a people may be simply too small to win independence by direct action without major outside aid against a combination of occupying countries determined to suppress them. This may be the case with the Kurds, superb and persistent guerrilla fighters of the traditional kind, but who have never achieved their independence.

Beyond these obstacles which vary from country to country, there is the problem of cities. However great the support for the movement in the cities, however urban the origin of its leaders,
cities and especially capital cities are the last place a guerrilla army will capture or, unless very badly advised, tackle. The Chinese Communists' road to Shanghai and Canton ran via Yenan. The Italian and French resistance movements timed their urban insurrections (Paris, 1944; Milan and Turin, 1945) for the very last moments before the arrival of Allied armies, and the Poles who did not (Warsaw, 1943) were wiped out. The power of modern industry, transport and administration can be neutralized for a significant length of time only where it lies thin on the ground. Small-scale harassment, such as the cutting of one or two roads and rail tracks, can disrupt military movement and administration in difficult rural terrain, but not in the big city. Guerrilla action or its equivalent is entirely possible in the city – after all, how many bank robbers are ever caught in London – and there have been some recent examples of it, for instance in Barcelona in the late 1940s, and various cities in Latin America. But it has little more than nuisance value, and merely serves to create a general atmosphere of lack of confidence in the efficiency of the regime, or to tie down armed forces and police which might be better used elsewhere.

Finally, the most crucial limitation of guerrilla warfare is that it cannot win until it becomes
regular
warfare, in which case it must meet its enemies on their strongest ground. It is comparatively easy for a widely backed guerrilla movement to eliminate official power from the countryside, except for the strong points actually physically occupied by armed forces, and to leave in government or occupation control no more than the isolated cities and garrisons, linked by a few main roads or railroads (and that only by daylight), and by air or radio. The real problem is to get beyond that point. Textbooks devote a good deal of attention to this ultimate phase of guerrilla war, which the Chinese and Vietnamese handled with brilliant success against Chiang Kai-shek and the French. However, those successes should not include mistaken generalizations. The real strength of guerrilla armies lies not in their ability to turn themselves into
regular armies capable of expelling other conventional forces but in their political strength. The total withdrawal of popular support may produce the collapse of local governments often – as in China and Vietnam – heralded by mass desertions to the guerrillas; a crucial military success by the guerrillas may bring this collapse into the open. Fidel Castro's rebel army did not win Havana; when it had demonstrated that it could not only hold the Sierra Maestra but also take the provincial capital of Santiago, the government apparatus of Batista collapsed.

Foreign occupying forces are likely to be less vulnerable and less inefficient. However, even they may be convinced that they are in a war they cannot win, that even their tenuous hold can be maintained only at quite disproportionate cost. The decision to call off the wasting game is naturally humiliating, and there are always good reasons for postponing it, because it will rarely happen that the foreign forces have been decisively defeated, even in local actions like Dienbienphu. The Americans are still in Saigon, apparently drinking their bourbon peacefully, except perhaps for an occasional bomb in a cafe. Their columns still criss-cross the country apparently at will, and their losses are not much greater than those from traffic accidents at home. Their aircraft are dropping bombs wherever they like, and there is still somebody who can be called the prime minister of ‘free' Vietnam, though it may be hard to forecast from one day to the next who he will be.

Thus, it can always be argued that just one more effort will tip the balance: more troops, more bombs, more massacres and torture, more ‘social missions'. The history of the Algerian war anticipates the one in Vietnam in this respect. By the time it was over, half a million Frenchmen were in uniform there (against a total Moslem population of nine million, or one soldier to every eighteen inhabitants, not counting the pro-French local white population), and the army was still asking for more including the destruction of the French Republic.

It is hard, in such circumstances, to cut one's losses, but there are occasions when no other decision makes sense. Some governments may take it earlier than others. The British evacuated Ireland and Israel well before their military position had become untenable. The French hung on for nine years in Vietnam and for seven years in Algeria, but went in the end. For what is the alternative? The old style of local or marginal guerrilla actions, like border raiding by tribesmen, could be isolated or contained by various relatively cheap devices which did not interfere with the ordinary life of a country or its occupiers. A few squadrons of aircraft could occasionally bomb villages (a favourite British device in the Middle East between the wars), a military frontier zone could be established (as on the old north-west frontier of India), and in extreme cases government tacitly left some remote and disturbed region to its own devices for a while, merely seeing to it that the trouble did not spread. In a situation like that of Vietnam today or of Algeria in the later 1950s, this will simply not work. If a people does not want to be ruled in the old way any more, there is nothing much that can be done. Of course, if elections had been held in South Vietnam in 1956, as was provided by the Geneva agreements, the views of its people might have been discovered at considerably less cost.

Where does this leave the anti-insurrectionaries? It would be foolish to pretend that guerrilla war is an invariable recipe for successful revolution or that its hopes, as of now, are realistic in more than a limited number of relatively underdeveloped countries. The theorists of ‘counter-insurgency' can therefore take comfort in the thought that they need not
always
lose. But that is not the point. When, for one reason or another, a guerrilla war has become genuinely national and nationwide, and has expelled the official administration from wide stretches of the countryside, the chances of defeating it are zero. That the Mau Mau were defeated in Kenya is no help to the Americans in
Vietnam; all the less help when we remember that Kenya is now independent, and the Mau Mau regarded as pioneers and heroes of the national struggle. That the Burmese government has never been overthrown by guerrillas was no help to the French in Algeria. The problem of President Johnson is Vietnam, not the Philippines, and the situation in Vietnam is lost.

What remain in such a situation are illusions and terror. The rationalizations of today's Washington policy were all anticipated in Algeria. We were told by French official spokesmen that the ordinary Algerian was on the side of France, or if not actually pro-French, that he wanted only peace and quiet but was terrorized by the
FLN
. We were told, practically once a week, that the situation had improved, that it was now stabilized, that another month should see the forces of order regain the initiative, that all they needed was another few thousand soldiers and another few million francs. We were told that the rebellion would soon die down, once it was deprived of its foreign sanctuary and source of supplies. That sanctuary (Tunisia) was bombed and the border hermetically sealed. We were told that if only the great centre of Moslem subversion in Cairo could be eliminated, everything would be all right. The French therefore made war on Egypt. In the last stages we were told that there might just conceivably be some people who
really
wanted to get rid of the French, but since the
FLN
obviously did not represent the Algerian people, but only a gang of ideological infiltrators, it would be grossly unfair to the Algerians to negotiate with them. We were told about the minorities which had to be protected against terror. The only thing we were not told was that France would if necessary use nuclear weapons, because the French didn't then have any. What was the result? Algeria is today governed by the
FLN
.