--- /dev/null
+[[!meta title="The Counterrevolution"]]
+
+By Bernard E. Harcourt.
+
+## Genealogy
+
+* Mass-scale warfare
+ * MAD
+ * Massive retaliation
+ * Game theory
+ * Systems analisys
+ * Nuclear war
+
+* Counterinsurgency
+ * Modern warfare
+ * Unconventional, counter-guerrila
+ * Special Ops
+ * Surgical operations
+
+* Mao's “Eight Points of Attention” plus two principles:
+ 1. Talk to people politely.
+ 2. Observe fair dealing in all business transactions.
+ 3. Return everything borrowed from the people.
+ 4. Pay for anything damaged.
+ 5. Do not beat or scold the people.
+ 6. Do not damage crops.
+ 7. Do not molest women.
+ 8. Do not ill-treat prisoners-of-war. 6
+
+ Two other principles were central to Mao’s revolutionary doctrine: first, the
+ importance of having a unified political and military power structure that
+ consolidated, in the same hands, political and military considerations; and
+ second, the importance of psychological warfare. More specifically, as Paret
+ explained, “proper psychological measures could create and maintain ideological
+ cohesion among fighters and their civilian supporters.” 7
+
+* Paret (1960) tasks of “counterguerrilla action”:
+ 1. The military defeat of the guerrilla forces.
+ 2. The separation of the guerrilla from the population.
+ 3. The reestablishment of governmental authority and the development of a viable social order.
+
+* Petraeus: 3 key pillars:
+ 1. "The first is that the most important struggle is over the population."
+ 2. "Allegiance of the masses can only be secured
+ by separating the small revolutionary minority from the passive majority, and by
+ isolating, containing, and ultimately eliminating the active minority. In his
+ accompanying guidelines,"
+ 3. "Success turns on collecting information on
+ everyone in the population. Total information is essential to properly distinguish
+ friend from foe and then extract the revolutionary minority. It is intelligence—
+ total information awareness—that renders the counterinsurgency possible."
+
+## Excerpts
+
+### Torture
+
+ In Modern Warfare, Trinquier quietly but resolutely condoned torture. The
+ interrogations and related tasks were considered police work, as opposed to
+ military operations, but they had the exact same mission: the complete
+ destruction of the insurgent group. Discussing the typical interrogation of a
+ detainee, captured and suspected of belonging to a terrorist organization,
+ Trinquier wrote: “No lawyer is present for such an interrogation. If the prisoner
+ gives the information requested, the examination is quickly terminated; if not,
+ specialists must force his secret from him. Then, as a soldier, he must face the
+ suffering, and perhaps the death, he has heretofore managed to avoid.” Trinquier
+ described specialists forcing secrets out of suspects using scientific methods that
+ did not injure the “integrity of individuals,” but it was clear what those
+ “scientific” methods entailed. 4 As the war correspondent Bernard Fall suggests,
+ the political situation in Algeria offered Trinquier the opportunity to develop “a
+ Cartesian rationale” to justify the use of torture in modern warfare. 5
+ Similarly minded commanders championed the use of torture, indefinite
+ detention, and summary executions. They made no bones about it.
+
+ [...]
+
+ In his autobiographical account published in 2001, Services Spéciaux. Algérie
+ 1955–1957, General Paul Aussaresses admits to the brutal methods that were the
+ cornerstone of his military strategy. 6 He makes clear that his approach to
+ counterinsurgency rested on a three-pronged strategy, which included first,
+ intelligence work; second, torture; and third, summary executions. The
+ intelligence function was primordial because the insurgents’ strategy in Algeria
+ was to infiltrate and integrate the population, to blend in perfectly, and then
+ gradually to involve the population in the struggle. To combat this insurgent
+ strategy required intelligence—the only way to sort the dangerous
+ revolutionaries from the passive masses—and then, violent repression. “The first
+ step was to dispatch the clean-up teams, of which I was a part,” Aussaresses
+ writes. “Rebel leaders had to be identified, neutralized, and eliminated discreetly.
+ By seeking information on FLN leaders I would automatically be able to capture
+ the rebels and make them talk.” 7
+ The rebels were made to talk by means of torture. Aussaresses firmly
+ believed that torture was the best way to extract information. It also served to
+ terrorize the radical minority and, in the process, to reduce it. The practice of
+ torture was “widely used in Algeria,” Aussaresses acknowledges. Not on every
+ prisoner, though; many spoke freely. “It was only when a prisoner refused to talk
+ or denied the obvious that torture was used.” 8
+ Aussaresses claims he was introduced to torture in Algeria by the policemen
+ there, who used it regularly. But it quickly became routine to him. “Without any
+ hesitation,” he writes, “the policemen showed me the technique used for
+ ‘extreme’ interrogations: first, a beating, which in most cases was enough; then
+ other means, such as electric shocks, known as the famous ‘gégène’; and finally
+ water.” Aussaresses explains: “Torture by electric shock was made possible by
+ generators used to power field radio transmitters, which were extremely
+ common in Algeria. Electrodes were attached to the prisoner’s ears or testicles,
+ then electric charges of varying intensity were turned on. This was apparently a
+ well-known procedure and I assumed that the policemen at Philippeville [in
+ Algeria] had not invented it.” 9 (Similar methods had, in fact, been used earlier in
+ Indochina.)
+
+ Aussaresses could not have been more clear:
+
+ The methods I used were always the same: beatings, electric shocks, and, in particular, water
+ torture, which was the most dangerous technique for the prisoner. It never lasted for more than one
+ hour and the suspects would speak in the hope of saving their own lives. They would therefore
+ either talk quickly or never.
+
+ The French historian Benjamin Stora confirms the generalized use of torture.
+ He reports that in the Battle of Algiers, under the commanding officer, General
+ Jacques Massu, the paratroopers conducted massive arrests and “practiced
+ torture” using “electrodes […] dunking in bathtubs, beatings.” General Massu
+ himself would later acknowledge the use of torture. In a rebuttal he wrote in
+ 1971 to the film The Battle of Algiers, Massu described torture as “a cruel
+ necessity.” 10 According to Aussaresses, torture was condoned at the highest
+ levels of the French government. “Regarding the use of torture,” Aussaresses
+
+ [...]
+
+ For Aussaresses, as for Roger Trinquier, torture and disappearances were
+ simply an inevitable byproduct of an insurgency—inevitable on both sides of the
+ struggle. Because terrorism was inscribed in revolutionary strategy, it had to be
+ used in its repression as well. In a fascinating televised debate in 1970 with the
+ FLN leader and producer of The Battle of Algiers, Saadi Yacef, Trinquier
+ confidently asserted that torture was simply a necessary and inevitable part of
+ modern warfare. Torture will take place. Insurgents know it. In fact, they
+ anticipate it. The passage is striking:
+
+ I have to tell you. Whether you’re for or against torture, it makes no difference. Torture is a
+ weapon that will be used in every insurgent war. One has to know that… One has to know that in
+ an insurgency, you are going to be tortured.
+ And you have to mount a subversive organization in light of that and in function of torture. It is
+ not a question of being for or against torture. You have to know that all arrested prisoners in an
+ insurgency will speak—unless they commit suicide. Their confession will always be obtained. So a
+ subversive organization must be mounted in function of that, so that a prisoner who speaks does
+ not give away the whole organization.16
+
+ “Torture?” asks the lieutenant aide de camp in Henri Alleg’s 1958 exposé
+ The Question. “You don’t make war with choirboys.” 18 Alleg, a French
+ journalist and director of the Alger républicain newspaper, was himself detained
+ and tortured by French paratroopers in Algiers. His book describes the
+ experience in detail, and in his account, torture was the inevitable product of
+ colonization and the anticolonial struggle. As Jean-Paul Sartre writes in his
+
+ [...]
+
+ In an arresting part of The Battle of Algiers it becomes clear that many of the
+ French officers who tortured suspected FLN members had themselves, as
+ members of the French Resistance, been victims of torture at the hands of the
+ Gestapo. It is a shocking moment. We know, of course, that abuse often begets
+ abuse; but nevertheless, one would have hoped that a victim of torture would
+ recoil from administering it to others. Instead, as Trinquier suggests, torture
+ became normalized in Algeria. This is, as Sartre describes it, the “terrible truth”:
+ “If fifteen years are enough to transform victims into executioners, then this
+ behavior is not more than a matter of opportunity and occasion. Anybody, at any
+ time, may equally find himself victim or executioner.” 20
+
+### Misc
+
+ The central tenet of counterinsurgency theory is that populations—originally
+ colonial populations, but now all populations, including our own—are made up
+ of a small active minority of insurgents, a small group of those opposed to the
+ insurgency, and a large passive majority that can be swayed one way or the other.
+ The principal objective of counterinsurgency is to gain the allegiance of that
+ passive majority. And its defining feature is that counterinsurgency is not just a
+ military strategy, but more importantly a political technique. Warfare, it turns
+ out, is political.
+
+ On the basis of these tenets, counterinsurgency theorists developed and
+ refined over several decades three core strategies. First, obtain total information:
+ every communication, all personal data, all metadata of everyone in the
+ population must be collected and analyzed. Not just the active minority, but
+ everyone in the population. Total information awareness is necessary to
+ distinguish between friend and foe, and then to cull the dangerous minority from
+ the docile majority. Second, eradicate the active minority: once the dangerous
+ minority has been identified, it must be separated from the general population
+
+ [...]
+
+ and eliminated by any means possible—it must be isolated, contained, and
+ ultimately eradicated. Third, gain the allegiance of the general population:
+ everything must be done to win the hearts and minds of the passive majority. It is
+ their allegiance and loyalty, and passivity in the end, that matter most.
+ Counterinsurgency warfare has become our new governing paradigm in the
+
+ [...]
+
+ imagination. It drives our foreign affairs and now our domestic policy as well.
+ But it was not always that way. For most of the twentieth century, we
+ governed ourselves differently in the United States: our political imagination
+ was dominated by the massive battlefields of the Marne, of Verdun, by the
+ Blitzkrieg and the fire-bombing of Dresden—and by the use of the atomic bomb.
+
+ [...]
+
+ warfare.
+ Yet the transition from large-scale battlefield warfare to anticolonial struggles
+ and the Cold War in the 1950s, and to the war against terrorism since 9/11, has
+ brought about a historic transformation in our political imagination and in the
+ way that we govern ourselves. In contrast to the earlier sweeping military
+ paradigm, we now engage in surgical microstrategies of counterinsurgency
+ abroad and at home. This style of warfare—the very opposite of large-scale
+ battlefield wars like World War I or II—involves total surveillance, surgical
+ operations, targeted strikes to eliminate small enclaves, psychological tactics,
+ and political techniques to gain the trust of the people. The primary target is no
+ longer a regular army, so much as it is the entire population. It involves a new
+
+ [...]
+
+ The result is radical. We are now witnessing the triumph of a counterinsurgency
+ model of government on American soil in the absence of an insurgency, or
+ uprising, or revolution. The perfected logic of counterinsurgency now applies
+ regardless of whether there is a domestic insurrection. We now face a
+ counterinsurgency without insurgency. A counterrevolution without revolution.
+ The pure form of counterrevolution, without a revolution, as a simple modality
+ of governing at home—what could be called “The Counterrevolution.”
+ Counterinsurgency practices were already being deployed domestically in the
+
+ [...]
+
+ new internal enemies. It is vital that we come to grips with this new mode of
+ governing and recognize its unique dangers, that we see the increasingly
+ widespread domestication of counterinsurgency strategies and the new
+ technologies of digital surveillance, drones, and hypermilitarized police for what
+ they are: a counterrevolution without a revolution. We are facing something
+ radical, new, and dangerous. It has been long in the making, historically. It is
+ time to identify and expose it.
+
+
+ [...]
+
+ so on. I argued that we have become an “expository society” where we
+ increasingly exhibit ourselves online, and in the process, freely give away our
+ most personal and private data. No longer an Orwellian or a panoptic society
+ characterized by a powerful central government forcibly surveilling its citizens
+ from on high, ours is fueled by our own pleasures, proclivities, joys, and
+ narcissism. And even when we try to resist these temptations, we have
+ practically no choice but to use the Internet and shed our digital traces.
+ I had not fully grasped, though, the relation of our new expository society to
+
+ [...]
+
+ strikes, indefinite detention, or our new hypermilitarized police force at home.
+ But as the fog lifts from 9/11, the full picture becomes clear. The expository
+ society is merely the first prong of The Counterrevolution. And only by tying
+ together our digital exposure with our new mode of counterinsurgency
+ governance can we begin to grasp the whole architecture of our contemporary
+ political condition. And only by grasping the full implications of this new mode
+ of governing—The Counterrevolution—will we be able to effectively resist it
+ and overcome.
+
+ [...]
+
+ approach targeting small revolutionary insurgencies and what were mostly
+ Communist uprisings. Variously called “unconventional,” “antiguerrilla” or
+ “counterguerrilla,” “irregular,” “sublimited,” “counterrevolutionary,” or simply
+ “modern” warfare, this burgeoning domain of military strategy flourished during
+ France’s wars in Indochina and Algeria, Britain’s wars in Malaya and Palestine,
+ and America’s war in Vietnam. It too was nourished by the RAND Corporation,
+ which was one of the first to see the potential of what the French commander
+ Roger Trinquier called “modern warfare” or the “French view of
+ counterinsurgency.” It offered, in the words of one of its leading students, the
+ historian Peter Paret, a vital counterweight “at the opposite end of the spectrum
+ from rockets and the hydrogen bomb.” 2
+ Like nuclear-weapon strategy, the counterinsurgency model grew out of a
+
+
+ [...]
+
+ from rockets and the hydrogen bomb.” 2
+ Like nuclear-weapon strategy, the counterinsurgency model grew out of a
+ combination of strategic game theory and systems theorizing; but unlike nuclear
+ strategy, which was primarily a response to the Soviet Union, it developed more
+ in response to another formidable game theorist, Mao Zedong. The formative
+ moment for counterinsurgency theory was not the nuclear confrontation that
+ characterized the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the earlier Chinese Civil War that led
+ to Mao’s victory in 1949—essentially, when Mao turned guerrilla tactics into a
+ revolutionary war that overthrew a political regime. The central methods and
+ practices of counterinsurgency warfare were honed in response to Mao’s
+ strategies and the ensuing anticolonial struggles in Southeast Asia, the Middle
+ East, and North Africa that imitated Mao’s approach. 3 Those struggles for
+ independence were the breeding soil for the development and perfection of
+ unconventional warfare.
+ By the turn of the twentieth century, when President George W. Bush would
+
+ [...]
+
+ T HE COUNTERINSURGENCY MODEL CAN BE TRACED BACK through several different
+ genealogies. One leads to British colonial rule in India and Southeast Asia, to the
+ insurgencies there, and to the eventual British redeployment and modernization
+ of counterinsurgency strategies in Northern Ireland and Britain at the height of
+ the Irish Republican Army’s independence struggles. This first genealogy draws
+ heavily on the writings of the British counterinsurgency theorist Sir Robert
+ Thompson, the chief architect of Great Britain’s antiguerrilla strategies in
+ Malaya from 1948 to 1959. Another genealogy traces back to the American
+ colonial experience in the Philippines at the beginning of the twentieth century.
+ Others lead back to Trotsky and Lenin in Russia, to Lawrence of Arabia during
+ the Arab Revolt, or even to the Spanish uprising against Napoleon—all
+ mentioned, at least briefly, in General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency field
+ manual. Alternative genealogies reach back to the political theories of
+ Montesquieu or John Stuart Mill, while some go even further to antiquity and to
+ the works of Polybius, Herodotus, and Tacitus. 1
+ But the most direct antecedent of counterinsurgency warfare as embraced by
+ the United States after 9/11 was the French military response in the late 1950s
+ and 1960s to the anticolonial wars in Indochina and Algeria. This genealogy
+ passes through three important figures—the historian Peter Paret and the French
+ commanders David Galula and Roger Trinquier—and, through them, it traces
+ back to Mao Zedong. It is Mao’s idea of the political nature of
+ counterinsurgency that would prove so influential in the United States. Mao
+ politicized warfare in a manner that would come back to haunt us today. The
+ French connection also laid the seeds of a tension between brutality and legality
+ that would plague counterinsurgency practices to the present—at least, until the
+ United States discovered, or rediscovered, a way to resolve the tension by
+ legalizing the brutality.
+
+
+ [...]
+
+ warfare theory. 3
+ A founding principle of revolutionary insurgency—what Paret referred to as
+ “the principal lesson” that Mao taught—was that “an inferior force could
+ outpoint a modern army so long as it succeeded in gaining at least the tacit
+ support of the population in the contested area.” 4 The core idea was that the
+ military battle was less decisive than the political struggle over the loyalty and
+ allegiance of the masses: the war is fought over the population or, in Mao’s
+ words, “The army cannot exist without the people.” 5
+ As a result of this interdependence, the insurgents had to treat the general
+ population well to gain its support. On this basis Mao formulated early on, in
+ 1928, his “Eight Points of Attention” for army personnel:
+
+ 1. Talk to people politely.
+ 2. Observe fair dealing in all business transactions.
+ 3. Return everything borrowed from the people.
+ 4. Pay for anything damaged.
+ 5. Do not beat or scold the people.
+ 6. Do not damage crops.
+ 7. Do not molest women.
+ 8. Do not ill-treat prisoners-of-war. 6
+
+ Two other principles were central to Mao’s revolutionary doctrine: first, the
+ importance of having a unified political and military power structure that
+ consolidated, in the same hands, political and military considerations; and
+ second, the importance of psychological warfare. More specifically, as Paret
+ explained, “proper psychological measures could create and maintain ideological
+ cohesion among fighters and their civilian supporters.” 7
+ Revolutionary warfare, in Paret’s view, boiled down to a simple equation:
+
+ [...]
+
+ the population.” 10
+ Of course, neither Paret nor other strategists were so naïve as to think that
+ Mao invented guerrilla warfare. Paret spent much of his research tracing the
+ antecedents and earlier experiments with insurgent and counterinsurgency
+ warfare. “Civilians taking up arms and fighting as irregulars are as old as war,”
+ Paret emphasized. Caesar had to deal with them in Gaul and Germania, the
+ British in the American colonies or in South Africa with the Boers, Napoleon in
+ Spain, and on and on. In fact, as Paret stressed, the very term “guerrilla”
+ originated in the Spanish peasant resistance to Napoleon after the Spanish
+ monarchy had fallen between 1808 and 1813. Paret developed case studies of the
+
+ [...]
+
+ But for purposes of describing the “guerre révolutionnaire” of the 1960s, the
+ most pertinent and timely objects of study were Mao Zedong and the Chinese
+ revolution. And on the basis of that particular conception of revolutionary war,
+ Paret set forth a model of counterrevolutionary warfare. Drawing principally on
+ French military practitioners and theorists, Paret delineated a three-pronged
+ strategy focused on a mixture of intelligence gathering, psychological warfare on
+ both the population and the subversives, and severe treatment of the rebels. In
+ Guerrillas in the 1960’s, Paret reduced the tasks of “counterguerrilla action” to
+ the following:
+ 1. The military defeat of the guerrilla forces.
+ 2. The separation of the guerrilla from the population.
+ 3. The reestablishment of governmental authority and the development of a
+ viable social order. 12
+
+ [...]
+
+ interact.” 13
+ So the central task, according to Paret, was to attack the rebel’s popular
+ support so that he would “lose his hold over the people, and be isolated from
+ them.” There were different ways to accomplish this, from widely publicized
+ military defeats and sophisticated psychological warfare to the resettlement of
+ populations—in addition to other more coercive measures. But one rose above
+ the others for Paret: to encourage the people to form progovernment militias and
+ fight against the guerrillas. This approach had the most potential, Paret observes:
+ “Once a substantial number of members of a community commit violence on
+
+
+ [...]
+
+ In sum, the French model of
+ counterrevolutionary warfare, in Paret’s view, had to be understood as the
+ inverse of revolutionary warfare.
+
+
+ [...]
+
+ The main sources for Paret’s synthesis were the writings and practices of French
+ commanders on the ground, especially Roger Trinquier and David Galula,
+ though there were others as well. 15 Trinquier, one of the first French
+ commanders to theorize modern warfare based on his firsthand experience, had a
+
+
+ [...]
+
+ persisting in repeating its efforts.” Trinquier argues that this new form of modern
+ warfare called for “an interlocking system of actions—political, economic,
+ psychological, military,” grounded on “Countrywide Intelligence.” As Trinquier
+ emphasizes, “since modern warfare asserts its presence on the totality of the
+ population, we have to be everywhere informed.” Informed, in order to know and
+ target the population and wipe out the insurgency. 17
+ The other leading counterinsurgency theorist, also with deep firsthand
+
+
+ [...]
+
+ time.’” 19
+ From Mao, Galula drew the central lesson that societies were divided into
+ three groups and that the key to victory was to isolate and eradicate the active
+ minority in order to gain the allegiance of the masses. Galula emphasizes in
+ Counterinsurgency Warfare that the central strategy of counterinsurgency theory
+ “simply expresses the basic tenet of the exercise of political power”:
+ In any situation, whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral
+ majority, and an active minority against the cause.
+
+ [...]
+
+ time.’” 19
+ From Mao, Galula drew the central lesson that societies were divided into
+ three groups and that the key to victory was to isolate and eradicate the active
+ minority in order to gain the allegiance of the masses. Galula emphasizes in
+ Counterinsurgency Warfare that the central strategy of counterinsurgency theory
+ “simply expresses the basic tenet of the exercise of political power”:
+ In any situation, whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral
+ majority, and an active minority against the cause.
+
+ The technique of power consists in relying on the favorable minority in order to rally the neutral
+ majority and to neutralize or eliminate the hostile minority.20
+ The battle was over the general population, Galula emphasized in his
+ Counterinsurgency Warfare, and this tenet represented the key political
+ dimension of a new warfare strategy.
+
+ [...]
+
+ US general David Petraeus picked up right where David Galula and Peter Paret
+ left off. Widely recognized as the leading American thinker and practitioner of
+ counterinsurgency theory—eventually responsible for all coalition troops in Iraq
+ and the architect of the troop surge of 2007—General Petraeus would refine
+
+ [...]
+
+ On this political foundation, General Petraeus’s manual establishes three key
+ pillars—what might be called counterinsurgency’s core principles.
+ The first is that the most important struggle is over the population. In a short
+ set of guidelines that accompanies his field manual, General Petraeus
+ emphasizes: “The decisive terrain is the human terrain. The people are the center
+
+ [...]
+
+ The main battle, then, is over the populace.
+ The second principle is that the allegiance of the masses can only be secured
+ by separating the small revolutionary minority from the passive majority, and by
+ isolating, containing, and ultimately eliminating the active minority. In his
+ accompanying guidelines, General Petraeus emphasizes: “Seek out and eliminate
+ those who threaten the population. Don’t let them intimidate the innocent. Target
+ the whole network, not just individuals.” 25
+ The third core principle is that success turns on collecting information on
+ everyone in the population. Total information is essential to properly distinguish
+ friend from foe and then extract the revolutionary minority. It is intelligence—
+ total information awareness—that renders the counterinsurgency possible. It is
+
+ [...]
+
+ paraphrasing the French commander, underscores the primacy of political factors
+ in counterinsurgency. “General Chang Ting-chen of Mao Zedong’s central
+ committee once stated that revolutionary war was 80 percent political action and
+ only 20 percent military,” the manual reads. Then it warns: “At the beginning of
+ a COIN operation, military actions may appear predominant as security forces
+ conduct operations to secure the populace and kill or capture insurgents;
+ however, political objectives must guide the military’s approach.” 27
+ Chapter Two opens with an epigraph from David Galula’s book: “Essential
+
+ [...]
+
+ General David Petraeus learned, but more importantly popularized, Mao
+ Zedong’s central lesson: counterinsurgency warfare is political. It is a strategy
+ for winning over the people. It is a strategy for governing. And it is quite telling
+ that a work so indebted to Mao and midcentury French colonial thinkers would
+ become so influential post-9/11. Petraeus’s manual contained a roadmap for a
+ new paradigm of governing. As the fog lifts from 9/11, it is becoming
+ increasingly clear what lasting impact Mao had on our government of self and
+ others today.
+
+ [...]
+
+ D eveloped by military commanders and strategists over decades of anticolonial
+ wars, counterinsurgency warfare was refined, deployed, and tested in the years
+ following 9/11. Since then, the modern warfare paradigm has been distilled into
+ a concise three-pronged strategy:
+ 1. Bulk-collect all intelligence about everyone in the population—every
+ piece of data and metadata available. (total information awareness)
+
+ [...]
+
+ 2. Identify and eradicate the revolutionary minority. Total information about
+ everyone makes it possible to discriminate between friend and foe. Once
+ suspicion attaches, individuals must be treated severely to extract all
+ possible information, with enhanced interrogation techniques if
+ necessary; and if they are revealed to belong to the active minority, they
+ must be disposed of through detention, rendition, deportation, or drone
+ strike—in other words, targeted assassination. Unlike conventional
+ soldiers from the past, these insurgents are dangerous because of their
+
+ [...]
+
+ 3. Pacify the masses. The population must be distracted, entertained,
+ satisfied, occupied, and most importantly, neutralized, or deradicalized if
+ necessary, in order to ensure that the vast preponderance of ordinary
+ individuals remain just that—ordinary. This third prong reflects the
+ “population-centric” dimension of counterinsurgency theory. Remember,
+ in this new way of seeing, the population is the battlefield. Its hearts and
+ minds must be assured. In the digital age, this can be achieved, first, by
+ targeting enhanced content (such as sermons by moderate imams) to
+ deradicalize susceptible persons—in other words, by deploying new
+ digital techniques of psychological warfare and propaganda. Second, by
+ providing just the bare minimum in terms of welfare and humanitarian
+ assistance—like rebuilding schools, distributing some cash, and
+ bolstering certain government institutions. As General Petraeus’s field
+
+### Torture and surveilance
+
+ T HE ATTACK ON THE W ORLD T RADE C ENTER SHOWED THE weakness of American
+ intelligence gathering. Top secret information obtained by one agency was
+ silo’ed from others, making it impossible to aggregate intelligence and obtain a
+ full picture of the security threats. The CIA knew that two of the 9/11 hijackers
+ were on American soil in San Diego, but didn’t share the information with the
+ FBI, who were actively trying to track them down. 1 September 11 was a
+ crippling intelligence failure, and in the immediacy of that failure many in
+ President George W. Bush’s administration felt the need to do something radical.
+ Greater sharing of intelligence, naturally. But much more as well. Two main
+ solutions were devised, or revived: total surveillance and tortured interrogations.
+ They represent the first prong of the counterinsurgency approach.
+ In effect, 9/11 set the stage both for total NSA surveillance and torture as
+ forms of total information awareness. The former functioned at the most virtual
+ or ethereal, or “digital” level, by creating the material for data-mining and
+ analysis. The latter operated at the most bodily or physical, or “analog” level,
+ obtaining information directly from suspects and detainees in Iraq, Pakistan,
+ Afghanistan, and elsewhere. But both satisfied the same goal: total information
+ awareness, the first tactic of counterinsurgency warfare.
+
+Census
+
+ What is clear, though—as I document in Exposed—is that the myriad NSA,
+ FBI, CIA, and allied intelligence agencies produce total information, the first
+ and most important prong of the counterinsurgency paradigm. Most important,
+ because both of the other prongs depend on it. As the RAND Corporation notes
+ in its lengthy 519-page report on the current state of counterinsurgency theory
+ and practice, “Effective governance depends on knowing the population,
+ demographically and individually.” The RAND report reminds us that this
+ insight is not novel or new. The report then returns, pointedly for us, to Algeria
+ and the French commander, David Galula: “Galula, in Counterinsurgency
+ Warfare, argued that ‘control of the population begins with a thorough census.
+ Every inhabitant must be registered and given a foolproof identity card.’” 5
+
+ [...]
+
+ Today, that identity card is an IP address, a mobile phone, a digital device, facial
+ recognition, and all our digital stamps. These new digital technologies have
+ made everyone virtually transparent. And with our new ethos of selfies, tweets,
+ Facebook, and Internet surfing, everyone is now exposed.
+
+Enhanced interrogation:
+
+ Second, tortured interrogation. The dual personality of counterinsurgency
+ warfare is nowhere more evident than in the intensive use of torture for
+ information gathering by the United States immediately after 9/11. Fulfilling the
+ first task of counterinsurgency theory—total surveillance—this practice married
+ the most extreme form of brutality associated with modern warfare to the
+ formality of legal process and the rule of law. The combination of inhumanity
+ and legality was spectacular.
+ In the days following 9/11, many in the Bush administration felt there was
+ only one immediate way to address the information shortfall, namely, to engage
+ in “enhanced interrogation” of captured suspected terrorists—another
+ euphemism for torture. Of course, torture of captured suspects would not fix the
+ problem of silo’ed information, but they thought it would at least provide
+ immediate information of any pending attacks. One could say that the United
+ States turned to torture because many in the administration believed the country
+ did not have adequate intelligence capabilities, lacking the spy network or even
+ the language abilities to infiltrate and conduct regular espionage on
+ organizations like Al Qaeda. 6
+ The tortured interrogations combined the extremes of brutality with the
+
+Getting information or "truth" was not the only, perhaps not the main point
+of torture sessions, and maybe not as well the main point for mass surveillance:
+
+ Even the more ordinary instances of “enhanced interrogation” were
+ harrowing—and so often administered, according to the Senate report, after the
+ interrogators believed there was no more information to be had, sometimes even
+ before the detainee had the opportunity to speak.
+
+Torture template:
+
+ Ramzi bin al-Shibh was subjected to this type of treatment immediately upon
+ arrival in detention, even before being interrogated or given an opportunity to
+ cooperate—in what would become a “template” for other detainees. Bin al-
+ Shibh was subjected first to “sensory dislocation” including “shaving bin al-
+ Shibh’s head and face, exposing him to loud noise in a white room with white
+ lights, keeping him ‘unclothed and subjected to uncomfortably cool
+ temperatures,’ and shackling him ‘hand and foot with arms outstretched over his
+ head (with his feet firmly on the floor and not allowed to support his weight with
+ his arms).’” Following that, the interrogation would include “attention grasp,
+ walling, the facial hold, the facial slap… the abdominal slap, cramped
+ confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation beyond 72 hours,
+ and the waterboard, as appropriate to [bin al-Shibh’s] level of resistance.” 8 This
+ template would be used on others—and served as a warning to all.
+ The more extreme forms of torture were also accompanied by the promise of
+
+"Bigeard shrimp":
+
+ The more extreme forms of torture were also accompanied by the promise of
+ life-long solitary confinement or, in the case of death, cremation.
+ Counterinsurgency torture in the past had often been linked to summary
+ disappearances and executions. Under the Bush administration, it was tied to
+ what one might call virtual disappearances.
+ During the Algerian war, as noted already, the widespread use of brutal
+ interrogation techniques meant that those who had been victimized—both the
+ guilty and innocent—became dangerous in the eyes of the French military
+ leadership. FLN members needed to be silenced, forever; but so did others who
+ might be radicalized by the waterboarding or gégène. In Algeria, a simple
+ solution was devised: the tortured would be thrown out from helicopters into the
+ Mediterranean. They became les crevettes de Bigeard, after the notorious French
+ general in Algeria, Marcel Bigeard: “Bigeard’s shrimp,” dumped into the sea,
+ their feet in poured concrete—a technique the French military had apparently
+ experimented with earlier in Indochina.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The CIA would devise a different solution in 2002: either torture the suspect
+ accidentally to death and then cremate his body to avoid detection, or torture the
+ suspect to the extreme and then ensure that he would never again talk to another
+ human being. Abu Zubaydah received the latter treatment. Zubaydah had first
+ been seized and interrogated at length by the FBI, had provided useful
+ information, and was placed in isolation for forty-seven days, the FBI believing
+ that he had no more valuable information. Then the CIA took over, believing he
+ might still be a source. 10 The CIA turned to its more extreme forms of torture—
+ utilizing all ten of its most brutal techniques—but, as a CIA cable from the
+ interrogation team, dated July 15, 2002, records, they realized beforehand that it
+ would either have to cover up the torture if death ensued or ensure that
+ Zubaydah would never talk to another human being again in his lifetime.
+ According to the Senate report, “the cable stated that if Abu Zubaydah were to
+ die during the interrogation, he would be cremated. The interrogation team
+ closed the cable by stating: ‘regardless which [disposition] option we follow
+ however, and especially in light of the planned psychological pressure
+ techniques to be implemented, we need to get reasonable assurances that [Abu
+ Zubaydah] will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his
+ life.’” 11 In response to this request for assurance, a cable from the CIA station
+ gave the interrogation team those assurances, noting that “it was correct in its
+ ‘understanding that the interrogation process takes precedence over preventative
+ medical procedures,’” and then adding in the cable:
+
+KUBARK
+
+ routines were approved at the uppermost level of the US government, by the
+ president of the United States and his closest advisers. These practices were put
+ in place, designed carefully and legally—very legalistically, in fact—to be used
+ on suspected enemies. They were not an aberration. There are, to be sure, long
+ histories written of rogue intelligence services using unauthorized techniques;
+ there is a lengthy record, as well, of CIA ingenuity and creativity in this domain,
+ including, among other examples, the 1963 KUBARK Counterintelligence
+ Interrogation manual. 13 But after 9/11, the blueprint was drawn at the White
+ House and the Pentagon, and it became official US policy—deliberate, debated,
+ well-thought-out, and adopted as legal measures.
+
+
+ [...]
+
+ The Janus face of torture was its formal legality amidst its shocking brutality.
+ Many of the country’s best lawyers and legal scholars, professors at top-ranked
+ law schools, top government attorneys, and later federal judges would pore over
+ statutes and case law to find legal maneuvers to permit torture. The felt need to
+ legitimate and legalize the brutality—and of course, to protect the officials and
+ operatives from later litigation—was remarkable.
+ The documents known collectively as the “torture memos” fell into two
+ categories: first, those legal memos regarding whether the Guantánamo detainees
+ were entitled to POW status under the Geneva Conventions (GPW), written
+ between September 25, 2001, and August 1, 2002; and second, starting in
+ August 2002, the legal memos regarding whether the “enhanced interrogation
+ techniques” envisaged by the CIA amounted to torture prohibited under
+ international law.
+
+How torture was defined to allow torture to happen:
+
+ As Jay Bybee, then at the Office of Legal Counsel and now a
+ federal judge, wrote in his August 1, 2002, memo:
+
+ We conclude that torture as defined in and proscribed by [18 US Code] Sections 2340-2340A,
+ covers only extreme acts. Severe pain is generally of the kind difficult for the victim to endure.
+ Where the pain is physical, it must be of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious
+ physical injury such as death or organ failure. Severe mental pain requires suffering not just at the
+ moment of infliction but also requires lasting psychological harm, such as seen in mental disorders
+ like post-traumatic stress disorder. […] Because the acts inflicting torture are extreme, there is
+ significant range of acts that though they might constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment
+ or punishment fail to rise to the level of torture.22
+
+ This definition of torture was so demanding that it excluded the brutal
+ practices that the United States was using. It set the federal legal standard,
+ essentially, at death or organ failure.
+
+ [...]
+
+ them 26 —and then, effectively, judicial opinions. The executive branch became a
+ minijudiciary, with no effective oversight or judicial review. And in the end, it
+ worked. The men who wrote these memos have never been prosecuted nor
+ seriously taken to task, as a legal matter, for their actions. The American people
+ allowed a quasi-judiciary to function autonomously, during and after. These self-
+ appointed judges wrote the legal briefs, rendered judgment, and wrote the
+ judicial opinions that legitimized these brutal counterinsurgency practices. In the
+ process, they rendered the counterinsurgency fully legal. They inscribed torture
+ within the fabric of law.
+
+ One could go further. The torture memos accomplished a new resolution of
+ the tension between brutality and legality, one that we had not witnessed
+ previously in history. It was an audacious quasi-judicial legality that had rarely
+ been seen before. And by legalizing torture in that way, the Bush administration
+ provided a legal infrastructure for counterinsurgency-as-governance more
+ broadly.
+
+ [...]
+
+ And through this process of legalization, these broader torturous practices
+ spilled over into the second prong of counterinsurgency: the eradication of an
+ active minority. Torture began to function as a way to isolate, punish, and
+ eliminate those suspected of being insurgents.
+
+Bare existence, indefinite detention, incommunication:
+
+ The indefinite detention and brutal ordinary measures served as a way to
+ eliminate these men—captured in the field or traded for reward monies, almost
+ like slaves from yonder. The incommunicado confinement itself satisfied the
+ second prong of counterinsurgency theory. 5 But somehow it also reached further
+ than mere detention, approximating a form of disappearance or virtual death.
+ The conditions these men found themselves in were so extreme, it is almost as if
+ they were as good as dead.
+ Reading Slahi’s numbing descriptions, one cannot help but agree with the
+ philosopher Giorgio Agamben that these men at Guantánamo were, in his words,
+ no more than “bare life.” 6 Agamben’s concept of bare existence captures well
+ the dimensions of dehumanization and degradation that characterized their lives:
+ the camp inmates were reduced to nothing more than bare animal existence.
+ They were no longer human, but things that lived. The indefinite detention and
+ torture at Guantánamo achieved an utter denial of their humanity.
+ Every aspect of their treatment at black sites and detention facilities
+
+### Drone strikes
+
+ This debate between more population-centric proponents and more enemy-
+ centric advocates of counterinsurgency should sound familiar. It replays the
+ controversy over the use of torture or other contested methods within the
+ counterinsurgency paradigm. It replicates the strategic debates between the
+ ruthless and the more decent. It rehearses the tensions between Roger Trinquier
+ and David Galula.
+
+ Yet just as torture is central to certain versions of modern warfare, the drone
+ strike too is just as important to certain variations of the counterinsurgency
+ approach. Drone strikes, in effect, can serve practically all the functions of the
+ second prong of counterinsurgency warfare. Drone strikes eliminate the
+ identified active minority. They instill terror among everyone living near the
+ active minority, dissuading them and anyone else who might contemplate joining
+ the revolutionaries. They project power and infinite capability. They show who
+ has technological superiority. As one Air Force officer says, “The real advantage
+ of unmanned aerial systems is that they allow you to project power without
+ projecting vulnerability.” 18 By terrifying and projecting power, drones dissuade
+ the population from joining the insurgents.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Covered extensively by the news media,
+ drone attacks are popularly believed to have caused even more civilian casualties
+ than is actually the case. The persistence of these attacks on Pakistani territory
+ offends people’s deepest sensibilities, alienates them from their government, and
+ contributes to Pakistan’s instability.” 19
+ In July 2016, the Obama administration released a report estimating the
+
+
+ [...]
+
+ Those in the affected countries typically receive far higher casualty reports.
+ The Pakistan press, for instance, reported that there are about 50 civilians killed
+ for every militant assassinated, resulting in a hit rate of about 2 percent. As
+ Kilcullen and Exum argue, regardless of the exact number, “every one of these
+ dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge,
+ and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as
+ drone strikes have increased.” 25
+ To those living in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and
+ neighboring countries, the Predator drones are terrifying. But again—and this is
+ precisely the central tension at the heart of counterinsurgency theory—the terror
+ may be a productive tool for modern warfare. It may dissuade people from
+ joining the active minority. It may convince some insurgents to abandon their
+ efforts. Terror, as we have seen, is by no means antithetical to the
+ counterinsurgency paradigm. Some would argue it is a necessary means.
+ Drones are by no means a flawless weapons system even for their proponents.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Regarding the first question, a drone should be understood as a blended
+ weapons system, one that ultimately functions at several levels. It shares
+ characteristics of the German V-2 missile, to be sure, but also the French
+ guillotine and American lethal injection. It combines safety for the attacker, with
+ relatively precise but rapid death, and a certain anesthetizing effect—as well as,
+ of course, utter terror. For the country administering the drone attack, it is
+ perfectly secure. There is no risk of domestic casualties. In its rapid and
+ apparently surgical death, it can be portrayed, like the guillotine, as almost
+ humane. And drones have had a numbing effect on popular opinion precisely
+ because of their purported precision and hygiene—like lethal injection has done,
+ for the most part, in the death-penalty context. Plus, drones are practically
+ invisible and out of sight—again, for the country using them—though, again,
+ terrifying for the targeted communities.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Chamayou’s second question is, perhaps, the most important. This new
+ weapons system has changed the US government’s relationship to its own
+ citizens. There is no better evidence of this than the deliberate, targeted drone
+ killing of US and allied nation citizens abroad—as we will see. 32
+
+ [...]
+
+ An analogy from the death penalty may be helpful. There too, the means
+ employed affect the ethical dimensions of the practice itself. The gas chamber
+ and the electric chair—both used in the United States even after the Holocaust—
+ became fraught with meaning. Their symbolism soured public opinion on the
+ death penalty. By contrast, the clinical or medical nature of lethal injection at
+ first reduced the political controversy surrounding executions. Only over time,
+ with botched lethal injections and questions surrounding the drug cocktails and
+ their true effects, have there been more questions raised. But it has taken time for
+ the negative publicity to catch up with lethal injection. Drones, at this point,
+ remain far less fraught than conventional targeted assassinations.
projects / blog.git / commitdiff