The Art of Insurgency

By John Narayan Parajuli

In the last nine years Maoists have run a relatively successful guerilla campaign against the state. The speed with which the rebels expanded their influence over the territory and their ability to influence events is astonishing. A small group of ragtag rebels operating in the remote Midwest in 1996 barely made news: Now there’s hardly any other news but the Maoists. So what exactly is guerilla warfare? What are the chances of success for a counter-insurgency operation, and what do the security forces need to do?

Guerilla warfare
Guerilla warfare is, traditionally, the response of a small indigenous group combating a powerful force, such as a state or an occupying power. It is asymmetric warfare, unlike most formally declared conflicts. Guerilla warfare involves mobile, small and flexible units, fighting without a distinct front line. Though most insurgencies never achieve much, except death and destruction, two prime examples from the 20th century show that they can actually win. Mao Zedong and Ernesto Che Guevara, a Cuban revolutionary of Argentine origin, were spectacularly successful using the tactics. Mao ran a successful guerilla war against the Kuomintang government in China and replaced it with communist rule in 1949. Che helped Fidel Castro overthrow the dictator Batista in Cuba and to found a communist state in 1959.

Ambush and sabotage are typical tactics of guerilla warfare; the aim is ultimately to destabilize the state by means of a prolonged, low-level confrontation. The Nepali Maoists have adopted the same tactics.

At the beginning of the insurgency in 1996, progress for the Maoists was slow but still steady. The Maoists, following the Chinese leader’s strategy, declared their struggle a “people’s war.” At the beginning they attached great importance to winning the “hearts and minds” of the people to establish base areas. At the same time they found terror an indispensable tool to command obedience from the residents of the same base areas.

Maoists in action
The Maoists moved to a full-fledged guerrilla war in November 2001, with a major offensive against police stations and military posts. Professor Thomas A. Marks, a military strategist at U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, describes the warfare scheme of Nepali Maoists in the following words: “Terror facilitates or establishes the ‘space’ necessary for the insurgent political campaign eliminating societal rallying points [creating a vacuum.]”

As the Police responds to the new situation the Maoists would attack the Police in guerrilla actions with small patrols—as a consequence they retreat and consolidate their forces, exposing larger swaths of the population to insurgent domination, according to Professor Marks.

Much to the rebels’ delight security forces overreacted, causing human rights violations. The government attempted a crack down on the Maoist activities twice. Operation Romeo (1997/98) investigated and arrested suspected Maoists. Operation Kilo Sierra (1998/99) was a search-and-arrest campaign in the Midwest. This caused the state forces to lose the hearts and minds of villagers, which the Maoists cleverly exploited. From the beginning, the Maoists appear to have successfully translated their thinking into action.

In 1996 they fought with the civilian police force that was largely unarmed or ill equipped. As the Maoists organized themselves into rough guerilla formations, they began to target police posts. Their tactics then were guided by their need to organize and equip themselves as a unified force. They captured a substantial amount of weapons in the attacks, and trained their cadres and officers. As their firepower grew, they began to make long-term war plans—as espoused by Mao.

Mao Zedong’s theory of guerilla warfare divides conflict into three phases. It talks about establishing base areas, strategic defense, strategic balance or equilibrium, strategic offense, and finally capturing the cities. In the first phase the insurgents gain support of the population and attack government offices and officers. They also disseminate propaganda that targets government institutions. In the second phase insurgents widen attacks on security forces and vital institutions, and take effective control of more territory. In the final phase, conventional and psychological attacks target major cities and take over the country. But there is a difference between Mao’s China and Nepal today.

The key difference: No external force is involved in Nepal. The anti-Japanese sentiments served as a rallying cry for both the Kuomintang and Maoists in 1930s in China. The same is not true about Nepal today. Analysts say the Maoists are trying to lure India into the fight precisely to fill the Japanese role. They say their recent exhortation against New Delhi is designed to achieve their goal. Despite Maoists claims about inevitable victory, the difference: The absence of a similar rallying cry will affect their ambition.

The Maoists now claim that they are in the final phase, a strategic offensive beginning 2004 adopting Mao’s tactics: Surround the cities with liberated villages. From 1996 to 2001, the Maoists ran a strategic defensive phase. In 2003 they claimed that they had attained the strategic equilibrium. They have some justification to substantiate their claim: The only parts of the country still under full government control are the district headquarters and cities and rest are by default under Maoists control. But the Maoists do not have what Mao had—sufficient forces to take the urban areas or maintain permanent base areas.

“The Maoists have failed in their schemes of things,” says military analyst Karna Bahadur Thapa, a retired major. “They have failed to overrun the state according to their time-frame.” Despite their apocalyptic rhetoric about the final phase and the end of the “old regime,” the Maoists know they cannot beat the Army if they have to fight a conventional war. But the Maoist weakness doesn’t necessarily imply that the security forces, in particular the Army, have succeeded at counterinsurgency.

Counterinsurgency
The Army’s counterinsurgency operation that began in 2001 hasn’t been able to contain the insurgents. Many say it has been a failure. “You can’t even talk about counterinsurgency failure in Nepal,” says Saubhagya Shah, a Harvard scholar who keeps a close tab on security related issues, “because there wasn’t any [counterinsurgency operation] to start with.” What the government forces have been doing so far is passive defense of static positions, which hardly counts as counterinsurgency, he says.

Analysts agree that the Army’s effort is falling short. They say insurgency is difficult to crush even for a superpower, if the insurgency has external shelter and support. They cite the ordeal the American military is facing in Iraq as an example. Even with the best technology and massive force, the U.S. Army is having a tough time. The Iraqi insurgents get support from sympathizers in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. “One of the main determinants [of the success of] any counterinsurgency operation around the world is whether the insurgents have safe havens and bases outside the country,” says Shah. Counterinsurgency successes have been rare.

Only two counterinsurgency operations after World War II are counted as outright successes: the British campaign in Malaya against the Communist Party of Malaya from 1948 to 1960 and the Philippine operation against the Hukbalahap Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army, a Communist resistance group in Luzon in the Philippines, from 1946 to 1954. The French and Americans failed grandly in Vietnam. There are conflicting opinions about the success of similar operations in Algeria against the Algerian National Liberation Front, and about the Angola conflict. With limited positive experience to draw on, there’s no roadmap for how to win a counterinsurgency campaign, but all analysts agree that information gathered by people on the grounds, humanintelligence or “humint,” is critical.

Human intelligence
“Governments that were able to create effective intelligence organizations and use them efficiently were normally successful in their counterinsurgency efforts,” wrote Dr. Charles A. Russel (former Chief of Acquisitions and Analysis Division, Directorate of Special Organizations, U.S. Air Force) and Major Robert E. Hildner, a former American counterintelligence officer in their joint essay “Intelligence and Information Processing in Counterinsurgency.” Fighting an insurgency means combating an indefinable and shadowy enemy who is intermingled with the local population. It is hard to pin-down who is a rebel and who is not without a reliable humint network. The pattern of attack and counterattack in guerrilla warfare is that a weaker foe attacks a stronger enemy in the place of his choosing, then melts into the population. And for a long time, the Nepali Army had been kept away from the people.

For many years the Army remained isolated, literally within their bases for the most part. Since its deployment against the Maoists in 2001, the RNA has put a lot of effort into revamping its intelligence network by planting informants and deploying regular army personnel undercover. But the key problem seems that it hasn’t been quite able to develop relationship with ordinary Nepalis.

“The Army hasn’t been able develop as good a humint network as expected, since its deployment,” says analyst Thapa, the retired Major. “But even the civilian intelligence network [the police and the National Investigation Department] has been destroyed by the political leaders in last 12 years.”

It has become a mere recruitment center for party cadres, he says referring to the National Investigation Department. One serious charge against the military commanders in the outpost is that they don’t seem too keen to intermingle with the local population—who can prove helpful for intelligence gathering. But more than poor intelligence constrains the Army.There just aren’t enough soldiers. “The Army is stretched too thin to contain the insurgency,” says an Army officer. There are 11 infantry brigades and seven specialist brigades. Most of them are engaged in Kathmandu or are deployed to guard city centers and district headquarters. Only a small force is available for search-and-destroy missions. Only 30,000 Army personnel are available for mobilization: The rest are a backup force, says one retired officer.

But increasing the number is not a solution. The Army has to think out of the box. The Malaya operation succeeded because the British forces successfully learned the tactics from the battle ground and ways to identify insurgents from local population with the help of local Malayan forces—using “psychological operations” at unit level.

Military Analysts note that the British forces were highly successful at gathering human intelligence dispersing their forces through a strategy that separated the insurgents from the local population. They conducted their operations using a calculated response, avoiding reprisals and excessive use of force.

If this post World War II counterinsurgency successes are anything to go by, the Army has to realize that more soldiers and firepower may simply not work, if they continue to implement conventional Military textbook manuals and doctrines. The Army hasn’t learnt how to fathom the ways the Maoists think, says an analyst. Without that the Army is unlikely to beat the insurgency.