[lbo-talk] Counter-Insurgency: the Malayan Campaign

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Mon Feb 16 22:37:09 PST 2004



>[lbo-talk] Bush expected to announce candidacy any day now, John
>Lacny jlacny at earthlink.net
>John Lacny jlacny at earthlink.net, Mon Feb 16 20:15:20 PST 2004
<snip>
>Some others have made an interesting argument here, to the effect
>that the Shi'ite masses who are demanding elections are able to get
>attention only because of the armed struggle, and that Sistani gets
>to play the role of Martin Luther King, the "moderate" alternative,
>in this context. That seems elegant enough, but I'm not sure it's
>true. In that game, you have to assume that the people pursuing the
>armed path and the people pursuing the "peaceful" one are still
>broadly on the same side and only differ on tactics

Different social forces among the colonized don't necessarily have to be on the same political side, nor do they have to be of the same race, ethnicity, faith, or anything else, for colonizers to get a clue, as the British obviously did during the Malayan Campaign:

***** Military Doctrine and Counterinsurgency: A British Perspective GAVIN BULLOCH

From Parameters, Summer 1996, pp. 4-16.

. . . An insurgency is an attempt to force political change, and thus it follows logically that the center of gravity can be reached only by political action. The [British] government response to an insurgency [in its Malayan Campaign, 1948 to 1960] should take as its fundamental assumption that the true nature of the threat lies in the insurgent's political potential rather than his military power, although the latter may appear the more worrying in the short term. Again, in Malaya, the center of gravity was targeted not by jungle patrolling, but by the political decision to grant independence;[3] the military contribution was invaluable, but not of itself decisive. The military campaign should focus upon the insurgents, but it is only one part of a wider solution. . . .

3. Decisions in principle were taken to move toward independence for Malaya from 1952 onwards, and proceeded via elections in 1955 to full independence in 1957. The effect of these political decisions was to improve the cooperation of the Malay authorities, allow the Malayan armed forces to be built up and integrated into the operations to defeat the insurgency, and to gradually isolate and neutralize the insurgents. . . .

<http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/96summer/bulloch.htm> *****

Cf. James Wong Wing On, "Chin Peng Tells His Version of History in Memoirs," September 4, 2003, <http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/2003090400111981.php>.


>[lbo-talk] Iraqi communists on "resistance"
>John Lacny jlacny at earthlink.net, Sat Feb 14 07:48:15 PST 2004
<snip>
>But what good does it do us to not recognize that there is no armed
>"people's war" going on in Iraq, apart from scattered armed bands
>who appear to have little popular support especially nationwide and
>indeed may be at eachother's throats?

No one has argued here that what's happening in Iraq is already a "people's war" -- no anti-colonial insurgency ever rose to the level of a "people's war" in Year One of invasion and occupation. First waves of anti-colonial armed revolts normally get defeated one way or another. Only out of accumulated experiences of defeats over decades (and sometimes centuries) did eventually successful national liberation movements develop (when successful ones emerged at all, that is). Besides, even defeated revolts can have beneficial effects, for instance, motivating the colonizers to hasten decolonization as in the aforementioned case. -- Yoshie

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