France's war in Algeria: telling the story

[davidbfpo]

A short blog article on Strife, a Kings War Studies blog, 'Lessons from Algeria: counter-insurgency, commitment and cruelty'. It opens with:

In the Algerian War of 1954-62, the belligerents tore apart a society that had coexisted for a century. The wounds they left were too deep to heal. But the continuation of theviolence after the war and the spiraling civilian-targeted terror campaigns conducted by both French colonists and Algerian independence fighters was not inevitable. Avoiding this type of outcome is the point of counter-insurgency operations today. More than sixty years later, we can see that no counter-insurgency campaign can succeed with aggressive ‘search and destroy’ tactics against embedded insurgentsif the ultimate aim is peaceful coexistence in a divided society. The United States failed to take this lesson to Iraq and as a result had to adapt during its operations.
Any country considering a counter-insurgency operation in the future must weigh up the extra costs of attempting it without this tool. France’s experience in Algeria shows that restraint and long-term commitment are vital if conflicts are to be resolved without the kind of fallout seen in Algeria in the 1960s and Iraq since 2011.

Link:http://strifeblog.org/2015/02/20/les...t-and-cruelty/

For reference this incident is seen by Algerians as the "beginning of the end" in 1945:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A...uelma_massacre

Incredibly there is contemporary newsreel of the French response, IIRC with unarmed men being shot down.