Managing COIN: Lessons from Malaya

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Entry Excerpt:

Setting the Record Straight on Malayan Counterinsurgency Strategy:
Interview with Karl Hack
by Octavian Manea

Download the Full Article: Setting the Record Straight on Malayan Counterinsurgency Strategy

You are a long time researcher and observer of the Malayan Emergency. What were the core key ingredients that broke the back of the communist insurgents in the Malayan Emergency? The primary cause for putting the campaign on a firmly winning path? The game changer that helped at the end of the day to regain the initiative?

That is a bit like asking, ‘In making a cup of tea, which action is the game-changer: the heating of the water, the addition of the tea bag, or the correct amount of steeping? If you don’t heat the water, or don’t add the teabag, or under or over-steep, you don’t get a drinkable cup of tea. In addition, if you do things in the wrong order, it may turn out disgusting. You can’t just skip a stage and go to the one and single ‘really important’ bit of tea-making.

The same goes for counterinsurgency. You cannot, for instance, go straight to a comprehensive approach for ‘winning hearts and minds’ and expect it to work, if you have not first broken up the larger insurgent groups, disrupted their main bases, and achieved a modicum of spatial dominance and of security for the population in the area concerned. Local fence-sitters are, quite rightly in terms of family survival needs, likely to regard personal safety and avoiding ‘collaboration’ with you as overriding concerns, especially after contractors and officials who help you are assassinated or tortured.

Yet for counterinsurgency, people do sometimes ask ‘what is the one key ingredient’? The answer is, menus do not work like that, and neither did the Malayan Emergency. There were distinct phases or stages. I would argue that many other insurgencies are also likely to have distinct stages, and indeed that within a single insurgency different provinces or regions may be at different stages at any one time. It is quite possible that Helmand and Herat, Kandahar and Nangarhar, could simultaneously be at very different stages, requiring very different policies.

The question above, therefore, encompasses what I would like to dub the ‘temporal fallacy’ (that policies abstracted from one defining moment might be equally valid in qualitatively different phases), and the spatial fallacy (that different geographic regions will be in the same phase, so allowing a single strategy for a country no matter how fractured and diverse).

Download the Full Article: Setting the Record Straight on Malayan Counterinsurgency Strategy

Interview with Karl Hack conducted by Octavian Manea (Editor of FP Romania, the Romanian edition of Foreign Policy).



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