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This chapter provides a background to the violence of the early 1980s. It explores the evolution of the revolutionary Left in the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter also explores the development of a well‐defined counterinsurgency movement in Guatemala and its methodical use of terror as a means of controlling the population and staunching the growth of the Marxist opposition. This chapter suggests that by the late 1970s, the ideology of counterinsurgency had degenerated into a chaotic culture of violence that repudiated the authority of the state. Much of the material for this chapter comes from secondary sources. However, it also utilizes primary sources from personal papers of Mario Payeras, who was a founder and intellectual leader of the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, which have only recently become available for scholarly use.

This chapter examines the language, images, and discourses that General Ríos Montt employed to promote his war of counterinsurgency. While the military’s war of counterinsurgency forcibly pacified the largely indigenous highlands (a campaign that some sources claim produced nearly 50 percent of the civilian deaths that occurred over the course of Guatemala’s thirty‐six‐year armed struggle), Ríos Montt captivated much of Guatemala’s urban and nonindigenous population through his anticorruption campaign and his Sunday sermons — weekly broadcast messages that stressed anticommunism and government loyalty against a backdrop of evangelical language and imagery. This chapter provides an analysis of the sermons and offers an attempt to explain and contextualize Ríos Montt’s political popularity, as he sought to establish order and a fresh ideology for what he called the New Guatemala. This chapter is based almost exclusively on transcripts of Ríos Montt’s Sunday sermons and on newspaper clippings from the period.

Chapter 3 addresses the politics of relief aid distribution as it has been reframed within a human rights-based approach. The chapter explicates the epistemology, techniques, and effects of relief aid in general and as evidenced in northern Uganda. It argues that, because of the Uganda government’s international political relations, relief aid has been allowed be incorporated into its counterinsurgency with highly destructive consequences, most evident in the archipelago of forced internment camps run by the Ugandan military and international aid agencies. The chapter also shows how the administrative aspect of relief aid tends to discipline the recipients of aid as helpless, passive victims and to criminalize those who refuse that aid.

This chapter studies the interplay between the battlefield in Yemen and the domestic front in Egypt. It begins with a revisionist account of the Egyptian counterinsurgency campaign, based on Egyptian memoirs and captured documents, and then proceeds to discuss three Egyptian taboos—casualties, cost, and corruption—demonstrating that the pursuit of revolutionary politics abroad contributed significantly to the enfeeblement of the revolution at home. Although the direct cost of the war in lives and treasure may not have been as great as some have argued, the indirect costs of the war proved catastrophic for Egypt. Furthermore, a number of mutually reinforcing factors impressed upon Nasser the need to come to terms with Saudi Arabia in order to end the conflict in Yemen.

After the war, senior BBC officers sought to use broadcasting to restore the status quo, returning to their domestic mission of cultural uplift, and their imperial mission of supporting British influence overseas. The BBC remained a major presence on short wave and, although rebroadcasting by organisations like the New Zealand Broadcasting Service (NZBS) declined, use of government-subsidized BBC transcriptions increased substantially. Connections with the British world were cultivated, with improved coverage of rugby and cricket, flagship comedies such as the Goon Show, and the broadcasting of ‘media events’ including the Coronation of 1953 and the Royal Tour of 1953/4. Cooperation among public broadcasting authorities continued to be organised on a non-commercial, public-service basis. Contemporaries also assumed that radio would help encourage economic and social ‘development’ in the dependent colonies, and could be used as a tool of counterinsurgency, to suppress resistance to colonial rule.

The work concludes by assessing MACV’s decisions and choices in developing and implementing counterinsurgency metrics of effectiveness and progress in Vietnam. In the end, it asks if the army was an organization with a deeply flawed mentality that sought to impose measurements on the immeasurable. It also provides historical perspective for those armies currently attempting to measure their own successes and failures in an unconventional environment.

This opening chapter, covering 1955–1965, provides an overview of contemporary counterinsurgency theory and analyzes the army’s counterinsurgency doctrine. It also illustrates the increasing influence of statistical analysis in the Department of Defense after Robert S. McNamara’s assumption of duties as the Secretary of Defense. The U.S. Army officer entering combat in 1965 seemingly could draw upon a wealth of counterinsurgency information—unless he was looking for how to measure progress and effectiveness. In the absence of doctrinal suggestions on how to develop metrics of progress and effectiveness, MACV, under pressure from McNamara, turned to computers and statistical analysis to help solve their measurement problems.

This chapter covers 1962–1964 and argues that a principle reason why MACV could not identify any useful indicators to measure its progress resulted from disagreements over American strategy in South Vietnam. If there was no clear strategy, what should MACV be measuring? This chapter also analyzes how staff officers developed metrics during General Paul Harkins’s tenure as MACV’s first commander. It argues that MACV’s inability to fully conceptualize the intricacies of counterinsurgency, of balancing and integrating the complex problems of security and pacification, led to a reliance on statistical indicators as a substitute for a fuller comprehension of the political-military conflict.

This final chapter concentrates on the final two years of U.S. Army participation in Vietnam, 1971–1972. It first considers any refinements made to counterinsurgency theory since the early 1960s and asks if these changes affected how MACV measured its effectiveness and progress late in the war. MACV revised HES in 1970 to overcome biases in reporting. Were other reports revised to account for biases or changes in counterinsurgency theory? From the operational standpoint, the army conducted operations in Laos and Cambodia, expanding the war effort to allow Vietnamization to work and the American army to withdraw from Southeast Asia. How did MACV assess these operations? Did MACV believe the final battles of the war to be a validation of Vietnamization? By the end of 1972, did MACV believe, based on its metrics, that it had successfully completed its mission in South Vietnam?

This chapter focuses on the covert side of the Vietnam War. Secrecy famously helped Richard Nixon cope with dovish domestic opposition toward the end of the war. In contrast, the chapter highlights the role of covert intervention in helping both sides compete in Vietnam while keeping the war limited during the earlier Johnson years (1964–1968). Even as he greatly expanded U.S. military activity in Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson acted to avoid provoking a larger war with China or the Soviet Union. Covert U.S. military operations in places like Laos, though an open secret, were a way to prosecute a counterinsurgency while keeping a lid on hostilities. China and the Soviet Union similarly sought to control escalation dangers through covertness. Both communist patrons provided military personnel covertly to improve air defense in North Vietnam. The chapter suggests that all three outside powers worked hard to avoid public and acknowledged clashes up through 1968.

This chapter analyzes the end of the Cold War and external involvement in Afghanistan. On the Soviet side, the December 1979 invasion was preceded by six months of covert involvement in counterinsurgency military operations. The chapter reviews evidence on the motives for covertness and the detection of it by American leaders. It then assesses covertness in the American weapons supply program after the overt Soviet invasion. Escalation fears—in particular, fear of provoking Soviet retaliation against Pakistan and a larger regional war—led to consistent efforts to keep the expanding U.S. aid program covert from 1979 to 1985. By the mid-1980s, however, American leaders embraced a more aggressive strategy and identified key changes that largely eliminated the risk of escalation, leading them to approve an overt form of weaponry (the Stinger missile system). The chapter also reviews covert Soviet cross-border operations into Pakistan and U.S. inferences from its detection of these activities.

This introductory chapter begins by identifying the two specific problems of counterinsurgency that have received inadequate attention in the scholarly literature. It then sets out the purpose of the book, which is to address these gaps in several important ways. First, it explains why sacred space is important both to insurgents and to counterinsurgency forces. Second, it discusses a series of case studies evaluating the most important counterinsurgency operations on sacred space in the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter examines the key problems that counterinsurgency operations pose in sacred places. It first delineates the concept of a “sacred space” and explains the key features that grant such spaces a sacral quality. It then examines how insurgent groups can usefully occupy and exploit sacred places. It argues that insurgents can mingle with pilgrims and worshippers and can also use the sacredness of shrines, mosques, and temples as sanctuaries from counterinsurgent forces who may be understandably loath to offend local religious sensibilities by using force against such locales. The chapter outlines possible strategies and potential pitfalls for security forces when they are seeking to flush out insurgents who have taken refuge in sacred arenas. Finally, it looks at some of the lessons derived from the Israeli siege of the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem, where several Palestinian militants retreated in 2002.

This chapter examines two important operations waged by Indian security forces to counter Sikh insurgents operating in India's northern state of Punjab, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. The first operation was a military as well as a public-relations debacle. The Indian Army had inadequate and flawed intelligence about the strength and capabilities of the insurgents who had entered and occupied the Golden Temple, and they failed to forge a viable public-relations strategy and ultimately used excessive force to prevail. Fortunately, the Indian state was capable of learning from its initial errors. When Sikh militants again attempted to use the temple as a sanctuary, the Indian security forces launched a second assault, which involved a prolonged siege, but one marked by careful attention to the sentiments of religious authorities and by a deft public-relations strategy. The two contrasting episodes underscore how the same regime, under different circumstances, can cope with and respond to the requirements of a counterinsurgency operation in a sacred site.

This chapter explains the dramatically different outcomes of two sieges conducted in the course of combating India's Kashmir insurgency: one of a historic mosque in an urban setting, and the other of an ancient shrine in a rural milieu. The first siege, that at the Hazratbal mosque in the capital city of Indian-controlled Kashmir, ended peacefully. The siege of the shrine of Sheikh Nooruddin Noorani, a Sufi saint, however, ended in a bloody conflagration culminating in the destruction of the shrine. It is argued that the markedly different locations of the two religious sites partially explain the different outcomes of the two sieges. The Hazratbal mosque, located in the heart of Srinagar, promptly attracted the attention of the national government in New Delhi, which granted an able civilian administrator to handle the negotiations while allowing the military to maintain a vigilant posture. The Charar-e-Sharief shrine, on the other hand, was located near the Line of Control (the de facto international border) in Kashmir and therefore was removed from significant political attention. This situation led the military and local police forces to adopt a more unyielding posture toward the insurgents. The demographic composition of the insurgents in the two sites also played a vital role in shaping the final outcomes.