Hearts and Minds

August 12, 2013
N.Y.U. Professor Gurman compiles essays on counterinsurgency (COIN), defined as efforts to “eliminate an uprising against a government” and whose chief aim is “to separate the insurgents from the population.” COIN is traced from the Kennedy administration all the way back to Lawrence of Arabia. Contributing authors appraise COIN in countries from Malaya (Malaysia), the Philippines, and Vietnam, to El Salvador, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and discuss various intimidating and punitive COIN tactics, including psychological warfare, night raids, police sweeps, targeted assassinations, scorched-earth campaigns, and softer techniques like the use of state-of-the-art technologies and close cooperation between military and civilian intelligence agencies. Emphasis is placed on the fact that, historically, COIN operations often worsen the “climate of misery” in war-torn nations, yet their effects are sometimes downplayed to conceal “the grisly reality on the ground.” Less attention, notably, is given to COIN successes, leading one to wonder if there have been any. Overall, the book leaves readers with a distinct impression of the difficulties of quelling insurrection when rebels, in Mao’s words, “move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.”

July 15, 2013
A collection of essays on counterinsurgency highlighting the "cognitive dissonance" in foreign policy of America's refusal to acknowledge the implications of its chosen role as successor to Europe's colonial powers. Editor Gurman (Foreign Relations/NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study; The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond, 2012) focuses the collection on "the self-serving mythology" that has been the main feature of the doctrine adopted under Gen. David Petraeus in 2006, which justifies ongoing wars while "omitting grimmer details" of the campaigns. The contributors offer different areas of expertise. Gurman's piece on the Vietnam War serves as a kind of conceptual bridge to the essays of historians Karl Hack (The Open Univ., United Kingdom) and Vina A. Lanzona (Univ. of Hawaii, Manoa) on the early Cold War campaigns against communist insurgents in, respectively, Malaya and the Philippines; pieces written by filmmaker Rick Rowley and McClatchy Syria bureau chief David Enders on the Iraq War; and essays on the war in Afghanistan by American history professor Jeremy Kuzmarov and GlobalPost correspondent Jean MacKenzie. Collectively, they present a convincing argument that the Vietnam War subsumed the population-control methods employed in the U.K.'s Malayan campaign and the war against Huk insurgents in the Philippines--relocation and resettlement, food control, collective punishment--under the large-scale deployment of some of the military's most destructive weaponry. This combination of "force and coercion," as Gurman writers, was also employed in Iraq and Afghanistan "to dislocate the population and dismantle the social structure of the countryside." The essays trace the legacies of imperial methods, especially British ones, and detail the indigenous populations' responses to those methods. These sharp criticisms of the methods and consequences of counterinsurgency campaigns merit serious consideration.

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September 15, 2013
In December 2006, amidst protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military released FM 3-24, a new field manual on counterinsurgency (or COIN, in military-speak). Coauthored by David Petraeus and built in part upon his dissertation on Vietnam, its stated purpose was to help prepare U.S. Army and Marine Corps leaders to conduct COIN operations anywhere in the world by collecting and codifying the accumulated lessons of several generations of U.S. counterinsurgency warfare around the world. FM 3-24 and other procounterinsurgency articles that emerged around the same time gave rise to what New York University scholar Gurman describes as a grand narrative of COIN that was used to indoctrinate military personnel, as well as the public, into the COIN paradigm. Collecting eight scholarly papers on the history, theory, and practice of counterinsurgency warfare, this selection aims to counter this grand narrative by identifying the limitations, contradictions, and outright failures of COIN warfare and emphasizing its consequences for the people living in places where COIN is used. Gurman herself writes on Vietnam; other commentators cover actions in Malaya, the Philippines, El Salvador, Iraq, and Afghanistan. One of several recent works criticizing COIN (see also Colonel Gian Gentile's Wrong Turn, 2013), readers looking for a multi-vocal survey of the issue will appreciate this selection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)