Brutality?
By Interesting. Seems to me that in 1982, in Hama, Hafez al-Assad wiped out an uprising against his regime by slaughtering 25,000 over a weekend. And in 1991, Saddam Hussein took down the Shiite uprising with similar viciousness. The idea that such monstrous tactics don’t work is ludicrous. They do work. But I think it’s fair to say that we would rather our civilization die than that we commit such acts.
The thing of it is that it isn’t a coincidence that Saddam and Assad were brutal dictators. Which is to say it’s not that on the one hand they were brutal dictators and then on the other hand they crushed insurgents with brutal measures. In order to make counterinsurgency-through-brutality work you need to be actually trying to establish or maintain a brutal dictatorship, crushing civil society and ruling perpetually through force. This is why the Western colonial powers, despite a willingness to engage in the occassional massacre, couldn’t make even though tactics work to maintain their empires.
Yglesias is correct, but that’s not quite how I would have phrased it. (Incidentally, I also don’t think that Clausewitz is cliche; I believe that he makes a very specific, oft misinterpreted argument, but one that’s quite right. Nevertheless, an argument for another day.) I think it would be more appropriate to say that brutal tactics can destroy an insurgency under some circumstances and not others. J-Pod cites Assad and Hussein, but leaves out the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, the Japanese war in China, the Nationalist Chinese war against the Communist Chinese, the Germans in Yugoslavia, and the French in Spain. In all of those situations the organization conducting the counterinsurgency campaign used the most brutal possible tactics (in an effort, in several cases, to establish a brutal dictatorship), yet the efforts failed. What J-Pod misses is that it’s not simply a question of having the will to engage in indiscriminate slaughter; even organizations that have no such qualms often lose.
I’m inclined to think that this is less a question of will than of military science. I’m sure that Kingdaddy could lend much more productive commentary, but my first cut at the question would be that extermination campaigns can work against opponents who are relatively isolated from the rest of the world, and thus lack supplies, sanctuaries, and a transnational leadership hierarchy. Indeed, although the determinants are probably different in some dimensions, my guess would be that the same factors that help determine success in a “civilized” counter-insurgency campaign are those that indicate success in a brutal one.