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Subject:
Poacher turned Gamekeeper: Seeking Help from the Casablanca Generation of Insurgency
jastayme3
2/8/2007 5:12:59 PM
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Retired insurgent. It sounds almost like an contradiction. Yet in the West until recently there was a considerable number of retired insurgents. Maquis, Palmachniks, resistance agents from every conceivable country, guerrilas. People who regarded insurgency as an expediancy rather then a way of life and who were satisfied to return to respectable life when their cause won, or at least was given up as fairly lost. And thus can communicate with people from normal society about what it is like to be an insurgent.
Some of these are still alive.
Now I point this out because of what I see as a weakness our structure has with regard to Small Wars. Government people seem to regard "causes" with annoyance-they get in the way of their tidy world. Even when they understand with there heads they really don't understand what it feels like.
There are lots of ways to rectify this. The Casablanca generation is of course remembered in film. Casablanca of course, but also Lawrance of Arabia, Exodus, and even Godfather. While this may seem laughable it does give an idea of how an insurgent feels and knowing your enemies mind and heart is more then knowing his tactics. There are also written accounts, like Eastern Approaches, etc.
But one source that should not be neglected is the few living insurgents remaining in the Western World. We should for instance have some from the Casablanca generation relating their experiences at academies for military, intelligence, and police officers. It would require little effort and might be helpful.
Now western insurgency is different in character from the Middle Eastern kind. Traditionalism and tribal ties matter less and ideology matters more. However they still have the experience of living a lifestyle that is simmilar in technique to that of a criminal(sometimes simmilar morally but that is not the present point). Western insurgents still have to constantly fortify themselves emotionally because they cannot resign themselves to being part of a machine the way a conventional soldier does. It is no accident that insurgents often use strange, secret ceremony to enforce discipline(anyone remember the Irgun recruitment ceremony in Exodus?).
Israel has an especial advantage in this regard. It has a supply of former insurgents and their children who learned their trade in the Eastern Meditterranean which really hasn't changed much sense then. They are dying out there but they remain. Another good source is the Phillipines. Or Greece. Places like that have insurgents who lived in a world where tribal and religious loyalties are more fammiliar then in Western Europe.
Nontheless it must be conceded that one insurgency is not the same as another. But I am not recommending this as a substitute. I am recommending it as an aid.
I am not saying there is a moral equivalence between modern terrorists and the Casablanca generation(sometimes they were equivalent by the way, but not always). I am saying that we need to learn to know our enemy and this is a very handy method.
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