Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy

by D. Michael Shafer

Overview

Michael Shafer argues that American policymakers have fundamentally misperceived the political context of revolutionary wars directed against American clients and that because American attempts at counterinsurgency were based on faulty premises, these efforts have failed in virtually every instance.

Originally published in 1988.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691609249
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1032
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	348
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

Read an Excerpt

Deadly Paradigms

The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy

---

By D. Michael Shafer

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07774-1

---

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: DOGS THAT DIDN'T BARK

This book explores the sources of American foreign policy. Like John Lewis Gaddis in his pioneering reassessment of postwar American national security policy, Strategies of Containment, I argue that although the international, domestic political, and bureaucratic contexts of action are essential to understanding foreign policy, they are insufficient without reference to policymakers' "strategic codes," their "assumptions about American interests in the world, potential threats to them, and feasible responses." But where Gaddis examines the "successive mutations, incarnations and transformations" of containment, I focus on the continuity in policymakers' assessments of the sources of insurgency and prescriptions for assisting governments threatened by it during the period 1945–1965.

There is no mistaking postwar American concern about Third World insurgency. From the Truman Doctrine to the debate on Central America, the suppression of insurgent challenges to friendly Third World governments has received recurring, high-level attention. The United States has committed billions of dollars in economic aid to preempt insurgency and in military assistance to deter or defeat it. The counterinsurgency campaigns waged by Americans in support of Third World allies and by those allies with American help have killed and injured millions. Whether or not Americans were involved directly, they have been among this country's most important and contentious foreign policy undertakings. Yet American counterinsurgency advice to others and even direct involvement in counterinsurgency operations have often failed to achieve their aims.

This book is an effort to understand why not. Like Strategies of Containment, it inverts the standard practice in political science of focusing on variables producing change in policy. The problem here is to explain continuity despite changes in the international distribution of power, presidential administrations, bureaucratic coalitions and capabilities, the locale of conflict and the nature of the insurgencies, and the governments they threaten. Thus, this book poses two questions: Why, given the importance accorded to defeating insurgency, have these assessments and prescriptions been so inaccurate, even counterproductive? And why, despite failure, have they remained virtually unchanged? The answers are straightforward: American counterinsurgency policy did not change because policymakers' faulty understanding of insurgency did not change; and their understanding did not change because of the nature and functions of the ideas underlying it.

Defining counterinsurgency requires care since the term is commonly used so laxly. Counterinsurgency is one element in postwar American national security policy toward the Third World. That policy, writ large, addresses the problems of managing a tight bipolar confrontation in an era marked by three essential characteristics: a relatively stable nuclear balance between the superpowers which has shifted confrontation to the periphery; a normative attachment to self-determination which has constrained traditional imperial forms of that competition; and tumultuous change in the Third World which has made it a tempting target for superpower meddling. For the United States, the challenge has been to define and implement a containment strategy for the Third World appropriate for a hegemonic, but not imperial (colonial) power. The generic solution might be called "security and development"; counterinsurgency is a form of it applicable when "blood is their argument."

This security and development solution addresses the perceived strategic problem posed by weak, would-be modern Third World allies. It aims to provide security for the development process and generate popular support for the regime by promoting better government and economic progress without violating recipients' often newly won sovereignty. Counterinsurgency is a subset of security and development for problem cases. "As a strategy," declared a State Department counterinsurgency coordinator, it is "a technique for tiding weak and unstable governments over periods of internal upheaval until the constructive forces of political and economic development are strong enough to control the situation without external assistance." It is a politico — military strategy to prevent latent insurgencies from breaking out by reinforcing the weak spots in threatened societies and, where this fails, to minimize the risk that American troops will have to be sent to suppress them. As such, counterinsurgency is limited to neither the brief counterinsurgency era from the advent of the Kennedy Administration to the Nixon Doctrine in 1969 nor to the formal doctrine spawned during it. In a variety of guises counterinsurgency has been preached and practiced by Americans since 1945.

Policymakers have touted counterinsurgency's prophylactic powers where insurgencies have not appeared and its curative powers where they have been defeated. Both claims are exaggerated. By and large, American counterinsurgency policy has failed, although this may seem a preposterous claim. After all, Vietnam aside, there is considerable evidence of success. In Greece, the Philippines, Thailand, Venezuela, and Bolivia active insurgencies were beaten back. Moreover, contrary to expectations, they have not broken out in other apparently insurgency prone areas. But appearances are misleading. Where insurgencies fell to defeat, victory was not the result of American efforts but of circumstances and actions largely unrelated to them.

Two problems haunt American counterinsurgency policy and programs: irrelevance and counterproductivity. Policymakers have misunderstood the sources of insurgency, underestimated the constraints on allies' willingness and capacity to make suggested reforms, and overestimated the United States' role as an outside promoter of security and development. As a result, their analysis of the potential for Third World insurgency is self-frightening while their claims for success are self-congratulatory. In fact, even where insurgencies were defeated, the United States failed to achieve the reforms deemed essential for counterinsurgency as they defined it. Instead, leaders of insurgency-threatened regimes used American aid to reinforce elements of their rule Americans considered sources of insurgent strength. In Greece and the Philippines this was irrelevant; in Vietnam it had disastrous consequences. In no case, however, did American policy achieve its aims: victory and defeat must be attributed to different factors.

Put differently, the problem has been the nonapplication and inapplicability of counterinsurgency policy. On the American side, nonapplication is a matter of domestic and bureaucratic politics. Despite agreement on what ought to be done, American counterinsurgency programs have suffered from political manipulation, managerial weakness, and sabotage by implementing agencies. Similar, though more exaggerated, problems have plagued the programs of countries the United States has attempted to assist. As a result, counterinsurgency as understood in theory has never been practiced. And the problems are deeper than this observation suggests since it implies that better management would improve counterinsurgent fortunes. This is not the case.

Counterinsurgency is inapplicable as well as unapplied. It misconstrues American relations with insurgency-threatened governments, the constraints facing leaders of those governments, and the relationship between governments and their subjects, as well as between them and the insurgents. Thus, counterinsurgency programs may place impossible demands on those expected to carry them out. Worse, misassessments of government–population relations and the sources of insurgency may produce inappropriate prescriptions, some of which aggravate the very problems they are designed to alleviate. Similar problems plague insurgency-threatened governments' efforts. American counterinsurgency prescriptions may be politically impossible to implement or inapplicable to the problem as defined by the government, and so be ignored. Either way, the key is not the American program per se, but the nature of the target government, the insurgency, and relations between them. Programs such as those suggested by the United States can work — witness Ramon Magsaysay's success in the Philippines. But they are not necessary to success — witness the Greek victory by means antithetical to American prescriptions. Finally, success may be impossible, U.S. program or no — witness Vietnam.

At fault is a pervasive, compelling, but distorted vision of the Third World state as beleaguered modernizer and the United States as manager of modernization. In this way, American counterinsurgency thinking obscured critical distinctions among threatened governments and in American relations with them. Instead, it offered lumpen assessments and lumpen prescriptions as a result of which counterinsurgency involvements were undertaken blind, without a clear measure of the prospects for victory in any given case.

This assertion raises further issues: when and under what conditions will threatened governments be able to defeat insurgencies? The questions go to the heart of the explanation of counterinsurgency's failure and the lessons to be drawn from studying it. The essential lesson is straightforward. Before undertaking any more such involvements, the United States requires an analytic capacity to distinguish among cases in terms relevant to its actual ability to shape events in accordance with American interests and values. We still lack such a capacity. Indeed, we still assume that if correctly managed, counterinsurgency can succeed anywhere. It is a dangerous assumption, for it may lead policymakers to commit American lives, lucre, and prestige to causes better analysis might have revealed to be chimerical. Thus, the final chapter of this book offers the outline of a more discriminating approach to assessing insurgency-threatened governments and the prospects of American involvement.

The aim of this book, however, is not only to investigate American counterinsurgency doctrine and past counterinsurgency involvements but also to explore the sources of foreign policy. After all, a focus on policymakers' assessments of insurgency and prescriptions for countering it presumes that what they think affects how they act in ways not reducible to situational factors. This may seem obvious to laymen, but few analysts defend such a position and disagree over which situational factors predominate. Indeed, debate rages over why governments do what they do overseas when they do it. This book contributes to that debate by systematically weighing alternative explanations of American counterinsurgency involvements against one another.

Chapter 2 outlines the claims of four approaches to understanding foreign policy in order to clarify their competing assertions and allow a structured comparison. In brief, realists explain counterinsurgency policy as a direct response to a particular security threat and the timing of its development by changes in the international arena. Observers of presidential politics attribute it to the interests of the president's team, and predict a four–year electoral cycle to major policy changes. Conversely, analysts of bureaucratic politics argue that policy content derives from the interaction of the agencies of the national security bureaucracy and the interests of their nonelected leaders. Such explanations discount the role of international events and politicians, and instead they attribute policy change to power shifts within and among organizations. Finally, American exceptionalists derive policy content from the American national style and suggest it will thus be unchanging, at least in its essentials.

None of these is wholly satisfactory. Realists offer no explanation for inappropriate policy or its failure to adjust to changing international situations. Presidential and bureaucratic politics analysts can explain poor policy implementation but not the continuity of perceptions and prescriptions over eight administrations and innumerable organizational changes. American exceptionalist explanations do account for policy fixity, but they fail because, when American counterinsurgency is compared to French revolutionary war doctrine, it is clear there is nothing exceptionally American about it. In fact, to explain both content and continuity, it is necessary to ask how policymakers assess insurgencies, develop prescriptions for coping with them, and conceptualize the United States' role in the process. Answers to these three questions are best understood in terms of the systematic, distorting impact of a coherent set of widely shared and unchallenged assumptions concerning the sources, nature, direction, and potential consequences of political change in the Third World.

To say as much is not to discard alternative explanations. This cognitive content approach is a bounded rationality approach and, as such, is modest in its claims. It recognizes the importance of international conditions and domestic constraints, as well as how changes in these may cause changes in policy (for example, in the relative importance of counterinsurgency in national security doctrine or in the level of resources devoted to it at any given time). Still, policymakers' ideas underpin the very definition of American national security interests, threats to them and possible responses. Changes in these ideas may result in a redefinition of American interests and so in a change in policy without a change in circumstance. Conversely, their failure to change with events may lead policymakers to fail to adjust policy as needed.

Testing the proposition that "where you stand depends on what you think" poses methodological difficulties. On the one hand, however judicious, all assessments of intention and perception are suspect. On the other, the tidal wave of bureaucratic politics literature has swept away all simple connections of intention, executive decision, and actual foreign policy action. Thus, analysts of ideas' impact on foreign policy face a twofold task: identifying actual links between specific analytic frameworks and foreign policy actions; and assessing how much explanatory power a focus on policymakers' ideas offers. Do ideas constitute a necessary condition or merely accompany antecedent situational, organizational, and role variables which provide more parsimonious explanations?

Failure to address this question explains much of the scepticism with which studies employing the cognitive content approach are met. This need not be the case, but avoiding it requires a three-step methodology. First, a tight match between policymakers' ideas and their actions must be shown. Second, the analyst must assess other, antecedent explanatory variables to determine if unresolved questions remain or, conversely, if these variables explain policymakers' ideas (which hence lack independent causal weight). Finally, it is necessary to trace the actual process by which policymakers' ideas shape their assessment of a situation and choice of responses to it. The cognitive approach is useful only if analysts can show that credible assessments and policy prescriptions inconsistent with policymakers' analytic framework existed but were not considered because of their preconceptions.

This approach is applied in each of the case studies comprising part III of this book: French counterinsurgency, Indochina and Algeria; Greece, 1947–1950; the Philippines, 1946–1953; and Vietnam, pre-1965. The aim is, in Alexander George's phrase, a "structured, focused comparison" among them consistent with the method outlined above. First, I analyze each case from the perspective of alternative models to determine whether there is any call for cognitive content analysis. Second, I examine each to demonstrate the congruence of foreign policy action and policymakers' assumptions about the Third World (identified in Part II). Finally, I analyze all four to identify alternative assessments and prescriptions not consistent with those assumptions and to show how (and how much) analysis and action were distorted by those ideas and the failure to modify them.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Deadly Paradigms by D. Michael Shafer. Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• PREFACE AND READER'S GUIDE, pg. ix
• ABBREVIATIONS, pg. xi
• NOTATION FOR FOOTNOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. xiii
• 1. Introduction: Dogs That Didn't Bark, pg. 3
• 2. Possible Explanations: Sources of Policy Content and Continuity, pg. 17
• 3. Flight, Fall, and Persistance: Political Development Theory, pg. 48
• 4. Security and Development, pg. 79
• 5. Mao Minus Marx: American Counterinsurgency Doctrine, pg. 104
• 6. Not So Exceptionally American, pg. 135
• 7. Greece: The Trojan Horse, pg. 166
• 8. The Philippines: Magsaysay's Miracle, pg. 205
• 9. Vietnam: Reaping the Whirlwind, pg. 240
• 10. Conclusion: Facing the Future, pg. 276
• BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 291
• INDEX, pg. 317

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Surprisingly, given its importance in American foreign policy, counterinsurgency as a set of doctrines and a set of policies has received very little scholarly attention. This is by far the most ambitious work on the subject, and it succeeds admirably first in explicating the intellectual universe which gave rise to the doctrines and policies, and second in examining the ways in which the policies were actually carried out."—Richard H. Ullman, Princeton University

Editorial Reviews

". . . a consistently persuasive account of the fallacies behind American foreign policy."

The Virginia Quarterly Review

"Surprisingly, given its importance in American foreign policy, counterinsurgency as a set of doctrines and a set of policies has received very little scholarly attention. This is by far the most ambitious work on the subject, and it succeeds admirably first in explicating the intellectual universe which gave rise to the doctrines and policies, and second in examining the ways in which the policies were actually carried out."—Richard H. Ullman, Princeton University

From the Publisher