Understanding Insurgent Resilience

Organizational Structures and the Implications for Counterinsurgency

Andrew Henshaw

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000068184
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoria: Terrorismo

This book examines terrorist and insurgent organisations and seeks to understand how such groups persist for so long, while introducing a new strategic doctrine for countering these organisations.

The work discusses whether familial or meritocratic insurgencies are more resilient to counterinsurgency pressures. It argues that it is not the type of organization that determines resilience, but rather the efficiency functions of social capital and trust, which have different natures and forms, within them. It finds that while familial insurgencies can challenge incumbents from the start, they weaken over time, whereas meritocracies will generally strengthen. The book examines four of the most enduring and lethal insurgent organizations: the Haqqani Network in Afghanistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan, Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia, and the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines. The author breaks down each group into its formative strengths and vulnerabilities and presents a bespoke model of strategic counterintelligence that can be used to manipulate, degrade and destroy each organization.

This book will be of much interest to students of counterinsurgency, terrorism, intelligence, security and defence studies in general.

Part I

Introduction to insurgency and the function of organizations

1 Introduction

By July 2018, Afghanistan had already reached the highest yearly civilian death toll in over 17 years of ongoing war: 1,355 children and 544 women were among the 5,122 civilian deaths (UNAMA 2018). What is more, by September 2019 the Taliban controlled more territory in the country than it did before the U.S. and allied forces invaded. Though while Afghanistan stands out in terms of the severity and longevity of its violence, it is not the sole long-running insurgent conflict in the world. Many other countries in the Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen), and states in Africa, Asia, and Southeast Asia also suffer enduring insurgencies.¹ This begs the question of how insurgent organizations persist and remain so resilient to efforts to counter them. Is it a failure of methods, doctrine, and the external pressures exerted on insurgent organizations? Alternatively, is it the resilience of the insurgents themselves and how they respond to external pressures that prolong violent political conflicts?

This book searches for answers to these questions by peering into the insurgent organizations themselves. In doing so, it contributes to our theoretical and empirical understanding of insurgent organizations so that governments can identify new ways to penetrate, counter, degrade, and destroy them. The book compares two broad types: familial versus meritocratic insurgent organizations. Familial insurgent organizations are those that draw extensively on familial connections when appointing commanders and leaders and in structuring their insurgency. Examples of familial insurgent organizations include the Islamic State-aligned Maute Group in the Southern Philippines, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE), the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC), and the Haqqani Network in Afghanistan. The Haqqani Network, in particular, exemplifies a familial organization with deep, broad-reaching, and powerfully entrenched kinship ties and clan bonds. It operates throughout Loya Paktia, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and Waziristan, and is responsible for some of the highest-profile attacks in the Afghan war.

Meritocratic insurgent groups, on the other hand, are those where recruitment, promotion, and senior leadership structures are based on talent and professionalism rather than any family or kin connections. A structure is how organizations build themselves and develop over time in response to internal influences and external pressures. More succinctly, structure describes the architecture of an organization. In true meritocratic organizations, everyone presumably has equal opportunities for advancement and personal gain dependent on their individual strengths and worth, regardless of their background.²

Examples of meritocratic insurgent organizations include Gama’a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group), Ansar Dine, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (AAMB), al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in Pakistan. AQI, for instance, had little in the way of an Iraqi kinship network to draw upon. As a consequence its recruitment, membership, and leadership were a varied group that included international and domestic jihadists. Indeed, the membership of AQI was an international melting pot with foreign fighters joining local Iraqis to resist the Iraqi Government and international coalition. Advancement within AQI was based on meritocracy. As a result, the top echelon were a diverse group with a range of different nationalities and backgrounds.

Ceteris paribus, which of these two types of insurgent organizations should governments expect to be the more difficult to defeat? At first glance there might be good intuitive arguments both ways. On the one hand, it might be assumed that family ties would be harder for security forces to penetrate and, if an insurgent fighter were captured, it would be more difficult for the government to convince the captive to “turn” on their family. The Mafia, for instance, might be considered the archetypal familial organization and has a worthy reputation for being difficult to infiltrate or encourage members to defect from.³

Alternatively, there are good intuitive arguments for why meritocratic organizations might be more resilient. First, an organization based on individual capabilities (intelligence, dedication, etc.) might be assumed to be an overall better system than one based on nepotism. Indeed, nepotism has become synonymous with ineffectiveness and graft. Second, one might speculate that the security and intelligence services would have an easier time constructing a “social network analysis” of an organization based on familial connections than on one that is not. Despite good intuitive arguments both ways, there has been little rigorous scholarly research that has compared these two types of insurgent organizations against their respective resilience. This book is an attempt to fill this gap.

The complexities of insurgency

Given the human cost of insurgent warfare it is of little surprise that these phenomena have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. One research agenda has asked why governments find it hard to win (Mack 1975; Arreguin-Toft 2001; Sinno 2008; Meron 2012; Staniland 2014), while scholars on the other side of the coin have asked how insurgent organizations appear to be so resilient (Mockaitis 2003; Connable and Libicki, 2010). Among this second group, some scholars have made attempts at examining the specific strengths and vulnerabilities of different organizations, such as Mobley (2008) in his analysis of counterintelligence risks, and Turbiville (2009) in his research on insurgent offensive intelligence collection practices.⁴ However, few have focused on the role of family and meritocracy in insurgent organizational resilience.⁵

In order to begin though we need to delineate what insurgency is. Trebbi and Weese (2015) define insurgency as armed rebellion against central authority, while Burchill (2016) describes it as actions taken to conquer existing power structures. These definitions provide a contemporary understanding. This book builds on these, and defines insurgency as an organized attempt by an armed organization to violently challenge the legitimacy of an incumbent authority and compete for control of people, land, laws, or the state itself. This expands the definition subtly to allow for the understanding of more nuanced dimensions and prismatic scope. This is achieved by viewing insurgency as actor groups in competition for authority over the whole society from which they come, rather than as actor groups in competition with others for primacy.

As Kalyvas writes on the blurred attempts of distinctions of human political violence, “Typically, they do not result from an overarching conceptual perspective; rather they are the result of practical considerations and the often-arbitrary (and solitary) development of a given subfield” (2019, 11). Therefore, the definition provided here addresses the issue of clarity by defining insurgency as a macro effort of political change, and one with a myriad of dimensions. This supports the goal of providing important understanding of how insurgency can be addressed with new ideas, approaches, and particularly a new strategic counterintelligence doctrine to exploit identified strengths and vulnerabilities.⁶

How to use this book

This book addresses a highly specialized niche within the counterinsurgency literature. Due to its design, focus on organizational resilience, and the presentation of how that can be degraded and manipulated with strategic counterintelligence, it is aimed at a multi-demographic audience. Such an audience may include operational leaders and practitioners of intelligence tradecraft and sub-disciplines, scholars, academics, and researchers. Likewise, it is particularly relevant to students as a coursework book in the disciplines of security, counterinsurgency (COIN), counterterrorism (CT), conflict and military studies, law enforcement intelligence and criminal studies, and international relations social sciences.

What makes this book different?

The security studies field is highly populated and growing every day, but it is unusual that genuinely new and novel material is introduced, particularly that which can be operationalized and put into practice. Building on the comprehensive analysis of insurgent organizational resilience, the material presented in Chapter 8 does so by introducing a new strategic counterintelligence doctrine that can be deployed into COIN operations globally. Succinctly speaking, this book attempts to provide the reader with the means to understand how insurgent resilience can be weakened, as well as a tour of the toolset required to do so.

It therefore achieves two critically important goals as a learning tool, and as a framework for operationalized application. This comes with a caveat, however. Chapter 8 is an introduction to strategic counterintelligence, not the doctrine itself. Those familiar with the practice of intelligence collection and counterintelligence operations will know the methodology involved, and for them this book provides a new direction. For others who are seeking to develop such knowledge, this book is a gateway into that world. It is this dualistic approach of problem analysis and understanding, and then the bespoke solution design of strategic counterintelligence in COIN, that sets this book aside from others.

Additionally, this book is intended to be complementary to other works, methods, and doctrines of warfare. As with every endeavour, it is not possible to arrive at a point of understanding without a body of knowledge forged by others, and there are many pinnacle works in the counterinsurgency realm that have made significant contributions to COIN theory and practice. These include: David Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, Praeger, 1964; Leites and Wolf’s Rebellion and Authority: An Analytical Essay on Insurgent Conflicts, Markham, 1970; and Fearon and Laitin’s Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War, American Political Science Review 97, 2003. Likewise, there is a healthy body of more recent texts that equally make valuable contributions, such as Shelly’s Dirty Entanglements: Corruption, Crime, and Terrorism, Cambridge University Press, 2014; Paul Moorcraft’s The Jihadist Threat: The Re-Conquest of the West?, Naval Institute Press, 2016; Andrew Mumford’s Counterinsurgency Wars and the Anglo-American Alliance, Georgetown University Press, 2017; and Thomas Mockaitis’s The COIN Conundrum: The Future of U.S. Counterinsurgency and U.S. Land Power, Department of the Army, 2017.

In the specialist academic field, works include Paul Rich and Usabelle Duyvesteyn, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Insurgency and counterinsurgency, Routledge, 2012; James Forest, ed., The Making of a Terrorist: Recruitment, Training, and Root Causes [three volumes], Praeger Security International, 2006; Walter Enders and Todd Sandler, eds. The Political Economy of Terrorism, Cambridge University Press, 2006; and Ekaterina Stepanova, Terrorism in Asymmetric Conflict: Ideological and Structural Aspects, Oxford University Press, 2008. These modern texts are some of the leading academic writings on the subjects of insurgency, counterinsurgency, and terrorism to date.

This book is a little different. Rather than assuming a phenomenological approach, it delivers nuanced understanding using detailed case studies that drill into the minutiae of insurgency, from the macro to the daily tactical levels. The analysis of familial versus meritocratic organizational structures and types enables better understanding of social capital and trust, how members rise through roles and responsibilities in different organizational types, and in turn the strengths and weaknesses of various structural systems.

Understanding this is very important because it can explain how familial and meritocratic structures affect insurgent organizational resilience in the face of an incumbent government’s attempts to defeat them. Few have attempted to carefully examine the operational side of insurgent resilience and responses to external pressures, and particularly the specific relationships of organizational leadership types, insurgency systematics (i.e. the system of activities to gather inputs, process and develop them, and then produce outputs), and social capital and trust.⁷ Likewise, those who have attempted to use potentially similar insights to develop new models to address insurgency are equally scarce.

At both longitudinal and chronological levels, the book makes a novel contribution to our understanding of insurgency. As insurgencies move through the three ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of abbreviations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Introduction to insurgency and the function of organizations
• PART II: Real world analysis
• PART III: A new approach
• Index