Douglas A. Borer

The Long War: insurgency, counterinsurgency and collapsing states

Abstract This introductory article provides the context for the contemporary debate about insurgency, counterinsurgency and collapsing states taking place against the backdrop of what originated as the ‘global war on terror’ (gwot) and is now increasingly being characterised as ‘the Long War’. The Long War and the gwot are often represented as a ‘new’ era in warfare and US geopolitics, despite the fact that, rhetorically, George W Bush and other administration officials have on occasion invoked the Second World War as analogous to the Long War. This article argues that the Long War is new in important respects, but it also bears many similarities to the Cold War. A key similarity between the Cold War and the Long War is the way in which insurgency and counterinsurgency are seen primarily in the context of inter-state rivalry in which the critical local or regional dynamics of revolution and counter-revolution are neglected. In this context US policy makers and their allies have again erroneously applied a ‘grand strategy’ that suits the imperatives of conventional military and geopolitical thinking rather than engaging with what is a much more variegated array of problems facing the changing global order. The Long War is ostensibly a war against various non-state movements, networks and actors, and is even represented as such by the Pentagon and the White House. However, the overall approach to the Long War has continued to fall back on the conventional ‘American Way of War’ that produces more problems than it solves.

Global Development and Human (In)security: understanding the rise of the Rajah Solaiman Movement and Balik Islam in the Philippines

Abstract Over the past 30 years rapid advances in the realm of digital technology and the establishment of an ever expanding globally networked communications infrastructure have radically altered the infrastructure of the global economy. Combined with new rules for international finance, the de-regulation of capital and labour markets and the embracing of a ‘free trade’ ethos by most states in the international system, todays ‘information age’ bears little resemblance to the economic world experienced by previous generations. Rapid economic changes have been accompanied by the broad dissemination of social, cultural and political information to all corners of the globe, a phenomenon that has contributed to a number of important socio-political developments. Using social movement theory to frame our analytical narrative, we investigate how the demands and pressures of globalisation have helped to foment ‘Balik Islam’, a religious-based social movement concentrated among the ranks of returned overseas Filipino workers in the northern island of Luzon. These workers, having converted from Catholicism to Islam while employed in the Middle East, are beginning to reshape the political fabric of the Republic of the Philippines, sometimes in a violent fashion. To illustrate the possible extremes of Balik Islam, the article will chart the rise and fall of the Rajah Solaiman Movement, a Balik-Islam group that was responsible for a number of recent terrorist attacks, and whose members, thanks to their ability to blend in with the dominant population, pose a special challenge to democracy.

Allies at War: The Soviet, American, and British Experience, 1939–1945

Preface - Introduction - PART I STRATEGY - Great Britain: The Indirect Strategy A. Danchev - The Soviet Union: The Direct Strategy O.A. Rzheshevsky - The United States: The Global Strategy M.A.Stoler - Coalition: Structure, Strategy, and Statecraft T.A.Wilson et al - PART II ECONOMY - Great Britain: Cyclops R.J.Overy - The Soviet Union: Phoenix L.V.Pozdeeva - The United States: Leviathan T.A.Wilson - Cooperation: Trade, Aid, and Technology R.J.Overy et al - PART III HOME FRONT - Great Britain: The Peoples War? J.Harris - The Soviet Union: The Great Patriotic War? M.N.Narinsky - The United States: The Good War? C.C.Alexander - Perceptions: Images, Ideals and Illusions M.N.Narinsky, L.V.Pozdeeva et al - PART IV FOREIGN POLICY - Great Britain: Imperial Diplomacy D.Reynolds - The Soviet Union: Territorial Diplomacy L.V.Pozdeeva - The United States: Democratic Diplomacy L.C.Gardner & W.F.Kimball - Legacies: Allies, Enemies, and Posterity D.Reynolds et al - Index

Blundering into Baghdad: an analysis of strategy, structure, principals and agents

Some postmortems of the Bush Administrations pre-Iraq war decision-making have focused on a dysfunctional National Security Council (NSC) structure as the major reason for the lack of a thorough strategic assessment prior to the March 2003 invasion. Other academic and journalistic accounts have focused on a lack of a first rate conceptual thinker at the top levels of the Bush Administration as an important cause of the strategic shortcomings in Iraq decision-making. This article will assess the relative impact of decision-making structure versus quality of strategic leadership in explaining poor performance in the first five years of the Iraq war.

Problems in the Intelligence-Policy Nexus: Rethinking Korea, Tet, and Afghanistan

Accusations of failure by elements of the US intelligence community (IC) have followed in the wake of nearly every war and terrorist bombing since Japans successful strike on Pearl Harbor in 1941. This article will illustrate how some problems that exist inside the ‘intelligence-policy nexus’ are beyond the control of the IC. By investigating the dynamics and tensions that exist between producers of intelligence (the IC) and the consumers of those products (policy-makers), we review three different types of alleged failure. First, by revisiting the Chinese intervention in Korea, we show that a rarely listed case in the literature is in fact a classic example of producer-based failure generated from within the IC. However, in our study of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War (1968), we show that the alleged intelligence failure by producers should be more accurately described as a ‘failure of intelligence’ by consumers. Third, by revisiting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979), we conclude that there existed neither a producer nor a consumer failure. The Carter Administration made a conscious policy choice to act surprised (when it was not).

Black Yanks in the Pacific: race in the making of American military empire after World War II. By Michael Cullen Green

conflict’ (p. 252). The Paguna mine is portrayed by many in Bougainville and the outside world as the villain in the Bougainville conflict saga. It is believed that the continued operations of the mine created the context and the reason for landowner grievance. In his chapter, ‘The Paguna Mine’, Don Vernon, one of the architects of the mine, accepts that things could have been done differently at a different time and in a different set of circumstances but, at the end of the day, he believes, the benefits of the mine accruing to Bougainville and Papua New Guinea overall were enormous. Unfortunately, it came to a stage in the 1980s where the mine was blamed for every imaginable ill in Bougainville. In fact, the conflict began when the late Francis Ona, then secretary to the New Paguna Landowners Association, could not accept the findings of a New Zealand-based consultancy firm Applied Geology Associates (AGA) that, while the environmental impact of the mine was significant, they ‘failed to find any significant levels of chemical pollution’ (p. 270). Ona branded this finding as yet another example of white man’s lies (‘whitewash’), fled into the mountains of Paguna, and began a campaign of terror and sabotage against the mine soon after. The call for secession from Papua New Guinea became a vociferous war cry throughout the period of the Bougainville conflict. The reasons are many and varied and are discussed from various perspectives in Bougainville before the Conflict. James Griffin and John Momis separately remind us that this feature of the Bougainville conflict was not a spur of the moment reaction. Secessionist movements in Bougainville have a long history compared with others in Papua New Guinea. The first indications emerged as early as the 1950s, but were ‘officially’ articulated on 8 September 1968 ‘when 25 Bougainvilleans, led by Paul Lapun and [Leo] Hannett in Port Moresby, initiated the Mungkas Society and requested a referendum on their province’s future’ (p. 296). It gained wide publicity and popular support during and after the land crises of 1969. It came a step closer when Bougainvillean leaders made a unilateral declaration of independence on 1 September 1975 and, after a period of dormancy, emerged with renewed strength and rampant brutality after 1988. Why has the secessionist movement in Bougainville persisted over time? One of the important explanations in the book is that a pan-Bougainvillean identity emerged during the past 100 years which has provided the basis for its continuation. The nature of this identity and the increasing complexity of its component parts are comprehensively discussed by Anthony Regan in ‘Towards Understanding the Origins of the Conflict’. Until 1975, for much of the past 100 years, Bougainville (and Papua New Guinea) was under colonial rule, first the Germans and then Australia. Colonialism brought with it some good and some bad things to all peoples of Papua New Guinea. Bougainvilleans, especially after the 1960s, and as a consequence of the colonial experience, believed that they are fundamentally different from other Papua New Guineans on the basis of their skin colour, for which they should be given a different identity politically. This is unfortunate. The whole Melanesian region then and in contemporary society is well known for its great diversity — socially, culturally and ethnically. That we are now independent as ‘one’ people was a creation of colonialism under whose jurisdiction no one group was treated better or worse than another. Bougainville before the Conflict is a great book written for all Bougainvilleans and Papua New Guineans who have an interest in Bougainville’s history and political journey.

All roads lead to and from Iraq: the Long War and the transformation of the nation-state system

Abstract This concluding article returns to some of the key themes of this volume in relation to insurgency, counter-insurgency and collapsing states. In particular it attempts to characterise the relationship between the Long War and the Cold War, in relation to the transformation of the nation-state system. More broadly it emphasises that the Cold War was an often misdirected, militarised struggle between ‘genuinely existing’ liberal capitalism and ‘genuinely existing’ state socialism (the First World and the Second World) against each other and for influence and power in the erstwhile Third World. The Long War, meanwhile, reflects both the triumph of ‘genuinely existing’ liberal capitalism as the dominant form of secular modernity over an equally, if not more virulently secular ‘genuinely existing’ state-socialism, and the emergence of an anti-secular neo-traditionalism (often, but not exclusively, Islamic) at both the nation-state and the transnational level. At the same time the binary that drove the Cold War and led to considerable bloodshed, was often characterised by contradictions within the two main ostensible challengers which were as potent as those between them. This is also the case in relation to Islamic revivalisms and their neo-traditional challenges to secular modernity and ‘genuinely existing’ liberal capitalism. (In fact, it is worth noting, that although Islamic fundamentalisms are at the forefront of the neo-traditional revival, there are other religious-based neo-traditionalisms seeking to counter the global spread of ‘genuinely existing’ liberal capitalism.) We conclude that the ‘real’ Long War may be a struggle within the ‘Muslim world’ rather than the ostensible struggle between the ‘West’ and ‘Islam’.

Russian Authoritarian Pluralism: a Local and Global Trend?

Russia is a country that has witnessed increasingly authoritarian governance over the last decade. Civil liberties have been curtailed; local and regional political power has been usurped by the Kremlin. Russia remains a democracy insomuch as elections are conducted, but increasingly those elections are so heavily influenced by state control over the media and fiscal elements of social power that substantive Western notions of democracy have greatly atrophied. However, the decline in substantive democracy has received solid support from the Russian electorate. As such, under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, Russia has become an ‘authoritarian pluralist’ state that now expresses long-standing cultural affinity for a strong authoritarian rule under an increasingly thin veneer of democratic principles. Furthermore, variations of this new Russian model seem to be spreading globally. Democracy is the dictatorship of the law. The stronger the state is, the freer the individual. Vladimir Putin

Americans Against America: The Legacy of Cold War Secrecy and the Crisis of Public Trust

Abstract This commentary addresses problems of political legitimacy in America. Using specific examples from the Cold War, we show how the development of a national security subculture of secrecy in the federal government served to undermine the core sources of legitimacy that lie at the heart of democracy. The analysis demonstrates how patterns of government behavior during the Cold War provided the material for conspiracy theories that erode trust among the public and provided the ideological foundation for the militant antigovernment “patriot” movement. The discussion concludes with recommendations for the future.