Puños de hierro y manos ocultas: inteligencia en la contrainsurgencia británica
| Autor | Andrew Mumford |
| Páginas | 130-165 |
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Ver Nota1
Counter-insurgency and intelligence studies have largely been two non-concentric fields of academic research. Few studies have investigated the role of intelligence in counter-insurgency campaigns or the particular demands on intelligence gatherers that the exigencies of asymmetric warfare créate.2 Counter-insurgency analysis has instead rested, in both its 'classic' and con-temporaneous form, on facets of the kinetic military campaign and on non-kinetic societal efforts to win 'hearts and minds'. If intelligence studies rep-resents the 'missing dimensión' of international history, as Christopher Andrew and David Dilks (1984) famously put it, then counter-insurgency surely stands as the 'ugly duckling' of strategic studies — a type of warfare marked out by its nebulous conception of'victory', its complex tactical rep-ertoire, and its emphasis on social measures as much as military goals. Mar-rying the two themes together by exploring their inter-twined past in the British experience sheds light on two historically under-explored and often misconceived dynamics of international strategic studies.
The post-9/11 clamour for heightened intelligence on the seemingly global networked threat of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates carne to dominate the security agenda of the West. As the 'War on Terror' degenerated into osten-sibly an extensive counter-insurgency campaign the parenthetic rush in academic and military circles to 're-learn' counter-insurgency has increased the need to interpret asymmetric warfare through the lens of intelligence.
This article seeks to achieve this by utilising historical and contemporary British counter-insurgency deployments as a means of assessing intelligence capabilities, responsibilities and effectiveness in response to multivariate 'threats from below' in the colonial and post-colonial age. Counter-insurgency assumed a status during the twentieth century as one of the British military's fortes. A wealth of asymmetric warfare experience was ac-cumulated after World War Two, as the small wars of decolonisation of-fered the army of a fading imperial power the opportunity to regularly de-ploy against an irregular enemy. Yet this quantity of experience has been misguidedly conflated with quality. This article holds that the British, far from being the counter-insurgent exemplars that history has benevolently cast them, have in fact consistently proven to be slow learners and slow
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strategic burners in the realm of counter-insurgency warfare. Yet it proved to be intelligence capabilities that became the critical enabler of eventual op-erational successes and lever against strategic inertia. The paper harnesses the chronologically and geographically dispersed examples of Malaya (1948-60), Kenya (1952-60), South Arabia (1962-67), the first decade of the Northern Irish 'Troubles' (1969-79), and analysis of the recent British counter-insurgency campaign in southern Iraq (2003-09) to explore the role of intelligence in its organisational and operational context across five of the most seminal campaigns in Britain's modern counter-insurgency experience. These case studies will determine the sources of British counter-insurgency intelligence, as well as critically assessing the challenges of intelligence gath-ering, assessment and adaptability in the face of often isolated and tight-knit asymmetric enemies.
The civil-military struggle to formúlate a successful counter-insurgency strategy in the modern British experience often depended on the establish-ment of an efficient, decentralised and well-integrated intelligence network. Not only did intelligence provide the basis for the launch of pin-point military operations, offering information on insurgent location, likely strength and movement, it also aided the political side of the campaign, re-vealing schisms within enemy political leadership, as well as establishing the political acceptability or likely civilian acquiescence towards a particular op-eration or policy. In short, intelligence proved itself to be integrally inter-connected with the military and political dimensions of counter-insurgency campaigns and was a critical element of eventual strategic success. As Mi-chael Howard (2002: 10) has succinctly stated: 'without hearts and minds one cannot obtain intelligence, and without intelligence terrorists can never be defeated.' Therefore, intelligence must be seen as both a by-product of other successfully implemented counter-insurgency tactics (such as 'hearts and minds', or an influential information campaign) as well as a catalyst for direct military, or indirect political, action.
The primary intelligence gatherers in colonial British counter-insurgency operations were indigenous pólice forces, who were then assisted by a Brit-
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ish-established Special Branch and, on occasions, MI 5. Recent operations in Iraq relied on intelligence collected by local pólice officers in conjunction with other military sources. The need for combined police-military action in counter-insurgency operations stems from the particular need to adapt to the nuances of asymmetric warfare among the people, and as a means of bridging the divide between the purposes of the two institutions. The gath-ering of information on suspected or known insurgents (and equally cru-cially their supply and support network) lends itself to the methodical and legalist work of minimum forcé policing. An insurgency can thus be un-dermined outside the conflict zone. However, the combative nature of in-surgencies requires the use of lethal forcé — a role reserved for the military. Therefore, the dual imperative in counter-insurgency operations of not al-ienating the indigenous population whilst concomitantly subduing and eliminating an insurgent group requires the parallel utilisation of effective community policing (necessary for intelligence gathering and 'population control' in a primarily protective sense) and targeted military operations that strike at insurgent cells or strongholds. This balance is by no means an easy one to find or maintain — as the contemporary British experience has proved — particularly given the jealously guarded fiefdoms of intelligence. However the belated benefits of co-operation will be noted throughout the upcoming case studies.
One particular challenge that the British have consistently failed to overeóme is that a paucity of intelligence need not be licence to adopt more an-tagonistic population control measures. The introduction of internment in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s showeased the way in which bad intelligence and draconian detention laws could be a catalyst for further violence.3 Intelligence was therefore used not only to tap into the ethos and motiva-tions of the aggrieved community in order to develop a greater understand-ing of the nature of the threat for política! means, but also in order to aecu-rately assess the insurgents' operational capabilities and organisation for practical military means. As one contemporary observation of the role of intelligence in operations in Iraq illustratively commented: 'Without good intelligence, a counterinsurgent is like a blind boxer wasting energy flailing at an unseen opponent.' (Cohén et.al., 2006: 50). Yet the British spent a
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significant amount of time, predominantly in the early stages of recent counter-insurgency campaigns, flailing in an intelligence vacuum before eventually landing effective punches.
Practically speaking, modern British counter-insurgency campaigns have used three methods of intelligence gathering: overt (collected by uniformed controls on the ground), confidential (retrieved largely from detainees under interrogation), and clandestine (including undercover or paralegal surveil-lance). These forms of intelligence were collected by both pólice and mili-tary intelligence units in order to form one of three types of intelligence: either background intelligence to gain a wider picture of the causes of the insurgency; operational intelligence that can guide the military side of the conflict; or criminal intelligence that is aimed largely at individual insur-gents or individuáis within their supply network in order to bring legal pro-ceedings Qeffery, 1987: 129, 141).
But as the case studies will demónstrate, an effective combination of such types and methods of intelligence in the British cases was only achieved if the intelligence gathering process fulfilled several key criteria: if intelligence networks became grounded in the local community, with a reliable system of protection and rewards in place for indigenous intelligence agents; if the intelligence gathering system became decentralised allowing for localised 'hot' intelligence to be acted upon without being lost in a hierarchy of authority; if the pólice, the military and government intelligence agencies were encouraged to share information at local and national level, although it is acknowledged that this was easier said than done; and finally, an absence of intelligence did not legitimise heavy-handed treatment of the local popu-lation — accurate intelligence is rarely the product of fear and coerción. Over the past sixty years the British have not been quick to realise the neces-sity of these factors; however, the bearing of intelligence on the outcome of previous counter-insurgencies has been crucial, as an engagement with key empirical case studies reveáis.
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The British4...
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