LOW-INTENSITY CONFLICT: One Hit, Two Misses
Nairn, Allan
When the Reagan Administration took office, it faced a vexing problem. In Nicaragua, the United States had lost control of hemispheric territory for the first time since the fall of Cuba 22 years...
...public opinion and military conditions in El Salvador and Nicaragua...
...As Sara Miles' report (Report on the Americas, April/ May 1986) aptly points out, low-intensity warfare provides timorous legislators with a menu of easy escapes-economic aid, humanitarian aid, maneuvers, police training...
...client was teetering on the brink...
...Down in Managua and Chalatenango, leftists still rule one country and keep another in a state of permanent uproar...
...Leavened with an occasional dose of targeted and memorable terror, this approach can indeed succeed in stopping an insurgency in its tracks...
...Without the ability to generate a genuine popular dynamic in support of the U.S...
...On one side stands an Administration that threatens to take them to the hustings and brand them as communist dupes...
...quite another to roll it back-to dismantle or marginalize the guerrilla force and restore a semblance of social stability...
...aid is truly remarkable...
...U.S...
...Elusive Public Loyalty With the odd exception of a case such as Afghanistan, where U.S.backed forces are fighting an unpopular army of occupation, the low-intensity tactic is customarily used on behalf of a regime--or, in the case of the Nicaraguan contras, a prospective regime-associated with the very officers and oligarchs whose decades of abusive behavior created the unrest in the first place...
...There is no reason to suppose that Reagan does not want to do the same in Central America...
...In Libya, the Administration has used conventional airstrikes and has clearly opted for a course where invasion becomes a major future possibility...
...Sylvester Stallone's Rambo is the prevailing cultural hero...
...It has stopped things from getting worse, but on the Pentagon sandtable it has made nothing better...
...The handful of cases they claim as successes, such as Venezuela in the 1960s, were short campaigns against small, poorly establishedfoco forces...
...Their emphatic sentiments swamped the more ambivalent feelings of those who did not share the fear of another Vietnam-who divided down the middle, with 44% opposed to contra aid and 43% in favor...
...In Nicaragua, the United States had lost control of hemispheric territory for the first time since the fall of Cuba 22 years earlier...
...And from the U.S...
...ally, low-intensity conflict practitioners are limited to running holding actions...
...Yet the Salvadorean authorities have failed to quiet the insurgency and remain incapable of independent selfdefense...
...By any relevant standards-whether the past history of U.S...
...government is still in power, but the guerrillas of the FMLN remain a serious threat...
...Low-intensity conflict has played its part, sustaining the war for five years and facilitating a revolution in Washington opinion...
...Billions of dollars and thousands of social engineers have been poured into the valleys of El Salvador and Vietnam...
...And in El Salvador, another U.S...
...The Times/CBS findings were Nicaragua: More entrenched than ever Allan Nairn is a New York-based journalist who writes frequently about Central America.E C E I (5 typical: they mirrored other polls, which have shown a rough two-to-one consensus against military involvement in Central America ever since Reagan took office in 1981...
...forces...
...Refugee and civic action programs, civil defense and public relations exercises, may not win public support, but when combined with well-planned military actions they may well succeed in rechannelling the patterns of daily civilian life and make it much harder for guerrillas to work with their popular base...
...Proponents of low-intensity conflict make much the same mistake as the naive guerrilla foco theorists of the mid-1960s...
...Creative ferment has given way to the politics of siege, and the image of the revolution has been tarnished overseas...
...troops occupied for more than 20 years, perhaps the most secure of all Washington's client states, today remains in the hands of leftist revolutionaries who are more firmly entrenched-in both political and military terms-than at any time since the fall of Somoza in 1979...
...As Chd Guevara discovered in Bolivia, and his contemporaries found in Guatemala, Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America, their approach was excessively mechanistic...
...The polls show a public that is ever-cautious and still only marginally interested in the issue: only 38% of those questioned in the New York Times/CBS April poll even knew which side the United States was supporting in Nicaragua...
...for A New Garrison State What they have succeeded in creating instead is a sophisticated modem variant of the old-fashioned garrison state...
...Clever tactics were no substitute for the careful cultivation of deeper social forces...
...Reagan's problem in Central America is that no such easy victory is to be found...
...Underestimating the need for preparatory grassroots organizing, and downplaying the importance of political preconditions for revolt, the foco advocates believed that guerrillas could take to the hills and create their own revolutionary dynamic...
...These tactics may be useful as far as they go...
...It has solved a knotty problem for Democrats and opinionmakers caught on the horns of a political dilemma...
...A New York Times/CBS News poll, published on April 15, 1986, showed public opposition to aiding the Nicaraguan contras running at a margin of better than two-to-one...
...By the same token, observers of U.S...
...advisers, El Salvador would fall...
...In certain strategic situations such as Cambodia, where the United States and China back a Khmer Rouge-led insurgency against the Vietnamese occupying forces, tactics with such limited potential are perfectly satisfactory from the U.S...
...Low-intensity theorists face the daunting task of explaining how to win popular support while fighting on the other side...
...Today, five years later, its success in correcting this situation has been limited at best...
...Out in Akron and Kansas City, people still want no part of their president's faraway war...
...But Washington opinion has done a virtual about-face...
...This is essentially what has happened in El Salvador-and with still greater severity in Guatemala-after the initial waves of massacres and assassinations cleared the way for the Army...
...These campaigns were less a matter of restructuring society than of tracking down bands of isolated, outgunned guerrillas...
...Regardless of the other limitations of their theory, left-wing foco theorists did at least propose an enterprise that was basically plausible: to rally exploited peasants against landlords and brutal armies...
...For although the United States is waging war in Central America, it is doing so in a way that involves no draft, few troops and very few admitted casualties...
...Meanwhile, Inside the Beltway The most interesting feature of this public repudiation, however, is the way in which it has affected the Central America debate in Washington...
...For it is one thing to halt the momentum of a movement...
...Today, it is the consensus position...
...Each of these advances the overseas war, but none is likely to provoke more than a plaintive sigh from the people watching back home...
...In the meantime, the campesinos will continue to endure the reality of the quiet war, a state of delegated belligerency in which Washington pays the bills and Central Americans pay the price...
...Resurgent anticommunism and loyalty to president notwithstanding, Americans remain terrified at the prospect of another Vietnam...
...But in the more congenial precincts of the Democratic Party cloakroom, the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour and the pages of The New Republic, the enemy has been routed from the field...
...Allen Dulles and Teddy Roosevelt would not be impressed...
...Those in the New York Times/CBS poll who "fear[ed] the U.S...
...Eisenhower rolled back Guatemala...
...Genuine structural change is simply not a serious option...
...The dream of walking into a serious insurgency and, in the midst of popular misery and hostile gunfire, instantly remaking the countryside in a manner that wins the hearts and minds of the population, has never come close to fruition...
...The officeholder can take a whole range of actions that may move the hometown voter to grumble to his or her spouse, or make a negative comment to a pollster...
...Given these basic constraints, the scope of the low-intensity "revolution" is circumscribed from the start...
...interventions, the track records of the old European empires in the Third World, or the present Administration's own clearly stated goals, the Reagan era effort to recapture Central America has been something of a disappointment...
...Or, when they take the offensive against established revolutionary regimes, they are restricted to harassment campaigns with little prospect of bringing the enemy down...
...U.S...
...point of view...
...When Democrats and commentators disagree, it is over tactics and packaging, not over fundamental policy goals...
...When the Reagan Administration came to power, the idea of bolstering the Salvadorean Army and bringing the Sandinistas to heel was hotly in dispute...
...In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas' early hopes for economic and social progress have been frozen by the war...
...will get involved in Nicaragua the way it did in Vietnam" rejected contra aid by an overwhelming 73% to 17...
...But it is also its severe limitation...
...Moving up the Conflict Spectrum Nor is there any reason to think that the Administration feels necessarily constrained to use low-intensity tactics in the pursuit of its strategic goals...
...power may be disappointed if they try to use the low-intensity model to explain anything more than certain limited aspects of overall Administration strategy...
...For that reason, unless public opinion changes, a full-scale invasion of either Nicaragua or El Salvador seems virtually out of the question...
...But if they fail to do the job, planners may have to consider moving up the scale and evaluating other options...
...But they know in practice that the opinions of their constituents are a matter I 5Habib in El Salvador: Spurious claims of diplomacy cal American public...
...And it minces no words in outlining the task at hand...
...What constrains the present Administration is neither a commitment to low-intensity conflict per se, nor satisfaction with the rather modest goal of making life miserable for the Sandinistas...
...and in the very week of the poll, patriotic sentiment around the impending confrontation with Libya's Col...
...But there are only a few actions that will get voters so fired up that they will take to the streets in protest, or seek retaliation at the polls...
...The reason for the apparent paradox is not hard to ascertain...
...The pattern prevailed among every group surveyed: residents of the South rejected Reagan's policy by 59% to 27...
...In El Salvador, after the investment of almost $2 billion and considerable political capital, the pro-U.S...
...On the other side sits the public, anticommunist to a fault and eager to stand up for America, but at the same time acutely fearful of another Vietnam nightmare...
...objectives through military force without arousing the anger of a skeptiJUNE 1986 power balance in Central America have remained essentially static since 1981...
...That was not the case in Grenada...
...allies' point of view, the game is hardly worth the candle unless they can play it in a manner that safeguards their own longstanding interests...
...The more ardent advocates of low-intensity conflict make the mistake of thinking that their doctrine is more powerful than it really is...
...The solution has been a subtle one: acquiesce to Reagan's programs-in defiance of public wishes-but do so with low-key tactics that keep the people in their seats...
...Central American hearts and minds remain elusive Without popular support, this is exceedingly hard to do short of foreign intervention and a massive and protracted bloodbath...
...Rather, it is the twin realities of U.S...
...even Republicans opposed contra aid by 51% to 36...
...He has made Central America-and particularly the contra aid proposal-his number one priority...
...Muammar el-Qaddafi was rising to a fever pitch...
...But they go further: they have the hubris to suggest that it can be achieved through a campaign that not only defeats the insurgents, but restructures society to boot...
...Yet despite all this, grassroots America said no...
...There are low-intensity conflict theorists who have talked of "nationbuilding" since shortly after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954...
...Even so, from the White House perspective, the bottom line is bleak...
...As Miles notes, Sam Sarkesian, one of the principal devotees of low-intensity warfare, says, "The existing system must take the revolution out of the hands of the revolutionaries...
...But they have never done it, anywhere...
...For it is here, on the front that exists inside the Beltway and in the minds of the nation's elite opinionmakers, that the Administration has scored its only real Central American success...
...The possibility of more limited conventional attacks in both countries, however, especially from the air, is by no means off the board...
...This is the military strength of lowintensity warfare-its ability to freeze the situation and avoid certain outcomes...
...When considered in the broader political context, this rejection of U.S...
...The theorists of low-intensity warfare argue that this is possible...
...The enemy of the guerrilla is the government," says the handbook, "which may not be popularly supported by the majority of the people . . . [T]he essence of the counterguerrilla campaign is to win back the support of the people for the established government...
...even with them, the FMLN remains the single most dynamic factor in the country's economic and political life...
...The theory of low-intensity conflict faces much the same pitfall, but with a bizarre and complicating twist...
...Nixon did it with Chile...
...Some Genius, but More Naivete This is the political genius of lowintensity conflict doctrine: the prospect of quiet war, the ability to pursue U.S...
...his approval rating in 1986 stands in excess of 65...
...Rather than looking at low-intensity conflict as an all-encompassing framework of strategic analysis, it is more useful to think of it as a set of tactics that occupies one particular space on the conflict spectrum...
...But in Central America, where the Reagan Administration wants to recapture Nicaragua, and even liberal Democrats hope one day to see a stable El Salvador that is not at war, the prospect of the current status quo being prolonged indefinitely is hardly satisfying...
...But the embarrassing fact remains that the Reagan JUNE 1986 Administration has made no fundamental progress on the ground in Central America...
...The overall margin of disapproval was 62% to 25...
...Reagan carried 49 states when he was reelected in 1984...
...Without the U.S...
...In the case of Central America, the public stands opposed to interventionist policies but is not sufficiently motivated to act against the lawmakers who vote them through...
...But just as low-intensity conflict doctrine shares the credit for the Administration's success in Washington, it is also responsible for much of the basic U.S...
...At such a limited level of direct risk, most U.S...
...Statements like this have an impressive ring...
...Grassroots America Says No The Administration's failure has been even more pronounced at the grassroots level of U.S...
...public sentiment and the of fine gradation...
...In many minds, it is intolerable...
...The key to maintaining this public quiescence lies in the policy itself...
...The American public will not tolerate another bloody commitment of U.S...
...The technique of low-intensity warfare has played an important part in this shift in the Washington wind...
...Washington needs these local elites to carry on the fight on the ground...
...In theory, it is risky for politicians to contravene a two-to-one public majority, as they do by supporting aid to the contras...
...A country which U.S...
...Yet the closer one looks at precisely what they mean, the more rhetorical and elusive they become...
...domestic politics...
...The United States has overseen the installation of President Jos6 Napole6n Duarte and financed a fourfold expansion of the Salvadorean armed forces, as well as their total rearmament and reorganization...
...This problem is compounded by the fact that even limited social reforms are exceedingly hard to implement amidst the chaos of wartime...
...Army Field Manual 31-16, the Counterguerrilla Operations handbook, first published in 1967, is one of the seminal documents of lowintensity conflict doctrine...
...voters are inclined to let it pass...
...but they may sit still for-and perhaps even cheer-a quick Grenada-style pushover...
...But they have never proved quite enough to 6 REPORT ON THE AMERICAS E o a m r B c o REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 6purchase popular loyalty Washington's client regimes...
...failure in the field...
Vol. 20 • June 1986 • No. 3
