GUERRILLA (UNCONVENTIONAL) WARFARE

As the focus of the cold war shifted from Europe to Asia, Africa, and Latin America, guerrilla warfare supplanted some of the conventional techniques of subversion discussed above. This type of revolutionary activity, which combines terror with mobile guerrilla attacks, was used extensively in Yugoslavia and other occupied countries during World War II and has since occurred in more than fifteen countries. Of course, not all guerrilla operations have been orga­nized, supported, or directed by an outside power. Some of the longest and most tragic unconventional military operations have been purely domestic affairs, as in Colombia, where internal strife with characteristics of guerrilla warfare has killed several hundred thousand people over the last thirty years. Successful guerrilla campaigns in Cyprus, China, and Cuba were basically internal rebel­lions, conducted with a minimum of external interference. In Southeast Asia, however, Noth Vietnam and Communist China played major roles in organizing, training, and supporting "national liberation" movements operating in Malaya, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Malaysia. This area offers partic­ularly attractive conditions for guerrilla operations, including dense jungles and marshes in which troops can hide, a predominantly rural population often cut off from direct influence from the central government, undeveloped communica­tion facilities between villages and urban centers, and long, unprotected frontiers that permit easy infiltration and supply of materiel from the "active sanctuary" (the country promoting the unconventional warfare). The romantic and ideologi­cal inspiration for guerrilla operations originated with Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists and was refined by Che Guevara. Unlike their Western comrades, who were concerned primarily with subversion and infiltration in an urban setting, the Chinese and Cubans engaged in protracted rural guerrilla warfare before achieving power. Because of the different environmental and historical traditions, subversion as practiced in Europe and unconventional war­fare as practiced in Asia and Cuba have been basically different means of gaining power.

²⁷ The facts of the Chilean episode come from Elizabeth Farnsworth, "Chile: What Was the U.S. Role? More Than Admitted," and the rebuttal of her arguments by Paul E. Sigmund, "Less Than Charged," in Foreign Policy, No. 2 (Spring 1974), 127-56; Time, September 30, 1974; and the New York Times, September 9, 1974, p. 3.

Clandestine Actions and Military Intervention

Guerrilla units, for example, do not wait for a "revolutionary situation" to develop before they begin direct assaults on the state and society. Nor do they necessarily infiltrate voluntary organizations, organize mass demonstrations, run parliamentary candidates, or seek ministerial positions. They usually begin with a small handful of dedicated men who make no pretense of having a popular base or political legitimacy, but nevertheless organize themselves into small military-political units to launch attacks against established authorities at the village level. Although every country poses different strategic and tactical prob­lems arising from varied political, social, economic, and geographic conditions, most of the major postwar guerrilla uprisings have displayed some common characteristics.

The main political strategy of guerrilla warfare is to win positive control over successively larger portions of the civilian population while simultaneously alienating the population from the regime in power. It may require only small groups of highly mobile guerrillas to defeat the state's military forces if the population remains apathetic. As Andrew Janos points out, "Governments fall not because they have too many enemies but because they have too few friends."²⁸ The military objective of guerrilla warfare is to cause the slow attrition of govern­ment forces to the point where they become concentrated in the larger cities, leaving the rebels to consolidate their control to the countryside.

A guerrilla force can be compared to an iceberg. What the observer sees is a small group of full-time guerrilla warriors that continually harasses government troops and drives them from the countryside. Sustaining this "cap" of the iceberg are thousands of civilians—usually peasants—who perform their ordinary routines during the daytime and fight or conduct supporting activities for the "regulars" during the night. They provide food, shelter, transportation, and intelligence about government troop movements and the activities of anti-rebel leaders. Without this civilian base the guerrilla force could not continue to function, for lack of food, supplies, and information. Yet the government, with all its troops and military resources, is little better off than a handful of guerrillas; for it cannot locate and identify the enemy, whose members submerge back into the mass of society after they have performed their services. The government's best hope is to obtain the loyalty of the peasants so that they will identify the rebels and provide information on their activities.

To construct the civilian base and gain control over the civilian popula­tion, guerrilla cadres combine positive incentives with terror. The political lead­ers of guerrilla forces usually offer programs of land and political reform, com­bined with propaganda campaigns designed to alienate the masses from the government. Themes emphasizing nationalist symbols are also prominent. Rebel agents infiltrate villages and recruit adherents and supporting personnel. Other peasants and civilians are deterred from informing government officials on local guerrilla activities by the knowledge that if their activities are discovered, they will be kidnapped, mutilated, or murdered. Guerrillas and their village agents

²⁸ Janos, The Seizure of Power, p. 20.

262 Clandestine Actions and Military Intervention

also practice selective terror against such government personnel as teachers, local administrators, and village leaders. In each village, a clandestine or "shadow" government is eventually formed, ready to take over control immedi­ately after the area has been purged of protecting government forces.

On the military front, the guerrillas start operating in the most remote areas, where government control and influence are least pervasive. Small units, usually armed with crude weapons, help capture small villages, cut government supply lines, sabotage communication facilities, and ambush government patrols. This type of harassment and attrition ultimately forces government troops to evacuate the rural areas and retreat into larger population centers. Only after several years, in which the guerrillas have gained control of the countryside through military and political operations, are they ready to launch a final military assault on the central political authorities. At this stage, the war of attrition develops into a more conventional war, with the purpose of anihilating the government's military resources. Conventional strategies and tactical principles replace the guerrilla harassing techniques, and the war is fought with more destructive weapons systems, including artillery, tanks, and armored trucks. Mass demonstrations of public support for the revolutionaries are arranged—if at all—only when military defeat of the government appears imminent. The entire process of infiltration and construction of a new order begins only after the revolutionaries have gained power. All the main voluntary organizations still remain to be purged of their leadership, a new mass party to sustain the new regime has to be created, and all of the state administration has to be reconsti­tuted. In short, much of the work that precedes a coup d'etat in the more traditional forms of subversion still remains to be carried out after the guerrillas have seized power. From the point of view of international politics, once power is gained, the new regime immediately shifts the country's orientation toward the external power that has directed, organized, and supported the guerrillas throughout their struggle.

MILITARY INTERVENTION

A final form of intervention is the sending of large quantities of troops either to stabilize a regime against rebels or to help rebels overthrow an established set of authorities. Massive military intervention may build up over a period of time, as in Vietnam, where the United States started by sending military advisors for training purposes, then had them perform various combat support activities, and finally sent more than a half-million troops to conduct military operations. More often, the intervention is the result of a crisis; troops are then sent in rapidly, often catching the target regime or rebels by surprise.

The classic case of sudden intervention to overthrow a regime is provided by the combined Soviet, East German, Polish, Hungarian, and Bulgarian invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. We have already pointed out how the Soviet government had used demonstrations of force in attempts to alter the Dubcek

263 Clandestine Actions and Military Intervention

government's policies. In addition, a series of conferences between the Czechs and other Warsaw Treaty governments had failed to convince them that the Dubcek regime's policies were not aimed at restoring capitalist and multiparty systems to the country. In particular, Walter Ulbricht of East Germany was afraid that the Czech reforms might lead to civil disturbances in his own country. Indeed, the Soviet and East European governments acted partly on the image of a domino theory: If the reforms in Czechoslovakia were not ended, they might infect the rest of the Communist bloc and seriously threaten the socialist system. The military operations were undertaken with great speed and surprise. After the country was effectively in the hands of the occupation troops, the Soviet government used a combination of kidnappings, threats, and persuasion to have Dubcek and his followers deposed from their party and government positions. At the same time, the more orthodox Communists, who had been expelled or demoted from their positions during Dubcek's period of reform, reappeared "to restore order." After the Soviet government had achieved its objectives, it negotiated a treaty with the new Czech regime for the withdrawal of all Warsaw Treaty troops.

Intervention may also be ordered as a means of supporting an ally or friendly state against real or supposed rebellion. The American involvement in Vietnam, of course, was justified on the grounds that the legitimate govern­ment of South Vietnam was faced with aggression from the north; the situation could not be characterized merely as a civil war pitting the Viet Cong against Saigon authorities. To the American government, the question was always one of North Vietnam's undertaking by military means to reunify the country.

The sudden American intervention against the Dominican Republic in 1965 was also undertaken to prevent a "Communist" revolution in that country. Decisions to intervene were taken rapidly and based on rather scanty information. Indeed, although it is true that civil turmoil had developed in the republic, the notion of a Communist plot has been discredited by subsequent information.

CONCLUSION

In the old European-centered international system (excepting the period 1791-1823, approximately), ideological consensus, impermeability of states, crude media of communication, and the doctrine of noninterference helped to preclude one sovereign's attempts to influence the purely domestic affairs of another.²⁹

²⁹ Under the vague understandings comprising the Quadruple (later Quintuple) Alliance of 1815, the major powers of Europe pledged to intervene on behalf of any European monarch who was threatened by liberal revolution. At the Congress of Troppau (1820), devoted to discussion of the liberal revolution in Naples, the assembled Excellencies, Highnesses, and Majesties solemnly declared that "when political changes, brought about by illegal [without royal approval] means, produce dangers to other countries by reason of proximity, and when the Allied Powers can act effectively as regards these conditions, they shall, in order to bring back those countries to their allegiances, employ, first, amicable means, and then coercion." The Allied Powers subsequently intervened in Naples (1821) and Spain (1823) to restore absolute monarchies.

264 Clandestine Actions and Military Intervention

Noninterference is still accepted as one of the foundations of international law and one of the norms that governments should faithfully observe in their foreign relations. The Charter of the United Nations specifically prohibits member states (and presumably the organization itself, in most circumstances) from interfering in each others' domestic problems. The norm does operate, of course, in most international transactions.

But today, complete isolation of internal events from the external envi­ronment may be impossible. It can hardly be expected that many governments, as well as international organizations, will be completely indifferent to political, social, and economic developments in foreign countries. Conditions of economic and political instability in many nations create situations that foreign powers will obviously exploit—sometimes for their own gain and, at other times, merely to prevent massacres and social collapse. When major internal conflicts with serious implications for the core security or alliance interests of the major powers occur, intervention and counterintervention will probably take place, even if these conflicts are not originally organized and directed from abroad. At the point where local political problems impinge upon the foreign-policy interests, objectives, and values of external powers, some sort of relationship between the external power and domestic groups will be established. If a dissident faction or revolutionary movement is seeking domestic objectives that coincide with the interests of an external power, the likelihood that it will become dependent on that outside power is dramatically increased. If a regime in power is threatened by revolutionary forces clearly identified as being organized, supported, and perhaps directed from abroad, it will ask its allies and friends to intervene on its behalf, unless it believes it can cope with the problem by employing its own capabilities.

Although actions involving interference in the internal affairs of other states continue to constitute part of the techniques of achieving objectives for many countries, a new set of norms seems to be developing, with less restrictive criteria to indicate when such actions are permissible. Clearly, the old norms of complete noninterference in other states' internal affairs are being violated frequently, but it cannot be claimed that every case is entirely undesirable. Al­though it is premature to speculate on any long-term trend, many governments take the position that in certain instances, intervention and interference in other states' internal affairs may be legitimate if those actions have the prior approval of some collective body or international organization or if the organization itself assumes such a task. Traditional legal principles prohibiting all forms of external interference are most clearly spelled out in Article 15 of the Charter of Bogota (1948), in which the Latin American states and the United States solemnly pledged that

no state or group of states has the right to intervene directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other state. The foregoing principle prohibits not only armed attack but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the state or against the political, economic, and cultural elements.

265 Clandestine Actions and Military Intervention

Under Article 16, the signatories further agreed that "no state may use or encour­age the use of coercive measures of an economic or political character in order to force the sovereign will of another state or obtain from it advantages of any kind."

In contrast to these strict rules, the recent practice of the Organization of the American States and unilaterally the United States has been quite different. If unilateral intervention has been involved, the acting party has in most cases sought prior approval from the Latin American states, implying that if that approval is forthcoming, the intervention is legitimate. In both the Guatemalan and Cuban episodes, the United States government sought multilateral approval for its actions. In American intervention in the Dominican Republic during 1965, however, the United States took military action before it turned to the OAS to seek approval of its policies.

More significant, perhaps, are those occasions when the OAS itself deter­mined to intervene collectively against one or more of its members. In 1960, for instance, the Inter-American Peace Commission of the OAS, in an action hardly compatible with the spirit of the Bogota charter, condemned the Trujillo regime for "flagrant and widespread" violations of human rights in the Domini­can Republic. Later in the same year, the foreign ministers of the Latin American states publicly condemned Trujillo for plotting against the life of Venezuela's president. The foreign ministers' resolution, which called upon members of the OAS to impose partial economic sanctions on the Trujillo regime, was the first time that truly collective action had been applied in the Western Hemisphere. Again, in 1964, the OAS Council voted almost unanimously to impose economic and diplomatic sanctions against the Castro regime in Cuba.

In the United Nations, collective intervention in the internal affairs of member states also seems to have become a legitimate method for coping with widespread domestic chaos that promises to involve external powers extensively. In the Congo (Zaire), United Nations military intervention helped prevent social chaos, secession of Katanga from the central state, and unilateral intervention of the Soviet Union and possibly the United States. In 1964, the organization once again sent troops abroad, this time to Cyprus to establish and police a cease-fire in the civil war on the island, as well as to forestall a Turkish invasion and possible Russian intervention. All these actions were taken in the name of the organization, with the consent of the major governments involved. It is easy to speculate that if the interventions had not been organized, the internal wars and rebellions could have easily become transposed into major international crises.

Diplomatic interference, clandestine political actions, subversion, guer­rilla warfare, and military intervention will remain important techniques for influencing or coercing other nations and exploiting or settling periodic domestic crises in unstable political systems. As long as the leaders of some states are committed to supporting and, in some cases, organizing and directing national "wars of liberation," counterintervention can be expected as well. Other states committed to expansive objectives or ideological principles, but lacking the capa-

266 Clandestine Actions and Military Intervention

bilities to achieve them through conventional military means, diplomatic bargain­ing, or economic pressures, will also be likely to emphasize clandestine tech­niques. These are often much less expensive, involve lower risks of escalating into a direct military confrontation, and, as the cases of Czechoslovakia and Chile reveal, if the internal conditions in a target state are right, can be brought to a successful conclusion. Where the internal circumstances of a state are less amenable to outside manipulation or two or more states are confronted with incompatible objectives that have little relationship to domestic political pro­cesses, then—provided other techniques of inducement fail—the usual decision is to use military threats and violent punishments.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blechman, Barry M., and Stephen S. Kaplan, Force Without War: U.S. Armed Forces as a Political Instrument. Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1978.

Burchett, Wilfred, Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerrilla War. New York: Interna­tional Publishers, 1965.

Cohen, Raymond, "Where Are the Aircraft Carriers?—Nonverbal Communica­tion in International Politics," Review of International Studies, 7 (1981), 79-90.

Cottam, Richard W., Competitive Interference and Twentieth Century Diplomacy. Pitts­burgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967.

Crozier, Brian, The Rebels: A Study of Post-War Insurrections. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960.

Debray, Regis, Revolution in the Revolution. Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1966.

Denno, Bryce F., "Sino-Soviet Attitudes toward Revolutionary War," Orbis, 11 (1968), 1193-1207.

Falk, Richard A., "The United States and the Doctrine of Non-intervention in the Internal Affairs of Independent States," Howard Law Journal, 5 (1959), 163-89.

Felix, Christopher, A Short Course in the Secret War. New York: Dutton, 1963.

Giap, Vo Nguyen, People's War, People's Army. New York: Praeger, 1962.

Gibert, Stephen P., "Soviet-American Military Competition in the Third World," Orbis, 10 (1970), 1117-38.

Guevara, Che, Guerrilla Warfare. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1961.

Henderson, William, "Diplomacy and Intervention in the Developing Coun­tries," Virginia Quarterly Review, 39 (1963), 25-36.

Janos, Andrew C, The Seizure of Power: A Study of Force and Popular Consent, Re­search Monograph No. 16. Princeton, N.J.: Center for International Stud­ies, 1964.

Kirkpatrick, Lyman В., Jr., Russian Espionage: Communist and Imperialist. New York: National Strategy Information Center, 1970.

267 Clandestine Actions and Military Intervention

_______, The United States Intelligence Community: Foreign Policy and Domestic Activities.

New York: Hill & Wang, 1973.

Marchetti, Victor, and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. New York: Knopf, 1974.

Mao Tse-tung, On Guerrilla Warfare. New York: Praeger, 1961.

McConnell, James M., and Bradford Dismukes, "Soviet Diplomacy of Force in the Third World," Problems of Communism (January-February 1979), 14-27.

McGowan, Patrick, and Charles W. Kegley, Jr., Threat, Weapons, and Foreign Policy. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1980.

Mitchell, C.R., "Civil Strife and the Involvement of External Parties," Interna­tional Studies Quarterly, 14 (1970), 166-94.

Pearson, Frederic S., "Foreign Military Intervention and Domestic Disputes," International Studies Quarterly, 18 (1974), 259-90.

Rosenau, James N., "Intervention As a Scientific Concept," Journal of Conflict Resolution, 13 (1969), 149-71.

______, ed., International Aspects of Civil Strife. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

Press, 1964.

Rowe, Edward Thomas, "Aid and Coups d'Etat: Aspects of the Impact of Ameri­can Military Assistance Programs in the Less Developed Countries," Interna­tional Studies Quarterly, 18 (1974), 239-55.

Scott, Andrew, M., The Revolution in Statecraft: Informal Penetration. New York: Random House, 1966.

Thornton, Thomas, and Cyril E, Black, Communism and the Strategic Use of Political Violence. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965.

Wright, Quincy, "Subversive Intervention," American Journal of International Law, 54 (1960), 520-35.

Weapons, War,

and

Political Influence

The international system is often described as one of anarchy, but such a descrip­tion overlooks the fact that an overwhelming majority of international transac­tions are carried on by means of bargaining, persuasion, or reward rather than violence. The routine issues that make up a large proportion of any nation's foreign relations rarely provoke statesmen to use or even threaten to use force. Nevertheless, recourse to violence has been and continues to be an important characteristic of the international system. In his classic study of war, Quincy Wright identified 278 wars occurring between 1480 and 1941.¹ Although the major powers were able to avoid a thermonuclear exchange during the height of the cold war, international violence has erupted at various levels of intensity in nearly every region since World War II. Between 1945 and 1967, there were eighty-two armed conflicts involving the regular forces of a nation, including twenty-six interstate wars. Moreover, many of the remaining fifty-six conflicts— civil wars, insurgencies, and the like—have had significant international implications.² There has been no abatement of international conflict during the years since 1967; and many civil wars, including those in Northern Ireland,

Note: This chapter was written by Prof. Ole R. Holsti, Department of Political Science, Duke University.

¹ Quincy Wright, Л Study of War, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 650.

² David Wood, Conflict in the Twentieth Century, Adelphi Paper No. 48 (London: Institute of Strategic Studies, 1968).

Weapons, War, and Political Influence

Lebanon, Chad, Angola, Ethiopia, El Salvador, Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Zaire, and elsewhere, have been marked by intervention of external powers.

The legitimacy of force as an instrument of foreign policy, although often denounced by philosophers, historians, and reformers, has rarely been questioned by those responsible for foreign-policy decisions of their nations. Some states have traditionally maintained orientations of nonalignment or isola­tion; but no nation is "neutral" with respect to its own security, and neutrality does not imply unconditional renunciation of force. Switzerland, for example, maintains active defense forces; India has tested a nuclear device; Sweden has been the scene of an extended debate on the desirability of acquiring nuclear weapons; and some of the staunchest adherents of a posture of nonalignment in the cold war have maintained armed forces proportionately larger than those of the United States, the Soviet Union, or China. Indeed, except in the case of a "puppet regime" established by an outside power, it seems unlikely that any government could long maintain itself in office unless it was committed to the use of all possible means, including force, to preserve the existence of the nation and other interests deemed vital.

Some types of nations may be more prone than others to the use of force as an instrument of foreign policy. In the work cited above, Wright reported that newly established states were more likely to use violence than were older, more mature countries, but that democracies had been involved in war as often as autocracies. Nations with industrial economies were less warlike than those with agricultural economies, and the states with socialist economies have been among the most warlike. On the other hand, some recent studies, based on data since World War II, suggest that democracies are more peaceful than author­itarian nations, and that smaller states tend to engage in more conflictual and high-risk foreign policies.³

Beyond the generalization that democratic nations have never gone to war against each other, the relationships in these studies are not always strong, and they should not obscure the fact that even states that have consistently denounced violence in international affairs will use force to achieve objectives or defend their interests as they define them. India, whose leaders have been outspo­ken opponents of violence in international relations, has used its military forces to capture the enclave of Goa from Portugal; to prevent Pakistani control over the disputed area of Kashmir; to defend its northern frontiers against border incursions by Chinese forces; and to dismember Pakistan by forcing it to grant independence to the area that now constitutes the nation of Bangladesh. Many other examples could be cited. The important point is that the decision to use violence reflects the continuing validity of Clausewitz's dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means. It is the leaders who ultimately

³ Wright, Л Study of War, pp 828-41; Michael Haas, "Societal Approaches to the Study of War," Journal of Peace Research, No. 4 (1965), 307-23; and Maurice A. East, "Size and Foreign Policy Behavior: A Test of Two Models," World Politics, 25 (1973), 556-576. Further discussion appears in Chapter 15.

270 Weapons, War, and Political Influence

make the choice; indeed, the determination of "core interests" and the decision on appropriate means to defend or attain them have traditionally been consid­ered inherent and legitimate attributes of sovereignty. Serious attempts to modify this aspect of sovereignty are largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. But even the United Nations Charter permits nations to use force individually and collec­tively for purposes of self-defense, in the event of an armed attack.

In summary, within an international system characterized by an absence of effective institutionalized constraints on the use of force by its member coun­tries, security is a scarce value. Those responsible for national security are rarely willing to rely merely upon the goodwill or professions of peaceful intent of other nations to ensure their own safety; as a consequence, they are likely to perceive few substitutes for procurement, maintenance, and deployment of mili­tary forces. A state that makes no provision for defending itself, moreover, is unlikely to find others that will take on the task, because such countries are scarcely desirable allies. Thus, while we may be able to attribute a particular war to an aggressive leader and an expansionist social-political system, a more general reason for the use of violence in international relations is the absence of systemic constraints on its use.⁴

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