Operation ‘Serval’: A Strategic Analysis of the French Intervention in Mali, 2013–2014

In 2013, France launched Operation ‘Serval’ to halt the southwards advance of Islamist insurgents in Mali. Using a Clausewitzian analytical framework, this article provides an assessment of France’s political and military aims in Mali and the degree to which they have been attained. Clear political goals, coordinated international diplomacy, an effective use of military force and blunders by the rebel forces turned ‘Serval’ into a short-term success. Strategically, however, the mission has proven unable to address the conflict’s underlying causes. Serval’s long-term effect is probably better measured by what it prevented than what it contributed.     

Setting a place at the table: ending insurgencies through the political process

This article argues that, under certain conditions, allowing insurgents into the political process – through elections or government posts – can be a useful tool in the peace process and can help end insurgencies. However, bringing insurgents into the political process is unlikely to end insurgencies on its own, particularly if insurgents, the government, or the population believes that force is still a viable means of defeating the opponent and changing the status quo. The article begins with a brief overview of the causes of insurgency and on conflict resolution for internal wars. The article then considers two examples of insurgents that have entered the political process – the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland and Hezbollah in Lebanon – and the differing degrees of success in transforming these insurgents to non-violent participants in the political process. It concludes by suggesting how insurgents can be brought into the political process as part of conflict resolution and the implications for Afghanistan.     

Hard Line: The Republican Party and US Foreign Policy since World War II Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment

This article examines the Dhofar campaign in Oman (1965–75), and the role Britain played in assisting the Omani royal government against left-wing insurgents. Using existing secondary sources and declassified British government papers, it reassesses the contribution of British military advisers and special forces to the counter-insurgency (COIN) campaign, the balance between military action and civil affairs, the external dimension of the conflict, and intelligence and covert operations. It concludes by assessing whether the Dhofar War offers any guidance to Western armed forces involved in contemporary COIN campaigns such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq.     

French intervention in Mali: strategic alliances,long-term regional presence?

The March 2012 coup in Mali opened the door to expanded territorial occupation in northern Mali by Tuareg separatists and subsequently armed Islamist extremists. French forces intervened at the behest of the interim government in Mali. This article examines how various actors frame the conflict to their advantage. While the Malian government and France are allies, the position of various Tuareg actors shift over time as they strategize and weigh the value of allegiance with the French. Local extremist organizations are labeled as terrorists and are targeted as enemies. This article argues that the conflict has been decontextualized and framed within the ‘war on terror’. France’s decision to intervene and to expand their regional military presence, rather than exit, is legitimized by the framing of their intervention as integral to counterterrorism efforts.     

Storming to partition: Croatia,the United States,and Krajina in the Yugoslav War

To many scholars and policymakers, ‘partition’ offers the most efficacious means of resolving ethnic-civil wars. Others reject partition as a solution, citing flaws (both logical and empirical) and harmful international implications should such an approach become commonplace. What has been missing from this debate is an understanding of how the process of partition unfolds. In this article we examine such a process, the case of the Krajina in the war in Yugoslavia, 1994–1995. The US aligned itself with Croatia against Serbs rebelling in the Krajina region of Croatia. The culmination of this alignment occurred in August 1995 when Croatian forces initiated ‘Operation Storm’ (Oluja) against Croatian Serb insurgents. Croatian forces effectively cleansed the Krajina of its Serbian population. Eager to initiate a diplomatic peace process, Washington welcomed the Croatian operation, and largely because of Operation Storm, negotiations at Dayton became possible.     

The Value of Respect: What Does it Mean for an Army?

The Australian Army has adopted “respect” as a new addition to the existing trio of values, “courage, initiative and teamwork.” This article explores what respect may mean as an army value. The significance of respect surrounding two incidents involving Australian Defence Force personnel while on duty in Afghanistan is considered. The first is the so-called “green on blue” attack by an Afghan National Army soldier killing three Australian soldiers on 29 August 2012. The second concerns allegations of mutilation of suspected Afghan insurgents’ corpses by soldiers attached to an Australian Special Forces Unit on 28 April 2013. The incidents have resulted in internal military investigations: in the second incident, with a view to possible prosecution for breach of the law of armed conflict and related disciplinary offences; and in the case of the green on blue attack, leading to a civilian coronial inquest. This article discusses the training and modelling of behaviour required to instil such a value as respect.     

Nigerian women and the trends of kidnapping in the era of Boko Haram insurgency: patterns and evolution

ABSTRACT

The rising trend of kidnapping targeting women has shown that counterinsurgency does not begin and end with the strategic advantage of state security providers in the security market and the field. Kidnapping of females by Boko Haram insurgents threatens human security and hinders sustainable development goals in Northeastern Nigeria. With primary and secondary sources, this qualitative study examines how Boko Haram insurgents target women in Northeastern Nigeria. The paper argues that community driven security strategy achievable through the collaboration between state and traditional security providers, can prevent the entry and easy escape of the insurgents. It concludes that the forces of order should sustain a policy of stop and searches until insurgents are defeated along with a programme of community-based human rights education and insurgency emergency response system for quick response to security threats.     

US warfare in Somalia and the trade-off between casualty-aversion and civilian protection

This article examines the ways in which the two normative concerns of casualty-aversion and civilian protection influenced US military strategy in the particular context of the asymmetric conflict in Somalia in the early 1990s. The article critically evaluates US military operations through the prism of international humanitarian law and examines whether American forces started prioritizing casualty-aversion over the safeguarding of Somali civilians. Finally, by drawing on emerging moral guidelines (such as Michael Walzer's idea of ‘due care’), the article examines whether lower numbers of Somali civilian deaths could have been achieved if marginal increases to the risks faced by US soldiers had been accepted.     

Sharing the load: factors in supporting local armed groups in insurgencies

Most counterinsurgency campaigns have featured the use of some form of local defense forces. Such forces have had a somewhat mixed record, both in their usefulness in actually countering insurgents and in their longer-term impact on internal security. This article focuses on historical cases that provide lessons for the best operational and strategic uses of local defense forces and measures to control their activities.     

The UK,interrogation and Iraq, 2003–2008

The UK’s interrogation operations during the conflict in Iraq (2003–2008) are often portrayed by the media as involving significant amounts of mistreatment. This article demonstrates that these practices are not necessarily representative of the UK’s interrogation operations across this conflict. In doing so it contributes to the limited literature on the practice of interrogation and on the UK’s combat operations in Iraq. The UK’s interrogation capability, and therefore its intelligence-gathering capability, is shown to have rested primarily with the military’s Joint Forward Interrogation Team (JFIT). The JFIT suffered from limitations to the number, training and experience of its interrogators and interpreters. It is argued that maintaining a permanent, higher level of preparedness for interrogation by the British armed forces is desirable.     

Building Legitimacy: Interactional Dynamics and the Popular Evaluation of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey

Abstract

Previous research has identified a variety of general mechanisms to explain how insurgents build legitimacy. Yet, there is often a gap between these mechanisms and the interactional dynamics of insurgencies. This article attempts to bridge this gap through a theoretically informed analysis of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s (PKK) insurgency in Turkey. I show how the PKK’s efforts to cultivate legitimacy, Turkey’s counterinsurgency strategies, and civilian perceptions of the PKK, all mutually influenced one another. Based on this analysis, I argue that the mechanisms that produce popular legitimacy coevolve with insurgents’ behaviors, states’ interventions, and civilians’ perceptions.     

Upstream engagement and downstream entanglements: The assumptions,opportunities, and threats of partnering

This article addresses Western recruitment and management of personnel from non-Western countries in armed forces as part of a strategy of state stabilisation, examining its risks and benefits. ‘SFA’ (Security Forces Assistance) to indigenous forces has long been practised by the West and seems to have returned in recent years in a new form with the creation of armies in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, while providing cheap, proxy substitutes for the West and offering opportunities for state-building, the policy creates its own problems and can have significant, negative consequences.     

Regional Support for Afghan Insurgents: Challenges for Counterinsurgency Theory and Doctrine

After the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, several thousand Afghan Taliban forces fled across the border to Pakistan, and the area became a safe haven for Afghan insurgents. In 2014, the transnational dimension of the insurgency is still highly prominent. Although regional support for insurgents is not uncommon, how to counter this aspect is mostly ignored in counterinsurgency (COIN) theory and doctrines. In this article, a regional counterinsurgency framework is developed, using the regional counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan as an example. The framework will facilitate the systematic inclusion of regional COIN measures in theory and doctrine.     

Turning the tides of war: The impact of private military and security companies on Nigeria’s counterinsurgency against Boko Haram

Since the 2003 war in Iraq, private military and security companies (PMSCs) have become increasingly legitimate actors in modern conflicts. Despite this normative shift, rumours in March 2015 regarding the use of South African mercenaries in Nigeria to combat Boko Haram insurgents caused an international outrage, while the Nigerian government remained nonchalantly silent on the matter. This article investigates the impact of mercenaries on the conflict in the last six months of the Jonathan government. Using primary and secondary qualitative research, it assesses the role that PMSCs played in Nigeria’s counterinsurgency strategy, along with the ensuing reaction of international and local media to the outsourcing of violence to foreign companies. The article concludes that – notwithstanding the improved image of PMSCs in the world, and the actual impact of the contractors on the Nigerian counterinsurgency effort – the stigma of mercenaries continues to plague the industry, particularly on the African continent.     

Policeman versus Soldiers,the debate leading to MAAG Objections and Washington rejections of the Core of the British Counter Insurgency Advice

The British recognized that insurgencies were based upon a struggle for political legitimacy and subordinated to this was the military conflict. Their plan countered insurgents by denying them political legitimacy. They cast the insurgent in the role of the criminal while they enhanced the government's legitimacy. Policemen were considered vital to this process because they arrest and charge criminals. If policemen impute criminality upon insurgents then the use of army troops had the opposite effect. Armies are used in combat and this bestows a well-recognized legitimacy on the foes they combat. The American military advisory group in Vietnam found this difficult to accept.     

Low-intensity conflict in Eastern Sudan: A comparative approach to the development of rebel groups

This article discusses the development of a low-intensity conflict in Sudan's eastern region between 1994 and 2006. Drawing on data collected in the region in 2009, recruitment processes within three different insurgent groups are analysed and compared, paying attention to the impact of these processes on insurgents' organisational development and military capacity. The peace process in Eastern Sudan is further discussed, focusing specifically on the disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration (DDR) programmes for former insurgents. The article finally discusses current developments and draws conclusions regarding the risk of renewed rebellion in Eastern Sudan.     

Boko Haram insurgency and gendered victimhood: women as corporal victims and objects of war

ABSTRACT

Boko Haram insurgency in North East Nigeria has exposed women (girls, ladies, and mothers) to a complex jeopardy. While some women have suffered untimely widowhood or child-lack as a result of the Boko Haram onslaught, others have suffered death, forced abduction, and allied assaults on the main and side lines of the insurgency. Oftentimes, women have faced direct violence that essentially degrade their humanity. This is evident in the deployment of women as war-front sex slaves, human shields, and suicide bombers by the insurgents. The virtual expendability of women in the context of Boko Haram insurgency has been vividly demonstrated by the gale of female suicide bombings in Nigeria over the recent years. By means of a textual and contextual analysis of library sources and/or documentary data, as well as an adroit application of the theory of objectification, this study posits that, in addition to suffering collateral vulnerabilities, women have equally been instrumentalized as objects of terror in the context of Boko Haram insurgency. The paper further argues that the ‘weaponization’ of women’s bodies as bomb vessels and human shields by the insurgents highlights the height of women’s corporal victimization and objectification in contemporary asymmetric warfare.     

Legacy of Bitterness: Insurgency in North West Rwanda

The insurgency in North West Rwanda is a good example of a small scale conflict that provides a first step into the more complex world of regional instability in central Africa. Following the genocide of 1994, genocidaires and ex-military personnel fled to what was then Zaire and established a network of anti-Tutsi bases. Linking up with local groups in Eastern Zaire, these insurgents, usually known as ‘infiltrators’ have carried out a low-intensity but consistent insurgency campaign in Rwanda.

The constant barrage of propaganda aimed at the local population, a technique pioneered during the 1994 genocide, has led to a general, manufactured support for the insurgency. In particular, those people returning from Zaire have been fed a constant diet of anti-Tutsi and Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA) propaganda, making it easier to act against these groups. Even within the local government and other official bodies, there are widespread Hutu sympathies that have led to additional aid reaching the insurgents.

The particular strain of ethnic violence has led to an insurgency in which civilian villages are as likely to be attacked as RPA military installations. More surprising, given the nature of the insurgency, Hutus themselves have been targets. Initially, moderate Hutus were singled out as examples, but increasingly indiscriminate killings have been aiming to force all Hutus to take sides.

The insurgents have deliberately polarised large parts of Rwanda and this has profound implications for conflict resolution. In particular, supplementing the military campaign with political social campaigns, at least partly to combat the mythology of grievance among the Hutus, and tackling the conflict as part of a supra-national conflict that goes beyond ‘national’ borders.     

Improvise,adapt and fail to overcome? Capacity building,culture and exogenous change in Sierra Leone

Military capacity building (MCB) is as problematic as it is ubiquitous, with the British experience in Sierra Leone providing a rare example of ostensible success. This article critiques the dominant conceptualisation of MCB as purely a principal–agent (PA) problem, using military change scholarship to examine the impact of wartime British intervention on the Sierra Leonean armed forces. Here, indigenous military change was both externally driven and fundamentally adaptive in nature, allowing MCB to bypass some of the difficulties predicted by PA models. However, this adaptive approach nonetheless failed to reconcile Western military values with prevailing Sierra Leonean culture, complicating post-war stabilisation efforts.     

Why did Sudan Lose a small war in Southern Sudan?

ABSTRACT

When on the wrong end of an asymmetry in the projection of hard power, weaker sides countenance the grim arithmetic of avoiding direct and massed confrontations. Invariably, insurgents have over the ages tended to employ indirect tactical methods to render their stronger opponents ineffective. Ultimately – interest asymmetry, regime type, asymmetries of strategy, and external intervention – combine in a complex interplay and pattern, to militate against a strong side. In Sudan, these factors interacted throughout the civil wars to produce regional autonomy and finally an independent South Sudan in 2011. Similar strategic logic had confronted many large African states battling insurgencies in Ethiopia, Angola, Nigeria, Zaire, and apartheid-era South Africa. Oftentimes, weakening public resolve has caused these governments to accommodate, capitulate or withdraw even if they try not to blink. Notwithstanding the regime type, it can be concluded that the majority of strong actors are prone to fail in a protracted, asymmetric conflict. Hence, the notion of linking victory in counterinsurgency to the degree of openness (democratic polyarchies); or closeness (totalitarianism) – is still valid but highly contestable in the case of Africa’s large dysfunctional states.