Royal Screwup

is the Hugo K. Foster associate professor of African studies at Harvard University and the author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya. Tham Yong remembers the events that took place in Batang Kali in early December 1948 with disturbing clarity. It was the early days of the communist insurgency in Malaya, and British soldiers had arrived in her village. They singled out scores of Chinese civilians, accusing them of supplying the communists with food. The women were loaded onto trucks and taken away, though not before they witnessed British troops leading off two dozen men and shooting them in the back. Two days later, when Tham returned to look for her fiance, she found mutilated bodies with heads hacked off and genitals smashed. The surrounding village had been reduced to ashes.Today, as the Bush administration searches for a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, several military thinkers are pointing to the British operations in Malaya as a model. Episodes like the Batang Kali massacre seem to have been forgotten. Instead, contemporary analysts argue that Great Britain effectively suppressed communist insurgents and won civilian support through a large-scale, "hearts-and-minds campaign." In his recent article in Foreign Affairs, Andrew Krepinevich, a former Pentagon official who now heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments--and whose views have had a major impact on the administration's thinking (see Lawrence F. Kaplan, "Clear and Fold," page 12)-- argues, "In the 1950s, the British used [hearts and minds] successfully in Malaya.... For the United States, the key ... is [also] winning `hearts and minds.' The Iraqi people must believe that their government offers them a better life than the insurgents do, and they must think that the government will prevail." According to an August 28 New York Times column by David Brooks, this argument is "already a phenomenon among the people running this war, generating discussion in the Pentagon, the CIA, the American Embassy in Baghdad, and the office of the vice president." To be sure, Britain's counterinsurgency operations in Malaya were a short- term success. British forces reestablished order and disengaged from imperial occupation. But the hearts-and-minds campaign, the theoretical backbone of Britain's counterinsurgency strategy, was more myth than reality. To seize civilian control, the British created a police state and invoked draconian powers ranging from movement-restriction and collective punishments to detention without trial. Winning the war against insurgents came at a high price for the local civilian population and for the independent state that picked up the mantle from its former colonizer. Rather than serving as a historical precedent for a successful hearts-and-minds campaign, the British campaign in Malaya illustrates the dangers of continuing our current strategy in Iraq. Between 1948 and 1960, the British ostensibly pursued, in British strategist Robert Thompson's words, "a war for the people," including much-touted social welfare and youth programs, along with civics courses and vocational training. But the scope and scale of these efforts were miniscule, and most of these projects were implemented in the later years of the war. More characteristic of the British campaign were military tactics like the "pseudo-gang" model, which British forces used to take aim at some 9,000 members of the Malayan Races' Liberation Army (mrla), whose hit-and-run tactics and knowledge of local terrain frustrated colonial troops. Employing local Chinese sympathizers in the ranks of pretend terrorist gangs, British forces tracked down mrla forces in the jungles and rooted most of them out by 1958. This campaign was riddled with abuses. The corpses of guerrillas were routinely put on display. Decapitation was also practiced: A photograph of a Marine commando holding two insurgents' heads caused an outcry in the spring of 1952. Privately, the British government noted that "there is no doubt that under international law a similar case in wartime would be a war crime." Britain's campaign against the Min Yuen, or the Chinese civilian supporters of the mrla, was similarly brutal. To sever the supply lines between the Min Yuen and the mrla, the British, as they did in nearly all of their counterinsurgency efforts, created a police state. They passed a host of measures--some 149 pages of regulations in all--that included search and seizure, curfews, strict food controls, and the right to detain without trial. This last emergency power was used liberally, with nearly 34,000 people detained in a labyrinth of camps. It was, though, Britain's creation of barbed-wire villages that took the heaviest toll. Nearly the entire Chinese population of 400,000 to 500,000 were forced from their homes and were resettled into some 400 heavily guarded barbed- wire villages. They were deprived of all civil rights, and they endured great physical and emotional abuse. One journalist described how the British police routinely resorted to brutality: "To many of these sergeants, every Chinese was a bandit or a potential bandit, and there was only one treatment for them; they were to be `bashed around.'" Villagers like Tham, who survived the Batang Kali massacre, endured years of abuse and hardship before submitting to colonial control. As in other parts of Britain's empire, it was the stick, not the carrot, that eventually broke civilian support for the insurgency. In some ways, the U.S. military in Iraq is already following the British counterinsurgency model in Malaya. Although stateside leaders and strategists continue to pay lip service to the hearts-and-minds approach, the reality is that commanders on the ground, much like their counterparts in the former British empire, are skeptical. As Iraq ground commander General Thomas Metz stated bluntly, "[I] don't think we will put much energy into trying the old saying, `Win the hearts and minds.' I don't look at it as one of the metrics of success." Instead, the United States is already pursuing a policy that is reminiscent of the British manhunt operations in Malaya. Drawing on the pseudo- gang model, the Pentagon assembled a Special Operations task force in November 2003 with the purpose of capturing or assassinating Baathist insurgents. For such a strategy to be effective, the Americans, like the British before them, must obtain accurate intelligence and sever civilian support. But most of the military's focus so far has been on brute force. The war has already witnessed the use of detention without trial, torture, and collective punishment against the Iraqi people. It remains to be seen whether U.S. forces will follow Britain's earlier lead and continue down the path of repression for the sake of military expediency. But the Malayan example illustrates the price of this strategy. In the years after independence, Malaya experienced continued violence, culminating in a state of emergency from 1969 to 1971. The Malaysian government's crackdown on dissent--including the suspension of due process and freedom of the press--is arguably the legacy of British repression. Today, Malaysians continue to live under an Internal Security Act that was adapted from Britain's emergency regulations of the late '40s. Allowing for detention without trial, this act has helped put thousands of people behind bars since independence, including the former deputy prime minister. In the final accounting, repressive laws and undemocratic institutions, not peace and progress, were the primary bequest of the British to Malaya. This legacy, and the counterinsurgency operations that helped to underwrite it, hardly seem like an appropriate model for restoring stability in twenty-first- century Iraq. The question then remains: Are there any successful counterinsurgency precedents to which the United States can look? Historically, hearts and minds was a myth that provided an ideological smoke screen for the more brutal tactics that unfolded on the ground. But what if, as Krepinevich suggests, the United States actually implemented hearts and minds on a large scale? Offering a better life by way of social, political, and material benefits would surely make significant inroads into the popular support for Baathist insurgents. Of course, such a strategy would have a steep price tag in terms of money, personnel, and time--one that the British weren't willing to pay in Malaya. Given the current political climate and plummeting popular support for the war, it is hardly surprising to see the Bush administration following in Britain's footsteps.

By caroline elkins