Insurgency capacity without state support

By Dave Anderson

The most amazing thing about both the Iraqi insurgencies and the Taliban insurgencies in Afghanistan is how minimal explicit external state support has been for both groups, and how little that has mattered. Matthew Yglesias raises this point as he is looking for an Afghanistan focused reading list so he can spin up to speed on the debate:

One question I�m looking at somewhat hazily is this. If you read accounts of the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, people generally always seem to think that American and Saudi and Pakistani support for the Mujahedeen was an important factor. I don�t see anyone saying �it was all a big waste of time and the same stuff would have happened anyway.� The Taliban has, as best as anyone knows, nothing remotely resembling that level of external support. So why isn�t that making more of a difference? Is our side actually much less effective than the Soviets were when you control for the change in external support?

The US force structure is intensely vulnerable to man-portable guided weapon systems. Those systems in the hands of a compentent, well trained force will not stop the United States from achieving high priority objectives, but they will greatly increase the costs in lives, time, and money.

Several truck-loads of SA-18s, FN-6s, Javelins or Mistrale missiles would make US air mobility operations extermely expensive. Instead the Sunni Arab insurgents made due with heavy machine guns, RPGs and older generation and much more easily decoyed man-portable SAMs as their primary air defense weapon. The same applies to Taliban insurgents --- they are relying on hand me downs and left-overs from the Cold War instead of more modern munitions that would be very effective at the very least in raising the threat profile for ex-Soviet helicopters that are flown by contractors and provide a good deal of ISAF air lift.

Again several truckloads of TOW-2, advanced Milan, HOT-2 or HOT-3, AT-14 or AT-15 anti-tank missiles would make US heavy infantry extremely vulnerable to multi-level ambushes where IED strikes fixed columns, and mortars forced vehicles to button up and long range guided anti-tank fire caused casualties. All of a sudden up-armored Humvees and MRAPs would not be the tactical panacea that they have been made up to be. Instead the Taliban and Iraqi insurgent groups have been using short range, light hitting RPGs as their primary stand-off anti-vehicle weapon. Finally, guided mortar rounds are becoming more common in Western service. Guided mortar rounds would be useful in attacking fixed US positions such as road blocks and outposts when the shooters only will launch a few projectiles before counter-battery fire arrives.

But we have seen none of these technologies show up in any significant number in Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead the weapons that are seen in either country are either improvised and locally produced such as most EFP IEDs, or have direct descent from post-World War II designs (AK-47, RPG, mortars, light artillery rockets etc). This is because the advanced weapon producing states are not directly supporting insurgents with decent or recent systems.

The one notable exception is Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah has strong ties to multiple nation states that either produce or import in large numbers modern man-portable weapons. Hezbollah used modern weapons to blunt a conventional Isreali attack in 2006. Modern ATGMs were used to negate the Isreali heavy armor advantage and slow any Isreali movement as the Isrealis had to conduct deliberate, combined arms attacks instead of running over Hezbollah positions. Hezbollah had minimal air defense capacity but after the 2006 war, it has spent significant effort in correcting that deficiency. And with the combination of a high level of training, disicpline, minimalist goals (defend Southern Lebanon), a coherent military-political plan and modern weapons, Hezbollah was able to accomplish its objectives against a modern Western force.

So what, what does this hardware geeking out mean?

Non-state actors received better support in the Cold War as the US was willing to send first line equipment to rag tag guerrilla bands in Angola and Afghanistan and the Soviets were doing the same. And yet those non-state actors were either slowly effective in denying the super-power invader/occupier/society transformer de jour their strategic goals or not effective at despite the high level of political support. Fast forwarding twenty years, the Sunni Arab insurgency denied the US its maximal political goals in just a few years despite having minimal foreign sponsorship or access to advanced weaponry. The Taliban and Pashtun tribal militias have been successful in denying maximalist US goals in Afghanistan for 8 years without significant foreign backing.

Strategically defensive guerrilla warfare is becoming easier and easier for non-state groups and weak states to contemplate and carry out since World War II. Part of this is due to the positive development of an international norm against overt and deliberate ethnic cleansing (let's not talk about Baghdad though) which is the 'easiest' way to fight guerrillas if an occupier is there for the economic rents and not the people of a region. Part of it is because the current strategically defensive guerrilla wars are being fought in areas of tertiary interest for the United States. Most of it is due to the democratization of violence though --- it is much easier to be effectively violent today than it was thirty years ago as modern nation state infrastructure is dispersed, brittle and non-redundant.