Transformative Invasions: Western Post-9/11 Counterinsurgency and the Lessons of Colonialism

The shooting side of the business is only 25 percent of the trouble and the other 75 percent lies in getting the people of this country behind us.

—British General Gerald Templer, Malaya, 1952¹

Having someone who can speak Arabic is like having another infantry battalion.

—U.S. General John Mattis, 1st Marine Division, Iraq, 2008²

One of the greatest surprises in the debate over the so-called New World Order in the final decade of the twentieth century was how the concept of empire won an astonishing new respectability. The word “empire,” which for decades had possessed a negative connotation (especially in American usage), increasingly took on a positive resonance—and not just among journalists.³ For theorists and policymakers, the notion of a “good empire” once again became thinkable: empire as a multicultural, flexible form of power operating across vast distances that could promote (if not guarantee) human rights, development, order, and prosperity.⁴ In order to justify the use of force, however, this concept “good empire” required both the development of a suitable new form of warfare and a reformulated narrative legitimation of this warfare.⁵

In the post–Cold War geopolitical environment, American debates over foreign interventions no longer pivoted around the old battle lines of internationalism or isolationism but increasingly around the politically sharpened concept of genocide prevention. In the United States, the belief that military operations could prevent or halt genocides led to an astonishing alliance of left-liberal humanitarian interventionism with neoconservative expansionism.⁶ On the one hand, neither the Cold War nor the conventional wars of the twentieth century provided usable models for the execution of “transformative invasions,” which after 9/11 appeared to have become the norm.⁷ On the other hand, references to humanitarian objectives, human rights, American interventionism, and United Nations mandates were not enough to make sense of this new form of transformative invasion. Instead, this new form of warfare, combining humanism and Machtpolitik, had historical roots in a different, rather unexpected place: in the guerilla wars of late European colonialism, which took place from the late 1940s through the early 1960s.

The goal of this essay is to analyze how American and Western European armies have appropriated the operational and conceptual arsenal of European late-colonial warfare and adjusted it to suit their current political objectives. This reception and adaptation of late-colonial approaches to how war is fought, we argue, takes place both in the operational conduct of current Western military interventions and in the portrayal of these wars before a national and international public. Identifying the structural parallels between late-colonial wars and current Western interventions helps to explain why some of today’s most important military theorists and planners find themselves attracted to the strategies deployed by European powers during the late-colonial wars.

In the decade since 9/11, the formula of “learning to eat soup with a knife” (often attributed to Lawrence of Arabia) has become a watchword for the adaptation of Western armies to the altered demands of what at first was called the “Global War on Terror” but which is now more commonly referred to as the “Long War.”⁸ In addition to homegrown American traditions originating with presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the idea of conducting military-led missions against barbarism, injustice, and underdevelopment has roots in European colonialism.⁹ Proponents of a systematic appropriation of European late-colonial war experiences criticize the inadequate strategy, tactics, and doctrines of conventional Western armies in combat with guerilla armies in Third World regions. They call for an institutional and political learning process, in which Western democracies integrate their military, development, and propaganda machineries into innovative apparatuses capable of bringing a lasting end to insurgencies—less through firepower than through development programs and aid. These approaches to countering guerilla fighters, first developed and tested during late-colonial wars, appear to their contemporary advocates to be the most militarily and politically plausible options currently available to Western states. The advocates of this integrated approach...