It is apparent that civilians are now considered legitimate targets of armies, a significant shift in the style in which wars have been fought historically. In part that shift can be traced to a Mao Tse-tung dictum on the subject of guerrilla warfare.
”Guerrillas are fish,” Mao said, ”and the people are the water in which they swim. If the temperature is right, the fish will thrive and multiply.” It is an allegory that has become a model for nearly every popular revolution in the world in which guerrilla fighters take on government armies.
This concept also has redirected the conduct of war today, with terrible consequences for civilian populations and increasing numbers of refugees. Wars used to be fought by trained armies on well-defined, fixed fields of battle away from civilian population centers.
As late as World War I, fought from 1914 to 1918, only 5 percent of the casualties were civilian; the other 95 percent were active combatants. In World War II, with the advent of much more powerful weapons and systems of delivery, war began to slip beyond the battlefields and into civilian centers as combatants tried to cut off their rivals` sources of arms and transportation networks. As a result, 75 percent of that war`s casualties were civilian.
Since World War II, guerrilla actions and counterinsurgency warfare have become the predominant mode of fighting, and 90 percent of the casualties have been civilians: babies, children, women and the elderly. They have been dying in a lot of places. According to the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues, there have been only 26 days of peace in the world since the end of World War II. In that time there have been about 150 wars fought, resulting in the deaths of 20 million people.
Why?
Part of the carnage comes from the incredible proliferation of deadly weapons traffickedthroughout the world and readily available through willing arms merchants. Rapid-fire rifles. Mortars. Antipersonnel mines. Machine guns. Rocket-propelled grenades. Artillery. High-tech, handheld antiaircraft missiles. Attack helicopters. These are conventional weapons of unprecedented destructive force, many designed not for optimum accuracy, merely optimum firepower. When used, they kill and maim far more indiscriminately than the weapons of just 50 years ago.
Arms trading tops $1 trillion annually as government and insurgent armies shop for the gun barrels they hope will maintain or propel them into power. They are freely available, too, from the world`s wealthy industrialized nations that supply the governments they want to maintain in power or the insurgent groups they would like to see take power.
But in accounting for the indiscriminate death they cause, the number of weapons traded is secondary to how they are used. In an era of guerrilla fighting, organized warfare has changed to something called ”low-intensity warfare.”
Low-intensity warfare directly tackles Mao`s model of guerrilla ”fish”
operating undercover in the ”water” of the civilian masses. It
”evaporates” the water by collecting the civilian population in contested areas and pooling them in heavily fortified zones where they can be watched and easily controlled. With the countryside empty of civilians, the ocean is effectively drained. Anybody caught there afterward is presumed a guerrilla combatant and a legitimate target for extermination.
Low-intensity warfare has as its roots the theory of counterinsurgency warfare devised in 1961 by the Kennedy administration to fight the Viet Cong in Vietnam. The idea was to collect South Vietnamese into ”strategic hamlets,” or fortified villages, and lay waste to the countryside and anybody caught in it.
The strategic-hamlet plan in Vietnam succeeded in displacing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and the rice paddies that were their only means of livelihood. Thousands of innocent civilians died when they were caught up in brutal, inept sweeps of the countryside by South Vietnamese forces. And, of course, the strategy ultimately failed.
The United States again sees potential for severe damage to American interests in many of the current Third World uprisings, insurrections and revolutions, so it has devised a doctrine of low-intensity conflict to combat them.
The name is something of a misnomer because it really means total war for the country involved. Under this doctrine, the United States will step in to aid a friendly government it thinks is imperiled by insurrection and mobilize the nation and its people to suppress the insurrection with massive assistance.
U.S. assistance equips, arms and trains national police and military forces, schooling them in the art of counterinsurgency fighting. It provisions government fighters with state-of-the-art weaponry of overwhelming firepower, including close-support bombers, attack helicopters and advanced artillery. As in Vietnam, the aim is not so much to capture and maintain control of the countryside as it is to deny the enemy the ability to survive and exist there. Low-intensity conflict resurrects another Vietnam War phrase, ”winning the hearts and minds of the people.” American aid shores up the economy of the target country to provide optimum employment and minimum disruption by the war. The doctrine also calls for the spreading of democracy: Through heavy American influence, reformist leadership is encouraged so ordinary citizens will have a stake in the government, and, in turn, a stake in U.S. aims.
El Salvador is the current test case for this doctrine. In 1987 the United States sent $608 million in aid to El Salvador, a figure exceeding that nation`s own domestic budget. Yet the nation is shattered by war, despite-or because of-America`s best efforts. Unemployment runs at 30 percent, tens of thousands of its citizens are in refugee camps in neighboring countries and half a million are displaced inside El Salvador itself. Another 1 million Salvadorans live abroad illegally, 600,000 of them in the United States, according to the U.S. State Department.
A reformist government led by Jose Napoleon Duarte, which the United States nurtured into power, has frittered away whatever public good will it once enjoyed through embezzlement and mismanagement of the treasury. San Salvador, the capital, is a city of assassins and kidnapers, from the Left and the Right. Its streets bristle with military checkpoints and armed guards. The nation must import food to survive, yet vast sections of its agricultural areas have been abandoned, pockmarked with empty, ruined farms and fields that grow only weeds.
Low-intensity conflict, in other words, is not a pretty or humane concept. Proponents do not pretend it is. A recent book on the subject, ”Low Intensity Warfare,” edited by military-affairs specialists Michael T. Klare and Peter Kornbluh, outlines some of the concepts: kidnaping of insurgent leaders, assassination and the use of torture and bounty hunters. The book quotes one American theorist who says:
”The American view of war is generally incompatible with the characteristics and demands of counterrevolution. If American involvement is justified and necessary, national leaders and the public must understand that low-intensity conflicts do not conform to democratic notions of strategy and tactics. Revolution and counterrevolution develop their own morality and ethics that justify any means to achieve success. Survival is the ultimate morality.”
The United States does not have a monopoly on low-intensity conflict by any means. The Soviets have used variations of it to empty Afghanistan of one-third of its people. Soviet advisers have used it to push more than a million people out of Ethiopia. South African-supported guerrillas have used it to push 800,000 people out of Mozambique. The Vietnamese have used it to push 300,000 Cambodians into Thai border camps.
Thus far low-intensity conflict has met with precious little success anywhere in the world. The endless sparring between military powers through Third World proxy wars has resulted mostly in stalemate and has prolonged the destruction and displacement of people.
Nevertheless, that is how war is mostly fought today. There are 13 million witnesses to that fact in refugee camps around the world.
Early this year, Khan Said, 22, a former Afghan student, was settling his young wife and two small children into a tent in Pakistan. He had just come back after three months of military service inside Afghanistan as a guerrilla fighter in the Mujahedin, the Afghan insurgency that has been at war against Afghanistan`s Marxist government and invading Soviet troops for the last nine years.
Khan Said, short, wiry and still boyish in appearance, personally has been at war with the Kabul government and the Soviets for six years. He joined a resistance group organized at the school he was attending in his hometown, Shagai, in Kunar province, when he was 16.
”I was studying liberal arts,” Khan Said said, ”and I was planning eventually to become a teacher. Nearly everybody in the school was in the resistance movement. There was no secret about it. Plenty of my friends were arrested by the authorities, and a lot of them were killed. It made no difference. The resistance continued to get bigger and stronger.”
Indeed, the resistance became so large and active in Shagai that Soviet troops mounted a full-scale offensive against the town in March, 1982. The town was an agricultural center of about 20,000 families spread over a broad plain surrounded by mountain peaks in eastern Afghanistan.
”It was a surprise attack,” Khan Said recalled. ”The Russians came about 3 a.m. They entered the town in three lines of tanks. I don`t know how many tanks there were, but to me, it looked like hundreds. As soon as they got into the town, we were bombed and strafed by jets and attack helicopters as well.
”People were dying everywhere. The Mujahedin had been caught by surprise but fought back very hard, even though the Russians had far more sophisticated weapons than we did. I was one of the fighters who faced them. I had a Kalashnikov rifle. We repulsed the first attack with RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and homemade gasoline bombs. We disabled five or six tanks.”
The battle for the town continued through the day, he said, ending at about 8 p.m. Despite the best efforts of the resistance fighters, they were outgunned by the Soviets and forced to withdraw into the nearby hills. For the next two days, he said, Soviets and soldiers from the Kabul regime hunted down and killed the young men of the town.
”The day I decided to leave, two days after the fight, 71 young men were killed,” he said. ”I was with my school friends, and we decided we had to go to Pakistan. About 200 of us left together, most of my friends taking along their families. My father was ill at the time, and he decided to stay. He told me that I could go because all the young men in the town would eventually be arrested by the Russians. I wasn`t happy about leaving, but it was better for me to go and continue to fight. I have five brothers, and three of them were already in Pakistan.
”We were close to the border, so we walked. It only took four days, but the Russians were trying to stop the influx to Pakistan, so they had mined the route. We put all of the sheep and goats in front of the people. The animals were killed by the mines one by one so that we could pass.”
