Pacification in Algeria Book Review 5 pages

Pacification in Algeria

The late David Galula, who served as a French Lt. Colonel and was stationed in China, Greece, and Hong Kong during the French Indochina War, and participated in the invasion of Nazi Germany in WWII, was a respected expert (and author) on counterinsurgency. His book is a well-written publication that offers all the insights and important strategies that are part of counterinsurgency. The book follows Galula’s two years when he was a company commander in Algeria, and he expertly points out to the reader how his notion of counterinsurgency emerged, and became part of the French policies in Algeria. This paper reviews and critiques his narrative based on those two years in Algeria.

Pacification in Algeria

It is interesting that David Galula’s counterinsurgency theories are used today by the U.S. In Afghanistan (and were used in Vietnam, and in Iraq before the U.S. began a draw-down there). In fact U.S. Army officers used Galula’s publication called “Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice” in the early stages of the war in Iraq. Meanwhile, Galua’s story in “Pacification in Algeria is far more exciting and interesting — even compelling — to the layperson than most manuals on war strategy. It is quite long — 326 pages in pdf formatting — but it is filled with well-thought-out narrative that trends toward the humor, irony, and descriptiveness a person might expect from a novelist.

The war being discussed by Galula is the 1954-62 Algerian War of Independence, which was the last uprising against a colonizing European power that had ruled over countries on the African continent for hundreds of years. The Dutch, the British, the Germans and other European nations has been basically escorted out — or blown out by revolutions — from Africa, but the French had held fast to Algeria, until this war of independence.

According to the Foreword to the book, the United States and other nations pretty much ignored France’s battle against a revolution in Algeria; all other colonizing countries were gone from African and it seemed a foregone conclusion that France — a country that was shoved out of Vietnam by Ho Chi Min and the communist revolutionaries in 1954 — would be gone from the African continent soon too.

The bullet points offered the Foreword are actually Galula’s remarks based on what he saw in Algeria and what he needed that he didn’t get. He was upset there was no counterinsurgency doctrine; and upon being asked to “pacify,” he asked “how?” There was no counterinsurgency policy in place. At the outset of the rebellion / revolution, a high-ranking officer (French officer) in Algeria called it “ordinary banditry” but in fact it was soon to be a massive, major insurrection. The rebels weren’t stupid — according to Galula. They knew that just a bomb or grenade in a cafe in Algiers would get far more world publicity than mowing down French officers in a remote mountain town; the French media, and other foreign correspondents were stationed in Algiers.

Given that the French had far more military power and soldiers, it seemed they should have “finished with [the rebels] quickly,” Galula writes. But what he knows of counterinsurgency tells him that the rebels learned quickly to get the support of the citizens “through terror and persuasion”; hence, the rebels needed to be isolated from the population so the French could gain the support of the people. When coming upon a citizen, it was Galula’s strategy to “outwardly treat every civilian as a friend” but inwardly a French soldier in Algeria must figure that civilian might just be a rebel ally, until “proof positive” is presented to the contrary. The difference between an insurgent — who unhesitatingly uses terror — and a counterinsurgent, is that the counterinsurgent soldier does police work, investigative work rather than just blowing up buildings and creating terror.

Galula finished writing this book, then declared, “I’m not writing all this to show what a genius I was, but to point out how difficult it is to convince people, especially the military, to change traditional ways and adapt themselves to new conditions” (Galula, vii).

In Algeria at the time of the war, there were several nationalist parties, Galula names at least three, but he points out they had not been able to come together in unity on one particular strategy to defeat the French. They “improvised” as the went along, Galula explains (15), and those improvisations included bomb throwing, “random assassinations,” “sabotage” and “noisy attacks against isolated small French military garrisons” (15). Terror was also launched against Moslems that worked for the French government (mail deliverers, teachers, policemen, and others), and also the strategy was to: force Moslems to participate in the rebellion; force villagers to “burn schools, destroy public properties, dig holes in the roads” and “cut telephone lines.” These were petty but effective terrorist activities, Galula explains on 16.

The rebels had a slogan for the French (“The suitcase or the coffin”) and the rebels put a lot of pressure on Moslems that were employed by the French or otherwise helped the French against other Algerians. The French, according to rebel narratives, “swore they would never leave Indochina; they left. They swore they would never leave Tunisia; they left; They swore they would never leave Morocco; they left. Now they swear they will never leave Algeria” (17). The pressure place on Moslems to make a choice — support the French or the revolution — but expect to pay a price if you support the French and they lose the war. The Moslems that chose to side with the French paid a stiff price, Galula explains; statistics reveal that for every European killed in the war, “eight Moslems were killed” (18).

On page 21, Galula mentions that while most of the practical needs of the counterinsurgency were met by the French government, but the legal system was backward and worked against the French. A terrorist caught red-handed could be arrested and taken to court but he could appeal his case, which bottled up the system during the war. If the terrorist was condemned to death, he could ask for a commutation to life imprisonment, which was granted in most cases. One can see how this would work against the French as they try to defeat the insurgency.

The problem in Algeria was similar to what the U.S. faced in Vietnam. Small groups of rebels could cause a terrible amount of violence, but they operated in a “diffuse manner” and there was “no enemy that could be identified, to whom we could give battle,” Galula writes on page 23. The American soldiers in Vietnam could never be sure if an individual was a South Vietnamese or a North Vietnamese person, or a Viet Cong. To the Americans, they all had an Asian face, and didn’t necessarily wear uniforms. Same problem existed in Algeria. And similar to the Americans’ difficulty in the mountainous region of Afghanistan, the French had a terrible time fighting in the Kabylia region. Caves, some big enough to “accommodate one hundred men in their long and twisted galleries” were perfect hiding places for well-armed rebel armies. It is well-known that caves in the high country of Afghanistan kept bin Laden and his comrades well hidden from American troops searching for him in the fall of 2001 after 9/11.

By the winter of 1957, Galula reports that the rebels were “on the run everywhere, ineffective as a guerrilla force” and incapable of putting together a good fight against the French military. The rebels were blowing up dance halls (killing or wounding 70 civilians) and other civilian gathering places but since they were operating from an old native down in Algiers called Kasbah, the 10th French Paratroop Division was able to block all entrances and exits to Kasbah in a deft counterterrorism strategy. The cleanup of all terrorists in Kasbah took ten days, Galula reports (143) but the war wasn’t over at all. In fact the insurgence continued and the violence was a daily part of life in Algeria until 1962 when the French finally exited and Algeria had its own country to work with rather than a European colonizing force.

Of course Galula offers final thoughts and strategies for those who follow in his footsteps in a situation that calls for counterinsurgency. Every conflict, he writes on page 272, is all about the “will between two camps” — and a camp lacking in sheer political and social will shall lose. Galula notes that France did not “lean on the minority among the Algerian Moslems” that in fact favored the French; if France had worked harder to enfranchise the Moslem minority, it might have been a more fruitful formula (272).

The strategy is to assure the minority that supports France that indeed France will come down hard on the minority that is not supporting France; and it will done thusly: rebel bands must be destroyed; troops must be left in the area so rebels can’t return; the population must be engaged and controlled; local political cells in neighborhoods must be destroyed; locally elected authorities must be put in place; train activists to support a new democratic party; give moral and material support to the new political party; once order is restored in this liberated neighborhood, the same scheme needs to be repeated elsewhere (273).

In conclusion, while Galula’s strategy at the end of his assignment sounds like an effective plan, it won’t always work. That has been proven in Afghanistan by U.S. forces; keeping the Taliban and other insurgents from coming over from Pakistan and terrorizing local people and shooting down U.S. helicopters has not been possible in the past, and won’t likely work in the future. Still, Galula’s book is an excellent historical document as to what actually happened in Algeria, and what might have worked if Galula had received the support and materials he asked for at the time he made those requests.

Works Cited

Galula, David. 2006. Pacification in Algeria 1956-58. Rand Corporation.

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