Guerrilla warfare

Tim Brown, like Cameron Sawyer, rejects John Heelan's idea of the invincibility of guerrillas: "As far as I can tell from studying history, guerrillas alone never win shooting wars. I talk fairly often with former guerrillas who, unanimously, tell me that this was never their intention. What they did intend to do was to prepare the way for either political solutions or military conquests by others. I could cite myriad examples - Vietnam, where South Vietnamese Viet Cong guerrillas paved the way for the North Vietnamese Army to win the war by invasion, making all of Vietnam into one country created by conquest; Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas fought a guerrilla war for 20 years but did not win until Cuba, Costa Rica, and Carter helped them build a fairly conventional army in Costa Rica that then invaded, fought with conventional weapons in standard military formations and then won only after the US cut off the ammunition supplies of their opponents; China, where the Communists fought a guerrilla campaign but thenwon a conventional war; Cuba, where Castro softened up Batista and the political milieu both inside and outside Cuba and then took power without ever seriously fighting the army; the Israelis who fought a form of guerrilla warfare for decades but won statehood only when the major Western powers gave it to them; the Afghans who won thanks to American weapons and funding that checkmated the Soviet's key weapons systems, especially helicopters.

The United States did not lose the Indian Wars. Many Native Americans may still be unhappy, but they were defeated and haven't engaged in anything like irregular warfare for more than a century, so the consequence of this conflict was the defeat on the battlefield of some of the world's best "guerrilla" forces. In El Salvador and Guatemala the guerrillas fought for decades, then essentially surrendered without taking power after the Soviet Union collapsed, in return for negotiated places but not vetoes within [more or less] democratic political systems. In Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Bolivia the revolutionaries were defeated by armies, making those who believe the guerrillas should have won perpetually unhappy. But that's what happened. In Cambodia the Kmer Rouge slaughtered half the country and then lost. The same outcome may have awaited Peru at the hands of th hyper-Maoist Sendero Luminoso, had good police work not intervened. In Colombia the war has long been one the guerrillas cannot win but refuse to lose, prefering in most cases to turn their movements into narcoguerrillas when Soviet funding was withdrawn, rather than negotiate surrenders as happened in El Salvador and Guatemala. Guerrilla movements can, as an alternative, stay alive as mere shadows of their former selves [Lucio Cabanas]. But this just postpones the inevitable.

This gives us several possible final outcomes of guerrilla wars, none of which involve unaided military victories by guerrilla forces: Victory through the political process [Cuba]; victory with major foreign help [Vietnam, Nicaragua twice - both the Sandinistas and then the Contras]; transformation into conventional forces followed by victory on the battlefield [China]; defeat on the battlefield [Native Americans, Bolivia]; de jure political agreements that mask de facto surrenders [Guatemala, El Salvador]. In not one case has a purely guerrilla force taken power. Not in South Africa, not in Ireland, not in Chechnya, not in China".

Ronald Hilton - 5/8/02