A leaf from history?
I have spent many months researching the Malayan Emergency, which stretched from 1945 until the 'peace treaty' (instrument of capitulation) of 1989. I have also spent many days with former Special Branch Officers in the UK, Malaysia and Singapore. None of the agent handlers claimed to have used violent means to turn guerillas ('CTs'); in fact, ASP Leong Chee Woh was able to interrogate couriers and persuade them to become agents, then release them on their travels without the guerilla leaders noticing them missing for those few hours. Violence, as Chee Woh says, was unproductive. Unfailingly kind handling was a sucessful strategy - in stark contrast with Army units operating in the peninsula that were competative in getting 'kills'. The former editor of the Daily Worker was even recruited by MI5 to turn 'stubborn' insurgents - he was able to persuade them that revolutionary communist dialectic was flawed; to fill the void he also converted a number of them to Catholicism.
In the mid 1960s the the FCO expressed grave concern about the use by the SAS of Dyak 'head-hunters' during the Konfrontasi when success was measured in the number of heads brought back. Again, in contrast the Director of Special Branch in Kuching personally ran a number of agents simply by persuading them that a better life could be had by cooperating with the authorities and accepting the payments for information. Unfortunately, he also lost several agents to the Dyak/SAS combination because these freebooting units would not clear their activities with the Director of Intelligence, ie, Hd of Special Branch.
The insurgency campaigns in Malaya/Malaysia were succesful because of a joint civil/military doctrine under civil control - and before I get accused of getting my history wrong, General Templer was appointed in 1952 as the Civil High Commissioner, ably supported by a reformed civil service in Malaya. Regrettably, military administration in 'post-conflict areas' is very, very rarely sucessful. In spite of what those in the military may think, the skills to run a counter-insurgency campaign are quite different from those need to fight an 'open' conflict.
This was recognised by the US State Department; in the Jan/Feb issue of Foreign Affairs, there is a call for 'London' to assist in establishing a civilian Special Branch in Iraq, based on the Malaya - and Northern Ireland - experience.
Let's allow the military to do the war-fighting, but also imbue them with the robust skills of peace-making, knowing that these skills will be needed in Phase IV ops. Our joint experience from the Balkans should have taught us that...
CC