By Ong Weichong
The
death of Chin Peng marked the ‘end of an era’ in counterinsurgency, but
the ‘lessons’ from the Malayan Emergency remains enduring to this day
Commentary
IN MANY ways, the death of Chin Peng, the leader of the Communist Party
of Malaya (CPM) marked the ‘end of an era’. Of the major Asian
insurgent leaders who fought against the colonial powers in the ‘Wars of
National Liberation’ era (1945-1975), Chin Peng, outlived them all. It
was an era that came to define modern ‘classical’ insurgency and
‘classical’ counterinsurgency (COIN) as we understand those terms today.
The
guerrilla successes of Chin Peng’s contemporaries Mao Zedong and Ho Chi
Minh are now enshrined as classics of insurgency whilst the guerrilla
campaign in which Chin Peng was so intimately involved, the Malayan
Emergency (1948-1960), has become a paradigmatic case-study of how a
COIN campaign can be waged and won.
Founded
in 1930, the CPM’s focus in its first decade of existence was to foment
unrest against the colonial government of Malaya. One of the CPM’s key
post-war strategies was to gain political ascendancy through the control
of labour. Decisive influence over trade union organisations thus
became the CPM’s foremost weapon in its effort to control the masses.
However,
no mass urban uprising occurred and from 1948, the CPM switched its
attention and strategy to mobilising the rural populace. The CPM’s open
armed struggle against the British government, which began in June 1948
led to the declaration of a state of Emergency in Malaya and a 12-year
long COIN campaign involving more than 300,000 British, Commonwealth and
Malayan forces.
In
the use of military force, by 1951, there was a gradual move away from
large-scale army sweeps towards a more effective system of small-unit
patrols. Intelligence by surrendered enemy personnel (SEP) and Special
Branch infiltrators was used to target selected insurgents with ‘minimum
force’. Instead of carpet bombing the jungle, the primary use of air
power was in psychological operations that eroded the morale and will of
the CPM’s fighters.
Most
importantly, General Gerald Templer, High Commissioner of Malaya,
treated the Emergency not as a military problem but a civilian problem.
In this campaign, the decisive tactical element was the village police
post rather than the army battalion. Both Templer and his military
predecessor Gen Harold Briggs, adopted an integrated civil-military
approach where all security forces (including the armed forces) operated
under civilian control.
Battle for hearts and minds
In
the battle for ‘hearts and minds’, the creation of the Malayan Home
Guard proved not only to be an invaluable link between the security
forces and the populace - but it was an exercise in trust. The act of
entrusting a shotgun to what was once a Chinese squatter sent a strong
message of the government’s faith to the very same population group that
the CPM was actively courting - that “we the government trust you.”
Ultimately,
the promise of independence for Malaya and citizenship for the Chinese
population convinced the rural Chinese that their future was in an
independent Malaya rather than one dominated by the Communists. By July
1960, the government forces of an independent Malaya had sufficiently
rolled back the CPM insurgency to declare an end to the Emergency.
What
remained of the hard core elements of the CPM retreated across the
border to Southern Thailand to reorganise. From their newly established
jungle strongholds in Southern Thailand, the CPM continued to battle
Malaysian security forces from 1968 to 1989 until the signing of the Hat
Yai Peace Accord.
Impact on Contemporary COIN
The
impact of the Malayan Emergency on contemporary COIN thought and
practice cannot be underestimated. More than half a century on, the
applicability of lessons from the Malayan Emergency remains a hotly
debated subject within academic and practitioner circles. However, there
can be no question of how the ‘rediscovery’ of the works of Robert
Thompson and Frank Kitson have been influential in setting the tone of
the ‘COIN Renaissance’ in the last decade.
Certain
key principles of classical COIN have been ‘rediscovered’: the
recognition of the population as the centre of gravity; well-developed
actionable intelligence as the key to success; the use of security
forces as part of an overall coordinated response; the imperative of
development and good governance in addressing the political, social and
economic conditions that led to insurgency; and the concept of ‘winning
hearts and minds’ - or winning the confidence of the population in
actual terms.
The ‘renaissance’ of these classical COIN ‘big ideas’ have been
instrumental in transforming the way in which the United States
military and its coalition partners think and fight in the last decade.
Gen David Petraeus, former Commander ISAF and Director CIA, was very
much the intellectual driver and public face in this transformation.
Indeed, in a speech in June 2013, Gen Petraeus maintained that “contrary
to pundit opinion, the Counterinsurgency Era is not over. That is,
quite simply, because the Insurgency Era is not over. Insurgency does
not appear to have gone out of style. It is, after all, amongst the
oldest style of warfare.”
Insurgencies
of today, be they Al Qaeda’s diffused brand of global insurgency or the
Taliban’s more localised version, may have evolved beyond the ‘Wars of
National Liberation’ template of Chin Peng’s era. But as Gen Petraeus
warned in a recent September 2013 interview with the Small Wars Journal:
“to reject the principles associated to defeating a Maoist insurgency
would be foolish.” He said bin Laden’s [Abbottabad] letters showed how
much he had embraced the Maoist concepts and used the very vocabulary of
people’s wars. Al Qaeda did not typically have the strength, certainly
not at the outset of the campaign, to seize and hold terrain.
Chin
Peng may have passed on, but the Maoist precepts of insurgency that
have inspired the CPM’s own and others will remain a wellspring of ideas
for insurgents well beyond the classical insurgency era. For the
counterinsurgent, to ignore these time-honed principles, particularly
the human and psychological dimensions that drive people’s wars, is to
risk defeat.
____________________________
Ong
Weichong is Assistant Professor with the S. Rajaratnam School of
International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. He is
author of the forthcoming book Malaysia’s Defeat of Armed Communism: Securing the Population from Subversion in the Second Emergency 1968-1981.
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