Radical, Religious, and Violent by Eli Berman

Author:Eli Berman [SPi]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780262026406
Publisher: The MIT Press

The answer, I believe, lies in examining the process that made insurgency increasingly difficult in the period before the Iraq War. As countries became wealthier, their ability to counter conventional insurgency improved. By the end of the twentieth century the Middle East and North Africa had only two large, ongoing insurgencies, in Algeria and Turkey. In the 1980s and 1990s, long-standing insurgencies that had begun in the 1970s had been either shut down or substantially reduced in intensity by the governments of Lebanon, Morocco, and Iran. A new insurgency was suppressed within a year in Yemen in 1994 and another within two years in South Yemen in 1986.6

One way to understand that decline in insurgency is to recall the discussion of defection constraints and to reconsider the example of a band of insurgents capturing a hill. This time let’s think of the government as the defender, with a police station at the top of the hill as the target. The insurgents follow standard procedure; they divide into groups and start taking turns running and shooting cover fire. As before, a group responsible for firing could decide to defect, stop firing, and sell out their comrades to the enemy at the top of the hill. In the “Black September” rebellion of 1970, for instance, the Jordanian police included some Palestinians, so, as in Afghanistan, the enemies could have been cousins.

Now freeze that battle for a moment and imagine what would happen if the government had a few helicopters in reserve, which may show up any moment. The business end of an attack helicopter is a sobering sight (Saddam Hussein demonstrated what a fierce weapon an attack helicopter is in Southern Iraq after the end of the first Gulf War). Should that helicopter appear, the insurgents would doubtlessly stop running up the hill and start running for cover, with the helicopter in pursuit. If the police manage to capture a few surrendering insurgents, then even those who escape will have to hide out for a while, shutting down the local insurgency.

The possibility of a helicopter arriving to save the police station should play into the defection/loyalty calculation of the insurgents responsible for cover fire, since it reduces their chances of conquering the target and collecting the payoff. They are less likely to remain loyal, since the payoff they can expect from the insurgency is lowered by the probability of no payoff (or worse) if that helicopter arrives. The helicopter probability makes high-value targets look a lot less attractive to commanders now, for two reasons: first, high-value targets are more likely to have a helicopter show up to defend them; second and more important, high-value targets are now more likely to exceed the defection constraint, since the chances of collecting a share of the prize fall when the helicopter is more likely to come beating down. The chance that a helicopter might show up changed the police station from a soft target to a well-defended or hard target—that is, one with a low probability of successfully attacking and then getting away safely.

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