Adam Curtis: How to Kill a Rational Peasant - a history of counterinsurgency

[muriel_volestrangler]

Because at the moment that Idema was entering his Afghan prison, a group of very senior US military men, led by a General called David Petraus, were sitting down in a military staff college in Kansas and beginning to write a study that would completely transform the tactics of the US army in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

What General Petraus and his team did was to go back into the past and exhume a theory of warfare that had been discredited by the US military who thought it was long buried and forgotten. It was called Counterinsurgency.

And out of that would allegedly come the same kind of arms-length, privatised interrogation and torture methods that Idema was indulging in.

I thought I would tell the history of how Counterinsurgency was invented, why it was discredited in America, and how it returned in 2007 to dominate and brutalise the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a fascinating and weird story that is far odder than anything Jack Idema could have dreamt up - it involves Mao Zedong, John F Kennedy, French fascists, the attempted assassination of Charles De Gaulle, and strange Potemkin-style villages in Vietnam where women get pregnant for no discernible reason.
...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2012/06/how_to_kill_a_rational_peasant.html

As always, Curtis has fascinating excerpts from film archives from the past 50 years.

[RainDog]

1. k&r n/t

[intaglio]

2. Essentially COIN is a failed strategy

and Democracies have no counter to insurgent warfare.

[cbrer]

3. This really is a fascinating insight

Into the birth and development of some of Americas strategic thinking. Good stuff.

[yurbud]

4. I thought it started with how we exterminated the American Indians

fight them on the battlefields, but also attack the villages that support them and the old folks, women, and children they were fight to protect, which would break their spirit and deprive them of logistical support.

Nothing is new under the sun.

It just gets co-opted and rebranded.