Civilian deaths

The bloody finish to the guerrilla war in Sri Lanka last week, and the continuing civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq point out once again the dilemma facing modern governments dealing with insurgencies. As Mao taught, insurgent fighters should move among the people like fish in the sea. The Tamil guerillas in particular deliberately used civilians as shields, giving the government forces opposing them two bad choices: quit fighting (the insurgents win the battle) , or incur civilian deaths (the insurgents get great propaganda and lots of worldwide support). In fact, in an insurgency there will inevitably be civilian deaths, many of them. Indeed, it is often unclear who really is a civilian in such battles. Besides the hard core fighters there are often locals, even women and children, who have been co-opted or threatened into fighting or helping, and other locals who, though not active fighters, willingly provide shelter, supplies and intelligence to the insurgents. When do these cease to become civilians and become legitimate combatants? It’s pretty hard to sort out even after the fact, let alone in the heat of a firefight.

Of course none of this would have worked against, say, the Roman army, who would not have cared if a few civilians were killed in a battle. Kidnapping only works if people are willing to pay ransoms – if they won’t pay ransoms kidnapping isn’t a worthwhile business proposition (something the shipping companies ought to learn). Similarly, civilian shields only work if one doesn’t care about civilian deaths but one’s opponents are squeamish about killing civilians. In the cases of Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Iraq the insurgent opponents seem not to care a bit about civilian deaths. Indeed, in Afghanistan and especially Iraq, the insurgents kill several orders of magnitude more civilians each month than our forces, and do so quite deliberately.

The key player in all of this, of course, is the world media. The leverage that insurgents get from accidental civilian deaths in combat comes entirely from the biased and one-sided publicity that these deaths reliably incur in the world media. Eliminate the publicity and the use of civilian shields loses much, though not all, of its effectiveness.

Only slowly do the modern western governments and military forces seem to be realizing that fighting insurgencies requires dominating not only the battlefield but also the public media. Fighting insurgencies is as much about cutting off the insurgent’s public support as it is about killing or capturing their leaders and fighters.