When the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan last year, and Washington’s puppet government immediately fell to the Taliban, the imperialists lost more than their heroin ratline. They lost the global narrative that the U.S. military is as formidable as it presents itself, a narrative which had already been deteriorating for decades amid developments like Washington’s defeat in Vietnam and the unexpected quagmire in Iraq.
With victory for a technologically inferior and outnumbered military in Afghanistan, it was revealed that there are some irregular insurgencies the U.S. simply can’t overcome, no matter how much it expands its military budget. The imperialists have learned this lesson before, but it appears they’ve repeatedly forgotten it. They’ve kept assuming that their counterinsurgencies can succeed, then been proven either decisively wrong (like in Afghanistan) or only technically right at a tremendous cost (like in Iraq). This has implications for the question of whether or not the United States will be able to remain internally stable during the coming decades. And despite how far-fetched U.S. collapse still sounds to many, this is a question that the country’s military strategists have been seriously considering, especially during the last decade of deteriorating living conditions.
The equivalent applies to Europe, Australia, and the other parts of the core imperialist alliance, which are experiencing the same dynamic of intensifying class conflict. As I’ll get into, these destabilizing factors are even more severe in exploited countries like India and Colombia, both of which are already experiencing insurgencies. The scenarios I’ll describe apply to any given place that’s experiencing the mounting contradictions of late-stage capitalism. Though the U.S. is the least stable among the imperialist countries, due to how much colonial baggage it’s taken on from both the indigenous genocide and the transatlantic slave trade’s legacy. The colonized nations here are under increasing pressure from the settler-colonial apparatus, and tensions are building. When these tensions reach a boiling point, the settler-colonial state will be faced with the same series of dilemmas it’s faced in its counterinsurgencies abroad.
The U.S. empire’s current working plan for how to defeat a domestic counterinsurgency: try to operate surgically
Throughout recent history, domestic U.S. counterinsurgencies have primarily taken the form of trying to stamp out radicalism before they can develop into actual military threats. As was exemplified during the Black Lives Matter protests of the last two years, counterinsurgency here is mainly waged through narrative manipulation and movement wrecking. But the conditions indicate that at some point, these measures will no longer be enough to hold back a revolutionary scenario. And the military is actively preparing for that breaking point.
After the current long depression began in 2008, an unusual pattern began among U.S. military analysts. Provoked by Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter—which started in response to the country’s declining living standards and the correlating militarization of police—these analysts started regularly producing speculations about how the armed forces would handle an armed uprising from the poor and the colonized. A year ago, I reviewed all of these provocative military statements in depth; there’s the 2016 Pentagon training video that implied a domestic intervention in response to armed uprisings is “unavoidable,” the War College report from the same year that detailed how the Army might suppress such guerrilla forces, the 2018 Pentagon training game that imagines a mid-2020s revolt from a disillusioned Generation Z, and the 2019 Pentagon report calling for domestic militarization in response to the climate crisis and whatever social instability might arise from it.
The scenarios imagined in these reports are consistent with the analysis since put forth last year by sociologist Temitope Oriola, who predicts that intensifying police brutality will provoke the colonized communities in the U.S. into waging guerrilla warfare against law enforcement during the next several decades. As well as with West Point's assessment last year that:
Not only does the service need to prepare for a form of conflict radically different from recent wars, but change must also be rapid enough to keep pace with the changing character of warfare—and the growing capabilities of our potential adversaries. Great power competitors like China and Russia are undertaking efforts to modernize their militaries for increasingly complex battlefields. They are engaging in irregular tactics using proxy forces, seeking advantage in the information environment and cyber domain, and advancing technologies for contested environments like dense urban terrain.
In the context of those earlier reports, this can be read as an expression of paranoia that Washington’s rivals will instigate the feared domestic U.S. insurgency, presumably through agitation propaganda. (This is at least the narrative the government will put forth during such a scenario; in reality that kind of revolt will arise not from foreign influence, but from the conditions which are radicalizing the masses to participate in an uprising.) West Point’s language about needing to adapt to increasingly complex irregular warfare environments is a call for the domestic counterinsurgency approach to be improved.
These reports posit a generally agreed upon counterinsurgency approach: when this domestic armed uprising begins, the military will try to make its interventions surgically limited—and theoretically not harmful towards non-combatants—so as to avoid losing the hearts and minds of the people. The 2016 Pentagon training video suggests the military should “drain the swamp of non-combatants” (as in get civilians out of the areas where the guerrillas will be fought), then engage the guerrillas in high-intensity combat using special operations forces. The War College report suggests the military will need to “bulldoze the slums” within the impoverished urban environments where revolts are expected to break out, allowing the military to counter the rebels while minimizing civilian casualties. West Point’s concern over the complexity of the urban terrain the military will be navigating indicates that these kinds of ideas, focused on avoiding the use of the military against U.S. citizens amid a future civil war, are now being refined within military intelligence circles.
The problem with this strategy of attempting to operate surgically within U.S. borders is that it would handicap or even backfire on the government. Special ops are only effective in fighting guerrilla forces on a small scale, not in the scenario the Pentagon describes where guerrillas have grown powerful enough to potentially take control over entire megacities. It’s like expecting one drop of food coloring to transform an entire pond; it’s simply not realistic. Neither is the idea of suddenly evacuating the millions of civilians who would be at risk should such conflicts break out.
If the military tries to pursue this route in response to the kind of uprising Oriola describes, the rebels will have a good chance of capturing multiple cities. But when the ruling class gets desperate, it will resort to that Plan B of bulldozing the slums (and the low income neighborhoods judged to be “slums”). As well as to far more drastic measures.
Bringing Plan Colombia home—and the risks this will pose
If the military starts killing civilians, suppressing information about these killings will be crucial. Thus the War College’s statements about how the military will have to cut off internet and cell phone access within the areas it intervenes in, and how online journalists who may expose the war crimes must be tracked down and neutralized. (It’s vague on this point, but we can imagine how those journalists will be dealt with from looking at Assange.) Which is where the brutal anti-guerrilla strategy of Plan Colombia comes in. During the Colombian neo-colonial regime’s campaign to put down liberation movements, it’s weaponized internet shutdowns in exactly this way. Last year, the regime cut off electricity and the Internet in Cali, the city most affected by the country’s recent anti-austerity demonstrations. Fixed line and cellular services were also impacted. The police used this opportunity to open fire on people in the streets.
It’s these kinds of tactics that will have to be replicated by the U.S. government if it’s to replicate Plan Colombia as a whole. Or at least utilize the plan’s heavily militarized aspects to the maximum extent that’s feasible; the plan has relied too much on force to be fully exportable. As one imperialist NGO has assessed the lessons from Plan Colombia, leaning entirely into military force is a risky way to fight insurgencies: “Nowhere else—not Afghanistan, not Central America, not Mexico—has success come from emphasizing the so-called ‘hard side.’ Plan Colombia is an important foreign-policy case study, but not a model to replicate elsewhere.” A way to alleviate these risks is by blocking off the flow of information, as the Saudi coalition recently did when it shut off Yemen’s internet during a civilian massacre.
Plan Colombia isn’t the ideal approach to emulate, but it’s the direction the conflict will likely go in if the government becomes desperate. Which is plausible in a situation where the special ops have failed to subdue the guerrillas, and the illusion of the military’s invincibility is therefore broken. The U.S. settler-colonial state has already resorted to bombing entire neighborhoods to suppress potential revolts, and in recent memory too; in 1985, Philadelphia police bombed several rows of houses to counter a Black liberation group. They managed to preemptively evacuate the residents who weren’t part of the group, but this was only because of the fact that the group didn’t pose a guerrilla threat, and was therefore easy to target. In the scenario the Pentagon lays out, where actual guerrillas are operating in cities, the environment will be far too complex for these kinds of clean, small-scale evacuations to be orchestrated. Many non-combatants will be victimized, like has been the case throughout Plan Colombia.
Another example of the U.S. empire embracing this kind of scorched earth counterinsurgency approach abroad is Operation Phoenix, where U.S. forces massacred civilians in Vietnam as a deliberate policy. Not only did they try to kill non-combatants as a way to terrorize the population into submission, but they often blamed the deaths on the guerrillas. Operation Phoenix was about combining terrorism with false flags, helping maintain the myth that Washington had merely waged a “limited war” against Vietnam by falsely attributing many attacks to the communists. No doubt such tactics will be used by the military during the kind of conflict the Pentagon anticipates. And the censorship of Plan Colombia or the Saudi-led siege will absolutely be replicated; the War College has as much as stated this.
It’s easy to see the flaw in this approach: it turns the people against the empire, and gives the guerrillas the support needed to win. This was true in Vietnam. It was true in Afghanistan, where the CIA replicated Operation Phoenix by sending death squads to frequently murder entire families on suspicion of Taliban affiliation—then ironically drove the population to embrace the Taliban. And it was just shown to be true in Yemen, where the anti-imperialist Houthis have won despite the Saudi coalition’s genocidal warfare and communications sabotage.
The Saudis and their assistants in the genocide have gone even further than the Colombian regime in trying to destroy rebellion, and they’ve still failed. As Brookings has concluded about why the Houthis have won, the imperialist coalition’s brutal determination is the very thing that’s caused it to lose: “The cost of the war to Yemenis is staggering. The United Nations Development Programme estimated in November that 377,000 Yemenis will have been killed by the conflict by the end of 2021, most indirectly and not in combat, 70% of them children under the age of five. The Saudi blockade of Yemen is a principal cause of the humanitarian catastrophe by denying food and medicine to the country.”
It’s this type of cruel approach which has also made Plan Colombia unsuccessful, even within the one country where it’s so far proven to be practicable. It’s led to a surge in illegal mining, mass displacement due to corporate pillage, and human rights violations, as well as a hubristic emboldening of the neo-colonial regime. Which has given the splinter groups from the old Revolutionary Army of Colombia (FARC) justification in the minds of many for reigniting their warfare efforts throughout the last several years, following the 2016 peace deal that the government’s overreaches made fall apart.
These new guerrillas may currently be experiencing a crisis of leadership due to the regime’s counterinsurgency successes last year, but the locals have proven largely willing to give the guerrillas support. Which, along with this last year’s gargantuan protests, has likely factored into the worries that the regime and its imperialist backers have over the stability of neo-colonialism within Colombia. This week, the Biden administration made paranoid statements about Colombia being under threat from foreign actors ahead of the country’s next election, mainly Venezuela and Russia. Absurdly, it also claimed that its recent $8 million increase in aid to Colombia’s police following the last year’s world-shocking law enforcement brutality is to “strengthen human rights and training of officers.” What the imperialists are doing is preparing their key neo-colony in the region for an even more brutal counterinsurgency amid intensifying class conflict.
Waging preemptive counterinsurgency to avoid having to choose between limited force & hard force
Imperial collapse, and the escalating class and anti-colonial conflict that goes along with it, has created a dilemma for the U.S. ruling class: severely handicap the counterinsurgency so that the people’s hearts and minds aren’t swayed against the government, or fully import the empire’s foreign counterinsurgency methods and risk such a public relations crisis. This is a quandary that for now only exists within the realm of the hypothetical. Such a domestic guerrilla revolt remains not a guaranteed scenario, only worth talking about because of these strange hints the military has been making about it sharing Oriola’s views towards the future of social tensions in the country. So the national security state is doing all it can to stop that conflict from arising, and from having to face the hard choices which will come if it does.
For this reason, the U.S. has already been waging a counterinsurgency within its own borders. One that’s primarily focused around counterinsurgency’s narrative control aspects—which should still be seen as a genuine war effort, being waged against the citizenry every day. In Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, the U.S. military defines these aspects as the principal ones within the warfare category:
COIN [counter-insurgency] is distinguished from traditional warfare due to the focus of its operations—a relevant population—and its strategic purpose—to gain or maintain control or influence over—and the support of that relevant population through political, psychological, and economic methods. The struggle for legitimacy with the relevant population is typically a central theme of the conflict between the insurgency and the HN [host nation] government. The HN government generally needs some level of legitimacy among the population to retain the confidence of the populace and an acknowledgment of governing power. The insurgency will attack the legitimacy of the HN government while attempting to develop its own legitimacy with the population. COIN should reduce the credibility of the insurgency while strengthening the legitimacy of the HN government.
This is why the U.S. legalized domestic covert psyops during the start of the new great-power competition a decade ago, and why NATO has come to consider cognitive warfare as now being equally important to land, sea, air, and cyber warfare. The prospect of revolution in the core imperialist countries, made apparent by all of the social decay these countries have been undergoing, has mobilized the ruling class towards preemptively snuffing it out. The main way to do this, aside from the brutality of the increasingly militarized police state, is by targeting the minds of the masses. This is ultimately what the growing prevalence of war propaganda is about. If Washington’s adversaries are demonized, and portrayed as the sources behind dissent in the U.S. (as well as in U.S. puppet countries like Colombia), COIN can keep the rebellion at bay.
But this propaganda-dependent approach has limits. Oriola’s thesis is that regardless of counterrevolutionary propaganda, the country’s conditions will lead to an insurgency materializing, so long as these conditions fulfill the historically proven criteria for armed mass insurrections. As Oriola explains:
Using research and contextual experience from the developing world to make predictions about the U.S. in this regard is apt. There are many interrelated conditions for the rise of an armed insurgency. None of them in and of itself can lead to an armed insurgency, but requires a host of variables within social and political processes. Transgenerational oppression of an identifiable group is one of the pre-conditions for an armed insurgency, but this is hardly news. What the U.S. has managed to institute on a national and comprehensive scale is what sociologist Jock Young calls “cultural inclusion and structural exclusion.” A strong sense of injustice, along with significant moments, events and episodes — like the killings of Taylor and Floyd — are also important….There is another, related variable: The availability of people willing and able to participate in such insurgency. The U.S. has potential candidates in abundance. Criminal records — sometimes for relatively minor offences — that mar Black males for life, have taken care of this critical supply. One study estimates that while eight per cent of the U.S. general population has felony convictions, the figure is 33 per cent among African American males.
Should these conditions produce an armed uprising, it will be karma for the U.S. empire, which has increasingly made mass incarceration and modern slave exploitation of colonized peoples into its profit sources during U.S. hegemony’s decline. The carceral state could become the catalyst for an unprecedented settler-colonial crisis, one that settler-colonialism may not be able to recover from.
If the government tries to suppress an uprising of this kind of strength, it will have to choose between those two risky options of self-handicapped counterinsurgency and scorched-earth counterinsurgency. The military strategists could try to maximize the benefits of both approaches by applying each of them to different areas and to different degrees, depending on what’s most practical in a given locality. But given how often the U.S. empire overestimates its strengths abroad, it’s more likely that we won’t see it act so rationally. Imperialism and colonialism are fundamentally reactive, limited by their hubris and drive for domination. As has been the case so many times in their recent decades of decline, they may use magical thinking in how they deal with those who challenge them.
Plus, a hybrid approach towards counterinsurgency wouldn’t be guaranteed to prevent the massive social instability that a domestic series of military interventions will inevitably create. All it could take for a vast turn in public opinion against the government is the awareness that citizens in some parts of the country are being murdered. Treating one’s own people with such brazen inhumanity is a barrier that states are too afraid to cross when they have guerrillas within their borders vying for the support of the masses.
Even India, which is ruled by the extreme right-wing BJP, constrains its counterinsurgency efforts against the communist rebels in accordance with this rational fear of alienating the people. Consequently, India’s counterinsurgency model has proven ineffectual. The country’s Maoist insurgents, despite adhering to an ultra-left deviation that’s ultimately unable to win the masses and is currently waning, have been phenomenally resilient. Imagine how badly the BJP regime will fare when it’s confronted with the strain of the communist movement that’s willing to properly interpret, and take advantage of, the country’s conditions. Then the state might react by going all-in with its counterinsurgency, in turn making its own demise all the more likely.
The India example teaches us two lessons: that a guerrilla insurgency is capable of gaining a foothold by taking advantage of the government’s fears of alienating the masses, and that this insurgency can still find itself unable to triumph if it commits the kinds of errors the Indian Naxalite Maoists have committed—namely, splintering from the Marxist-Leninist movement and pursuing adventurism. The Naxalites have embraced the correct military strategy in not attempting a conventional war (which the government would easily win), and pursuing irregular warfare. But their embrace of an ideology that’s divorced from the masses, and from the material realities that a communist movement needs to recognize in order to prevail, have left them unable to supplant even an unstable fascist state.
It’s therefore unsurprising that fomenting left sectarianism and adventurism has been a major part of the U.S. government’s counterinsurgency. Unless the coming revolt can overcome these ideological diversions, it will find itself in the same position as the Naxalites: able to exploit the state’s many weaknesses to an extent, but unable to carry out a revolution.
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