MAOIST INSURGENCY: RETURN OF THE NIGHTMARE

(Courtesy: Dr. Thomas A. Marks)

(Originally published in "India and Global Affairs [New Delhi], Apr-Jun 09," re-posted here with the Author's consent).

Dr. Thomas A. Marks is a political risk consultant based in Honolulu, Hawaii, who has authored a number of benchmark works on Maoist insurgency, to include his recent Maoist People’s War in Post-Vietnam Asia.

Maoist insurgency is back. People’s war, once thought to have ended with the Cold War, is alive and well in South Asia. Large parts of India are effectively “no-go” areas. Bangladeshi officers cite Maoism as a greater threat than violent radical Islamists. Sri Lanka, having twice decimated the Maoist JVP at considerable human cost, now has them in the ruling coalition, where their often-bizarre positions are a faithful replication of India’s own legal Maoist spectrum. And to the north, what was the world’s only official Hindu kingdom finds itself now ruled by a party which yet begins its meetings before pictures of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao (Nepalis all, cynics note).

Ironically, New Delhi can look to its own intervention for the Maoist victory in Nepal. It was South Bloc which gave heed to the legal left and, in return for the swing votes which allowed Congress to cling to power, effectively ceded control of Nepali policy to the Indian Marxists. The shift brought on by Marxist opposition to the nuclear pact with the US came too late to save Kathmandu, and the country is now a failed state, posing a far greater security threat than ever it did when it was convulsed by war.

Ironically, too, Maoist growth in the Subcontinent continues even as the last real threat elsewhere, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), has been decimated and driven into a survival posture. Marxist but not Maoist, FARC nevertheless used a potent version of people’s war as its revolutionary doctrine. Copied from a combination of FMLN (El Salvador) and Vietnamese manuals, it was only national mobilization under President Alvaro Uribe (2002-present) which reversed the tide.

Why this stunning reality in South Asia? Why now?

Brave New World

The answer to the first query is that South Asia has long had the perfect conditions for Maoist upheaval. To the second, that the age of globalism has exacerbated many of these conditions.

Indeed, it can be argued that the present global situation is “the perfect storm,” combining as it does elements of two past eras of carnage. The first was the profound, irrevocable upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, which gave Europe the so-called “Age of Revolution” and the first age of terrorism. The second was the economic, social, and political despair of the interim between the world wars, which produced the twin nightmares of Stalinism and Fascism and their stupefying cost to humanity.

That terrorism has returned to lash out against the Brave New World of globalism hardly needs mention. It only needs emphasis how sterile is the approach that seeks to gather individual characteristics of those who, say, blow themselves up and then generalizes to the whole. Quite the contrary, it is the context, married to organizational acumen and finesse, that taps individual particulars. Nowhere is this more evident than in the violent radical Islamist organizations, such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

It is the violent radical Islamists who are the modern manifestation of fascism (termed by some, Islamofascists), complete with an anti-Semitism that would make the early Hitler of Mein Kampf appear somehow inadequate in his virulence. It is the Maoists who are heirs to Stalinism. Indeed, South Asian communism is distinguished by its continued domination by the thought of one of history’s most loathsome figures, Stalin.

In “globalism,” what was often local is now all but invariably international. Eras of profound change produce winners and losers. Mao emerged from the death of the Chinese imperial system and the clash between two alternative views of its successor, the Republic of the Kuomintang (KMT) and the “People’s Republic” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). By exploiting everything from economic-social-political dislocation to Japanese invasion, he was able to build a challenge capable in the end of seizing the world’s most populous country.

Inspired, self-proclaimed Maoist insurgencies emerged in the likes of Malaya, Thailand, the Philippines, Burma, Cambodia, India, Sri Lanka, Peru, and ultimately Nepal. Even communist but non-Maoist insurgencies recognized the efficacy of people’s war as strategy, and potent versions were seen in Vietnam, Laos, El Salvador, and Colombia. More often than not, linkages were established between the theaters of conflict, with China often directly involved in assisting its ideological partners.

For a time after the end of the Cold War, Maoism seemed a past nightmare. Globalism and the spectacular growth of challenges to the nation-state ensured that the heyday of people’s war was recreated in South Asia. Pronounced economic-social-political imperfections ensured that the 21st Century would see a new age of Maoist bloodshed, with ideologically inspired leaders mobilizing the alienated masses.

Nature of the Challenge

Maoism as a goal seeks to reorder society in a quest for social justice. There is no template as to how this reordering is to take place, except that it is to be Marxist-Leninist (communist). Theoretically a transitional dictatorship guiding socialism to achieve communal ownership of the means of production, in reality it has led only to would-be totalitarianism and attendant human carnage. Even China, where Mao Tse-tung invented the particular politico-military approach that is people’s war, has turned its back on “Maoist” ideology, which produced a tragedy conservatively estimated to have cost 80 million lives.

This is irrelevant to Maoists elsewhere. Arising in terribly flawed states such as Peru or Cambodia, Maoist insurgents seek a way out of the structural abyss by championing a triumph of the will.

Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) saw the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” of 1967-76 as a model for its future Peru. China saw it as a self-inflicted disaster that cost the lives of millions. The Khmer Rouge saw in their own “Year Zero” approach the Cambodian version of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” which latest research convincingly demonstrates to have cost between 30 and 50 million lives. In Cambodia, between one-fifth and one-third of the population perished.

Whatever the lack of a realistic goal, the means to achieve the end is manpower, mobilizing the masses in order to overwhelm the foe. The way, linking means to goal, is the strategy of people’s war. The mobilized masses are organized into a new state, a “counter-state,” to challenge the existing state.

In this mobilization, “all politics is local.” Leaders, normally drawn from marginalized elites – divorced either objectively or subjectively (in the mind) – look at the imperfections of the state and advance Maoism as the solution. Specifics need not be spelled out, since utopia is sufficient inspiration for followers, who seek redress of immediate grievances (as well as reinforcement of hopes and aspirations).

Any people’s war, then, is in reality myriad local wars, with “Maoism” serving only as the driver for leadership and committed cadres. Indoctrination of the so-called “grievance guerrillas” gives the effort greater cohesion.

Role of Violence

People’s war is a strategy for armed politics. The mistake is to think it is merely “war,” by which we normally mean action between armed forces. To the contrary, people’s war is very much like any electoral campaign – except violence ensures “the cards favor.”

Significantly, rebels such as the Maoists claim they are merely doing what the state itself has been doing all along. They assert there never has been “non-violent politics.” Rather, echoing Lenin, they label democratic politics practiced by the “old-order” but a façade for oppression. This oppression is carried out using the violence of the state through its armed component, the security forces, as well as the “structural violence” of poverty and injustice.

Thus the Maoists see themselves as engaged in a struggle for liberation, of self-defense even. Such a struggle will proceed along different but orchestrated lines of effort. Use of violence is but one line of effort. Within that line of effort, there are varied forms of violence, from assassinations to main force attacks – the large actions that seek to battle units of the armed forces on even terms.

Each type of violence – terror, guerrilla warfare, main force warfare, war of position (i.e., liberated areas) – may be thought of as a campaign, comprised of numerous discrete acts separate in time and space yet connected in a unity of action designed to achieve a goal. We can speak, for instance, of the campaign of terror that the Maoists use to eliminate all who oppose them in local areas, whether individuals or police. Who can forget those famous photos of the mutilated individuals in Nepal, especially teachers, their limbs hacked, their bodies hanging from poles?

Yet such terror occurs for a reason: to clear the space for political action, to eliminate competitors. This is why legal political activists are normally particular targets. They compete to mobilize the same target audience as the Maoists. Such rivals must be driven out so that the Maoist cadres have uncontested access to the masses. This clears the way for insurgent political mobilization.

Of course, such methods are anathema, even as certain portions of the party platform are attractive. It is for this reason that the Maoists sponsor a multitude of front organizations, the wide variety, for instance, of ethnic and community rights organizations one sees from the Philippines to Nepal to India. On the surface, they are not Maoist, but in reality fronts are controlled by the Maoists. Student, labor, and human rights organizations are normally prominent in this respect.

Such control need not be direct. Fronts can present themselves as independent, even as they are being used to enhance Maoist strength. Lenin called those who unwittingly join such fronts, thinking they are acting on their own, “useful idiots.”

Even as this goes on inside the country, the Maoists work outside. States tend to focus upon the tangible links. Much more important is the information campaign of the insurgents, designed to present their movement as almost benign. As states make mistakes, such as seen in instances of indiscipline when military units are deployed, these are exploited to claim the state itself is the problem, terror as but a natural, defensive component of the solution.

For a Maoist movement, the goal is always power. They must have power, because their goal is to refashion society. They are not seeking reintegration. That would be to accept the structure that exists and to play by that structure’s rules.

Quite vocally, they reject the legitimacy of that structure and its rules. That is why they are adamant that there must be a remaking of society.

Have they worked out the details of what this new society will look like? Of course not. That is the beauty of being the political challenger. Today’s realities can be opposed with tomorrow’s promises.

This is what politicians always do, even those who run “on my record.” The danger of left-wing ideologues, such as the Maoists, is that their worldview dramatically constrains their view of possibilities.

They tend to think of fantasies, such as “self-reliance” and “independence,” as ends that can be achieved if only “will” is harnessed. It was just such fantasies, implemented through violence, that gave us the astonishing crimes of the past century – crimes, it must be noted, the Maoists deny occurred.

India’s Need for Enhanced Approach

India’s approach to the Maoists in South Asia, whether internal or elsewhere, has been consistently misguided, improperly inspired and organized, and wholly tactical.

Internally, there has been a failure to take the threat seriously. The conceptualization of the Maoists as having a military and a political wing quite misses the reality of an armed political party advancing on five lines of effort – political (mass mobilization), allies (creating fronts), violence (of various types, not all present but interlocking when such is the case), political warfare (using nonviolent actions, such as subversion, to make violence more effective), and international (which can be decisive).

The inability or unwillingness of the center to coordinate an inter-state response allows the unified Maoist challenge to play the seams between state forces. Such assistance as New Delhi has provided has been tactical. Calling an individual and small unit tactical center for police “counterinsurgency training” highlights the point. Counterinsurgency is a strategic category. There are no “counterinsurgency tactics,” only tactics applied appropriately in support of correct strategy and operational art.

Externally, India has erred in thinking the Maoists are but a version of the Northeast ethnic insurgents and thus can be “bought.” Nepal offers the best example to the contrary.

There, the Maoists first used the monarchy as their foil, as a surrogate for what they claimed was its role in the old-order. If the “feudal monarchy” is swept away, they endlessly repeated, all would be right with Nepal. In this, they certainly were assisted by the tragic circumstances which placed the then-incumbent, Gyanendra, on the throne. Similarly, they were assisted by his mistakes in maneuvering through the maze of Nepali politics.

A number of elements figured into their calculations. First, as the hegemonic power in an unstable subcontinent, India wanted restoration of order. This was necessary for precisely the reasons stability is desired in Sri Lanka. Disorder produces refugees, unleashes intra-Indian passions, transfers elements of the conflict to Indian soil, and sucks New Delhi into foreign policy nastiness. Second, having opted for order, India played a hand well known to its smaller neighbors: intervention. The only question was how to intervene.

Here, there are several schools of thought. My past work in Sri Lanka has led to my being less than charitable as to Indian motives. In the Sri Lankan case, New Delhi was into everything from supporting terrorism to running covert ops in a friendly, neighboring democracy. Only when the Frankenstein it helped to create, LTTE, turned on its former benefactor did logic and morality reassert themselves in New Delhi’s policy.

In this case, in Nepal, it is perhaps too early to speak in such terms. What we know at the moment is that is that the weak position of the coalition government in New Delhi, combined with its normal “Great Game” psychology and the eagerness of certain Indian personalities, especially on the left, to expand their own role and spheres of involvement, led to a policy shift that supported SPAM (the Seven Party Alliance and the Maoists).

It was disappointing and tragic that the SPA and the Palace could not have a meeting of minds. Parliamentary democracy should have been the ultimate bulwark against the Maoist challenge, but the very nature of Nepali parliamentary democracy, with its corruption and ineptitude, led to its marginalization. The increasingly bitter split between SPA and the king became all but inevitable in such circumstances, but personalities also played a central role, as they do in all that occurs in Nepal.

It seems equally clear that India, as it did previously in Sri Lanka, went into the present endeavor quite misinformed by its alleged experts, not to mention its intelligence organs, and that it was ignorant as to the actual nature of the Maoists – no matter the efforts of those same personalities just mentioned to claim how wise, thoughtful, and caring Prachanda and other members of the Maoists leadership were.

In once again misreading the situation in a neighboring state, India now seeks a “soft landing.” To get one, New Delhi’s strategy has been to facilitate in Nepal creation of a “West Bengal” or a “Kerala” – states where the tamed Indian left challenges and even rules (sometimes, in the case of the latter), where it continues with its nasty verbiage and bizarre worldview, but where it must respond to the realities of power and hence stay within the lanes on the national political highway.

What New Delhi has overlooked is that such realities occur in India only because of the capacity of the national state to force compliance. Subtract the Indian military, paramilitary, and police forces from the equation, and India would be anarchy. Not surprisingly, that is the very term being used by many to describe the situation in Nepal.
This has its own implications for India’s security and for its struggle against the growing strength of the Indian Maoists. What Nepal itself is facing is the “state within a state” as seen in Palestine with Hamas and Lebanon with Hezbollah. Whether events play themselves out as we are seeing even now in the Middle East depends quite upon what the Maoists are actually up to.

Hamas and Hezbollah have behaved as the Nepali Maoists seem determined to behave, to participate in “the system” only to use it for their own ends. Those “ends,” obviously, have now made life even worse for the population.

The Way Ahead

What Nepal as a state never understood was that it faced an armed political campaign. This means – a lesson for India -- that democracy, no matter how messy, accompanied by good governance and transparency, should be at the heart of any response to the Maoists, with the security forces providing the shield.

Nepali parliamentary democracy proved incapable of using mobilization of democratic capacity to defend itself. It did not do what the Thai, the Filipinos, the Peruvians, and the Sri Lankans (against the JVP, twice) did to defeat their Maoists. They brought reform to imperfect systems and made them better. They remain imperfect, but so are all systems. And they are not the vicious, man-eating systems as desired by the left-wing, of which the Maoists are the premier representatives.

It should be obvious that the claim that there is “no military solution” to insurgency is simply a canard. Armed capacity enables the campaign of reform, because armed capacity is what enables the challenge to the old-order.

In circumstances such as India (or Nepal earlier), security forces are not committed simply to defend the status quo. They must be committed to defend transformation. That transformation, though, must look rather more like what can be seen in India as it advances toward economic, social, and political modernity – and a lot less like Mao’s China.