Page 15 - Counter Insurgancy

infrastructure and personnel will undermine the government’s morale,
confidence and capability, weakening its authority and control over
affected areas;

– This effect is magnified by the depiction of such violence in propagan-
da, portraying the government as weak and the insurgents as strong, and
exacerbating local grievances. Propaganda is sometimes the primary
aim of insurgent violence;

– Targeting members of different ethnic or sectarian groups may engender
a sense of social identity, solidarity and alienation from the government;

– By creating violent instability, insurgents may be able to encourage
people to turn to them in preference to the government to ‘restore’
public order;
– If insurgents can provoke excessive government action against a popu-
lation, then death, injury, mistreatment, or dishonor can become a
powerful motivator for retributive action against the government.

Challenging Government Security

Insurgents usually have less conventional military capacity than the government (at
least in the early stages of insurgency) and so tend to use guerrilla tactics to inflict
damage without allowing their fighters to be engaged by equal or larger govern-
ment forces. Tactics such as raids, ambushes, assassinations, sabotage, booby traps,
and improvised explosive devices take advantage of mobility, stealth, deception
and surprise to weaken, discredit, or paralyze the less agile government security
forces. Insurgents try to manage the tempo and intensity of their activities to permit
a level of effort they can sustain indefinitely. By prolonging the conflict, they hope
to exhaust the opposition, seeking to impose unsustainable costs on the government
to force capitulation. Although the permutations of insurgent activity are context-
driven, historical analysis shows that insurgents typically apply four basic tactics,
or variations of them, to defeat stronger security forces:

• Provocation: Insurgents often commit acts (such as atrocities) that are intend-
ed to prompt opponents to react irrationally, in ways that harm their interests.
For example, government forces, frustrated by their inability to distinguish
fighters from non-combatants, may be provoked into indiscriminate reprisals
or harsh security measures that alienate parts of the population. Alternatively,
one tribal, religious, ethnic or community group may be provoked into attack-
ing another in order to create and exploit instability.
• Intimidation: Insurgents intimidate individual members of the government
(especially police and local government officials) to dissuade them from taking
active measures against the insurgents. They will also publicly kill civilians

10 U.S. GOVERNMENT COUNTERINSURGENCY GUIDE • JANUARY 2009