Lessons For Americans From France's Ugliest War

Probably few Americans have heard of the case of General Paul Aussaresses, but it has troubled the peace of France for a decade. As Barack Obama rewrites the rules for America's struggle against terrorism, the Aussaresses case reminds us that successful counter-insurgency is never easy and rarely clean.

Gen. Aussaresses served in the Free French special forces during WWII, then in Indochina and Algeria. In the Algerian war, Gen. Aussaresses played an important role as an intelligence officer--a role that involved torture to obtain information. Aussaresses also gave the order for at least two political assassinations, both of which were represented as suicides.

Aussaresses told his story in an interview with Le Monde in 2000, and then in his 2001 book Services Spéciaux Algérie 1955-1957. (Translated into English as The Battle of the Casbah). The Aussaresses statements provoked intense controversy both because of his own lack of regret for what he had done, and also because he implicated France's political leadership in the decisions--including then-justice minister and future French president, Francois Mitterand.

President Jacques Chirac stripped Gen. Aussaresses of his Légion d'honneur.

A court fined him 7,500 Euros for condoning war crimes--an act that is a legal offense in France. Aussaresses' two publishers were fined 15,000 Euros each. The latter verdict was sustained on appeal by France's highest courts.

But one week ago, on January 15, the European court of human rights cancelled the publishers' condemnation (span style="color: #0950b0;">Orban et autres contre France, requête no 20985/05<). The ECHR verdict was based on Article 10 of the European declaration of human rights, related to freedom of speech.

Gen. Aussaresses spoke out mainly because he wanted to tell his own story. Yet his case also raises some hard and important questions of global relevance.

While Aussaresses has been disgraced, his contemporary David Galula has become famous thanks to the attention paid him by America's Gen. Petraeus. Galula was a French officer, expelled from the Army as part of the Vichy regime's purge of Jews, who also served with the Free French and also saw action in Algeria. In Algeria, Galula developed an ambitious theory of counterinsurgency that stressed gaining the support of the population--a seemingly soft alternative to the methods used by Aussaresses.

Galula's own experience, in the area of Tizi-Ouzou, was apparently a successful one, and Petraeus drew many lessons from it for his own counter-insurgency manual, now the basis for US counter-insurgency operations.

So we have an attractive morality tale: Hard methods fail; soft methods work.

But is it so really so easy?

My father, who served in the same sector some months before Galula, reminded me that before Galula could win over the population in his sector, counter-insurgent forces had to kill a lot of FLN operatives. To do that, they had to use more classical, and brutal, methods. In Algeria, the bulk of the FLN was destroyed through the "plan Challe" (Challe was the general in charge of the operations in Algeria from December 1958 to January 1961, before taking part in the failed coup in April 1961). The Challe plan simply consisted in destroying FLN units sector by sector with elite regiments (paratroopers and legion) and then transferring pacified sectors to mainstream army units while sealing the Tunisian border with the "Morice line", a defensive fence heavily surveyed and defended. Only then could the "non-kinetic" counter-insurgency work begin. People like Aussaresses, Massu or Bigeard had to come first in order for the "population security" techniques advocated by Galula to succeed.

What made Algeria a particularly problematic period in recent French history was in large part the fact that the war was won and lost at the same time. It was won in military terms, the FLN having been mainly destroyed, but it was lost politically because French war aims were incoherent from the start. Winning the war meant keeping Algeria as part of France. That would have been a disaster, and as that fact dawned on the French, the governments decided to quit despite the military success.

France's withdrawal from Algeria unleashed some ugly political consequences--consequences that are still felt today. Defeat can bring long-term political problems which a victory can spare.

Having said that, the Galula method seems to have worked well in Iraq, at least well enough to prevent a defeat, but two questions may have to be asked:

1. How important have the pre-surge operations been in the current, apparently positive, outcome?

2. Can defeat be avoided the same way in Afghanistan, a bigger country with a larger population where the US/allied contingent is far less important than it has been in Iraq and where, for that reason, "classical" or "kinetic" war has not really been an option the way it has been in Algeria and Iraq?

The answer is certainly far from obvious, but it is probably wise to keep in mind that Afghanistan is not Iraq, and that the Galula model is not a magic solution. It is always a good idea to read Galula, but thanks are due the European Court of Human Rights for allowing us to read Aussaresses without penalty.