Native Son

David Galula, a Tunisia-born Jew and French military officer who has been dead more than 40 years, was the greatest single influence on American counterinsurgency practice in Iraq and Afghanistan after Gen. David Petraeus. The idea that winning the population’s loyalty, not winning territory, is the key to quelling an insurgency has roots dating back 200 years to the Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz, but Galula was the conduit through which the U.S. Army learned it. The notion of active patrolling of hostile cities, of dispersing U.S. forces in small groups rather than stationing them on large bases, the insistence on getting to know the local culture—all these are Galula’s ideas.

His precepts, developed from his two years as a company commander in Algeria between 1956 and 1958, became American doctrine through two books. The authors of the U.S. Army counterinsurgency field manual FM 3-24, of whom the most famous is Petraeus, cite one: “Of the many books that were influential in the writing of Field Manual 3-24, perhaps none was as important as David Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare.” But Galula’s other book, Pacification in Algeria, written for the RAND Corporation in 1962 and classified until 2005, is the more useful book for the soldier and the more interesting for the military historian.

Pacification gives a nearly week-by-week account of how Galula implemented his theories in a tiny, mountainous area of Algeria’s Kabyle region. The Kabyle is 100 percent Berber, to use the old word—or Amazigh, to use the word Berbers call themselves—and it was a hotbed of the insurgency. Galula admits that the two officers who followed him in command were both quickly killed by the insurgents. Yet he suggests that his ideas were taken up by French generals and resulted in tactical successes in the Algerian war. Of course, France lost that war, but in Pacification Galula emphasizes, correctly, that the Algerian revolutionaries had largely been defeated when Charles de Gaulle decided for political reasons to give Algeria its independence. Given Galula’s importance in recent years, it was only a matter of time before someone would try to revisit the historical record and assess his actual achievements.

Galula in Algeria, by Grégor Mathias, takes a deep dive in the French military archives to examine, almost day by day and village by village, what Galula accomplished and how his area fared after he left. (It is such a deep dive that only military historians will want to join in.) Unfortunately, the book is marred by what may have been unclear syntax in the French original, which I haven’t seen, and a sloppy translation. The reader’s confidence is undermined by small errors throughout (“it was to Galula to conduct counterpropaganda,” reads one). In the crucial “Conclusions” chapter, there are sentences that make no sense: “The main criticisms of Galula’s tactics, having never been compared against the archival record and are more focused on the simplicity of its methods with respect to other, more elaborate French counterinsurgency doctrine thinkers.”

Sadly, Mathias is also cavalier with extrapolations from material I know well. He frequently cites a magazine article I published on Galula and my biographical study of Galula for the Army War College, but he loosely interprets and re-transmits the details. To take one case, where I wrote that Galula “apparently met” Samuel Griffith, a translator of Mao: Mathias has “Galula knew Griffith well.” This does not inspire confidence in his use of other sources.

As to the larger points—Was Galula effective? Did he report his results accurately?—Mathias finds that Galula was just as likely to gloss over his failures and trumpet successes as most of the rest of us. He also convincingly suggests that despite some military successes and an impressive decrease in violence, Galula never eradicated the political substructure of the insurgency in his area.

I would suggest that Galula’s inconclusive results stem from an obvious error that the French officer made that neither I nor Mathias noticed. I understand it now because I recently spent a lot of time among Berbers in Libya, where tensions with the Arab majority are similar to those in Algeria. Put simply, the Kabyles don’t like the Arabs very much—and the best way to get them to go over to the French side might have been to capitalize on the ethnic, religious, and linguistic tension between the two groups.

Galula, along with every French commander in Algeria I’ve read about, missed the elephant in the room: If the French had been able to drive a wedge between the roughly 30 percent of Algerians who are Berbers and the Arab majority, they might have stopped the insurgency in its tracks. The potential of this idea is confirmed by the fact that the newly independent Algeria quickly set about oppressing its Kabyle citizens. One of the first acts of the new Algerian government was eliminating Berber studies at Algiers University in 1962. It was forbidden to name children traditional Tamazight names, and the Berber radio station was limited to four hours of broadcasting daily. In a country 30 percent Berber, the study of the Berber language was banned at the national university.

While the Kabyle produced a disproportional number of revolutionary leaders—and casualties—many were marginalized or slain by the Arabs in the 1960s. Meanwhile, the Algerian government built mosques throughout the Kabyle in towns that had never had them, including some that were and are Christian. This campaign was so unpopular that some Kabyle separatist leaders, like the exiled Ferhat Mehenni, openly support recognizing Israel.

Continue reading: Born and bred in North Africa

Ann Marlowe, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, is the author of a biography of David Galula. She blogs at World Affairs. Her Twitter feed is at @annmarlowe.