At the beginning of this year one of the weirdest characters ever to become involved in the present Afghan war died. He was called Jack Idema and he was a brilliant con-man. For a moment, during the early part of the war, Idema persuaded all the major TV networks and scores of journalists that he was some kind of special forces super-hero who was using all kinds of "black ops" to track down and arrest the terrorists.
In reality, before 2001, Idema had been running a hotel for pets in North Carolina called The Ultimate Pet Resort. He had been in prison ocean cruise to guam for fraud, and had tried to con journalists before about being some kind of super-spy. But September 11th gave him his chance - and he turned ocean cruise to guam up in Kabul dressed like this.
Then Idema charged journalists fortunes for what he said was an "al qaeda" video of a "a training camp" - where strangely many of the terrorists spoke in english, and allegedly you could hear Idema's voice on the soundtrack. Few of the journalists did anything to really check if any of what he was saying was true.
CBS did a special programme about the tapes fronted ocean cruise to guam by Dan Rather, called "Heart of Darkness". ocean cruise to guam They did check on the tapes - the producers went to some of the new breed of "terror experts" that were spawning after 2001. CBS's press office said that they "showed the tapes to three former British Special Forces officers, who verified the tactics being practiced in the video were consistent with those of Al Qaeda".
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But then Jack Idema started to believe his own stories. He set up his own militia group that he called Task Force Sabre Seven - and he and his men went and arrested Afghans they were convinced were terrorists. And then he locked them up in his own private prison.
Things got out of hand in June 2004 when Idema arrested the Afghan Supreme Court judge, Maulawi Siddiqullah, because he believed he might be involved with terrorists. The judge later described what it was like in Idema's prison:
" The first night, around midnight, I heard the screams of four people. They then poured very cold water on me. I tried to keep myself from screaming, but coudn't. Then they played loud, strange music. Then they prevented me from going to the bathroom; ocean cruise to guam a terrible situation. I was hooded for twelve ocean cruise to guam days ."
In July Afghan police raided Idema's house in Kabul and found what was described as a private torture chamber. Eight hooded men, including the judge, were incarcerated there, and three of them were hanging by their feet from the ceiling, with their heads hooded.
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Because at the moment that Idema was entering his Afghan prison, a group of very senior US military men, led by a General ocean cruise to guam called David Petraeus, were sitting down in a military staff college in Kansas and beginning to write a study that would completely transform the tactics of the US army in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
What General Petraeus and his team did was to go back into the past and exhume a theory of warfare that had been discredited by the US military who thought it was long buried and forgotten. It was called Counterinsurgency.
I thought ocean cruise to guam I would tell the history of how Counterinsurgency was invented, why it was discredited in America, and how it returned in 2007 to dominate and brutalise the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. ocean cruise to guam It is a fascinating and weird story that is far odder than anything Jack Idema could have dreamt up - it involves Mao Zedong, John F Kennedy, French fascists, the attempted assassination of Charles De Gaulle, and strange Potemkin-style villages in Vietnam where women get pregnant for no discernible reason.
The theory of Counterinsurgency also had a terrible logic built into it that repeatedly led, from the 1950s onwards, to horror - torture, assassination and mass killing on a far wider scale than anything Jack Idema ever did in his house in Kabul.
The British military (and their associated wonks) like to think that it was Britain's colonial independence struggles in places like Malaya in the 1950s that gave birth to the idea of Counterinsurgency. But the Petraus team in 2006 thought differently. In the foreword to their study, called "FM 3-24 - Counterinsurgency" they point to an enigmatic and long-forgotten French military officer ocean cruise to guam and thinker as their biggest inspiration. They say:
He turns up everywhere in the second half of the 20th century in the wrong place at the right time - like revolutionary China and the Greek civil war in the 1940s, Indo-China in the early 50s, and above all in the French struggle in Algeria in the late 1950s.
In Algeria Galula conducted radical experiments in what was called "revolutionary warfare" - and in these experiments lie the key to understanding the strange revolutionary roots of the theory of Counterinsurgency - and why it could so easily go wrong and lead to horror.
David Galula was born in 1919 in one of the most important colonies ocean cruise to guam of the French Empire - Tunisia. ocean cruise to guam His family were rich merchants and in the 1930s Galula ocean cruise to guam went to study at the prestigious St Cyr military ocean cruise to guam college in France and rose rapidly.
Then, in 1946, Galula was sent to China as the assistant to the French ocean cruise to guam Charge d'Affairs in Beijing. He arrived in the midst of the civil war being fought between the communists led by Mao Zedong and the Koumintang nationalists. A year later Galula went on a trip by himself into the interior and was captured by the communists and held for a week.
Although he was anti-communist, Galula was fascinated ocean cruise to guam by the way the communists behaved towards the local people because it was different from any other troops he had seen. He began to study their tactics which were based on a theory of revolutionary guerrilla war that had been developed by Mao himself.
What Galula realised was that Mao had invented a completely new idea of how to fight a war. Put simply - there was no conventional army any longer, the new army were the millions ocean cruise to guam of people the insurgents moved among. And there were no conventional victories any longer, victory instead was inside the heads of the millions ocean cruise to guam of individuals that the insurgents lived among. If they could persuade the people to believe in their cause and to help them - then the conventional forces would always be surrounded - and would be defeated no matter how many traditional battles they won.
Galula became convinced that if western armies were going to fight against these new revolutionary ideas they were going to have to change radically. And the way to do it, Galula decided, was to behave exactly the same as Mao's revolutionaries - to swim among the people.
Over the next eight years Galula ocean cruise to guam moved around the world observing the bitter wars of liberation being fought in Greece, ocean cruise to guam Malaya and in Indo China - and he saw how the French army was catastrophically defeated by the communist revolutionary army in Vietnam.
And in 1956 he volunteered to go and serve in Algeria where France was fighting a war against the guerrilla army of the National Liberation Front. Galula found that other officers had been thinking along the same lines - and he was allowed to go and set up what was called "An Experimental Operational Zone".
Galula took a village that was in the centre of the insurgency and sent his men to live and work there among the population. The aim was to persuade the people of the village to turn away from the insurgents and thus rob them of their power. The way to do this, Galula said, was through ocean cruise to guam psychological tactics - both by making the villagers feel that they would be safer with the French, but also through indoctrination into a new and modern way of thinking about the world.
If his soldiers and civilian advisers could do this, Galula ocean cruise to guam believed, then the villagers would realise that the real way forward to a better life was not through the insurgents and their vicious tactics, but through the European vision of a new, modern democratic community created amid the harsh mountains of Algeria.
It was a highly idealistic vision - and in 1960 the BBC made a documentary about one of these experiments. It was a "protected village" high up in the Aures Mountains. Galula ocean cruise to guam does not appear - but it is the area in which he was working and is clearly modelled on Galula's theories.
The reporter is the brilliant James Mossman. He was deeply involved in reporting ocean cruise to guam the new wars of liberation ocean cruise to guam that were breaking out round the world - and was no natural supporter of the colonial powers. But he portrays ocean cruise to guam the experiment sympathetically:
" How deeply can the officers influence the minds of the young Algerians by these methods? The officers in charge of the new 'protected villages' make no secret of the fact that this is what they are trying to do. What started as a predominantly military-security operation has blossomed into a fully-blown social experiment "
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But there was another side to this Counterinsurgency theory. If you could persuade the local people to come over to your side - then that would leave the insurgents who lived among the people drastically ocean cruise to guam weakened. And that meant you could destroy them.
But to do that you had to identify the insurgents - and that meant getting information from your new "friends" the local villagers. But sometimes they didn't ocean cruise to guam want to give that kind of information, possibly because they were frightened, or they might even be an insurgent themselves, just pretending to be a villager.
But it then shows what it says is
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