Allow me to draw a semantic distinction between Revolution and revolution. For our purposes, big-R Revolution is top down, fundamental change, while little-R revolution is more like evolution (even though it’s not). Think of the difference between, say, the Bolsheviks or Khmer Rouge and the various colored revolutions of the past six years: the former wanted to completely destroy society to build utopia; the latter simply wanted a more just and responsive government.
This serves as a useful context for the latest Tom Johnson paper (pdf). It compares the Taliban to the IRA and asserts that Ulster can give us clues for “solving” the Taliban. It is not a coherent argument, both for the reasons above—they are fundamentally different in goals—but many others as well.
The standard Johnson caveats apply: it is mostly half-truth, mostly incomplete and poorly-sourced literature masquerading as deep and well-grounded analysis, and riddled with logical errors. Those are simple enough to note (like where does he get off quoting Afghanistan Conflict Monitor without a citation, since ACM is really a news aggregating service, has dated entries, and was almost certainly referencing a third source for his news nugget? Who does that in a legitimate paper?), but boring. More interesting, or perhaps depressing, is the strange trap into which he falls: Johnson seems to think that superficial similarities between vastly disparate situations are the key to understanding them, rather than the differences.
Hence, we have the IRA versus the Taliban. Both movements, according to Johnson and English:
- Feature “the profound and durable strength of ethno-religious identity.”
- “[Deploy] violence for political ends in ways that include (but that are not neatly contained by the term) terrorism.” [yes, that is an actual quote—ed.]
- Benefited from international support—funding, gun running, etc.
- Made use of a porous border to provide safe haven and staging grounds.
- Use violence to impose internal order.
- And so on…
In other words, they are simply listing the features that are common to all vaguely ethno-religious insurgencies, especially if a radical secularist ideology can be considered conceptually similar to a zealous religion. The LTTE of Sri Lanka, the Naxalites of rural India, the Maoists of Nepal, the Red Brigades of Italy, and so on, all could fit into this framework. Since each of those movements were obviously very different, as were their ultimate fates, simply looking at blurry similarity between them does not offer much insight. Indeed, the ways in which the Nepalese Maoists were able to force King Gyanendra into incorporating them into a democratic government vary quite differently from how the Sri Lankan government has violently cracked down on the LTTE, both of which are very dissimilar from how the IRA eventually reached a reconciliation with the British government. Looking only at how they are similar says nothing, because the differences are what make each so unique and challenging.
Johnson and English even concede the existence of differences between the IRA and the Taliban—I am certain many Irish would resent the comparison—but don’t seem to realize these idifferences fatally undermine their argument:
The timeline is different, with the Northern Ireland conflict erupting in the late 1960s and the immediate Afghan crisis emerging as a 21st-century phenomenon; the historical contexts of the Afghan state and the Northern Ireland state are different; the religious cultures involved in the combatant groups diverge in some key respects; and the respective scales of disorder, crisis and military engagement have been different in the two places.
So Ireland and Afghanistan are facing the same conflict, except their histories are different, the drivers of conflict are different, the nature of the religious component of each conflict is different, the scales at which they operate is different, and the ways in which the national governments responded have been different. Where again is there a basis for drawing similarities when the authors here concede essentially that there isn’t one?
There is no mention of the fundamental difference between resisting foreign occupation, which was how the IRA viewed itself, and fighting to impose a proper form of Islam, which is how the Taliban viewed itself. Fundamentals matter.
If only it stopped at the gee-whiz moment: that at least would be understandable, as if realizing that many people fight guerrilla wars is insightful. But Johnson and English take it a step further: they offer “lessons” that both conflicts, considered together, can offer.
- Over-militarization is a problem in combating insurgencies.
Actually, that is the only lesson they draw, as all of the examples that follow are examples of harsh over-reaction by government forces to insurgency.
To summarize: the IRA and the Taliban are alike because they dislike a national government, they both have religion and tried to organize people along religious lines, they use violence, and they have international ties. Even though they differ in motivation, concept, goals, religious temperament, violence, history, reaction, and popularity, they can both help teach the lesson that militarization is not an effective response to insurgency.
Well, I am glad Thomas Johnson is publishing papers to tell me these things. Because otherwise, I’d never know them.
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