Continuity and Change in Guerrilla War: The Spanish and Afghan Cases

by Anthony James Joes

INTRODUCTION: THE QUESTION OF COLD WAR DISTORTIONS

Of the many good studies we possess on the subject of guerrilla warfare, most are concerned with the period of the Cold War. Guerrilla conflicts during those forty years developed in a world characterized by far-flung intervention on the part of the United States and the Soviet Union. It is a safe assumption that great power involvement, or its prospect, warped to an important and perhaps decisive degree the shape some guerrilla insurgencies would otherwise have "normally" taken. For example, the ideology of Marxism-Leninism provided, at least for some leaders of guerrilla movements, the assurance that they were working in accordance with the tides of history. Lucian Pye and others suggest that in Malaya, for instance, many joined the communist rebels because they viewed them as linked to an invincible world movement headed by the mighty USSR.¹ Ho Chi Minh and his followers surely would have pursued very different policies against the French and the Americans if they had not been able to count on copious supplies from the Chinese and the Soviets.² And on the other side, it is not clear, for example, how long the Greek monarchy could have resisted communist rebellion without the tangible effects of the Truman Doctrine.³ Even guerrilla conflicts that had their origins in the most arcane local circumstances eventually became enmeshed in the schematic of the Cold War.

But in the post-Cold War age, all is changed, apparently. The global clash of ideologies and the widespread interventions in its name have disappeared, for now. The Americans and their former Russian adversaries will not engage in measures to counter each other's allies or clients in guerrilla wars all over the world, presumably. These and related circumstances may suggest that lessons drawn from forty years of Cold War guerrilla struggles may be less relevant, or even irrelevant, to a new age.

The purpose of this article is therefore to examine ­ really, to challenge ­ the proposition that guerrilla conflicts during the Cold War were sui generis to such a degree that their analysis may be of greatly reduced value for policy guidance in years to come. The method will be to compare two large-scale guerrilla conflicts involving major powers, one Cold War and the other very much pre-Cold War: the Napoleonic experience in Spain (1808-14) and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan (1979-89).

SPAIN AND AFGHANISTAN CONTRASTS

It is of course not difficult to come up with numerous contrasts between the guerrilla wars in Spain and Afghanistan. Among the most important differences between them, perhaps the primary ones, were the military advantages over their adversaries enjoyed by the Soviets but not by the French. For example, the Soviets had a modern air force which they used with great destructiveness and which could carry their wrath into every province of suffering Afghanistan. The French enjoyed no such technological advantages; indeed as their war went on they lost even their tactical supremacy over the Spanish guerrillas. Again, Soviet forces in Afghanistan faced guerrilla units alone, unsupported by friendly regular troops, while French forces in Spain confronted not only a guerrilla uprising but also the regular armies of both the Spanish government at Cadiz and the future Duke of Wellington. Another major contrast: Napoleon's Spanish occupation had to compete for French resources with the struggle against the British and later with the invasion of Russia. During their Afghanistan conflict, however, the Soviets were not simultaneously at war with any major power (although they had poor and often tense relations with every one of them). These are important differences. Nevertheless, a comparison of the two conflicts uncovers significant common features.

SPAIN AND AFGHANISTAN SIMILARITIES

A comparison of the French occupation of Spain with that of the Soviets in Afghanistan might well begin by recalling some observations of the Swiss Napoleonic officer and Spanish conflict veteran Antoine Henri Jomini,⁴ observations that establish a perspective on the nature of guerrilla conflict across time and space. Jomini observed that "in mountainous countries, the people are always most formidable." The problems involved in fighting them,

become almost insurmountable when the country is difficult. Each armed inhabitant knows the smallest paths and their connections; he finds everywhere a relative or friend who aids him; the commanders also know the country, and, learning immediately the slightest movement on the part of the invaders, can adopt the best measures to defeat his projects; while the latter, without information, and not in a condition to send out detachments to gain it, having no resource but in his bayonets, and certain safety only in the concentration of his columns, is like a blind man: his [maneuvers] are failures; and when after the most carefully concerted movements and the most rapid and fatiguing marches, he thinks he is about to accomplish his aim and deal a terrible blow, he finds no signs of the enemy but his campfires; so that, like Don Quixote, he is attacking windmills; his adversary is on his line of communications, destroys the detachments left to guard it, surprises his convoys and his depots, and carries on a war so disastrous for the invader that he must inevitably yield after a time.

In a large and mountainous country full of guerrillas, no army can be successful,

unless it be strong enough to hold all the essential points of the country, cover its communications, and at the same time furnish an active force sufficient to beat the enemy wherever he may present himself. If this enemy has a regular army of respectable size to be a nucleus around which to rally the people, what force will be sufficient to be superior everywhere, and to assure the safety of the long lines of communications against numerous bodies?⁵

Jomini was writing about Spain, but almost every single word quoted above could be applied with equal benefit to Afghanistan.⁶

Both France and the USSR enjoyed the apparently great advantage of sharing a border with the target state. While the forbidding topography of these potential battlegrounds might have caused a would-be invader many misgivings, it was balanced (or seemed to be) by an irresistibly inviting proximity. In both cases, moreover, the invaded country was not only easily accessible but also markedly inferior to the invader in population, economic development and social organization.⁷

It is clear that no government has real control over its neighbor's topography or geography. But both the French and Soviet invasions encountered or created political and military factors that were very much the result of their deliberate policy. These factors included ideological justification (or rationalization) for invasion, unexpectedly effective foreign assistance to the guerrillas, systematic misbehavior by the invading troops toward the civil population, the consequent inability of the occupation authorities to develop support within the target country, and, very revealingly, a disinclination to face the clear implications of all these factors with regard to the required commitment of forces.

Napoleon's France, like Brezhnev's Soviet Union, was not only a powerful military empire, but also the self-proclaimed vehicle of a universalistic ideology of human advancement and felicity. It is worth recalling that it was not the twentieth century, or even the Cold War, that invented ideology as a justification for invasion; such justification flourished during the French Revolutionary period, as it had in the great wars of religion, from the Invincible Armada to the Peace of Westphalia.

Both invading powers were thoroughly dismayed to find that the insurgents were able to get quite unexpectedly large amounts of assistance from the outside world. The Anglo-French global rivalry and the Soviet-American Cold War guaranteed that both Spanish partisans and Afghan mujahidin would receive help from far horizons. It was of course the Royal Navy that made Wellington's Iberian exploits possible. English ships brought him and his men to Portugal; they transported most of the weapons, ammunition, food and money for the allied armies, and some for the guerrillas as well.⁸ And when an allied force fell into grave danger, the navy could pick it up and evacuate it to safety.⁹ In effect, the Royal Navy was itself like a powerful guerrilla force: striking quickly and in strength at the enemy's weakest points, and then just as quickly dispersing. In addition, British mastery of the high seas allowed the Spanish resistance government at Cadiz to receive sustenance from Spain's American colonies. One of Napoleon's objectives in invading Spain had been to get control of her colonial empire, but the Royal Navy and his own ill-advised policies in Spain ruined that plan.¹⁰ The effects of this outside assistance on the morale of the Spanish government and the Spanish guerrillas were profound. In this way the British turned the tables on their French rivals, whose assistance to the rebels in America thirty years previously had cost Britain its Thirteen Colonies.

In the Afghan case, resistance fighters were able to use neighboring Pakistan's territory as a sanctuary, albeit an imperfect one: Soviet aircraft sometimes bombed Afghan refugee camps across the border. The Soviets, with all their power, were never able to close off the flow of aid from Pakistan; China, Saudi Arabia, the United States and other countries (as well as Iran, from the other direction) sent in many good weapons. The acquisition by the Afghans of surface-to-air missiles, and the arrival after 1985 of the famed Stinger antiaircraft weapon, went very far to neutralize the power of the Soviet air force.

Both Imperial France and the Soviet Union were unprepared for the scope and ferocity of popular resistance. Successful guerrilla warfare requires an emotionally-charged cause around which popular support can rally. In each case, the invader provided that cause: both the French and the Soviets allowed (or encouraged) their military forces to behave in a manner that thoroughly outraged the local population. Rape, sacrilege, and the casual murder of civilians characterized each invasion and subsequent occupation.¹¹

Aside from infuriating the civil population and thus multiplying recruits for the guerrillas, there was another serious consequence of this behavior of the invading forces: neither the French nor the Soviets were able to exploit profound and potentially quite explosive internal divisions among the rebellious populations. Instead, although both powers were able to gather some native adherents, in each case these supporters were thoroughly unrepresentative of the general population, numerically inconsiderable and militarily valueless. In Spain, there were those who, in spite of everything, were prepared to collaborate with the French armies. These so-called Afrancesados saw England as Spain's true enemy, wished to continue the venerable Franco-Spanish alliance that had arisen in the days of Louis XIV, believed the Napoleonic conquerors to be invincible anyway, and hoped that the French would bring what recently would be called "modernization" to Spain.¹²

Similarly, in Afghanistan, adherents of the Soviets clustered in the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), a group numbering a few hundred, who had come to power in 1978 after a bloody coup d'etat in Kabul.¹³ Quite aside from its miniscule size, the PDPA was utterly unrepresentative of the country. Afghan society was mainly tribal and deeply religious, while the PDPA was predominantly urban and ferociously atheistic. The PDPA puppet regime was unable to prevent massive desertions and defections among the officers and soldiers it had inherited from the previous Afghan government. Nor could it recruit any considerable body of new troops, in spite of all kinds of inducements, including academic credits for army service and the most bizarre inflation of the officer corps.¹⁴ It had been quite successful, however, in provoking widespread rebellion against itself; by the time of the Soviet invasion (25 December 1979) probably 23 of Afghanistan's 28 provinces were completely or mainly in the hands of anti-PDPA insurgents.¹⁵ The clumsy Soviet efforts to divide-and-rule the many ethnic groups in the country ended in failure.

As a consequence of the preceding circumstances ­ serious foreign assistance, intense popular resistance, weak native support ­ both invading powers found that they had grossly underestimated the amount of effort they would have to expend to conquer and hold their prey. Yet both proved unwilling to commit the number of troops necessary to ensure victory or even reasonable security. That was in part because each invading power had major military commitments elsewhere (the French in central Europe and later to their Russian venture, and the Soviets in eastern Europe and along the China border) that they could not seriously reduce without potentially grave consequences.

In European terms, Spain is a large country, the size of Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany combined; or the size of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan combined. Moreover, Paris is farther from Cadiz than it is from Warsaw. In addition, several mountain ranges and rivers cross Spain east-to-west, obstacles in the path of an army invading from the north. And in Napoleon's day, without the airplane, the telephone or even the telegraph, when the fastest land transportation was by horsepower in the literal sense, Spain was in effect considerably bigger than even these comparisons suggest.¹⁶

In the face of British assistance, popular fury and difficult distances, the French and their allies never came close to having enough manpower in Spain. Wellington commanded 60,000 Anglo-Portuguese regulars. A very conservative estimate of guerrilla strength in 1812 would be 35,000. Using the commonly accepted ten-to-one ratio of soldiers to guerrillas for successful counterinsurgency, French and Imperial forces would have had to number 350,000 to fight the guerrillas, plus at least 75,000 to contain Wellington, and another 50,000 to besiege Cadiz. This comes to a requirement of 475,000 men. In fact the French usually had only between 230,000 and 300,000 troops in Spain.¹⁷ But if one accepts the higher estimate of guerrilla numbers, around 70,000, then the French would have needed 825,000 men. It was utterly impossible to approach such a figure, even using scores of thousands of allied troops from Italy and Poland.¹⁸

Similarly, on the map, when compared to the Soviet Union or China, Afghanistan may not appear very large. But in fact it is the size of Manitoba, or of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin combined, or of France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland together. Its longest north-south axis is over 800 miles, greater than the distance from Warsaw to Rome or from Indianapolis to New Orleans. This extensive country is covered with rugged mountains. It had no railroads and very few serious highways, but it had plenty of hardy and devout peasants and herdsmen, tens of thousands of whom took up arms in defense of hearth and religion. To subdue the estimated 90,000 guerrillas produced by this formidable country and people, the Soviets would have needed a force of over 900,000; in fact they never committed more than perhaps 125,000, a number that proved grotesquely inadequate for any task except the most wanton destruction.¹⁹ And the invading forces were as deficient in effectiveness as in numbers: the Soviet army that invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 had not fought a real war since the Nazis surrendered, more than thirty years before. "It is particularly necessary," Jomini wrote, "to watch over the preservation of armies in the interval of a long peace, for then they are most likely to degenerate."²⁰

Both Napoleonic and Soviet forces eventually found themselves waging a stalemated war. They each occupied the invaded country's capital city, most of the other large cities (which nevertheless from time to time the Soviet Air Force found it necessary to strafe and bomb), and the highways ­ most of the time ­ between them. That was all. Unable to dominate the countryside, the Soviets decided to destroy it. Out of a pre-invasion population of 16 million, 1.25 million Afghans died directly from the war or related effects. The systematic destruction of the economy of many of the provinces created the largest group of refugees ­ four million men, women and children ­ on the face of the earth.²¹ But even these savage tactics failed to break the mujahidin, the "soldiers of God;" quite the contrary. The Afghan insurgents never lost that most priceless weapon of any body of fighters, high morale, which was sustained by the profound conviction that their Islamic cause was just and therefore invincible.²²

OUTCOMES

Estimates of the cost of the Spanish war in terms of French casualties vary, but they are all very high. One authority says there were 200,000 Imperial casualties, half of them accounted for by the guerrillas.²³ Another provides a much higher figure: 260,000 French killed and wounded, plus another 40,000 allied casualties.²⁴ The latter numbers are in line with the estimate of the French General Bigarre who wrote that the guerrilla struggle alone killed 180,000 imperial troops (not counting wounded and missing).²⁵ And the Napoleonic forces suffered all these losses even though after Bailen (1808) the regular Spanish armies never won a battle.²⁶

But there is another way to try to appreciate what these Iberian casualty figures meant to France. All the world considers the invasion of Russia to have been the supreme, fatal disaster of the Napoleonic cause. That wintry debacle cost Napoleon about 210,000 French soldiers, including prisoners and missing (not counting casualties, prisoners and missing among Napoleon's numerous allies, such as the Poles).²⁷ In comparison, Spain cost the Napoleonic cause, as stated above, somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 killed and wounded. This was a very high price to pay for what was in large part the failure to deal sensitively or at least sensibly with the people of Spain. To put these Franco-Imperial losses in some perspective, consider that reliable estimates place the total number of battle deaths suffered by all the Union armies during the entire War of Secession at 138,000.

Strategically as well as tactically, for Napoleon Spain was par excellence the wrong war. His destiny lay across the Rhine, not across the Pyrenees, as he himself recognized by word and deed.²⁸ The French army had no proper doctrine on how to fight guerrillas.²⁹ There was no way to isolate the battlefield, and so foreign assistance to the rebels poured in. And Napoleon's other European commitments made it impossible for him to send in the huge number of troops that was thus required. Indeed, his Russian campaign of 1812 further reduced the already sub-minimal number of French and Imperial troops inside Spain. In light of all this it is easy to say ­ but nonetheless quite true ­ that the French should never have gone into Spain in the first place; and above all, once it became clear that the price of the conflict was much bigger than they wanted to pay, they should have gotten out, or at the very least retrenched behind the Ebro. Against the argument that a retreat out of Spain would have severely damaged Napoleonic prestige, that is what resulted anyway, and to a much greater degree. Finally, the Spanish conflict taught an attentive Europe that resistance to the all-conquering French could go on, and even be successful.

Similarly, Afghanistan was first a distraction and then a disaster for the USSR. The Soviet war against the Afghans helped to drive the United States and China together; in a notable hyperbole, President Carter had called the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan "the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War," and sent his Secretary of Defense off to Peking. The war later helped President Reagan to pry big defense budgets out of Congress. The wanton Soviet destructiveness in Afghanistan provoked a firestorm of resentment and criticism throughout the Muslim world. And potentially most dangerous of all, the endless conflict was exposing the USSR's own sizeable Muslim population to a truly provocative spectacle: the invincible Red Army baffled by the Soldiers of God, Leninism tamed by Islam.³⁰ Finally, in 1989 Gorbachev ended the invasion that Brezhnev had begun ten years before.³¹

What would victory in Afghanistan have required of the Soviets? To obtain their minimum basic objective of a quiet Afghanistan, the Soviets needed to accomplish some combination of the following: first, close off outside assistance, since by the mid-1980s an informal but truly impressive international coalition was sending a steady stream of invaluable supplies to the mujahidin; second, divide the racially, linguistically and religiously disparate resistance in order to conquer it ­ the Soviet failure under this rubric is utterly stupefying; third, employ far less destructive tactics toward the civilian population; or finally, increase the number of Soviet troops in the country at least sevenfold.

The presentation of this or any similar list dramatizes how really colossal the Soviet failure in Afghanistan was. And let us not overlook one of history's most delectable ironies: Trotsky's old aphorism about the road to Paris lying through the villages of Central Asia was given a new application. The Afghan debacle contributed mightily to the profound re-evaluation of Soviet policies that culminated in the collapse of the empire. The cries of battle in the Afghan mountains found their echo in the shouts of freedom at the Berlin Wall.³²

CONCLUSION

In the end, it seems a reasonable conclusion that there are important and compelling similarities between at least some guerrilla conflicts of the Cold War and some in the pre-Cold War period. It is therefore neither necessary nor helpful to consider Cold War conflicts as totally sui generis and thus worthy of consignment to the dusty bottom shelf. There are still plenty of lessons to be mined from Cold War guerrilla conflicts, however unpalatable some of those lessons may prove to be.

But the most important conclusion of the present study is undoubtedly this: when we reflect on the experiences not only of Napoleonic marshals in Spain and Soviet marshals in Afghanistan, but also of the British in the Carolinas, the Japanese in China, the French in Indochina, the Germans in Yugoslavia, the Chinese in Tibet, the Americans in Viet Nam, and the Vietnamese in Cambodia, it becomes clear how grave a challenge guerrilla insurgency presents even to the most militarily powerful countries.³³ C.E. Callwell's stark observation made so many decades ago continues to demand our thoughtful attention: "guerrilla warfare is what regular armies always have most to dread."³⁴

Anthony James Joes is Professor of Politics and Director of the International Relations Program at Saint Joseph's University.

Endnotes

1. Lucian Pye, Guerrilla Communism in Malaya (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956).
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2. The literature in English alone on Ho Chi Minh and his communist party is voluminous. A savagely abbreviated list of excellent studies would include William J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Viet Nam (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1981); Dennis J. Duncanson, Government and Revolution in Viet Nam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Ellen Hammer, The Struggle for Indochina 1940-1955 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966); Huynh Kim Khanh, Vietnamese Communism 1925-1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); John T. McAlister, Viet Nam: The Origins of Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Anchor, 1971); Douglas Pike, History of Vietnamese Communism 1925-1976 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1978); Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1975).
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3. On American involvement in the Greek civil war and related topics, see Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (New York: Norton, 1969), esp. chap. 22; Howard Jones, "A New Kind of War:" America's Global Strategy and the Truman Doctrine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Lawrence S. Witner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943-1949 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947, vol. 5, and Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, vol. 4 (both published in Washington, DC, by the Government Printing Office).
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4. Born in Switzerland in 1779, a colonel in Napoleon's army by age 26, Jomini served as chief of staff to Marshal Ney and accompanied Napoleon into Russia. His most enduring work is The Art of War.
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5. Antoine Jomini, The Art of War, translated by G. Mendell and W. Craighill (Westport, CT: Greenwood, n.d., [orig. 1862]), pp. 27-29.
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6. The Soviets were not the first major power to encounter difficulties in Afghanistan. In 1841 a column of 4,500 British and Imperial troops conducted a fighting retreat from Kabul to India; only 100 Europeans reached safety. This was the worst defeat the British would suffer until Dunkirk. See Patrick A. Macrory, The Fierce Pawns (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1966). The best study of the First Afghan War is probably Sir John Kaye, History of the War in Afghanistan, first published in London by Bentley in 1851.
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7. On the communist takeover and subsequent Soviet invasion, see Anthony Arnold, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Perspective (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1985), and Afghanistan's Two-Party Communism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983); Henry S. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985); Richard Newell, The Struggle for Afghanistan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); and Marie Broxup, "The Soviets in Afghanistan: The Anatomy of a Takeover," Central Asian Survey, 1 (1983).
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8. "[The French] could not comprehend Wellington's abandonment of his communications with Lisbon. They had always believed that Wellington was a general who was particularly sensitive about his supply lines. It had not occurred to them that, by calling in the Royal Navy, he could procure a new base with lines of communication as short, if not shorter, than their own." Michael Glover, Wellington's Peninsular Victories, (London: Pan Books, 1963), p. 127. On British assistance to the Cadiz government and also to the guerrillas, even as far away as Catalonia, see John M. Sherwig, Guineas and Gunpowder: British Foreign Aid in the Wars with France, 1793-1815 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), esp. pp. 219-21 and 227-29. The British eventually sent a total of 222,000 muskets to Spain, along with 29,000 barrels of gunpowder. Ibid., p. 237n.
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9. David Gates, The Spanish Ulcer: A History of the Peninsular War (New York: Norton, 1986), pp. 28-29.
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10. Ibid., pp. 9-11.
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11. On French atrocities in Spain, see Gabriel Lovett, Napoleon and the Birth of Modern Spain, 2 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1965); and Don W. Alexander, Rod of Iron: French Counterinsurgency Policy in Aragon During the Peninsular War (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1985). For the Soviet actions in Afghanistan, see footnote 19 below.
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12. On these collaborationists, see Michael Glover, Legacy of Glory: The Bonaparte Kingdom in Spain (New York: Scribners, 1971); Raymond Carr, Spain 1808-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); and Lovett, Napoleon and the Birth of Modern Spain.
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13. For the PDPA, see Anthony Arnold and Rosanne Klass, "Afghanistan's Divided Communist Party," in Rosanne Klass, ed., Afghanistan: The Great Game Revisited (New York: Freedom House, 1987); Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union; Thomas T. Hammond, Red Flag over Afghanistan: The Communist Coup, the Soviet Invasion, and the Consequences (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984).
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14. One defecting Kabul officer told his captors that in his unit of 400 men there were 20 brigadier generals. See Anthony James Joes, Modern Guerrilla Insurgency, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), p. 178.
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15. It must be noted, however, that by 1986 the Kabul army was improving. This was the result of better training by the Soviets, the increasing proportion of troops contributed by PDPA members, and, not least, by the mujahidin practice of killing their prisoners.
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16. The most effective guerrilla movements flourished in Navarre and Aragon, the provinces that lay directly across the French routes into central Spain. See John Lawrence Tone, The Fatal Knot: The Guerrilla War in Navarre and the Defeat of Napoleon in Spain (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1994); and Alexander, Rod of Iron.
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17. David Chandler, foreword to Napoleon's War in Spain, by J. Tranie and J-C Carmigniani, translated by Janet Mallender and J. Clements, (London: Arms and Armour, 1982), p. 10.
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18. For some classic British views of the Spanish conflict, consult J. W. Fortescue, History of the British Army (London: Macmillan 1919-1920), vols. 7 and 8; W. F. P. Napier, History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France (London: F. Warne, 1890-1892); and Charles Oman, A History of the Peninsular War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902-1930). One should be aware that these works, like most studies of the Spanish war by British authors, downplay the contribution of the Spanish guerrillas and magnify the splendor of Wellington. Divergent French views can be found in Louis Adolphe Thiers, History of the Consulate and the Empire under Napoleon (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1984 reprint), vol. 6; and Georges Lefebvre, Napoleon from Tilsit to Waterloo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969).
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19. Joes, Modern Guerrilla Insurgency, p. 195. Olivier Roy believes that the guerrillas maintained between 150,000 and 200,000 fighters throughout the war. See The Lessons of the Soviet/Afghan War, Adelphi Paper 259 (Oxford: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1991). See as well Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin, The Bear Trap: Afghanistan's Untold Story (London: Leo Cooper, 1992); Yousaf directed Pakistan intelligence on Afghanistan in the mid-1980s. Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, vol. III: The Afghan and Falklands Conflicts (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990) contains much of value.
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20. Jomini, Art of War, p. 42.
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21. On the deliberate targeting of civilians and the general policy of "ecogenocide," see J. Bruce Amstutz, Afghanistan: The First Five Years of Soviet Occupation (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1986); Bradsher, Afghanistan and Soviet Union, esp. p. 211; Edward Girardet, Afghanistan: The Soviet War (New York: St. Martin's, 1985); Barnett Rubin and Jeri Laber, A Nation is Dying (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988); Claude Malhuret, "Report from Afghanistan," Foreign Affairs, 62 (Winter 1984); the report by Amnesty International, Afghanistan: Torture of Prisoners (London: 1986); the Reports to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Afghanistan by Felix Ermacora, February 1985, November 1985 and February 1986; Tears, Blood and Cries (New York: Helsinki Watch, 1984); the Christian Science Monitor, 24 October 1988; and the New York Times, 17 December 1984, and 10 December 1985.
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22. See especially an outstanding work by Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); also Grant M. Farr and John G. Merriem, Afghan Resistance (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1987); David Isby, War in a Distant Country (London: Arms and Armour, 1989); and Mike Martin, Afghanistan: Inside a Rebel Stronghold (Dorset, UK: Blandford, 1984).
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23. Tranie and Carmigniani, Napoleon's War in Spain, p. 10.
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24. Owen Connelly, Blundering to Glory (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1987), p. 112n; Tone in The Fatal Knot, says 300,000. See a general discussion of casualty figures in D. J. Goodspeed, The British Campaigns in the Peninsula (Ottawa, ON: Directorate of Military Training, 1958).
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25. Cited in Lovett, Napoleon and the Birth of Modern Spain, p. 683.
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26. Connelly, Blundering to Glory, p. 132
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27. Ibid., p. 181. Figures on how many men Napoleon took into Russia and how many eventually came out vary rather widely. Lefebvre says that Napoleon crossed the Nieman with over 600,000 soldiers, only half of whom were from France, the others being mainly Germans and Poles. See Napoleon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), vol. II, pp. 311-12. Felix Markham thinks that 450,000 crossed the Nieman on 25 June 1812, of whom less than 40,000 recrossed in anything like a recognizable military formation. See Napoleon (New York: Mentor, 1963), pp. 190 and 199. James Marshall-Cornwall says 510,000 Imperial troops entered Russia. See Napoleon as Military Commander (London: Batsford, 1967), p. 220. Eugene Tarle believes that 420,000 crossed with Napoleon and 150,000 eventually followed, for a grand total of 570,000. See Napoleon's Invasion of Russia 1812 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 397. Richard K. Riehn provides the following figures: 685,000 men marched into Russia in 1812, of whom around 355,000 were French; 31,000 soldiers marched out again in some sort of military formation, with perhaps another 35,000 stragglers, for a total of less than 70,000 known survivors. See 1812: Napoleon's Russian Campaign (New York: John Wiley, 1991), pp. 77 and 501. Whatever the accurate number, everybody agrees that the overwhelming majority of this grand army, French and allied, remained, in one condition or another, inside Russia.
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28. Napoleon reportedly said (and if he didn't, he should have): "I am not the heir of Louis XIV, I am the heir of Charlemagne." This is the quintessential Gaullist view.
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29. The Soviets had no viable counterinsurgency doctrine either, and seem to have been aware of this grievous shortcoming. The Soviets were certainly far less efficient in Afghanistan than the French had been in Algeria or the Americans in Viet Nam. They often relied on traditional Soviet tactics of concentration of numbers and artillery saturation. Besides, they were determined to keep their casualties down. See Stephen T. Hosmer, "How Successful has the Soviet Union been in Third World Protracted Conflict?" in Richard H. Shultz, Jr., et al., eds., Guerrilla Warfare and Counterinsurgency: U.S.-Soviet Policy in the Third World (Lexington, MA: Lexington, 1989); Olivier Roy, The Lessons of the Soviet/Afghan War; and Douglas Hart, "Low Intensity Conflict in Afghanistan: The Soviet View," Survival, (March/April 1982). For specifically Soviet treatments, see Oleg Sarin and Lev Dvoretsky, The Afghan Syndrome: The Soviet Union's Viet Nam (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1993); Gennady Bocharov, Russian Roulette: Afghanistan Through Russian Eyes (New York: HarperCollins, 1990); and Artyom Borovik, The Hidden War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990).
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30. Joes, Modern Guerrilla Insurgency, pp. 193-94.
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31. As the Soviet invasion in 1979 underlined the end of detente, the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 symbolized the end of the Great Power confrontation. On the winding up of the principal Soviet ground presence, see US Department of State, Afghanistan: Soviet Occupation and Withdrawal (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988); T. Daley, "Afghanistan and Gorbachev's Global Foreign Policy," Asian Survey, 29 (May 1989), pp. 496-513; Amin Saikal and William Maley, eds., The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
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32. See Anthony Arnold, The Fateful Pebble: Afghanistan's Role in the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1993).
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33. The point here is not, of course, that guerrillas always win, because they don't (see the Vendee, the Cristeros, the Boers, Greece, Malaya, Tibet, El Salvador, post-1898 and post-1945 Philippines, and many other cases), but that all major powers have at one time or another experienced a counterguerrilla struggle that gravely embarrassed them.
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34. C.E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (Wakefield, UK: EP Publishing, 1976 [original 1906]), p. 126.
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