Algerian Civil War Studies?
Has there been a recent tactical, campaign, and political analysis of the Algerian Civil war (1991–2002) besides what is found in Wikipedia? I would presume the only existing European language study covering this conflict would be written in French. This would be a fascinating military conflict study in light of Afghanistan. The Algerian government allegedly infiltrated the more radical of the various Algerian jihadist factions, the GIA, and manipulated it into attacking the other factions while massacring the general population. This effectively played off the various Algerian jihadist factions against each other, depleting the insurgency, while alienating the appeal of the jihadist movement to the general Algerian population. This would be a study of a government doing what he Soviet forces apparently failed to do in Afghanistan.
Brian Ghilliotti
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The closest I’ve seen is the film “The Battle of Algiers.” Well worth watching.
That was better than a generation earlier Birdie and an insurrection against a colonial power. The parallel to the “battle of Algiers would be the struggle in French Indochina.
And I don’t think it’s correct to equate the situation in Algeria during its civil war as comparable to the the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. The Soviets made the mistake we are currently stumbling through. That is the belief that a primitive tribal society can be brought to heel in a world where the combatants have access to a plethora of weapons and financing from a hodge podge of powers too numerous to catalog. The difference between Algeria and Afghanistan, to put it bluntly is that Algeria is by comparison civilized (thanks to the French). And while the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan amounted to the intrusion of a foreign power, the Algerian civil war was like our own an internal conflict. It is better to view it as the settling of differences bubbling up in the vacuum resulting from the loss of French hegemony.
Afghanistan was essentially an urban vs rural conflict, where the urban elite, under the influence of socialism, tried to impose their values on the more conservative rural populations. The Algerian Civil War of the 1990’s (not to be confused with the decolonization war against France) seemed to be partially driven by elements who wanted to emphasize Algeria’s Arabic heritage while trying to destroy European cultural influences. In any case, the Afghan communists would not have needed a large scale Soviet deployment in its support if it used the same tactics that the Algerian government used against the Islamic factions it was fighting.
Brian Ghilliotti
I wouldn’t be so sure. The obstacles confronting the Algerian government with it’s French soaked and comparatively sophisticated population seem trivial to ever reconciling Marxist ideas with tribal imperatives.
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