The American Civil War offers a better lesson on how to deal with guerrilla insurgencies than most previous wars that the U.S. has waged.

The essence of war is violence.  Moderation in war is imbicility.
– Sir John A. Fisher

Conventional wisdom among the more dovish in our society says that a guerrilla insurgency cannot be combated effectively.  Carefully hidden among the locals, partisan fighters are invisible until they attack, and they just as quickly vanish with the help of a sympathetic public. A popular guerrilla movement can strike at will, and the only hope in dealing with such tactics is to reach out in friendship to the populace.  The carrot, not the stick, is the path to pacification.  This concept is best embodied by the oft-quoted phrase of Pope Paul XI, "if you want peace, work for justice;" warfare and fighting, the thinking on the Left goes, is a result of social inequality.  That inequality stems from our wealth and power, and peace will elude us until we right this injustice.  An insurgency cannot be beaten without realigning our priorities.

Of course, such "wisdom" is the purest sophistry, and wars are determined generally by who is the more determined — and has the power to implement their will.  Ultimately, success or failure in warfare hinges on psychological factors; if a people feel beaten then the war is over.  If they do not then the war will continue, if only in another form.  Guerrilla warfare is a frequent example of that other form.  When traditional military techniques fail, but the enemy does not feel defeated, often he turns to the tactics currently being employed by the "insurgents" in Iraq; hit and run, hide among the populace, strike at "soft" targets, etc.  It has become painfully clear that our failure to actually shock-and-awe as we had threatened left the enemy in Iraq feeling confident, unbowed and ready to continue the struggle.  This was a serious mistake we made; the will of the enemy was not broken.  Now we are fighting the messiest kind of war, one those on the Left say we cannot win. It should not surprise us, since we failed at the most basic, most primal aspect of warfare; we failed to break the will of the people.  Unbowed, our enemies continue the struggle, sensing that we are the ones doing the breaking — and they are right. 

During the American Civil War Robert E. Lee forbade the disbanding of his Army of Northern Virginia when Grant had him cornered, because Lee understood that a proposal made by his staff to engage in partisan warfare would cause untold grief, and Lee knew the Confederacy was beaten. Had he and his men not suffered that psychological blow of defeat they may have continued the struggle, and America would never have healed from the wounds.  (Look at the centuries of suffering in Ireland; the Irish never saw themselves as having lost the fight with the British.)

Actually, the American Civil War offers a better lesson on how to deal with guerrilla insurgencies than most previous wars that the U.S. has waged; in Missouri, bands of "Bushwackers," Confederate partisans, kept the state in play for the duration of the war, and were finally defeated through aggressive tactics aimed not at the guerrillas themselves but at the locals who supported and protected them.

Most people fail to realize that the Civil War did not begin with the election of 1860, but actually started some years earlier with the stroke of a pen.  In 1854 President Franklin Pierce signed the death warrant for tens of thousands of Americans; the Kansas-Nebraska Act changed the rules for the entry of new states into the Union, instituting Stephan Douglas' "popular sovereignty" as the deciding factor in whether a state would be slave or free. A mad scramble into the Kansas territory ensued, with the Massachusetts Immigrant Aid Society establishing the town of Lawrence and recruiting abolitionist colonists to make Kansas Free.  Southerners likewise poured into the territory, and bloodshed began as the "Border Ruffians"  — pro-slavery Southerners – fought the "Jayhawkers" — abolitionist radicals.  Border Ruffians sacked Lawrence, and this prompted John Brown to come to Kansas at the behest of his son and massacre a number of innocent Southern settlers at Pottawatomie, beginning a fine old tradition which would be followed by "Doc" Jennison and Senator James Lane's men throughout the War, with midnight raids on Missouri farms and plantations, often involving the burning of farmhouses, and the hanging of the male heads-of-household. Kansas was bleeding.

With the outbreak of hostilities following secession, Missouri remained in the Union by the sheer willpower of Nathaniel Lyon, a brevet commander sent by Lincoln to hold Missouri "at all cost." Lyon chased secessionist-minded Governor Claiborne Jackson across the state before falling at Lafayette to Confederate guns, and Union forces held most of Missouri.  Union troops were unable to complete the pacification of the state, however, because Confederate President Jefferson Davis authorized the creation of bands of "partisan rangers" who were authorized to fight as irregulars.

These partisans would be led by William Clark Quantrill, perhaps the most capable and cold-blooded commander in the War.  Quantrill's band was a veritable who's who of the toughest of the tough; Frank and Jesse James, as well as Coleman and James Younger, William "Bloody Bill" Anderson, Frank Dalton, etc. Unlike most partisan commanders, Quantrill held a commission as a full colonel in the Confederate army, and Robert E. Lee once said that he could win the War in just a few weeks were he to have several more men like him.  His band made it impossible for the Union to consolidate their control of Missouri.

Quantrill, whose band was put under the black flag early in the War,  understood the importance of crushing the enemy. According to the book Quantrill of Missouri by Paul R. Peterson, when meeting with the Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon, he is alleged to have said:

Nothing of them; there would be no prisoners.  Do they take any prisoners from me? Surrounded, I do not surrender; surprised I do not give way to panic; outnumbered I rely on common sense and stubborn fighting . . . I hunt my hunters in turn; hated and made blacker than a dozen devils, I add to my hoofs the swiftness of the horse and to my horns the terror of a savage following.  Kansas should be laid waste at once.  Meet the torch with the torch, pillage with pillage, slaughter with slaughter, subjugation with extermination . . .

Now, Mr. Quantrill would have made a fine Jihadist; he certainly made a ferocious guerrilla warrior who raided throughout Missouri and eastern Kansas at will.  His men were all locals, and their families and friends gave them shelter and support.  His band would strike suddenly and disappear into the lush hardwood forests and hills of the countryside.  How does one go about dealing with that?

With General Order #10, issued on August 13, 1863 by Union General (and brother-in-law to William Tecumseh Sherman) Thomas Ewing, which reads in part:

Such officers will arrest, and send to the District Provost-Marshal for punishment, all men and all women, not heads of families, who willfully aid and encourage guerrillas with a written statement of the names and residences of such persons and of the proof against them. They will discriminate as carefully as possible between those who were compelled, by threats or fears, to aid the Rebels and those who aid them from disloyal motives.  The wives and children of known guerrillas, and also women who are heads of families and are willfully engaged in aiding guerrillas, will be notified by such officers to move out of this district and out of the State of Missouri forthwith.  They will be permitted to take, unmolested, their stock, provisions, and household goods.  If they fail to remove promptly, they will be sent by such officers, under escort, to Kansas City for shipment south, with their clothes and such necessary household furniture and provisions as may be worth removing.

When the families of Quantrill`s band did not heed General Order #10 they were arrested and held in custody in Kansas City.  There either a great crime or great tragedy occurred; the building they were being held in collapsed upon them.  (There is strong evidence that the building had its integrity intentionally undermined.) In a fit of rage Quantrill's band marched on Lawrence, committing the worst civilian massacre in American history and burning the town to the ground.

Now, if Union leaders were to behave as our current crop does today, the raid on Lawrence would have been considered proof that the War was lost and there would have been a strong push to "redeploy" from Missouri.  Fortunately for the United States, they were a different breed, totally committed to victory.  As a result of Lawrence, General Order #11 was issued demanding the complete depopulation of several Missouri counties:

First, all persons living in Cass, Jackson, and Bates counties, Missouri, and in that part of Vernon including in this district, except those living within one mile of Independence, Hickman's Mill, Pleasant Hill, and Harrisonville, and except those in parts of Kaw Township, Jackson County, north of Brush Creek and west of the Big Blue embracing  Kansas City and Westport, are hereby ordered to remove from their present places of residence within fifteen days from the date hereof. (August 25, 1863).

Second, all grain or hay in the fields, or under shelter . . . will be taken to such stations and turned over to the proper officer there . . .

Third, the provisions of General Order #10 . . . will at once be vigorously executed . . .

Forth, Paragraph 3, General Order #10 is revoked as to all who have borne arms against the government in the district since August 20, 1863.

This was the end for Quantrill`s guerrillas.  Although they had some successes after the Lawrence raid, they were unable to sustain the kind of activity that had made them infamous.  Without friendly locals to offer shelter and provisions, the band split between Quantrill and Bill Anderson, and eventually Quantrill would try to join Lee in Virginia in the hopes of being able to surrender as conventional soldiers.  He would be killed in a raid on his camp by Union troops in Kentucky.

So, what does this tell us?  It tells us that even the toughest, most determined enemy can be fought, but that the fight cannot be waged in the kinder, gentler version of warfare we find palatable in post-modern America.  War is not kind or gentle — it is a hard, ugly thing. The sooner it ends, the faster the enemy is broken, the sooner the public can get on with their lives and rebuild.  The worst scenario is to fight with only one hand, to allow the war to simmer for years. 

It tells us that guerrilla warfare is successful when backed by a friendly populace, but if the friends of the guerrillas are removed it spells the end of the fighting. Why didn't we do something comparable in Fallujah, say?  It would have been an ugly thing, but it could have been done, and the Iraqi public would be the better for it.

Winfield Scott ordered the execution of any Mexicans caught fighting out of uniform when the United States marched on Mexico City during the Mexican War.  That is the traditional way partisans were treated, yet we haven't executed any of our enemies when they are caught red-handed.  We cannot expect to win without making the enemy understand that we mean business.

After the Second World War the victorious allies had to contend with an insurgency by the Werwolves, a group of Nazi-trained terrorists who attempted to make der Fatherland ungovernable.  The method employed by all of the allies — including the French — was to fight fire with fire. According to "The Anti-Terror Campaign That Succeeded" by Steven Plaut:

The French were second to the Soviets in the viciousness and ferocity of their suppression of Werwolf terrorism. French soldiers pillaged German areas as they fell under their control. Random beatings of Germans by the French were common. The French forcibly expelled all German civilians from numerous towns and villages in their area of control. General Le Clerc issued an edict on November 25, 1944 to shoot five Germans for every act of sniping near Strasbourg.

Following some Werwolf activity around Constance, French forces grabbed 400 hostages and executed two. Any building in the French zone with Werwolf graffiti on it was immediately demolished. Owners had at most an hour to remove such graffiti once it appeared in order to avoid such a fate. Collective fines were imposed on German civilians for sabotage activities in their area. Wholesale travel and curfew restrictions were imposed on the entire German population.

While American troops generally avoided the excesses of the Soviets and French, they were sharply criticized by the British for using excessive brutality and force in suppressing the Werwolf. General Eisenhower ordered the execution of all Werwolf fighters captured in civilian garb.

It was understood among U.S. troops that they had a green light for applying frontier justice to terrorists, with no lawyers or trials. The counterinsurgency manual issued by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expedition Force (SHAEF) recommended that troops simply ignore Geneva Convention rules when dealing with the Werwolf.

It is possible to win against partisan warfare.  It requires some hard choices be made, but it is better for the public in the long run. Ours is a failure of will, not of ability.  If the Union could put an end to Quantrill's reign of terror without satellite reconnaissance, air support, computer modeling, and the like, what more could be accomplished with the technological miracles at the disposal of our armed forces today?  If we do not win it is because we do not want to win badly enough.  Victory often belongs to the determined.  We have the means to win this war, but do we have the will.