South African apartheid's 'Total Strategy'
South African JWN commenter Dominic and I have both started working on trying to find a good--preferably primary-source-- articulation of the "Total Strategy" developed by the apartheid regime in 1976-77 with a view to being able to do a good comparative study between that and what is probably the Bush administration's authoritative articulation of the 'Global War on Terror', namely the National Security Strategy document of September 2002.
We're not quite there yet. Any other interested JWN readers are warmly invited to join our little project. Also, if you yourself are unable to contribute to this work but know of someone else who might be interested, please forward this post to them!
The quick background on the 'Total Strategy' is that in 1974-76 two disastrous sets of things happened to the "security situation" and the "security strategy" pursued up until then by the apartheid bosses:
- (1) Portugal's massive African empire completely collapsed, "handing over" control of the two large southern African states Mozambique and Angola to national-liberation movements that were firmly African-nationalist and because of the nature and history of their struggle favorably inclined to the Soviet Union.
This was seen as the "collapse of vital buffer states". Plus, of course, the example of victory provided by the nationalists in those two countries might--it was feared in Pretoria-- serve as inspiration to SA's own majority Black and other non-White populations... And
(2) In 1976, the sprawling, Black-only "townships" of Soweto incubated the Soweto Uprising, a revolt by disaffected Black youth that spread rapidly through most of the country's urban areas. The youth were rebelling against the perceived passivity of their own elders as much as against the continuation of White control. They sought to make the country "ungovernable", and were much more radical than most of the older-generation supporters of the existing nationalist organizations.
It does sound a lot like the Bush administration's GWOT already, doesn't it? I guess my aim is to flesh out this hypothesis as much as possible.
Dominic doesn't think this portion of Vol. 2 of the TRC report gives much useful info about the TS. However, I think it's not a bad place to start, especially paras 108-139 and 152-165.
Dominic has found a couple of really helpful (though still not primary) sources. One is a book that I think he picked off his bookshelf called “Brutal Force”: it was written by Gavin Cawthra and published by International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF) in 1986.
The other is the web-available text of a research paper titled Modernizing Racism: Racial Confederalism and Racial Consociationalism”. It was written in 1999 by a UCLA grad student in sociology called Alan Emery...
Well, I just Googled Emery, and look at this: It's the text of a paper he gave to the SA Sociological Conference in 2003, titled Comparing Opposition to Apartheid and Emerging Opposition to American Empire: The Dynamics of Ideological, Military and Political Power.
Here's an excerpt from what Emery wrote there:
- South African and American empire share a remarkable degree of similarity in the degree [to] which they were or are imposed through overwhelming force, and in the mechanism of rule through illegitimate or quasi legitimate client states. South Africa’s Bantustans represented the clearest example of the principle of client state rule. But the principle can be extended to South Africa’s attempts to control the governments of Frontline states through direct intervention, sanction, or even periodic bombing of ANC buildings in foreign capitals. American Empire has followed a strikingly similar course on a global scale. In Western Europe, the US has ruled indirectly through NATO. In the middle East, through a slew of moderate Arab states, most importantly Egypt and Turkey, but also most of the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. When the strategy of rule through client states has proved ineffective, then the US has resorted to more interventionist approaches... Successive American administrations could acquire legitimacy from its allies, and conservative elites in developing countries by invoking the threat of the communist developmental model and state authoritarianism that accompanied it. The end of the cold war has made it possible for the US to ascend to a position of unquestioned hegemony on the world stage. But it has also raised the specter that faced the Apartheid state: assertion of American Empire is being increasingly seen as illegitimate, even by erstwhile allies. In this context, it is worthwhile to see if the struggle against apartheid can illuminate how present and future contestation of American empire might proceed. This is the goal of this paper.
Emery does deal with that a little there in that 2003 paper-- and also in his 1999 paper. In his 2003 paper he writes of the late-apartheid leadership in SA that:
- In response to the growing ideological power of the opposition and its impact on oppositional organizations, the state developed a sophisticated counter-revolutionary strategy. The essence of the strategy was threefold:
1. Eliminate the movement leadership;
2. Crush the oppositional organizations;
3. Impose your own vision of social organization.
Based on the logic of counter-revolution, the state attempted at this point to restructure oppositional civil society. Hence the considerable increase in the number of detentions in the years from 1985-1987.
In addition, in the footnotes to his 2003 paper, Emery cites a 1988 book called Selected official South African strategic perceptions, 1976-1987 -- and guess what, my local great university library here in Charlottesville, Virginia actually has it! I'm certainly hoping that someplace there I can find one or more documents analogous to Bush's 2002 Natinal Security Strategy... and then my little textual-analysis project can proceed.
Well, it would be a lot better if I could find an online text. But we'll see what we can do about that.
Meantime, here are some of the interesting things that Dominic noted from Gavin Cawthra's book Brutal Force:
- Pages 21 to 38 are very useful indeed for our purposes. Gavin is now Director:Centre for Defence and Security Management at the Wits University Graduate School of Public & Development Management here in Johannesburg. I used to know him a bit including in London when he was an exiled war resistor and both he and my wife were working at IDAF. I haven’t seen him for a while. There’s a CV and picture of him at http://pdm.mgmt.wits.ac.za/pdmacad2.html (scroll down).
Let me pick out some of the info on these pages.
P W Botha became Defence Minister in 1966. B J Vorster was Prime Minister, with an “outward” policy, otherwise called “détente”, for a “constellation of Southern African States” led by South Africa. In 1974 there was a coup in Portugal and Mozambique became independent in June 1975. In August 1975 South Africa invaded Angola but was beaten back. P W Botha outlined the “total strategy” in two Defence White Papers, one in 1975 and the other in 1977. Botha was rivalled by General van den Bergh, head of BOSS, but when Connie Mulder was involved in the “Information Scandal” P W Botha was able to push through and become Prime Minister in September 1978 (later President after the change in the constitution, and only succeeded by de Klerk in September 1989).
Gavin gets to the “National Security Doctrine” at the bottom of page 26, saying: “The basic premise of the SADF’s doctrine – that there is a ’communist total onslaught’ in all spheres aginst the security of the state – is a product of cold war thinking which gradually established itself in the minds of apartheid security planners during the 1950s and 1960s. … By the time Botha became Defence Minister he was well versed in these concepts. … The development of a ‘total response’ to this percieved ‘total onslaught’ took somewhat longer to materialise.”
The State Security Council was established in 1972. P W Botha, the thug, was identified with the verligtes (the more "emlightened" Afrikaners), believe it or not.
“It involves economy, ideology, technology, and even social matters and can therefore only be meaningful and valid if proper account is taken of these other spheres… all countries must, more than ever, muster all their activities – political, economic, diplomatic and military – for their defence. This, in fact, is the meaning of ‘Total Strategy’”. (1975 Defence White Paper).
Then Gavin mentions General Magnus Malan (as “the most prominent of the ‘Total Strategy’ advocates”) who was attached to the French forces in Algeria in the 1960s and studied at the US Army Command and General Staff College, and then:
“The French theorist André Beaufre features prominently in the more intellectual of the SADF training courses… According to Philip Frankel, who has conducted the most comprehensive study of the developmentof the SADF’s ‘Total Strategy’, vurtually every course at the Joint Defence College is based on one or other of Beaufre’s strategic works.”
So there are two more good leads, Beaufre and Frankel. It looks like Beaufre is the originator of the term “Total Strategy”.
The following is a quote from the 1977 Defence White Paper:
“The resolution of a conflict in the times in which we now live demands interdependent and co-ordinated action in all fields – military, psychological, economic, political, sociological, technological, diplomatic, ideological, cultural, etc. … It is therefore essential that a Total National Strategy be formulated at the highest level. The Defence of the Republic of South Africa is not solely the responsibility of the Department of Defence. On the contrary, the maintenance of the sovereignty of the RSA is the combined responsibility of all government departments. This can be taken further – it is the responsibility of the entire population and every population group.”
...
The next lead is Gavin’s mention of a symposium (its first) of the Institute of Strategic Studies of the University of Pretoria, starting “just two days after Botha signed the White Paper”, i.e. in 1977. This symposium heard Lt. Gen. J R Dutton.
There was another conference of military and business people in 1977 given by the National Management and Development Foundation attended and addressed by Malan, Ian Mackenzie, chairman of Standard Bank, and Maj. Gen. Neil Webster, SADF Director-General of Resources.
In 1979 Botha issued a Twelve Point Plan which is given on page 2 of the .pdf document at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/groups/scr/emery.pdf under the heading “Modernizing Racism: Racial Confederalism and Racial Consociationalism”. Worth looking at. Note points 11 and 12.
In 1980 “… rearrangement of government and state functions served to both facilitate and disguise the establishment of a centralised and a largely secret power structure dominated by military, police and intelligence personnel and known as the National Security Management System.”
Another conference was held at the Carlton Centre in Johannesburg in 1981 attended by 300 leading businessmen and the entire cabinet where one government official declared that ‘the National Party used to regard private enterprise as part of the onslaught, but under P W Botha, it is part of the strategy’. Business-backed organisations such as the Urban Foundation played a prominent role in the effort to ‘stabilise’ the black urban areas in the wake of the 1976 uprisings, says Gavin. The successor organisations of the Urban Foundation are still around and active.
This period might be of interest to Jonathan Edelstein. Consociationalism plus ‘free enterprise’ was all the rage and the tricameral parliament was the vehicle. My brother-in-law was picked up and tortured during the boycott campaign against the tricameral parliament. Consociationalism was part of the ‘Total Strategy’ and I would say it is part of the Bush equivalent, too, as applied in Iraq and other parts of the imperial periphery.
Gavin then goes on to describe the structure of the National Security Management System. Top is the State Security Council (SSC), then 15 Interdepartmental Committees (IDCs), covering all departments of state, with an SADF representative reporting to the SSC Secretariat sitting on each IDC. Then the ten Joint Management Committees corresponding to the area commands of the SADF covering the whole country, and comprised of the SADF regional commander and senior officials from government departments. Under the JMC are sub-JMCs in smaller towns. All these structure operated in secret. The SADF ran 5-month ‘inter-agency’ course at its Defence College on implementation of the ‘Total Strategy’. It would be nice to see the course material...
I think my next steps will be to print out and give a good thorough read to all of Alan Emery's 2003 paper; maybe try to contact Alan; get ahold of that "strategic perceptions" book from UVA library; see what else might be available...
If anyone else has chance to give Alan's 2003 paper a good read and can write a good quick digest of it, please do so and post that on the Comments board here. (Length restrictions lifted for such good work.)
Now, I gotta run. Tomorrow, no doubt, back to Iraq news. Today it's exactly nine weeks since the election, and they still don't have a government.
And no, naming a "speaker" for their Assembly may be a step in the right direction but it is still nowhere near the same as naming an empowered, legitimate, national government.
I'm curious as to the purpose of the comparison, is it strategic or is it ideological? By this I mean, is it to see how to win at or defeat the GWOT or to make the GWOT seem just like the (losing) Total Strategy for rallying the troops?
Strategically, the comparison is a little like comparing two different armies that both use flanking manouvers or that both use artillery. You might learn something useful, but, of course, the success of one effort won't predict the success of the other.
Ideologically, (or propagandistically) it might be effective, but logically it's like saying that since Botha used bullets and Bush is using bullets, they're both racists and they're both going to lose, so fight on. That won't hold up. Just to belabour the obvious, the ANC is different from the Jihadists.
In any case, it should be interesting to see what you learn.
The National Security Strategy of the USA (NSSUSA) is a most peculiar document.
George W Bush is quoted like a living Lenin at the beginning of each section, and in the entire Introduction.
What he presents is not Marxism, of course, but rather Manichaeism, the eternal struggle of good and evil.
It makes you realise that Clausewitz's understanding of strategy as the definitive overall plan and end, and tactics as the variable means to that end, is still not understood, let alone accepted.
There is no clear distinction between strategy and tactics in the NSSUSA. There is no sense of strategy as progress. The end is simply the preservation of what is presumed already to be. It is "an historic opportunity to preserve the peace". Strategy as forward movement is left unstated. It is "fudged".
The document drives the reader's attention towards frequent bullet-pointed lists, preceded by "We will:" or "The United States will:" and the like. These are means, or in other words tactics, and are the actual content of the documents. But the word "tactics" never appears.
From this point of view the document is a sleight-of-hand, or what South Africans call a "schlenter". The "Total Strategy" was also a schlenter. In fact it was the very same schlenter. It was not a strategy at all, it was an ensemble of tactics in search of a strategy.
There was no actual forward movement in it, only a defence of the status quo. That was its weakness, and that is the NSSUSA's weakness, too.
I've now read Alan Emery's "Opposition to Apartheid and to American Empire" and I think we can and must do better. His idea seems good but is weakened by his adoption of a doctrinaire post-modernist sociological schema (seemingly abandoned half way through); an eclectic gathering of narrative material that promotes the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and the Democratic Party (DP) and takes the African National Congress (ANC) for granted; and a confusion between strategy and tactics.
The ANC-led liberation movement's non-racial strategic goals were firmly set 50 years ago at the Congress of the People in Kliptown, where the Freedom Charter was adopted. The movement's tactics were "unity in action", or in other words broad-front or popular front. This strategy and these tactics held fast for over 40 years, and brought victory.
The BCM and the DP had nothing to do with this strategy and these tactics except to oppose them at different times and to yield to them in the end.
In my opinion the old regime has to be examined separately from the liberation movement. Its tactics were many and varied but its strategic position was always hopeless and never looked like being solved except in quite crazy dreams.
The quote to the effect that "it is the flight of the intellectuals from the ancien regime that signals its demise" is great (and apt for the USA of George W Bush as well) but Emery actually does not do it justice. His examples are poor, in my opinion.
When it comes to present-day parallels on the anti-Imperialist side, I have to say that I think WarrenW is right for once in his life to the extent that "the ANC is different from the Jihadists". The difference is that the ANC had a firm strategy which they were able to project in many different tactical ways, always based on unity in action with the largest possible coalition of forces. The jihadists, not.
The parallel between the old SA regime and the present day USA is good, though, and Emery spells it out quite well in his very first paragraph. Subjectively, their problem is the same. There is no way to imagine a way forward, except in mad dreams. The dream of the USA maintaining its present relative position in the world indefinitely by force of arms is just as mad as the old-regime South Africans' similar dream. The second-best dream of holding on in the hope of something turning up is even worse: it's pathetic. Objectively, the inexorable rise of a more certain and single-minded power is irresistable. That determined power is not Bin Laden, who is a bogey-man similar to the Soviet Union in relation to apartheid SA.
It is the single-minded power of the anti-Imperialist masses of the whole world that is slowly turning the US over. In the end, like the South African whites, the US will be relieved to be beaten. May that day be soon!
How could I forget to mention that the ANC has its own document called "Strategy and Tactics". The original was adopted in 1969, and a conference in Morogoro, Tanzania. You can find it at http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/stratact.html
Perhaps the similarity lies in the sense of "total war" or world war. Both regimes are surrounded and frightened. Their worldview prevents them from understanding why everything seems to be crashing down on them. With out truly understanding what makes their enemies tick, they are incapable of driving them to give up. In short, both regimes suffer from a massive intelligence failures that have nothing to do with "data collection".
This is going to rquire some hard reading before one can post a useful response. However, I am always reminded of the admonition of the late Edward Said that the liberation and anti-imperialist movements in the Arab world, especially the Palestinian but also those in Lebanon and Iraq could learn a lot from the example of other third world movements including India, South Africa and Latin America. A major difference between the 2 theaters (South Africa versus Middle East) is that the former was an important but subsidiary theater during the cold war while the Middle East is currently at the heart of the American strategy to maintain global hegemony. Accordingly I suspect that the events in the Middle East will continue to unfold along a more vicious trajectory. If one includes the lack in the Middle East of visioniary leadership such as that that guided the struggle against the aparthid regime in South Africa, the full scale of the current tragedy becomes clear.
The openly declared “strategy” in both cases is not a strategy as such, but a reaction. Both regimes have sought to preserve their supremacy, which is had at the expense of the rest of the population, of Africa in the SA case, and the whole world in the US case.
Supremacy is not equilibrium. It is unstable. It must be maintained by a constant application of expedients, including the use of military force.
The expedients that may be applied are listed and described as “Total Strategy”, or “National Security Strategy”, but they do not comprise strategy in fact. Each is rather a collection of tactics. This is what the two have in common as they stand.
If there could be a strategy for the USA, what would it be? It would have to recognise that there will be no “New American Century”. It would recognise that it must parley with the rest of the world and yield its position. It would recognise that the US must, like SA, “Adapt or Die”.
The absence of an express strategy from both SA and US “Strategies” indicates crisis. There is no way forward to calm waters. There is only defensive reaction. In the SA case this was maintained for years, only to collapse in a rush to negotiation. I expect the same will happen with the USA.
This looks like the outcome of the “textual” analysis. It is useful. It means that the anti-Imperialists can proclaim as the ANC used to do: “Victory is certain!”, even if it takes 40 years.
A further investigation could be undertaken. This would identify the common historical sources of the two “Strategies” in French and US military academies. It would interrogate the whole nature of the State and its “special bodies of armed men”, its “monopoly of violence” and the purpose of that monopoly. It would begin to create the necessary critical basis for the dismantling of coercive institutions as part of the dismantling of monopoly-bourgeois dictatorship in general.
Helena
A better comparison might be the counter insurgency policies pursued during the Malayan emergency . See stubbs for a good introduction to this period.
Kanish
Funny you should say that about Malaya, Kanish.
Here is the end of an article from Providence, Rhode Island, yesterday, by a man who has been watching "Apocalypse Now Redux" and comparing the spin then with the spin now.
(1969, by the way, was the date of the ANC's Morogoro Conference where they adopted the document called "Strategy and Tactics".)
I found the article at: http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0405-31.htm
It goes like this:
It's Iraqization, stupid.
And what of the camp itself? Western reporters are rightly terrified of traveling anywhere outside the Green Zone. So for all we know, the rebel "terror" factory on the banks of Lake Tharthar is back in business. And since the good guys say they took no prisoners, there's no one to interrogate about the alleged cohort of dead foreign fighters, which supposedly included foreign Arabs, a Filipino and, for good measure, an Algerian. (The war against terrorism, like the one against communism, must be portrayed as a worldwide struggle.)
Back in the Heart of Darkness, Marlon Brando isn't quite finished torturing Martin Sheen. Tightening the screws, he reads from another Time-magazine bromide, dated Dec. 12, 1969: "Sir Robert Thompson, who led the victory over Communist guerrillas in Malaya and is now a Rand Corp. consultant, recently returned to Vietnam to sound out the situation for President Nixon. He told the president last week . . . 'that things felt much better, and smelled much better over there.' "
Of the half-dead Sheen, Brando asks, "How do they smell to you, soldier?"
I suspect that the claim that the Global Strategy response of the former South African aparthid regime and the current US adminstration is not a strategy as such but a mere collection of tactical responses is a weak claim. There is indeed stratgey, defined by a set of coordinated actions seeking to serve an overarching vision. That the strategy is flawed is not in doubt. The current US stance is overeaching and the US economy cannot support such hubris indefinitely. Yet the US strategy posits control of oil resources especially those in the Middle East as the linchpin of a global strategy to maintain US hegemony. Political control by proxy has broken down by 1990-1991 so direct US military intervention is now the norm inthe Middle East. Almost every Arab country now boasts a US base or US military persence. But a flawed strategy can still incur enormous costs on all parties concerned. Victroy after 40 years is not a solace. Consider the fate of the Algerian revolution, a case where a general adverserial outcome for the French was also not in doubt. Nevertheless the horrific events of the war of independence led not to victory but to a state of perpetual turmoil. Unlike South Africa, the Arab Middle East has no equivalent leadership to that developed under the ANC. More importantly, I see no prospect that such a leadership in opposition is to develop anytime soon. The best that can develop (at least in the Levant if not the entire Middle East) is a modified sort of Bantustan leaderships (encourgaed by outside powers) focused on ethnic and religious minorities and stalking their worst fears of the other. The alternative leadership currently contesting for power, that of the islamists, is dead ended as convincingly argued by Roy Olivier. It is a time of internal political crisis in the Arab World that appears to stay with us for the time being.
TC, you write of "strategy, defined by a set of coordinated actions seeking to serve an overarching vision."
The strategy here would be the "overarching vision", wouldn't it? Something independent of the "co-ordinated actions", the means or the tactics which may be used to achieve the strategy. That vision, you say, is "to maintain US hegemony", in other words the status quo. A second "American Century", presumably to be followed by a third, and so on.
This vision is not different in kind from the idea of the perpetual Afrikaner ("Christian National")Republic of South Africa or the former German Nazi idea of the "Thousand-Year Reich".
Not different either from the idea of Octavian, self-named Augustus, who for the sake of eternal continuation, bleached the life out of the Roman republican institutions, while retaining their dead forms. The eventual result of his actions was a fifteen hundred years of fixed relations, in due course rationalised as feudalism, and only overthrown by the republics of Italy, the Netherlands, England and France, in bourgeois revolutions.
You praise the "leadership ... that developed under the ANC" while ignoring the content of that leadership, as if it had nothing to say for itself. In fact, the leadership had plenty to say about strategy and tactics. What distinguishes the ANC's strategic goal from the old SA regime's, and the present US government's, is precisely that it was not a fixed, but a revolutionary one.
It aimed to set the country free, with every intention of going further, in what is called the "National Democratic Revolution". This is not a final, but a transitional condition. We are free to create a better life and to shed the legacy of the past. That is a strategy with useful content. A strtegy which only aims to boil the pot for another hundred years or two is not worthy of the name. It is hollow, lifeless, even necrophiliac, as Freire would put it.
At University I studied apartheid South Africa's "total strategy" developed under premier PW Botha. It could be an interesting comparison, not only for similarities but also differences. Total Strategy was itself based very closely on US experiences in occupations and wars and the SA state also drew on the Israeli experiences later when it was developed further into the Joint-Strategic management plan (forget the exact jargon), with linked up local units of security forces, other state groups, businesses, etc. There is excellent primary material in the African Studies Library at the University of Cape Town. You might also want to speak to the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconcilliation at the University of the Witwatersrand. This was a research area of their director (Dr Graeme Simpson) during the 1980's (before he moved there).