In French Lessons, Alvaro Vargas Llosa looks at the lessons of the Battle of Algiers:
What lesson from that conflict is relevant today? The paramount lesson seems this: “First-world” armies and “third-world” guerrillas have different notions of time and space, and therefore of what constitutes defeat and victory. A “first-world” army can defeat “first-world” guerrillas and a “third-world” army can defeat “third-world” guerrillas because in both cases the army and the enemy operate under similar notions of time and space. The Italian security forces were able to defeat the Red Brigades, just as Germany’s security forces were able to defeat the Baader-Meinhof Gang, because they were at war with each other under similar time and space horizons. Equally, Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship was able to defeat the Shining Path in Peru in the 1990s and Venezuela’s Romulo Betancourt destroyed the Castro-inspired guerrillas in the 1960s because the warring sides shared a common idea of where and when they were fighting. That is not to say that in all such cases the army will triumph. Castro’s victory in 1959 proves that the opposite can happen. But as long as the established power commands enough civilian support, which is usually the case against a terrorist insurgence, the security apparatus enjoys a big advantage.In Algeria, the occupying force’s notion of space was purely physical and military: The French paratroopers thought that as long as they smoked the terrorists out of the Casbah — the Muslim quarter in Algiers — they would win. The insurgents’ notion of space was historic and civilian: As long as they gave the oppressed masses a sense of the anomaly that the century-old French presence in their land constituted, the liberation struggle would go on. The French army’s notion of time was narrow, while the insurgents had a broad time horizon. The French won the battle of Algiers but in 1962 they had to give up the colony.
It was not a matter of how many troops there were on the ground. In 1960, France had 400,000 troops in Algeria — not far from the number the U.S. poured into Vietnam. And the moral legitimacy of the insurgents is not defined by the methods they employ, but by how close they are to the population and how effectively they help shape the people’s perception of the enemy. Algeria’s insurgents were tyrants, and once they liberated their nation they established a dictatorship. But the fact that they were perceived as legitimate by the civilian population — precisely because their notion of space and time attached them to that population and the country’s history — meant that the occupiers ended up losing the war whose every battle they had won.