ABSTRACT
Abel Esterhuyse shows in his chapter on South African counterinsurgency that the South African Defense Forces, while not pursuing an all-out strategy of attrition in Angola, were able to successfully create a battlefield stalemate by using purely military means. This set the stage for an eventual political solution to the Angolan problem. Other historical cases offer supportive evidence for the value of an ‘enemy-centric’ approach. Missing in this volume is a specific French perspective on counterinsurgency. Treated in other studies, great French thinkers, such as Lyautey, had traditionally an eye for the effectiveness of repression. It was widely practised in French colonial conflicts and to a certain extent quite successful in stabilizing French colonial presence. The case of Algeria provides a moot point. In recent years it seems that the French record of counterinsurgency is preferably forgotten or brushed over, with some exceptions such as the publication of the controversial memoirs by Paul Assaresses about his experiences in Algeria (2005).2
