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Walling Off Your Enemies: The Long View

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Chang W. Lee/The New Y ork Times

DIVISION Its an old idea: Barriers help separate friends from enemies. Chinas w all has lasted millennia.
ELSEWHERE ON NYTIMES.COM

By TIM WEINER
Published: April 29, 2007

TWITT ER
LINKEDIN

Correction Appended
THE rulers of China spent 2,000 years building and rebuilding the
worlds greatest wall, to keep out invaders from the north. The
Roman emperor Hadrian built battlements across Britain against the
barbarians 19 centuries ago. The Soviets cut Berlin in two; that wall
came down when the will to defend it faded. The Israelis now build
barricades against the Palestinians, guarding against an Arab
population bomb as well as suicide bombers.
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These are walls of war the

architecture of long struggle. Hard to
erect, harder to maintain, they are
never stronger than the political skill of their designers.

Last week, thousands of people in Baghdad were uniting

against a wall dividing them. Twelve feet high, it separates
Ernst Haas/Getty Images
Sunnis and Shiites in the Adhamiya district of northern
The Berlin w all fell 18 years ago.
Baghdad, and it is part of the American militarys fight
against the Iraqi insurgency. Adhamiya is becoming one of
many walled and gated communities in Iraq; the Americans have been building them for
months. Gen. David Petraeus, the counterinsurgency specialist who leads the American
forces in Iraq, said on Wednesday that he was walling off neighborhoods in order to
control population and to provide security. He spoke of the concrete caterpillar that
grows 500 meters every night in Baghdad.
The idea is the essence of counterinsurgency: to separate the good guys from the bad guys,
and to impose political will to convert or defeat the enemy. History suggests that it can
work but that it takes many years and a heavy hand.

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AUTOS

The British are the prime example of success in modern times. At the close of their colonial
era, after World War II, they isolated the ethnic Chinese population in Malaya, building
new villages and herding hundreds of thousands of people into them. In doing so, they
controlled the population within the walls actually, fences that included barbed wire
and attacked Chinese insurgents outside them.
If the insurgency is countrywide, wrote Sir Robert Thompson, the architect of the idea of
the new villages, it is impossible to tackle it offensively in every area. It must be
accepted that in certain areas only a holding operation can be conducted. Hence the
concept of creating walls or fences to separate friends from foes.
In practice, the British demoralized and defeated enemies of the empire, though thousands
of noncombatants died in the process. The moral hazards of their methods seem fairly
plain today, and therefore difficult to duplicate. But in its time, Malaya was counted as a
famous victory, and the land of present-day Malaysia is peaceful and relatively
prosperous.
The results speak for themselves, notes Lt. Col. Wade Markel, a United States Army
strategist, writing last year in Parameters, the quarterly journal of the Army War College:
by 1957, the number of insurgents had declined sharply to perhaps 200 active
combatants from an estimated 8,000 five years earlier allowing a new Malay
government to take shape.
Short-term, it was a success, said Caroline Elkins, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian
whose field is the twilight of British empire. But what happens within these walls? The
British argued that they were winning hearts and minds. But behind the walls, its all
about forcing people to cooperate.
Winning the allegiance of civilians within the walls required a strong political will and a
degree of violence, she said, and the British were much more brutal than the Americans
were willing to be in Vietnam.
Sir Robert transplanted his theory to South Vietnam, and American advisers in Saigon
embraced it in 1962. But they were never skillful enough or tough enough to sort out
their foes, the Vietcong insurgents, from their South Vietnamese friends behind the
stockade fences of their strategic hamlets.
When an American-backed coup took down the Saigon government in November 1963,
the hamlets strategy went with it. The Americans could not clear and hold the jungle, and
within a year the Vietcong were using roadside bombs, car bombs, and suicide bombers in
Saigon. Half a million American troops followed.
Forty years later, after building billion-dollar bases walled off from Iraqis, American
officers are embracing the strategies and tactics of counterinsurgency under the new
Baghdad security plan, which adapts concepts used in the countrysides of Malaya and
Vietnam to Iraqs urban centers.
Building concrete walls in Baghdad and controlling gated communities across Iraq is a
crucial part of that plan. In the near future, identity cards or internal passports may be
issued in an effort to isolate the enemy in Baghdad, as has been done with some success in
the embattled city of Falluja.
1

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Correction: May 6, 2007

A picture caption last Sunday with an article about the use of walls in the history of
warfare misstated the length of time the Berlin Wall lasted. It fell after 28 years, not 18,
having stood from Aug. 1961 to Nov. 1989.
More Articles in Week in Review
Tips

To find reference inform ation about the words used in this article, double-click on any word, phrase or
nam e. A new window w ill open w ith a dictionary definition or ency clopedia entry .
Past Coverage
THE WORLD; See You in Septem ber, Whatev er That Means (May 1 3 , 2 007 )
IDEA & TRENDS; Walling Off Your Enem ies: The Long View (April 2 9, 2 007 )
THE REACH OF WAR; U.S. Com m ander Say s Fall Pullback in Iraq Would Lead to More Sectarian
Killings (April 2 7 , 2 007 )
THE REACH OF WAR: NEWS ANALYSIS; 4 Years On, the Gap Between Iraq Policy and Practice Is
Wide (April 1 2 , 2 007 )
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Iraq
Petraeus, Dav id H
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Maliki, Nuri Kam al al-

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