At the beginning of the fight, rebels have the advantage. Provided they have the right terrain, they can take on their opponents with simple means even if they are vastly outgunned.

  When the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the party in government in Afghanistan, started fighting its own people in the late 1970s, the tribesmen of Nuristan, a region remote even by Afghan standards, had next to nothing with which to defend themselves. In some instances, they had to resort to slingshots and axes. But what they did have was the terrain, which they knew better than anyone else and could use to their advantage. The government went on the offensive and sent armoured vehicles to put down the rebellion. But the mountain roads were so narrow that the vehicles couldn’t even turn their gun turrets. And engaging targets above them along those steep ravines? Forget it.56 And even if the armoured battalions did come close, the Nuristani tribal militias triggered mudslides to halt their advance.57

  But eventually, neither slingshots nor mudslides will do the trick anymore because taking harder targets requires different tactics and different weapons. Rebels have to fight more like a conventional army. As Mao believed, they need to control territory, to mobilise people and resources like the state. When they control those resources, they can defend any newfound territories from the state’s counter-attacks before going on the offensive.58 But when this happens, the rebels become more vulnerable because they need to concentrate their forces, thereby becoming a bigger target for the tyrant’s firepower.59 That vulnerability has allowed many tyrants to stay in power.

  On the battlefield, civil wars and insurgencies are particularly challenging because the flame of rebellion is difficult to extinguish for good. Nevertheless, clever tyrants can manage rebellion. As many armed opposition groups have found out to their cost, winning a civil war is much more difficult than not losing. Even if the government’s forces are corrupt and not designed primarily to go to war, they are often enough to overcome any opposition.

  If they succeed and the tyrant manages to hold the rebels at bay, there are much bigger monsters across the horizon. For if these cruel leaders make a single wrong move at the wrong time and in the wrong neighbourhood, they will come face to face not with peasants wielding Kalashnikovs, but with other states. And when that happens, all bets are off.

  5

  Enemies, Foreign and Domestic

  First pacify the interior then resist the external [threat].1

  Chiang Kai-shek

  Tyrants are often much weaker than they appear. When an external power tries to unseat them, they don’t necessarily have to use a lot of force to knock them off their pedestal. In part, that’s because prioritising internal enemies, as many tyrants do, makes them particularly vulnerable to foreign threats.2

  And yet, there’s a common conception that authoritarian regimes have an advantage when it comes to the battlefield. In some respects, that’s true. To give one example, democratic leaders have a real problem when they take their nation to war and flag-draped coffins start coming back home. Those casualties have mothers and fathers and siblings and friends, and those are the people whose votes are needed by democratic politicians in order to stay in power. In highly personalised systems of government such as absolute monarchies or personalist dictatorships, family and friends mourn their dead just as they do in democracies, but they aren’t the constituents the leader needs to worry about. As long as the regime can repress dissent from the streets, and ensure that the sons and daughters of their allies don’t get shot, the autocrat is much less vulnerable to the immediate fallout of battlefield deaths than the democrat. Autocracies, in other words, have a lower ‘casualty sensitivity’ and that helps them to stay in the fight.3

  Similarly, twenty-first-century dictatorships are less constrained than liberal democracies when it comes to the use of extreme violence. That’s not to say that democracies are incapable of it, of course. But there are two key differences. The first is that even the most bloodthirsty democratic leaders can only go so far before they risk being stopped by the courts or people around them. Secondly, in instances where war crimes are committed, there’s a process for them to be brought to light by a free press and often a realistic chance of perpetrators being held accountable. In 2023, for example, a former member of the Australian Special Air Service Regiment was arrested for murder after an independent inquiry found special forces operators had purposely killed Afghan civilians.4 As part of the process, the Australian state encouraged anyone who had relevant information to come forward.

  It’s difficult to imagine something like this happening in Putin’s Russia or in any other personalist dictatorship. When the Russian Air Force bombs a civilian target and then waits for doctors to arrive before bombing them as well, it will never be reported on Russian television. And even if it is, what is supposed to happen? Nothing.

  In combination with a higher capacity for extreme violence, lack of political sensitivity about casualties provides tyrants with a significant advantage on the battlefield. But that’s largely where the despot’s advantages end, and these are outweighed by the costs of coup-proofing and of having an army weakened by the effects of purges, political promotions and a climate of fear.

  On 11 June 1937, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, one of the Soviet Union’s most capable generals, was standing in front of a secret court. ‘I feel I’m dreaming,’ he said.5 Weeks earlier, he had been demoted and then arrested. In the meantime, he had been tortured by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and beaten into signing a confession.6 The trial was part of the Great Purges, a wave of terror unleashed by Stalin in the latter half of the 1930s. The Soviet Union had always been a brutal regime, but this was of a totally new order. Stalin saw enemies everywhere, including where there were none.7 Instead of eliminating the few rivals that might actually threaten him, the regime proceeded to come up with quotas of people to be disposed of. With a single order, 268,950 people were to be arrested: 193,000 of them were to do forced labour, the other 75,950 were to be executed. Thereafter, things only became worse. New lists were drawn up, more people were killed. Nikolai Yezhov, the ghoulish head of the NKVD, would send ‘albums’ of people’s names to Stalin for review. The 383 albums seen by Stalin contained around forty-four thousand names.8

  By the time General Tukhachevsky went on trial, the purges had become a frenzy. Regional officials were no longer simply fulfilling their quotas but going out of their way to ask Moscow for permission to kill and torture more. No longer content with killing people in the basement of Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison, Yezhov had a slaughter room set up in a building across the street. On one side of the room were logs so that bullets could be caught after exiting the victims bodies; the floor was sloped to allow for easier drainage of blood.9 Not even the families of ‘enemies of the people’ were spared. On the contrary: the regime locked up thousands of women for the crime of being married to the ‘wrong’ man. Children as young as three could be imprisoned.10 The revolution also ate its young: Corps Commander Ivan Belov, one of the judges sentencing Tukhachevsky, was so scared at the trial that he wondered whether he might be next.11 And indeed, a little over a year later, the regime found Belov guilty and had him shot.

  By one estimate, Stalin’s NKVD arrested 1.5 million people between 1937 and 1938, with most of them never being released again.12 Shot at 22.35 on 11 June 1937, Mikhail Tukhachevsky was one of them. As well as the distinguished general, others purged were among the Red Army’s most talented and experienced officers.13 The regime even boasted that tens of thousands of officers had been arrested.14 A consequence of this was that other people who were much less capable than the purged officers were now being promoted into more senior roles due to their perceived ‘loyalty’ to the regime.

  As a result of this bloodshed and the promotion of lackeys, Stalin vastly increased his domestic power. Before the terror, the Communist Party had been the most powerful political actor in the Soviet Union. When the violence began to die down, all power was centred in him. He stood alone at the top of one of the largest empires the world had ever known.

  But because the purges were so intense, the disruption of the economy, the administrative state and the Red Army so extreme, Stalin put himself at risk. He, after all, could only survive in power if the Soviet state survived, and that was no longer assured.15 The situation was especially precarious because the international environment had been deteriorating for quite some time. War would break out shortly and the purge of military leaders was undoubtedly one of the main reasons the Soviet forces initially did so badly when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.16

  But even if Stalin hadn’t purged Tukhachevsky and other competent generals, the Soviet Army would have struggled. Soldiers can’t fight properly when they are more scared of their own government than the men they see through their gunsights. Whereas generals in democracies may fight for country and glory, generals in heavily politicised militaries can find themselves in an impossible situation. If they lose too much, they become a liability and that can easily mean death rather than demotion. If they win too much, they become a threat to the tyrant and that can also mean death. With the stakes so high, military leaders have a strong incentive to ‘lie, exaggerate, and shift blame to cover their mistakes’.17

  In 1943, Stalin’s Red Army and Nazi Germany fought one of the most decisive battles of the Second World War in Kursk. On the southern front of the battle, several hundred Soviet tanks stood in opposition to about a third as many German tanks. Despite the numerical superiority of the Red Army, the German military won a massive victory. By one estimate, they destroyed ‘as many as 15 Soviet tanks for every one they lost’. With the fighting done, it now fell to General Nikolai Vatutin to tell Moscow about the defeat. But he refused, so terrified was he that Stalin would sack or execute him. Instead, according to Kenneth Pollack, he fabricated a fierce battle, claiming that both sides had suffered terrible losses.18

  That story about the Battle of Kursk was repeated again and again, from battle to battle and soldier to soldier. Everybody lied. And over time, military effectiveness was hindered because lying on this scale is devastating when trying to win a war. It’s as if the tyrant’s own troops set up such a smokescreen that it becomes impossible for the ruler to see anything at all.

  Sometimes the fear can be so intense that officers don’t just lie to their superiors but become paralysed outright. During the Gulf War, Saudi forces and American forces fought side by side, and both broke through enemy lines. American Marines, despite facing stronger resistance from the enemy, pushed ahead much quicker than the Saudi soldiers. Why? Mainly because Saudi commanders were unable to make decisions in the heat of the moment, constantly looking for their superiors to decide for them.19 They were so scared of doing the wrong thing that they did nothing.

  And unfortunately for tyrants, open warfare isn’t all they have to worry about. There’s a world beyond congressional authorisations or prime ministerial speeches – a world of shadows. In that world, external powers can go after the despot despite having said that they never would. There are all kinds of options. External powers can train the opposition, give money to armed groups, keep enemies alive or encourage coup-plotters to take on the incumbent. If we travel back to the Cold War for a moment, we can discover what that threat towards tyrants can look like.

  In her book Covert Regime Change, the political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke provides a thorough account of the ‘secret wars’ the United States waged while it was struggling against the Soviet Union.20 In total, the United States pursued seventy regime-change operations (that we know of). Of these, sixty-four were covert. By O’Rourke’s count, twenty-five of them led to a US-backed government taking power. The rest failed.21

  The goal of these interventions varied greatly. Sometimes, they were meant to push back the influence of the Soviet Union by replacing supposedly pro-Soviet leaders with more amenable ones. At other times, they were meant to take out leaders before they could come anywhere near the Soviet camp. While some of the targets were tyrants, others definitely were not.

  As O’Rourke argues, covert action is such a problem for tyrants because it’s attractive to policymakers.22 In a way, that’s surprising because staying in the shadows while attacking other states inevitably means that the attacker has to operate without their total strength.23 If they can go to war openly against another nation, they can use everything they’ve got to try to topple that unfriendly regime, and that can maximise the chances it will actually happen. The demonstrative show of massive power can be so useful that generals have planned entire military doctrines around the notion that overwhelming force can quickly break the enemies’ will to fight. Shock and awe is a little harder to do when nobody is supposed to find out who was behind it.

  That said, the decision as to how to topple a foreign leader doesn’t happen in a vacuum and there are always other considerations at play. Is there public support to go to war? How expensive is it going to be? What does it mean for the next election if young men and women become crippled because they were sent into harm’s way by the government? What will it do to the country’s reputation if the government openly admits to toppling established governments?

  Using political violence out in the open is, in other words, not that easy to do. That’s where covert action comes in. To politicians, it’s a convenient middle ground: they do something and it could pay off but even if it doesn’t, it’s not the end of the world. Indeed, many covert regime-change operations have been signed off despite it being abundantly clear that they were unlikely to succeed. When the CIA director told President Eisenhower that the chance of success in a planned intervention in Guatemala could be below 20 per cent, Eisenhower actually thought a low number made the proposal more convincing. Talking to Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, the president said: ‘Allen, the figure of 20 per cent was persuasive. If you had told me the chances would be 90 per cent, I would have had a much more difficult decision.’24 Covert action from abroad can be particularly dangerous to dictators precisely because the allure of ‘plausible deniability’ makes action against them more likely.

  But the men and women working to overthrow dictators in the shadows aren’t omnipotent. More often than not, the high appetite for risk combined with the need for things to remain hidden leads to mistakes. Blunders have saved more than one dictator.

  After ruling with an iron fist for decades, Cuba’s military dictator was overthrown in 1959 by a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro. Unlike Fulgencio Batista, Castro wasn’t content to let rich Americans control much of the island’s wealth. Since Castro was a self-declared Marxist-Leninist, the White House was immediately concerned that he could align Cuba with the Soviet Union. After John F. Kennedy won the presidential election against Richard Nixon, American intelligence agents presented their plans. Kennedy was reluctant. If the United States was going to try to overthrow Castro, the operation needed to be covert. Initially, American intelligence set out to train exiled Cubans in Florida and Guatemala. Americans would help, but the Cubans themselves were going to be the tip of the spear.

  If they were to have any chance of holding out against the inevitable counter-attack, they needed to disable Castro’s air force. To maintain the conspiracy, the CIA painted American B-26 aircraft to try to make them look like units of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces before they took off from Nicaragua to bomb the planes.25 While there was some division within the government, most pre-assessments of the invasion’s chances of success were optimistic. The US Department of Defense and the CIA were of the belief that, at the very least, the invaders would reach the safety of the mountains. And at best, there might be a ‘full-fledged civil war in which we could then back the anti-Castro forces openly’.26

  When the first troops landed in the bay, they saw a B-26 up in the air. ‘We assumed it was ours,’ one of them explained. ‘It even dipped its wing. But then it opened fire on us,’ he added.27 Since they had previously been told that Castro’s air force had already been destroyed, they could barely believe what they were seeing. But it was real. The CIA’s planes had missed many of their targets and now Castro’s planes were dominating the skies.28 Out at sea, one of the cargo ships carrying ammunition and fuel was hit. In an attempt to avoid a similar scenario, other supply ships turned back.29 Stranded without adequate supplies and some fifty miles away from the mountains in which they were supposed to find refuge if things went wrong, the attempt to topple Castro through force was doomed. Perhaps the enterprise had been doomed before the first shot was fired. The CIA itself later made a good point which indicates that the invasion plans were probably always destined to fail:

  The bay was also far from large groups of civilians, a necessary commodity for instigating an uprising, which may be a moot point, as the bay was surrounded by the largest swamp in Cuba, making it physically impossible for any Cubans wanting to join the revolt to actually do so.30

  Would things have played out the same way if Kennedy hadn’t insisted on covert action over an open attack? We will never know.

  With the invasion an abject failure on all levels, the United States could have stopped further attempts to overthrow Castro. Instead, Kennedy authorised a follow-up operation that proposed more and more absurd plans for getting rid of Fidel. The man in control of the effort to find ‘a solution to the Cuban problem’ was Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s younger brother, who wanted to succeed in order to confirm his position. In one meeting with his team, he said finding a solution to the Cuban problem was the top priority of the United States government. ‘No time, money effort, or manpower is to be spared,’ he added.31

 

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