Duck & Cover: How Local Proxies Manage Foreign Patrons in Counterinsurgency Wars

• In Event: Counterinsurgency Warfare

Abstract

To minimize the costs and risks of foreign military intervention, external powers often rely on local proxy forces to combat shared adversaries. Existing scholarship tends to frame local partners as strategic extensions of their foreign patrons and focus on the tools available to foreign powers to coerce local clients. This paper adopts an alternative perspective by focusing on the strategic logic of local proxy forces and the tactics they take to manage their powerful patrons. Despite their limited capabilities, local allies are highly strategic actors, navigating complex political environments balancing threats from rebels, rivals, foreign enemies, and foreign allies alike. This study analyzes the specific types of tactics these ostensibly weak local proxies rely on to press wealthy allies for increasing aid and decision-making autonomy. Using a novel dataset of hundreds of policy requests from intervening forces to local partners in five large-scale interventions, namely the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam, the Indian intervention in Sri Lanka and the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the paper identifies when local actors verbally agree, bargain, or refuse the policy demands of external patrons, analyzing how and what local allies communicate to their foreign partners across and within each intervention. The findings offer insights into these critical security partnerships, exploring how local actors strategically respond to structural incentives to evade and extract as much as possible from external partners, a bargaining process affecting war duration, costs, and outcome.

Author

• Barbara Elias, Bowdoin College