I don't know what happened in my post above but here goes again. Some said I was as bad as McGuiness for saying that he and the IRA should have been finished off by the SAS. I would point out the the SAS do not make a habit of murdering and maiming totally innocent adults and children. I think if was Giles that stated no insurgence was resolved militarily - communist insurgence in Malaya. Some one said borders are not important. They define the economic and legal basis under which we are ruled. It is true that the South would not want theburden of thd North economically but then the Unionists would not want the influence of the pope. I see the IRA faction tried to murder police last night. I am affraid that it is all just under the surface, especially with older people.
Sorry I've taken a bit of time getting back on this. I was travelling yesterday and couldn't face tapping all this into my iPhone.
You slightly misquoted me. What I actually said was "There is no such thing as a purely military solution to this sort of problem".
Now, the Malayan "emergency" is a very interesting case, one could say the exception to the rule, but I would not categorize it as "this sort of problem" as it's not at all comparable.
The communist insurgency was not at all driven by the indigenous Malay population; only a very few were involved. The communists were (rightly) perceived as being Chinese by the Malays, who largely preferred the British. The point is, it wasn't an insurgency that was wanted by the the indigenous population. Incidentally, the malay terrorists originally started out as guerrillas we were equipping to fight the Japanese in WWII (sound familiar ?)
It is true that we did manage to resolve it, but one of the main reasons that we were successful was because our approach was not purely military. Rather than just using the force of arms, the key to our success was the hearts and minds campaign which made the local villagers trust our forces more than they feared terrorists.
The campaign was highly intelligence led (made MUCH easier by the fact that almost all of the terrorists were ethnically chinese). We had a successful strategy of starving out the CTs by corralling the villagers into defended compounds, cutting off the terrorists supply lines, and extensive defoliation of the jungle and the clearings where they were trying to grow food (yes, we used agent orange and similar products very extensively in Malaya a long time before the US did in Vietnam).
Much of what we did to successfully prosecute this campaign would in any case not be possible these days due to all the constraints of human rights legislation. There was quite a lot of quiet bumping off of bad guys.
It's a bit of a pet subject of mine as my Dad was a Naval Intelligence officer in Singapore in the aftermath of the emergency when there were still a load of weapons floating around, and still communists wanting to get the whole thing going again. It nearly kicked off again in 1967 but the lid was put back on it pretty quickly.
