Readers of this journal are of course principally interested in studies that expand, challenge, or change our knowledge of Southeast Asia in general. Karl Hack’s monograph does these things very well, despite the fact this is not his principal objective, nor are this journal’s readers his main intended audience. The mandate of the Cambridge University Press series that published his book is to present studies of war ‘in all its military, strategic, political and economic aspects’ that focus on the ‘‘hard" military history of armies, tactics, strategy and warfare’. Hack does just that, but in a book with an approach so well-crafted and executed that it will rise to the level of becoming the standard study of one of the most important events in the modern history of Southeast Asia. This claim does not need justification here. The effort by the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) to foment, through armed struggle, a socialist revolution to create a very different Malaya — a campaign that stumbled into the violent insurgency known to the MCP as the 20 June Incident, but to the rest of us as the Malayan Emergency — is well recognised as a fundamental experience in the wider Southeast Asian histories of decolonisation, independence, international relations, nation-building, and the Cold War, and of course as a defining event in the national histories of Malaysia. More interesting is the previous claim. How does the study of a war, moreover one that focuses on the conduct of that war, became not only the standard account of the conflict but also an essential source for those wider themes?
Three conditions need to be present: a mature and layered literature, lively ongoing debates, and the ability to combine very thorough critical immersion in both with critical engagement of a more comprehensive array of primary sources than previously available to, or used by, anyone else. They all apply here, and Hack combines them magisterially. His approach is to examine three distinct perspectives — the government, insurgent, and local — on their own terms, but also to show how they interacted, to shape a conflict that evolved through three distinct but messy and overlapping phases, each phase defined by a particular mixture of insurgency and counterinsurgency strategies and tactics. This leads to Hack’s seminal insights: the war was defined by the dynamic and unpredictable interplay between these forces, and thus cannot be reduced to any singular conclusion or theory to explain its course or outcome. Hack expresses this most directly on page 338, concluding his chapter on the role played by Field Marshal Gerald Templer: ‘Neither winning hearts and minds nor harsh controls are in themselves strategies. Instead, they are tactics or ingredients to be mixed and remixed according to particular campaign phases and local circumstances.’ The thrust of the book was to unpack, document, and explain this powerful and persuasive argument.
That approach can only reach full effect when used to reconsider a familiar topic, one already subjected to numerous contingent and theoretical explanations. Standing on the shoulders of that work, much of which he produced himself, Hack revises, corrects, and convinces with surgical precision. We learn more herein as to why the MCP launched an armed struggle to begin with, why its first major strategy collapsed even before the government began to organise any kind of coordinated reply, why the Communists handed the military initiative to their enemy, and why they could never claw this back. We also learn more about how counterinsurgency evolved from disorganised large-scale repression to bureaucratic counterterror, from there to geodemographic strategy, finally to a comprehensive but flexible recipe of various techniques that all had to be applied consistently, with determination, to achieve the vital breakthrough: the systematic destruction of the district organising and controlling committees and command structures on which the MCP relied to wage a decentralised war. Early mistakes by both sides, the Briggs Plan, Templer and his leadership, Special Branch and special forces, psychological warfare, national politics — none emerge drastically revised from Hack’s careful scrutiny, but the pattern they all formed together stands out more clearly. The author makes it his business to try to understand and explain ‘how things worked’ (private conversation with this reviewer, 2019). He succeeds in a study the beginner can rely on and the expert will find conclusive. Hack, fittingly, saves his last words for the line of analysis about this war that has always been the most controversial: counterinsurgency in general. He summarises with aplomb (page 454):
Outside of Malaysia, practitioners and scholars still argue over the ‘lessons’ of the campaign, sometimes artificially picking one technique or another as the critical, insurgency-busting ingredient. Hopefully when they do so in future, they will acknowledge how very different the conflict was in different phases, and the way violence, structural violence, hearts-and-minds measures of political, civil and military nature and techniques were all present in most periods, with the overall strategy shaped by the changing way they were mixed.
Hear, hear.
