From civil war to proxy war: past history and current dilemmas

Abstract

The use of surrogate or ‘proxy’ actors within the context of ‘irregular’ or guerrilla conflict within or between states constitutes a phenomenon spanning nearly the whole of recorded human military history. Yet it is a phenomenon that has also acquired urgent contemporary relevance in the light of the general evolution of conflict in Ukraine and the current Middle East. This introduction to a special issue on the theme investigates some potentially important new avenues to studying the phenomenon in the light of these trends.

Keywords:

• Proxy wars
• irregular conflict
• Russian Civil War
• Lenin
• Iraq
• Syria
• Vietnam
• Afghanistan
• war economy
• European Union
• unintended consequences
• war on drugs
• war on terror

The rise of proxy forces as major military and political actors in South-East Asia and the Middle East in recent years clearly demands scholarly attention, not least since the phenomenon has become both near-endemic and also shows signs of overlapping into the European security sphere, given both the course of military events in Eastern Ukraine since 2014 and suspected Russian-led cyberattacks on Estonia and Lithuania in 2008 and 2015. The Middle East constitutes the most obvious current cauldron of proxy conflict. In Syria, the civil war which has unfolded since 2011 has become marked as much by the degree to which Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia fund and support armed rebel factions within Syria, as by the role of Russia and Iran in supporting and backing the Assad regime in Damascus with both arms and armed volunteers of their own. US airstrikes against ISIS/ISIL in Syria and northern Iraq have meanwhile also become hampered by the fact that, barring offering open support to the Shia factions most active in leading the fight against ISIS – a course of action that would quickly alienate the United States from the Sunni regimes it still regards as its major allies in the Middle East – the one viable local actor able to serve as both proxy foot soldiers on the ground, and provide intelligence for American airstrikes, are the Kurds. Yet here the potential political challenges again also multiply alarmingly, given the level of antagonism that exists between the Turkish government in Ankara, one of Washington’s key allies, and the Kurdish YPG/PKK factions which are actively involved in the fight in Syria.¹ These developments, when considered in conjunction with the wider proxy war unfolding in the Middle East, which has also seen a Saudi-led Arab intervention in the Yemeni civil war, means that the subject of proxy warfare, and the use of proxy irregular actors in military conflict, is gaining a degree of public attention which it has perhaps not enjoyed since the end of the Cold War. Developments in the Middle East have after all been further complemented, not only by recent events in Eastern Europe, where Russian-backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine have challenged the government in Kiev, but also by Western strategy in Afghanistan, particularly in the wake of the 2014 troop drawdown of American forces deployed there. The widespread recruitment of Afghan tribal militias into the Afghan Local Police (ALP) to help ‘fill in’ the security gap left by the withdrawal of Western military forces has both generated parallels with earlier Soviet withdrawal policies from the same country and also highlighted to Western analysts the wider paradox of funding and supporting state-building abroad, while also supporting and backing numerous local militias in the same countries concerned for the purposes of immediate security.²

The topicality of the proxy war theme led to the convening of a workshop on the subject by the Scottish Centre for War Studies at Glasgow University in June 2015, and papers by the majority of presenters at this workshop form the substance of the current special issue. The workshop occurred thanks to the financial support of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in the longer term the aim and ambition of the project is to develop a research network devoted to studying the dynamics of wars involving proxy actors and externally funded irregular forces throughout history. The workshop however highlighted both the durability of the theme and the diversity of approaches increasingly taken towards studying it, not least in terms of the politics around state-building, capacity building, counterinsurgency theory, and development assistance, as well as the relationship between the study of insurgent/irregular actors and wider international relations theory. A ‘longue durée’ historical approach towards the study of proxy warfare also highlights both the questionable utility of continuing to regard the Treaty of Westphalia as the key turning point in the evolution of the wider international system and the importance of factoring in local war economies, and shifts within the wider global economy, when studying both the regions in which such warfare becomes dominant and the cycles in which the role and importance of proxy actors and irregular combatants often appear to surge and then, in relative terms, decline.³ The use of historical case studies meanwhile also allows investigation of the kinds of circumstances within which the military and political importance of proxy actors and irregular forces rise in concrete terms, as well as the motivations and thinking behind the governments that historically tend to support them. While the theme is rich with potential historical examples dating back to the medieval period, one obvious recent example meanwhile of archival findings having led to a revised view of proxy wars within a whole particular epoch of historical time is the Cold War itself.

The opening of formerly closed archives in the newly established Russian Federation after 1991 promised to cast new light on one of the key chapters of the Cold War, namely the ‘proxy wars’ that the two major superpowers of the twentieth century – the United States and the Soviet Union – had conducted globally against each other for nearly 40 years since 1948. In many ways, however, the real story that eventually emerged provoked a major revision of conventional views over how the Cold War had in fact been conducted. Far from Moscow (or indeed Washington) always tightly orchestrating or directing events, the story revealed by the archives has almost invariably been one in which the supposed ‘proxies’ or ‘surrogates’ of both powers often efficiently manipulated their sponsors at least as often, or more often, as they themselves were controlled or manipulated. Whether in regard to Cuba’s 1975 military intervention in Angola, now revealed to have been far more ardently pursued by Havana than by Moscow, the PDPA (Afghan Communist Party)’s premature seizure of power in Kabul in 1978, carried out against Moscow’s own advice, or the incapacity of the American government to recover all of the more advanced weapons provided to the Afghan mujahidin, or to prevent the wider strategic ‘blowback’ generated by funding and supporting Islamic fundamentalists, the Cold War was rife with episodes of the tail wagging the metaphorical dog when it came to the role of proxy actors.⁴ The archives also revealed, however, that in many ways this phenomenon in twentieth-century terms could be traced back further than 1948, back to the ‘First Cold War’ that arguably began in 1917 between the British Empire and the newly emergent Soviet Union, with echoes that continue in Eastern Europe today.

At the very end of the Russian Civil War, in two short documents held within the Trotsky Papers and published abroad in the 1970s, but not published inside Russia until 1999, the first Soviet leader, Lenin, dwelt on the phenomenon of ‘proxy conflict’ on the Soviet Union’s western frontiers as both a serious governmental challenge and as a means of political pressure on the Soviet Union’s nearest Western neighbours. This episode arguably offers key insights both into the ‘proxy actor’ strategy which the Soviet Union periodically pursued in the earliest years of its existence, the reasons for that strategy, the kind of physical operating environment within which such strategies can be pursued, and at the same time the potential dangers, limitations, and unintended consequences of just such a strategy.

The late autumn of 1920 constituted a key turning point in the relations of the Soviet Union to the wider external world, marking as it did both the culminating stage of the Russian Civil War – the internal war between the Red Army and the ‘White’ bands that had at one stage offered a three-sided threat to Moscow from the directions of Siberia, the Caucasus, and the Baltic states – and the high tide of the Soviet–Polish conflict, the moment after which the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary enthusiasm for spreading the world revolution abroad began to retreat, to be replaced by an ever-greater dose of pragmatism and realpolitik instead. By March 1921, Lenin and the Bolshevik government would abandon the economic policies of ‘war communism’ and begin pursuing instead the New Economic Policy (NEP) of concessions to market exchange and small-scale capitalism within the Soviet Union, a process that also demanded the normalising of diplomatic relations with established capitalist regimes in the West in order to again reintegrate with world trade. It was in almost every sense therefore a transition period, marking a shift between an era of full-blown war, in which the role of external actors sponsoring the White forces fighting on one side had already played a large role, while enthusiasm for sponsoring revolution abroad from the Bolshevik side had also run equally high, towards a period of domestic stabilisation, in which the numerous local bandits, insurgents, and peasant rebels who had been thrown up by the anarchy of imperial collapse in the borderlands of the Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires became a target for increasing repression from the side of the Red Army. Typical of the military adventurers, warlords, and freebooters thrown up by the civil war in the borderlands of the former Russian Empire was General Bulak-Balachowicz, a ‘useful brigand’ who served in the Tsarist army, as head of a partisan detachment in the Red Army, within the Estonian national forces, in the Russian People’s Volunteer Army (NDA) under Boris Savinkov in Belorussia, and in the Polish Army. This was a figure apparently devoid of principles, beyond his eventual diehard opposition to Bolshevism, a man about whom General Pilsudski himself would later remark ‘today [he could be] a Russian, tomorrow a Pole, the day after that a Belorussian and later, perhaps, a Negro’.⁵

By November 1918, having defected from the Red Army, the self-proclaimed Cossack ‘Ataman’ Bulak-Balachowicz was leading an anti-Bolshevik partisan unit of some 300 armed men, which threw in its lot with the Northwestern Army group of White forces operating in the wooded borderland between Russia and Estonia. The core of his force were young horseback mounted peasants, many of whom had already committed criminal offences and were on the run from punishments earned while serving with other White formations. Consequently, in its military activity, Bulak-Balachowicz’s small force soon acquired an unhealthy reputation for indiscipline and adventurism, including extortion, rape, looting, and spectacularly violent anti-Semitic pogroms behind the formal front lines of the conflicts in the region.⁶ Once having established a military base in this borderland, Bulak-Balachowicz loaned his forces to the newly formed Estonian government to help put down internal insurrections, participating as well in an Estonian army counter-offensive in 1919 against the Red Army, before continuing his own private crusade against the Bolsheviks with frequent cross-border raids into Bolshevik-controlled territory, expeditions marked by pillage and looting rather than any clear strategic objectives. The excesses of his troops, however, and his unwillingness to fully subordinate himself to the local White command, led to a fracture in his relations with the Northwestern Army group, and to an attempt by August 1919 to arrest and court-martial the errant ‘Ataman’. Bulak-Balachowicz escaped punishment, however, and the signing of the Soviet–Estonian peace treaty in February 1920 then saw him, alongside a hard core of armed followers, migrate into neighbouring Latvia, before ultimately enlisting as auxiliary troops in the Polish Army. An ill-fated raid into Belorussia after the end of hostilities in the Soviet–Polish War, with the aim of declaring an independent Belorussian state under the aegis of the NDA, and Bulak-Balachowicz as local dictator, ended in a military debacle, and Bulak-Balachowicz’s military career shortly thereafter went into eclipse. By December 1920 his band had been interned by Polish forces and fully disarmed. The rise to prominence of this irregular warlord and intransigent rebel has nonetheless been summed up by the most detailed Western study of his career, in words that also encapsulate the often transitory relevance of proxy fighters and irregular warriors throughout recorded historical time:

the real secret of Balakhovich’s [sic] ‘success’ was that he was useful, albeit temporarily, to larger forces around him. He was a passing phenomenon, but the type he represents does and will live on so long as there are times and places of ‘dissolution and crisis’.⁷

The continuation of irregular hostilities during this period in the borderland with the Baltic states, and the ongoing existence, despite the peace treaties, of an organisation carrying out recruitment for Wrangel and Bulak-Balachowicz’s respective armies, in August 1920 also prompted an irritated outburst from Lenin, who remarked that it was ‘insufficient’ to send a diplomatic protest to the Estonian government. In looking to apply increased military and political pressure on the Baltic states to observe their political agreements in relation to the ongoing irregular war still playing out in the borderlands, Lenin suggested that the Red Army mount a raid of its own, ‘to penetrate across the border right on Balachowicz’s heels for perhaps a verst, and then hang between 100–1,000 of their officials and rich men’.⁸ Remarking as well on a ‘beautiful plan’ drawn up by Sklianskii, a member of the Soviet Military Council, in collaboration with Dzerzhinskii, the head of the Cheka (and at the time also a member of the shadow Polish government), Lenin that same month also endorsed what in modern-day terms might be termed a ‘false flag’ operation to further promote class warfare in the Polish countryside:

Under the guise of the Greens [another insurgent faction in the Russian Civil War] (and we will pin it on them later) we shall go forward for 10–20 versts and hang the kulaks, priests and landowners. Bounty: 100.000 roubles for each man hanged.⁹

The use of ‘pseudo-gangs’ to conduct political terror with plausible deniability in border territories and ungoverned spaces, in situations where conflict continued, even if formal hostilities had allegedly ended, therefore formed a conscious part of Lenin’s strategy for the early Soviet state.¹⁰ The problem of banditry and semi-anarchic insurgency was endemic across most of the frontlines as the formal civil war came to an end, with the biggest immediate internal threat being the peasant-based ‘Green’ movement mentioned above, which materialised in the North Caucasus, Kuban region, in the Urals, and in the lower Volga area, among other regions under Soviet control. In the Kuban and North Caucasus region alone, the Red Army faced the challenge of putting down a ‘Green’ peasant army that fluctuated between 20,000 and 30,000 armed men at a time.¹¹ As Mark Galeotti notes in this issue, the Bolsheviks therefore utilised a combination of terror and counterinsurgency methods against such actors, and the co-option of similar kinds of actors at the same time became a means to further their own political aims and objectives. The use of ‘pseudo-gangs’ posing as rebels to mount ambushes and sow division among basmachi rebel detachments in Central Asia, the co-option of former insurgent leaders, the instrumental employment of ideological sympathisers such as the Young Bukharans or broader-based political ‘fronts’ to further, often by proxy, the Bolshevik cause, and, again, the idea of utilising cross-border raids into Afghanistan to strike at basmachi safe havens there with a degree of plausible deniability, all formed part of Soviet operations and tactics in Central Asia.¹² Such considerations at times also extended to the level of strategy and the public presentation of Soviet diplomacy; in the wake of the signing of the Anglo–Soviet Trade Agreement of 1921, Lenin issued instructions that ‘. . . the attack on British imperialism must be pursued ever more vigorously, although not in our name, but in that of Azerbaijan and Bukhara. This must never be mentioned in notes or letters.’¹³

In some ways, however, such strategies also mirrored and paralleled strategies that the Bolsheviks knew had already been utilised against them, both with regard to the raids of non-state actors like Bulak-Balachowicz, but also in the degree to which White forces in general had gained support and military significance through the financial intrigues of British intelligence agents in the early years of the civil war. In December 1917, the British government had pursued the setting up of Ukrainian, Cossack, Armenian, and Polish banks on Russian soil in order to fund proxy forces on the ground in the borderlands of the collapsing Russian empire, partly in response to a White request for a covert route to get funding to anti-Bolshevik forces within Russia. For an advance of £5 million, the British were promised control not only of banks within White-held territory, but also access to industrial resources – money in this context was being advanced against ownership of stocks and shares in railways, oil, cement, sugar, timber, flax, cotton, and coal held by the banks. Through control of the banks, British agents anticipated being able to fund and direct (in their own interests) anti-Bolshevik forces spread out across the whole of southern Russia, and ultimately foresaw the possibility of gaining a government aligned with the interests of the British Empire. However Bolshevik nationalisation of the banks, changes on the military front lines, and Cheka pursuit of the key financial intermediaries in this whole process quickly led to the collapse of the entire scheme. British exposure to the collapse of the venture at the point that matters finally unravelled was reduced to the level that ‘merely’ £1 million was effectively lost, but the whole enterprise underlined to the Bolsheviks the fact that external actors were more than able and willing to channel funding, aid, and support to their internal enemies, a situation that remained broadly true throughout much of the subsequent Cold War.¹⁴

The Russian Civil War therefore clearly merits reconsideration, not merely as the struggle whose final outcome created the Soviet Union, but as perhaps the first major proxy war of the twentieth century. The conditions in which the war was fought highlight both why irregular forces often rise to prominence as proxy fighters and why strategies of conducting fighting by the use of proxies often come into existence. The collapse of central authority, the anarchic dispersal of arms, the lure to external powers of acquiring access to substantial natural resources and potentially sizeable political influence quickly and cheaply, the emergence of a war economy on the ground based on barter and plunder, and the attraction to revolutionaries, whose military situation is weak in conventional terms, of furthering their cause by means that also carry with them the patina of plausible deniability – all are conditions which describe Afghanistan in the 1980s, or Syria today, as much as they do the Russian Civil War. The capacity for such wars to run out of control, to become dominated by tit-for-tat raiding and pillage, to further eroding international trust and thereby rendering the rebuilding of a stable regional order even more difficult was also as apparent in the 1920s as it is in the Middle East today. In terms of the unintended consequences of such wars, the mentalities and pathologies that such kinds of struggle can provoke are clearly perhaps their longest and most enduring consequence.

Since the end of the Cold War, the ‘four changes’ identified by Andrew Mumford in military affairs as favouring the growth of proxy warfare may appear to have acquired ever-increasing force. Mumford in 2013 classified these changes as:

(1)	Growing apathy among Western publics towards military engagement involving expeditionary warfare or large-scale counterinsurgency and state-building, conjoined with the obsolescence of ‘total war’ between advanced states in general.
(2)	The rise of private military companies (PMCs) as a means of ‘outsourcing’ security delivery with reduced public accountability.
(3)	The increased use of cyberspace, with its capacity to mount multiple forms of low-risk, low-cost indirect cyberattacks on state business, infrastructure, or intelligence organs, while simultaneously establishing a screen of plausible deniability by rerouting such attacks through thousands of proxy servers worldwide.
(4)	The emergence of China as a major superpower rival to the United States, with the interdependence of the Chinese and American economies rendering conventional military confrontation highly unlikely.15

However, the collection of articles gathered within this special issue also allows for a perhaps more nuanced and historically centred approach to the seeming resurgence and full-blown re-emergence of proxy wars on a large scale. For one thing, the growing role of proxies in much of both the Middle East and South-East Asia today – whether Kurds in northern Iraq, Iranian-backed Hezbollah fighters in Syria, or tribal militias in Afghanistan – is clearly also a product of wider changes within the international system, changes which Seyom Brown in this issue classifies as the shift from the bipolar Cold War to a polyarchic world order. As Geraint Hughes here also points out, certain states for historical reasons – most notably the internal process of deliberately ‘coup-proofing’ their domestic militaries, via dispersing the means of violence among the population as a whole – may also lead them to being structured in such a way that, in the event of the collapse of central authority, militias and private security actors are inevitably destined to play a central role in the struggle that follows. Libya certainly constitutes an arch-example of this conflict dynamic, but similar trends are arguably also visible in post-2003 Iraq. While the rise of militias, paramilitaries, and violent non-state actors (VNSAs) were therefore held by Mary Kaldor to be one of the three critical characteristics of the ‘new wars’ alleged to have unfolded across the world stage since the 1990s, others have rightly questioned the degree to which this phenomenon can adequately be considered ‘new’.¹⁶

The role of cycles in the global economy may therefore have as much a role to play in the recurrence of proxy warfare, and the rise of irregular actors to particular prominence in individual regional contexts, as any wider consequences of globalisation and technological change. Since the 1970s, the global economy as a whole has become dominated by the role played by finance capital in advanced nations – between 1973 and 2007, financial profits rose from 16% to 41% of total profits in the US economy, for example.¹⁷ The change from the gold standard to floating exchange rates initiated by the ‘Nixon Shock’ of 1971–73 reorientated an international system, which since the end of the Second World War had seen the rise of the ‘positive state’, towards a model where international regulations were deliberately aimed at constraining state interventions in market activity instead. While state power continued to expand in terms of surveillance and advanced defence systems, therefore, its capacity to control and direct market forces withered. This change in the economic sphere has arguably had an ever-increasing bearing on international relations and the course of modern geopolitics, although the two developments are arguably still too rarely integrated in the security and strategic studies field. The downsizing of conventional militaries, the inconceivability of conventional conflict in many cases anyway given the nuclear threat, the relentless cutting of the tax base within advanced nations, the outsourcing of security to private contractors that has resulted from that, and finally the turn away from import substitution strategies in developing economies towards open borders instead have produced what one might argue is a perfect global environment for the dominance of both wars of plunder and proxy wars.¹⁸

Whether this phenomenon as a whole merits being classified as an epochal change, as argued by Robert J. Bunker and Pamela Ligouri Bunker in this issue, will undoubtedly remain a source of debate. But these shifts also help explain the institutional response of international governance institutions like the EU tasked with managing the system, which, as Eva Stambøl also notes in this issue, are now increasingly inclined for both cultural, budgetary, and strategic reasons, to seek partnerships that amount in practice to finding and engaging ‘proxy actors’, in many cases actual states, in order to manage the transnational threats presented by increased flows of drugs, illegal migrants, counterfeiting, and arms trafficking at an ‘upstream’ stage. The question of who is more effectively manipulating who in such scenarios is also undoubtedly destined to be long debated, but the circuits of capital created by blossoming transnational crime under such conditions also contain within them major disproportionalities, patterns in which flows of ‘hot’ money further the potential for generating and prolonging an international system prone to favouring both wars of plunder and proxy warfare. Between 2000 and 2010, international development assistance for example rose from $58 billion to a projected $125 billion. In 2005 however, Raymond Baker also estimated that more than $540 billion flowed out of developing countries annually, through a combination of tax evasion, fraud in international trade, drug trafficking, and corruption.¹⁹ The vast majority of such illicit proceeds ends up recycled in the advanced economies, with financial hubs such as London and New York offering competitive advantage when it comes to money laundering the proceeds of such looting and state collapse. The funds raised from money laundering from organised crime in general, and drugs in particular, are now considerable, and in fact growing; a study of 20 OECD countries between the mid-1990s and 2006, acknowledging an ongoing margin of error of ±20%, estimated an increase in the volume of money laundered by organised crime across that period. This study estimated a rise from $273 billion in 1995 to $603 billion by 2006, with a corresponding overall increase in criminal turnover from $595 billion in 2001 to $790 billion by 2006. The money laundering related to drug enterprises in 2006 as a proportion of this figure was estimated at $600 billion in 2006, or in other words the vast majority.²⁰ In 2005, the UN World Drug Report for its part estimated revenue from the global illicit drug trade at just over $320 billion, although flaws, bias, deliberate exaggeration for political purposes, shortage of hard data, and problematic methodologies remain acknowledged obstacles to estimating the true scale of the trade in financial terms.²¹ This 2005 report estimated that the market was worth $13 billion at the production level, $94 billion at the wholesale level, and $322 billion based on retail prices, after taking seizures and other losses into account. As the UNODC itself remarked, such a value, if accepted by measurement in retail prices, was higher than the GDP of 88% of the countries in the world. The clear implication is that Western development assistance will simply never keep pace with the amount of capital flowing out of Third World states, most of it by formally ‘illicit’ routes, while the incentives for irregular forces and potential proxy warriors to engage in ‘resource capture’ in the territories affected by such massive outflows will only continue to grow. In Afghanistan, local warlords have formed ‘joint extraction’ mechanisms in relation to drug wealth that result in the consolidation of authority within a ‘criminalised peace economy’, and to such actors in some cases becoming in effect proxy actors for central government. The paradox, as Jonathan Goodhand has pointed out, is that in Afghanistan’s most recent history:

The most rapid expansion of the drugs trade has coincided with two periods of statebuilding – first, during the Taliban regime, when the number of opium growing provinces grew from ten to 23, and second, during the Karzai regime, when it grew from 24 to 32 provinces . . . The post-Bonn construction boom has been funded largely by drug money, so to a great extent economic activities in the hinterland are actually responsible for the peace dividend experienced by the centre. Although much of the proceeds from the drug economy have been invested outside the country, there are visible signs of inward investment in drug-producing areas, and there has been a recycling of money into licit businesses.²²

In Syria, ISIS/ISIL, in addition to the funds they are able to secure from external sponsors, have established a lucrative position astride a black market in antique trafficking, drugs, pornography, oil, and extortion and protection rackets.²³ Though estimates are always likely to be contested, they are consequently widely thought to be self-generating financial income that runs to something of the order of $1 million a day. Such pools of illicit capital give proxy or non-state actors and irregular warriors resources and negotiating powers which further the potential for the phenomenon to become self-perpetuating.

The creation of a cycle of profitable perpetual collapse, in which large numbers of states are either continuously stagnating in terms of their real governance capacity, or actually failing, creates a breeding ground – as the collapse of the Russian Empire did in the Russian Civil War – for multiple proxy warriors to emerge and to continue to attempt to ride the tide of local war economies. The irregular warrior serving as a proxy for wider forces is therefore likely to be with us for a long time to come.

Notes

1. On these dynamics, see Hughes, ‘Syria and the Perils of Proxy Warfare’ and Thornton, ‘Problems with the Kurds’.

2. On the use of militias in Afghanistan during the Soviet era, see Giustozzi, ‘Auxiliary Irregular Forces’ and Marshall, ‘Managing Withdrawal’. On the ALP, see both Velbab-Brown in this issue, and at Brookings Institute, and Goodhand and Hakimi, ‘Counterinsurgency’.

3. For a sceptical approach towards the Treaty of Westphalia as a true turning point, see Teschke, The Myth of 1648. For a text that already points out the historical durability of local militias and paramilitary forces as significant conflict actors, see Ahrem, Proxy Actors.

4. On all of this, see for example Gleijeses, ‘Moscow’s Proxy?’ and his subsequent work Conflicting Missions and Visions of Freedom, alongside Westad, ‘Concerning the Situation in “A”’ and ‘The Soviet Union and Afghanistan’, 128–84, but see also Gibbs, ‘Reassessing Soviet Motives’. On ‘Operation Cyclone’, the American programme to covertly sponsor the Afghan mujahidin in Afghanistan, see Coll, Ghost Wars and Youssaf and Adkin, Afghanistan.

5. Spence, ‘Useful Brigand’, 18.

6. Ibid., 22.

7. Ibid., 32.

8. Meijer, The Trotsky Papers, 272–3.

9. Ibid., 278–9.

10. For a developed terminology on ‘counter-gangs’ and ‘pseudo-gangs’ within the framework of COIN (counterinsurgency) warfare, see Hughes and Tripodi, ‘Anatomy of a Surrogate’.

11. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, 342. On the Green movement in the North Caucasus at the time, see Marshall, The Caucasus under Soviet Rule, 157–60. On the Antonov movement, the most high-profile ‘Green’ band, see Landis, Bandits and Partisans.

12. See the article by Mark Galeotti in this issue.

13. Loginov, V.I. Lenin, 412.

14. On the ‘Banking Scheme’, see Occleshaw, Dances in Deep Shadows, 53–76.

15. Mumford, ‘Proxy Warfare and the Future of Conflict’, but see also Mumford, Proxy Warfare.

16. The other two characteristics in Kaldor’s account were a new ‘war economy’ and a new wave of ‘identity politics’ fed by cultural globalisation: Kaldor, New and Old Wars.

17. The Wikileaks Files, 139.

18. Le Billon, Wars of Plunder.

19. Reuter, Draining Development?, 1–2.

20. Schneider, ‘Money Laundering’, 1, 19–26.

21. Friman, Crime and the Global Political Economy, 4.

22. Goodhand, ‘Corrupting or Consolidating the Peace?’, 413, 415.

23. Shelley, ‘Islamic State is a Diversified Criminal Operation’.