By uprooting these Algerians from their homes and fields and placing them in camps where they led listless and largely unemployed existences, the French only created a new area of profound social discontent; while by helping “to break up an antiquated rural and tribal structure”, says Dorothy Pickles, they also encouraged “a sense of national solidarity”. Thousands fled over the border into Tunisia or Morocco to join the ranks of the F.L.N. there. Regroupment undeniably made life much more difficult for the A.L.N., but—as so often in the Algerian war—French policy found itself caught in the insoluble paradox of what was good militarily being bad politically, and vice versa. It was a pitfall into which, to some extent, the Americans were to stumble in South Vietnam.

XREF: Connects to the author's explicit parallel with American policy in South Vietnam — a recurring theme in counterinsurgency history.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 693