The New Counter-insurgency Era in Critical Perspective

By Celeste Ward Gventer, D. Jones and M.L.R Smith

The notion of counter-insurgency has become a dominant paradigm in American and British thinking about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This volume brings together international academics and practitioners to evaluate the broader theoretical and historical factors that underpin COIN, providing a critical reappraisal of counter-insurgency thinking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jan 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781137336941

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Introduction

Celeste Ward Gventer, David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith

The rise and fall of intellectual fashions is something that analysts sometimes ponder, attempting to discern the factors that inspired them and the manner in which they eventually fade into irrelevance. The past ten years witnessed the rise to ascendancy of counter-insurgency orthodoxy within military, political, and academic circles, notably in Washington and Westminster.¹ The origins of this orthodoxy are not hard to trace. They date from 11 September 2001 when the al-Qaeda jihadist network hijacked four airliners, two of which were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the other striking the Pentagon in Alexandria, Virginia, while the fourth crashed into a Pennsylvania field. The loss of nearly 3,000 lives on that fateful day was the defining factor that eventually saw counter-insurgency as its logical response.

At first, analytical attention in the wake of this attack focused on the al-Qaeda network and its capacity for ‘asymmetric’ assaults on Western targets. The years following 9/11 saw further deadly attacks and conspiracies by al-Qaeda franchises, most notably in the cities of Western Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Many of these attacks were perpetrated by so-called ‘home-grown’ jihadists. Consequently, among other things, much attention focused on how states could secure themselves from such threats through the provision of legal and intelligence measures, strengthening internal resilience through greater social cohesion, mutual cooperation between threatened states, and programmes that aimed to ‘de-radicalise’ either actual or potential jihadist operatives.

Much of the practical and scholarly work undertaken by governments, defence planners, and academics in the first few years after 9/11 may reasonably be described as the first wave of counter-insurgency thinking (although it was not labelled such at the time), concerned as it was with understanding, confronting, and defeating the attempt by violent, transnational jihadism to disturb the modern secular Western world order through a programme of radical subversion.²

This initial wave was the harbinger of a more distinctly counter-insurgent-focused second wave that broke after 2004. In the weeks following the 9/11 attacks Western coalition forces invaded Afghanistan. The hard-line Islamic Taliban regime that had provided a safe haven for the core leadership of al-Qaeda was swiftly deposed. Western forces subsequently assumed an uneasy posture supporting the new Afghan government under Hamid Karzai, whose authority was under constant armed challenge from the remnants of the Taliban, particularly in the Pashtun heartlands of Helmand Province. The difficulties Western forces faced in addressing an ethnically fragmented and fragile Afghanistan society whilst propping up the increasingly corrupt Karzai government presented seemingly classical counter-insurgency dilemmas in terms of winning the support of the people for the government cause and securing the country against Taliban resistance. Twelve years on, the Afghan conflict, and the problematic Western efforts to end it, remain unresolved.

It was, however, the controversial decision of the US administration of President George W. Bush to invade Iraq in March 2003 that provided the real impetus for the second wave of counter-insurgency writing. The optimism that initially followed the ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime, which over three decades had systematically brutalised Iraqi society, quickly gave way to uncertainty as the occupation forces faced growing violence and disorder in the country. The combination of Saddam’s fall, the Coalition Provisional Authority’s missteps, a weak transitional government that struggled to establish popular legitimacy, and the lack of troops on the ground helped fuel Iraq’s descent into anarchy. Feuding between the Shiite majority and the once politically dominant Sunni minority population resulted in sectarian conflict, while jihadist elements, now functioning under the umbrella of ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’, exploited the political vacuum to launch indiscriminate attacks on government targets, coalition troops, and their mainly Shiite religious enemies.

As Iraq fragmented, the provisional authority struggled to interpret and respond to the spreading chaos: counter-insurgency experts, often self-appointed, suggested that the coalition’s military operations were too focused on hard ‘kinetic’ encounters intended to eliminate pockets of militant resistance. In this view, conventional force-on-force concentrations paid insufficient attention to the wider effects of such violence in populated areas, particularly with respect to non-combatant casualties and the collateral damage inflicted. Instead, these observers argued, provision of public services and engagement with the population would help gain their sympathy, and that this would, in turn, isolate extremists.³ Around the end of 2005, a variety of experts and military officers gathered under the leadership of General David Petraeus, then commander of the US Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to revise and update the Army’s manual on counter-insurgency. Animated by the belief that the US and its commanders were too ‘conventionally-minded’, these writers drew inspiration, in part, from a range of ‘classical’ writings on counter-insurgency dating from the British and French experience of de-colonisation in the 1950s and 1960s. These soldier-scholars and their like-minded advisors in the military, academe, and non-governmental think tanks produced Field Manual 3–24 on Counterinsurgency. Utilising concepts of population-centric war and deep cultural knowledge of the enemy, and of the broader society from which it emanated, these officers and planners described a universal set of tactics that, they believed, could be used to effectively defeat any ‘insurgency’.

By the end of 2006, Iraq seemed on the verge of nationwide civil war. The Bush administration looked for a path out of the unfolding disaster. At the end of 2006, just as FM 3–24 was released with great fanfare, the administration appointed General Petraeus to lead a ‘surge’ in US forces in Iraq – an increase of approximately 30,000 troops. Armed with the new manual and accompanied by many of its contributors, Petraeus took over the war in Iraq in early 2007. Over time, violence in Iraq began to decrease, seemingly vindicating the new leadership and, presumably, the implementation of new tactics as defined by the manual. Counter-insurgency seemed to have solved America’s problems in Iraq, and a powerful new narrative emerged: the US replaced ‘conventionally’ minded commanders with allegedly more enlightened ones who, armed with new thinking about war among the people, implemented new tactics to win over the population. The new troops provided the necessary security on the ground to apply the new techniques of counter-insurgency, and to prize tribal chiefs away from al-Qaeda’s embrace in a ‘Sunni awakening’. As a result, violence declined, enabling Iraq to progress to elections, reconciliation, and effective self-government.

This narrative thus assumes recent history unfolding in a dialectic of challenge and response. Retribution for al-Qaeda and its fellow travellers via the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq followed swiftly upon the attacks on the United States of September 2001. Subsequently, the mishandling of the occupations of these fragile states saw a promising situation slide out of control. However, dynamic, innovative leaders capable of bold, decisive action saved the situation (at least in Iraq). This narrative achieved, between 2007 and 2010, quasi-official sanction. Military handbooks codified the creed of counter-insurgency and media commentary extolled its virtues.⁴ Counter-insurgency (COIN) advocates subsequently advanced the doctrine as an all-purpose template for future wars of similar kind.

It was the largely uncritical acceptance of this COIN narrative that forms the background to this edited volume. Even as the COIN myth evolved a number of military and academic commentators, who did not necessarily deny the part that effective leadership and new ways of thinking came to play in Iraq, came to question the theoretical assumptions and anachronistic use of history that seemed to inform the newly minted COIN orthodoxy. The emergence of the neo-COINs as a distinct ‘lobby’ within the Washington Beltway, promoted by entrepreneurial, but not necessarily always historically informed, enthusiasts, also prompted commentary. Critical voices particularly those with practical knowledge of serving in Iraq, either as soldiers or civil servants, expressed concern at the ease with which this lobby dominated the terms of debate, resisted any questioning of its premises, and sought to exclude from the debate those that might have presented alternative readings both of the accuracy of the COIN narrative of success in Iraq and the broader implications for policy that this intimated.

It was in an attempt to broaden debate about the theory and practice of contemporary counter-insurgency that guided the various authors who have contributed to this book. Its origins lie in a two-day seminar held in June 2012 at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum, hosted by the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. The chapters in this volume thus present the work of those participants. The seminar brought together a diverse range of views broadly critical of the received wisdom of COIN as it had evolved after 2002. Those involved included academics, journalists, former military commanders, and former civil servants or advisors with experience of Iraq and Afghanistan. They address the subject of COIN from different standpoints. It was the intention of the seminar to allow contributors to speak, where relevant, from their own experience, and from their own professional perspectives rather than through a predetermined academic framework. This pluralism is evident in the following chapters, which reflect the differing perspectives of the scholar, the journalist, the soldier, the civil servant, and the political advisor. The editors considered such pluralism vital to raising crucial questions about the viability of the contemporary COIN advocacy. Consequently, this volume raises questions about the theoretical basis and plausibility of counter-insurgency as a distinct concept, points to the shaky historical assumptions that underlie COIN, critically evaluates case studies of examples of supposedly successful counter-insurgency practice, and presents assessments of the accuracy of the existing COIN narrative of success in Iraq, and its questionable relevance for other arenas of future conflict.

Contributors addressed the problem of COIN from three general perspectives, which form the major sections of this volume: (1) the theory of COIN and its historical underpinnings; (2) COIN in Iraq and Afghanistan; and (3) COIN and future warfare. Each of these broad categories is a critical aspect of the recent debate over COIN and merits further discussion. While by no means a comprehensive assessment of COIN, the contributions of this volume represent the beginning of a broad challenge that, it is hoped, will continue to receive the attention of scholars and practitioners.

While the modern-day counter-insurgency advocates achieved great influence over policy making in the course of the last decade, the high watermark of their impact has begun to recede. Arguably, this has happened as the claims of counter-insurgency have come under scrutiny from the interrogative voices of the kind represented in this volume. Nevertheless, the intractability of ongoing practical problems, most clearly illustrated by the instability in Afghanistan that has long bedevilled Western forces in that country, underscores the criticism that the COIN template possesses qualities that are far from relevant and timeless.

Moreover, the power of the COIN narrative still exerts its potency in popular commentary, and remains, to some extent, embedded in influential sections of the armed forces and defence establishments in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.⁵ The overarching view of the majority of the contributors to this volume is that COIN’s conceptual underpinnings are weak, its practical claims questionable, and that COIN does not represent the way of war for the future. Irrespective, though, of whether we have ultimately witnessed the passing of the ‘new’ counter-insurgency era, the primary goal of this collection of essays is to represent a range of sceptical analysis, the validity of which informed readers can weigh up in their own mind against the claims of COIN advocates.

Notes

1.  David Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the U.S. Military for Modern Wars (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009).

2.  David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith, ‘Greetings from the Cybercaliphate: Some Notes on Homeland Insecurity’, International Affairs 81, no. 5 (2005): 925–50.

3.  In fact, US troops throughout the conflict routinely conducted engagement with the population and spent billions in reconstruction funds to build schools, sewage plants, electrical production and distribution facilities, roads, and hospitals.

4.  Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008 (New York: Penguin, 2009).

5.  See, for example, Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013).

Part I

Counter-insurgency: History and Theory

1

Minting New COIN: Critiquing Counter-insurgency Theory

Celeste Ward Gventer, David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith

Introduction

Over the last half-decade, counter-insurgency (COIN) rose to prominence as the dominant paradigm in American and British thinking about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and indeed for the presumed wars of the future. ‘COIN’ achieved such currency in the strategic community that it became more than a military doctrine, which is its nominal status. Instead, it became a universal panacea. It offered a strategy, a theory of warfare, a movement in defence and military circles, and a ‘how to’ guide for implementing an interventionist American and allied foreign policy, informed by a seemingly humanitarian orientation.¹

In recent years, however, scholars have raised serious questions about the applicability of counter-insurgency thinking to Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite initial claims that implementation of a robust counter-insurgency was chiefly responsible for the decline in violence in Iraq in 2007–2008, there is growing acceptance that this explanation is, at best, incomplete.² Observers have also noted that a variety of conditions in Afghanistan – including the absence of a competent and legitimate host government and the existence of insurgent sanctuaries in a neighbouring country – make counter-insurgency, as conventionally understood, difficult, if not impossible, to implement there.³ Partially as a result of these developments, COIN, like any intellectual trend, seems to have lost its lustre. For all the vast energy and money expended on fighting a series of counter-insurgency campaigns, the question is whether for all its initial promise COIN offers only meagre returns on such an enormous intellectual and monetary investment: mere pennies on the dollar?

But the theory and practise of COIN should end not with a whimper, but with a proper accounting of the past decade’s debates. This accounting should go beyond whether what we call COIN might be or, indeed, was effectively implemented in recent conflicts. It is also important to explore more deeply the origins and underpinnings of COIN and the reasons for its exceptional prominence in recent discourse. Given the significance of COIN, its undeniable impact on American and British security policy, and the inevitability of debate over future interventions, the theory itself merits closer scrutiny.

The debate will no doubt continue for some time, as the discourse of counter-insurgency and the terms of involvement in wars of choice appear with troubling regularity in Western military thought. This chapter is an attempt to begin a larger discussion by addressing a fundamental question: what is COIN? The examination begins by exploring whether counter-insurgency is a strategy, as has been asserted by many analysts and pundits. The analysis then proposes to examine the theoretical basis of counter-insurgency thinking and situate it in the context of military and strategic thought, pointing out some of the incoherence in COIN thought and practise. The study concludes with a discussion of the role that COIN has played in recent strategic discourse. Ultimately, this analysis suggests that the phenomenon of COIN, as it has been represented in contemporary debate in the Anglo-sphere, comprises a number of not entirely logically related features, but which when put together in a single package for public consumption enables a consoling narrative to be put forward that offers degrees of, not necessarily accurate, reassurance to be conveyed to both military and popular constituencies about the purpose of Western involvement in deeply problematic external entanglements.

Is COIN a strategy?

Since 2005 and in particular after the ‘Surge’ in Iraq in 2007, COIN became the defining orthodoxy governing the Western state military response to so-called low-intensity conflicts, small wars, and global asymmetric threats. Commentators widely discussed the concept of a ‘counter-insurgency strategy’. This phrase has been used extensively in the media and in larger discussions of US and allied approaches in Iraq and Afghanistan. A US Army War College workshop in 2007 was entitled ‘COIN of the Realm: US Counterinsurgency Strategy’.⁴ In 2009, The Guardian newspaper noted that ‘the US military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has quietly launched a new counter-insurgency strategy aimed at bolstering popular support for the government in Kabul’.⁵ The Obama administration famously debated, in late 2009, whether to ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan, and its two choices were presented as a ‘counterterrorism strategy’ or a ‘counter-insurgency strategy’.⁶ But what is ‘COIN’ and is it, in fact, a strategy?

In the broadest terms, inferring from the recent literature, it is reasonable to view COIN as an attempt to confound a challenge to established authority. This is a plausible though somewhat vague formulation. It contains the notion that an insurgency (from the Latin insurgo; insurgere to swell or rise up) is a challenge to the legally constituted government. It is not clear, however, from such a broad definition whether an insurgency has to be an armed challenge to authority. Can it be an unarmed challenge or even constitute any form of organised or disorganised dissent (occupying Wall Street or Greek workers demonstrating violently about budget cuts for instance)? The breadth of the definition worryingly connotes any potential opposition, peaceful or violent, as insurgent.

The terms insurgency and counter-insurgency are therefore generously wide in scope. Indeed, so all-embracing is the term, potentially, that any government, irrespective of its ideological and political composition, could be said to engage in permanent COIN to ensure the continuation of established authority. From such an all-inclusive perspective even non-authoritarian, democratic governments that wish to minimise discontent that might threaten their authority and legitimacy conduct counter-insurgency.

The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and its British counterpart are the most recent official articulations of COIN theory and helpfully offer more specific definitions. According to the Field Manual, an insurgency is a ‘movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict’.⁷ Consequently, counter-insurgency is the ‘military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat an insurgency’.⁸ This at least offers some greater specificity. However, if we insert instead the less euphemistic word ‘combatant’ in place of the term ‘insurgency’ and ‘war’ in place of the term ‘counter-insurgency’, we would derive the following statement:

War involves military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat a combatant.

In this way we arrive at a definition that ironically applies to all war. Yet the doctrine outlined in the Field Manual also asserts a uniform military response. The document tells us that ‘most insurgencies follow a similar course of development. The tactics used to successfully defeat them are likewise similar in most cases’.⁹ In other words, the Field Manual, while ostensibly providing technical guidance, seems to maintain that counter-insurgency is a universal strategy. This leads, then, to the further question: does counter-insurgency, as the set of principles set out in publications like the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and the British COIN manual, Countering Insurgency, represent a coherent strategy?

Broadly defined, strategy connotes the attempt to attain goals with available means.¹⁰ In a military context this entails the procedure by which armed force is translated into intended political effects.¹¹ It is a process of thought that, while guided by certain understandings of military planning, is certainly not, or should not, especially in a functioning democracy of appropriate checks and balances, be determined by them. This is because strategy requires clear answers to the following existential questions: What are we fighting for? How can we use the means at our disposal to help attain desired outcomes? How will we know when we have achieved these outcomes? How can we attain these outcomes at proportionate costs and without causing further problems later?¹²

Somewhat problematically, neither US or British contemporary COIN manuals nor the commentary by COIN specialists address these strategic questions. The COIN handbooks in particular do not explain why coalition forces are fighting in Afghanistan or remained, until recently, in Iraq. They do not elucidate the political object of fighting or how to achieve strategic goals, however they might be defined. They do not identify what success entails or offer any method for assessing proportionality. These questions are not raised or answered precisely, it would seem, because they involve or require a political judgement.

Any such judgement would rely on assessments of how armed forces can be used in circumstances that will never be repeated. But contemporary COIN analysis is silent about the political intent informing the recourse to armed force. Counter-insurgency as an understanding therefore cannot be a strategy. This point will be elucidated further in the discussion below.

Understanding COIN

COIN as doctrine

If COIN is not a strategy, what is it? COIN, nominally, is military doctrine. According to the US military, doctrine constitutes the ‘fundamental principles by which the military forces or elements thereof guide their actions in support of national objectives … It is authoritative but requires judgment in application’.¹³ Doctrine seeks to develop a set of agreed-upon methods by which the military will conduct its operations and a common language for doing so. Military doctrine encompasses all facets of operational activity – maritime doctrine, air power doctrine, land warfare, and others.

But what, it may be asked, does doctrine mean? Significantly, the term itself derives from the tenets and structure of religious thought laid out in a set of practises, or doctrines, that the official priesthood inculcates as the correct or orthodox path of belief. At its core, then, doctrine is a system of faith, and faith ought by its nature to be unyielding. Hence we describe someone who is rigid and inflexible in their orthodoxy as dogmatic, or more accurately, doctrinaire.

Yet ‘war’, Carl von Clausewitz, observed, is ‘more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to any given case’.¹⁴ Clausewitz contended that all wars are exceptional in their origins, shape, and practise. They are sculpted by their time and place. What governs instances of war, and the way the observer perceives them, is always different, reflecting the contingent circumstances of each case. At the same time, Clausewitz also maintained that in its ultimate purpose war is the same, the pursuit of political ends through violent means.¹⁵ Yet its character is always distinctive, formed by a unique mix in each discrete conflict of the variables of time and place and the trinity of passion, chance, and reason.¹⁶ Here lies a paradox that confronts all strategic formulation: if all war is unique, how is it possible to plan for it? How can military planners and policymakers make stable assumptions about the likely course of future wars they might confront?

To reiterate, all war is unique, yet all doctrine is – in theory – fixed. This paradox, it seems, can never be fully resolved. The course of any war cannot be predicted beyond the Clausewitzian formula of a known set of independent variables (passion, chance, and reason), which regulate all war. Yet how those variables will interact in each unique circumstance of time and place is always unknown beforehand.

COIN, according to its exponents, is a doctrine derived from the observation of historical cases. The core instrumental assumption of contemporary counter-insurgency doctrine is that, Clausewitz notwithstanding, there are distinct ‘types’ of war that are repeated, and one can divine universal prescriptions based on this typology. According to its COIN adherents, insurgencies are informed by a uniform set of ‘dynamics’.¹⁷ Consequently, ‘[i]nsurgencies, like other forms of armed conflict, are better defined by their associated methodologies than by ideologies’. Thus, ‘while causes change regularly, the fundamentals of insurgent methodology remain relatively constant’.¹⁸ For its advocates, then, COIN constitutes a military template that may be applied whenever a state recognises it confronts an insurgency. COIN thought maintains that there are enduring historical lessons that underlie and inform the success of anti-insurgent campaigns. In particular, all insurgencies, it is maintained, are informed by a common set of practices. The timeless dynamics of insurgency, therefore, are the key to the timeless response of successful counter-insurgency.

But such typologies are, at best, dangerous oversimplifications. Is ‘insurgency’ a distinct (and recurrent) type of war, and if so, how does it differ from other forms of internal conflict, such as civil war? What are the indicators that determine which type of conflict one is in? Should the US military maintain a doctrinal manual for all forms of internal war? Bernard Fall, one of the seminal originators of counter-insurgency thinking, questioned this practise of classifying hostilities:

The terms ‘insurgency’, ‘paramilitary operations’, ‘guerrilla operations’, ‘limited warfare’, ‘sublimited warfare’, etc. … We have gotten to the position of the doctor faced with a strange disease. Whenever doctors are faced with a strange disease they give it a long name. It does not cure you, but at least it makes you feel good because you think they know what they are talking about.¹⁹

This lexical thicket underscores the confused logic at the heart of counter-insurgency doctrine. Harry Eckstein, one of the most prominent scholars of so-called ‘internal war’, argued that

[t]he term ‘internal war’ denotes any resort to violence within a political order to change its constitution, rulers, or policies. It is not a new concept … Nor does it mean quite the same thing as certain more commonly used terms, such as revolution, civil war, revolt, rebellion, uprising, guerrilla warfare, mutiny, jacquerie, coup d’etat, terrorism, or insurrection. It stands for the genus of which the others are species.²⁰

Eckstein’s definition of ‘internal war’ is strikingly similar to the definition of insurgency in the US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. It is unclear whether the term ‘counter-insurgency’ is intended to be synonymous with Eckstein’s ‘internal war’, and if so, whether one should conclude that the Counterinsurgency Field Manual and similar manuals offer cures to internal conflict of any variety. This would be, at best, a bold claim for a military doctrinal manual. At least one academic analysis of the potential resolutions to internal wars concludes ‘with the probably accurate if pessimistic conclusion that the vast differences in the origins and nature of civil conflict make it difficult, perhaps even impossible, to achieve overarching solutions; they are inevitably too general to be useful or too specific to apply to most or many cases’.²¹ In other words, the uniqueness of such conflicts defies the development of a fixed, all-encompassing doctrine.

COIN and the uses of history

That COIN terminology is so imprecise and its assumptions depart markedly from the academic literature may have something to do with the paternity of counter-insurgency thinking. To a large degree, COIN is not a product of the academy, but emerges from the world of ‘practitioners’, a designation many modern COIN theorists use to describe themselves. Its intellectual luminaries – David Galula, Robert Thompson, Julian Paget, Frank Kitson,²² and others – were serving or retired British and French military or colonial officers. And, with some notable exceptions, modern advocates tend to follow this pattern.

The origins of COIN also go some way towards explaining the fact that modern COIN theory tends to derive its belief in the fundamental dynamics of counter-insurgency largely from a single case: the British campaign in Malaya, which took place between 1948 and 1960 against a determined Communist revolt. The Malayan Emergency, where British forces successfully extinguished the rebellion via an interlocking programme of military, economic, and social measures, constitutes the locus classicus of how a democratic state can win against a seemingly intractable insurgency through a policy of winning ‘hearts and minds’. COIN advocates thus promote a global Malayan Emergency-style approach to all insurgencies post-9/11.²³

Contemporary COIN analysis, following John Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam,²⁴ however, treats the Malayan case not as a historian might – examining the causes of the insurgency and the plausible reasons for the failure of what Richard Clutterbuck termed The Long Long War.²⁵ Instead, the campaign functions as a repository of methods and tactics that can be dusted down and adapted to the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Abstracted from the counter-insurgency conducted by the British in the 1950s, via Nagl’s attempt to show the superiority of the British Army’s adaptable small-wars organisational culture, is a socially and democratically palatable message applicable to contemporary COIN.²⁶ In this rendition, British success rested on the effective capturing of hearts and minds via programmes like the Briggs plan to build safe new villages and relocate the squatter population from the edges of the jungle and plantations. Meanwhile, the tactic of securing ‘white areas’ and then concentrating on the more troublesome ‘black areas’ after 1955 evidently carries its echoes into today’s clearing, holding, and building.²⁷ Today, in Afghanistan, this practise finds its operational embodiment in Provincial Reconstruction Teams consisting of, among other things, social scientists who ascertain the levels of social need and development of the frontier peoples.²⁸

The use of the Malayan Emergency as the model COIN campaign, however, obscures its selective use of the historical record. It ignores or obfuscates critical aspects of the campaign that were crucial to British success. Firstly, it is not without significance that Emergency measures were conducted under conditions of colonial governorship. The United Kingdom might have been a democracy but it conducted the ‘long long’ war as a colonial power. Moreover, as Karl Hack argues in one revisionist account of Emergency historiography, the prelude to ‘hearts and minds’ required forcefully ‘screwing down’ the Communists and their supporters.²⁹ That is to say, coercive military power preceded the socio-economic reforms that gave rise to the later hearts and minds mythology.³⁰ Notably, at the level of civil society and the British-administered rule of law it required recourse to a highly repressive Internal Security Act (ISA). The post-colonial nations of Singapore and Malaysia after 1965 have never repealed the ISA. Indeed, in these single-party-dominant states, the political elites maintain that the ISA constitutes the basis for social cohesion, internal resilience, and political stability. Nowhere of course do these new states advocate pluralism, accountability, and transparency.³¹

Little acknowledgement is made in modern COIN advocacy, either, of the utility of repressive legislation to curtail the activity of Communist front organisations or of the hard power underpinnings of classic colonial era counter-insurgency success.³² In terms of applying the lesson of Malaya globally, it is strange that COIN devotees never advocate that those conducting it introduce an internal security act, for example, as in the United Kingdom to curtail the front activities of jihadists in British mosques or on British campuses. That would indeed be applying the ‘lessons’ of Malaya.

Military doctrine or armed social work?

Evidently, what is distilled from the Malayan case is an anachronistic distortion of the historical record in order to support a much less coercive use of hard power.³³ This in turn supports a technical preference for grievance settlement over ideological confrontation. Probing a little further into the instrumentalist world of COIN, we discover that the vague talk of hearts and minds in contemporary doctrine conceals an interesting ideological syllogism:

•   All insurgencies are a result of social contradictions

•   All social contradictions are a result of local grievances

•   All insurgencies are a product of local grievances

From this syllogism a number of consequences follow. Leading COIN advocates assume, for instance, that all socially produced grievances are in some manner legitimate, and therefore deserve to be either remedied or appeased.³⁴ Remedy the grievance, advocates contend, and the insurgency is substantially solved. The practise therefore that current COIN ultimately embraces is a form of armed global social work. This can be illustrated by some further quotation from COIN analysts. Nagl and Burton argue:

Political disenfranchisement, lack of economic opportunity, and social alienation at the personal level are more widespread within these [Western Muslim] communities. For many of the young men who end up joining militant groups, the commitment to jihad is less important than the feeling of belonging and chance to avenge perceived indignities of the past. The militant ‘cause’ may be couched in Islamist terms, but it is not simply bred into individual would-be jihadists with tabula rasa minds. They have pasts, grievances, and personal justifications for their actions that run deeper than the veneer of extremist religion.³⁵

Similarly, John Mackinlay asserts: ‘[A]dangerous insurgency … usually has legitimate grievances or cause [requiring a] change [in] direction in order to remove the pressure of the grievance’.³⁶ While for David Kilcullen:

For Muslims in much of the world, there is no middle way: only a stark choice between jihad and acceptance of permanent second-class citizenship in a world order dominated by the West and apparently infused with anti-Islamic values. For many self-respecting Muslims, the choice of jihad rather than surrender is both logical and honourable.³⁷

Statements such as these may not always be wrong, even if they might be disturbingly simplistic. Nevertheless, because political circumstances are always different and war is ever changing, they are certainly not right all the time. Yet these statements and others like them issue ex cathedra from COIN thinkers. Moreover, we can see that such declarations are deeply political. As political claims they are contestable and the solutions they promote are not evidently applicable in each and every instance of insurgency. They are not timeless. And this leads COIN theorists into what may be argued are naive empathic stances that are the inexorable harbinger to poor policy, if not an outright misunderstanding of the purpose of politics per se.

COIN and the rationalist disdain for politics

Leafing through a contemporary COIN manual, the reader struggles to find political advice, goals, or ideals. These documents, as well as much commentary on the subject, shrink from the political dimension of war, that is to say the higher purposes for which wars are fought. Questions in the political realm are invariably complex in relation to the particular outcomes that an individual combatant seeks to gain, and sometimes dirty in that the achievement of goals can require deeply utilitarian calculations. Above all, the political aim requires the state – or other social actor – engaged in war to enunciate and clarify the values it upholds and wishes to secure.

COIN manuals share a resemblance with a financial guidebook, such as how to be a successful investor in 20 lessons, or a recipe book guiding the novice chef in catering for successful dinner parties. But, unlike these technical manuals for investing or cooking, the counter-insurgency ingénue can never be guaranteed the perfect COIN mix because the manuals ignore the key ingredient in all war: politics.

Yet COIN advocates prefer to present themselves as disinterested connoisseurs of combat, neutral observers untainted by the messy business of politics. They prefer instead the image of politically impartial managers or engineers who fix problems. In this self-presentation, COIN clearly represents a form of what Michael Oakeshott termed rationalism in politics. It leads to a particular apolitical style of policymaking that is bureaucratic, or more precisely technocratic, and which seeks to purvey a technology of government. It consequently attempts to eschew anything that seemingly compromises the status of the objective manager, the neutral observer, or the disinterested problem fixer. As Oakeshott explains, this view sees ‘rationality in conduct as the product of a determinate instrument, and asserts that the rational way of going about things is to go about them under the sole guidance of the instrument’.³⁸

The technocratic instrument in the case of contemporary warfare is COIN doctrine and as with all such rational conduct it seeks to break up human behaviour ‘into a series of problems to be solved, purposes to be achieved and a series of individual actions performed in pursuit of these ends’. The seemingly unprejudiced consideration of every project takes place from this perspective. As Oakeshott shows, however, the rationalist’s craving for this sort of ‘mistake proof certainty’ and the ‘instrumental mind it reflects may be regarded in some respects as the relic of a belief in magic’.³⁹

Two distinguishing features of the counter-insurgency discourse clearly illustrate both this instrumentalist approach and its anti-political consequences. Firstly, the anti-political character of the COIN ‘instrument’ is evident in its attempt to denigrate or dismiss the Clausewitzian view of war, namely, that it always has a political object. Thus, a London-based consultative group that met to discuss the development of British Army counter-insurgency doctrine concluded their attempt to reframe doctrine with the injunction: ‘Be wary of Clausewitz … some of his theories complicate rather than inform an effort to explain the complexity of the current version of insurgency’.⁴⁰ Nowhere was it explained why Clausewitz’s thought was problematic. Similarly, Montgomery McFate, the anthropologist who assisted the US military in formulating its field manual maintained: ‘Neither Al-Qa’eda nor insurgents in Iraq are fighting a Clausewitzian war, where armed conflict is a rational extension of politics by other means’.⁴¹

Why is Clausewitz, we might wonder, treated so dismissively? On one level of course such distancing merely reflects misunderstanding about Clausewitz’s view of war, assuming that the Prussian general was only concerned with third-generation or nation state warfare. This is a common error and one made by several well-known scholars in the past.⁴² There is, however, lurking within this nescience a more compelling reason for COIN analysts to reject Clausewitz. This is because Clausewitz emphasises, above all, the centrality of politics in war.⁴³ It is politics and the contingent political circumstances that go with it that makes war uncertain, and ensures war manifests itself in different guises on each and every occasion. Clausewitz thus clearly rejects the view that there is a precise, universal tactical, or rational instrumental template to guide conduct in warfare.

Secondly, the instrumentalist approach also dismisses ideology, or more precisely in the current context, the political religion that informs jihadist rhetoric and which compellingly outlines the political objectives of what some COIN theorists view as a condition of global insurgency.⁴⁴ Accordingly, leading COIN advocates like David Kilcullen arbitrarily maintain that ‘people don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks’.⁴⁵ Analogously, John Nagl and Brian Burton inform us that ‘insurgencies, like other forms of armed conflict, are better defined by methodologies than by ideologies. While causes change regularly, the fundamentals of insurgent strategy remain relatively constant’. Moreover, the ‘cause’ serves only ‘to motivate and energise the insurgent leaders and a core group of committed followers’.⁴⁶

Here, once again, the insistence on dismissing the ideological drivers of jihadism reflects an instrumentalist preoccupation not to engage with either values or politics. Addressing the ideology of the jihadist or that faith which may motivate the Taliban fighter in Afghanistan would require the counter-insurgent to articulate and defend their core principles; and establish the political outcomes that are intended to be attained and, just as importantly, to explain why. It is the ‘why question’ that the COIN analyst particularly seeks to avoid. COIN campaigners prefer instead to concentrate on the ‘how’.

The avoidance of the ‘why’ question arises from the incoherence at the core of managerial rationalism now replicated in COIN doctrine. This maintains that all problems can only be addressed by the instrumental mind supposedly bled of all prior assumptions and political prejudices. Again, as Oakeshott noted, it is a constituting error of instrumental rationalism ‘to call an activity rational on account of its end having been determined in advance and in respect of its achieving that end to the exclusion of all others, because there is in fact no way of determining an end for activity in advance of the activity itself’.⁴⁷ For the truth is that to understand the ‘how’ you must of course actually understand the ‘why’.

Technique as a substitute for political understanding

Concentrating on the instrumentalist how, without the non-instrumental why, invites increasingly opaque, jargonistic, and abstruse discussions of tactical minutiae about the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan and what COIN has achieved. Instrumentalists require a managerial vocabulary and flow diagrams to express their function. These functions can only be understood, moreover, by those inculcated in their techniques. Consequently, COIN requires population-centric approaches; it animadverts about centres of gravity; and it engages endlessly in anthropological accounts of how to win the confidence of tribal hinterlands.⁴⁸ The Field Manual’s diagrammatic rendering of COIN theory’s fundamental principles, shown in Figure 1.1, is one of many examples. The illustration somewhat simplistically divides members of the ‘population’ into three groups according to their presumed view of the insurgency, and implies a deterministic, causal link between counterinsurgent actions along ‘lines of operation’, and changed public opinion. Similarly, superficial representations dot the pages of both contemporary COIN manuals and the writings of prominent theorists.⁴⁹

COIN tactics may have some utility at the operational level, and might indeed be relevant in specific theatres of conflict. However, once the rationalist core of the doctrine is exposed, it becomes possible to challenge the idea that this localised tactical knowledge has any wider strategic application. Creating universal principles from local techniques, and abstracting them into a universally applicable instrument, has the worrying effect of not even producing a coherent recipe. Instead, the outcome is at best the spinning of bland injunctions and at worst the erroneous application of the instrument to a situation in which it does not apply, with potentially devastating consequences. Illustrations of the deeply problematic road down which COIN leads, in this respect, are not hard to find.

Figure 1.1 The Counterinsurgency Field Manual’s diagrammatic summary of COIN theory⁵⁰

In its fullest application after 2007, COIN involved military, governance, law and order, infrastructure, the building of Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), and development. Ironically, employing the lessons of Malaya to capture ‘hearts and minds’ led, by a process of mission creep, into the nation-building and economic modernisation agenda associated with the less than successful counter-insurgency in South Vietnam.⁵¹ In the 1960s, the prevailing paradigm in American political science held that the transition from tradition to modernity in the developing world demanded US intervention in South East Asia to forestall the threat of Communism. Walt Rostow observed in his classic study of Politics and the Stages of Growth that opposing communism would grant ‘to the rest of Asia a decade to find its feet and begin to fashion a framework of progress and cooperation which might balance in the long run the power and influence of … China’.⁵² In this understanding, political stability and security constituted the necessary conditions for investment in developing states, ‘finding the terms on which private capital flows can make a rational contribution to development’ leading to economic take-off and political as well as economic development.⁵³

In 1961, President Kennedy sent Rostow, one of his key National Security advisers, to South Vietnam to assess conditions and put forward recommendations. Rostow suggested that more advisers and equipment should be sent, and that a fundamental ‘transition from advice to partnership’ should be instituted with South Vietnam.⁵⁴ Any limited advisory commitment was thereby superseded by a nation-building and modernising agenda. By 1962 it was the ‘clearly stated objective of the Kennedy administration’, according to Robert McNamara, ‘to train the South Vietnamese to defend themselves’.⁵⁵ In the same year a RAND Corporation Symposium on counter-insurgency agreed, among other things, on the need to ‘identify and redress the political, economic, military, and other issues fueling the insurgency’, and ‘gain control over and protect the population which the counterinsurgent must see as the prime center of gravity’.⁵⁶

No more Vietnams? It seems that it is precisely towards more drawn-out involvements along Vietnam lines that much current counter-insurgency thinking leads. COIN methodology, it seems, consistently ignores or misreads the historical analogies, leading to increasing complexity and flawed judgements and commitments when advanced as a standard model for military guidance. It asserts a reductionist understanding that holds that insurgencies are simply defined by their ‘methodologies’, that is, their tactics. Accordingly, the respondent merely requires counter-tactics, and the problem is solved. It renders political judgement untenable because COIN can never identify what interests need securing with these tactics, and as a matter of instrumental rationalist technique there is no clear criterion to judge political success. By 1965, when the ever-expanding American commitment to South Vietnam was already proving ineffective, Hans Morgenthau provided a prescient critique when he argued that the American approach to the complexity of the war had instead been treated as a ‘self-sufficient, technical enterprise, to be won as quickly, as cheaply, as thoroughly as possible and divorced from the foreign policy that preceded and is to follow it’. He continued: ‘Thus our military theoreticians and practitioners conceive of counter-insurgency as though it were just another branch of warfare, to be taught in special schools and applied with technical proficiency wherever the occasion arises’.⁵⁷

Morgenthau’s criticism of COIN’s reductionist tendency to hold itself at the level of a discrete technical exercise finds its modern-day echo in the injunction of ‘clear, hold, and build’.⁵⁸ But this memorable slogan does not actually explain what requires clearing, holding, or building. More to the point, if it is recognised that North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces need to clear an enemy from Helmand province for instance, and then hold it at great cost, such a rhetorical formula never offers a means of verbally framing why this is being done, to achieve what end, and for how long. COIN analysis cannot establish, given its constituting instrumentalism, when NATO in Afghanistan will have sufficiently cleared, held, and built, and thus achieved its strategic goal.

Only politics can determine what success entails. But this is now a problem. For as we have seen, the technical rationalist discourse sounds plausible: it promises a universal panacea for insurgencies. COIN theorists try to solve the paradox of war with the technical grammar of an instrument. Such a technique appeals to both policymakers and military practitioners alike because it offers the seductive blandishment of off-the-shelf remedies to otherwise complex political problems: Morgenthau’s eponymous cheap, self-sufficient, technical enterprise.

The instrumentalist, reductionist, technocratic character of modern COIN thinking thus reveals an apparent contradiction at its very heart. The most basic tenet of the manual is that the population is the ‘center of gravity’.⁵⁹ This is the key assumption embedded in nearly all COIN analysis. Counter-insurgent forces must win their loyalty, which is the key to defeating insurgents, and this imperative must drive all operations.⁶⁰ From this assumed axiom flow other requirements, most notably the felt need to develop a deep understanding of the local cultural, linguistic, and sociological context, which, in Alex Marshall’s words, represents a ‘powerful military–anthropological tradition, one which remains an active part of most European counter-insurgency doctrine even today’.⁶¹

But COIN theory also instructs that the specifics are irrelevant: all insurgencies have similar dynamics and the solution to each is the same throughout time and space. Nowhere is this apparent contradiction more obvious than in the US counter-insurgency ‘strategy’ for Afghanistan that was leaked to the press in late 2009. As Ambassador Robert Blackwill observed, ‘I notice that in the entire treatise, more than 23,000 words, the word Pashtun, who are after all the primary objects of that strategy, is mentioned exactly once. Unless all references to them are redacted and extensive, those folks are Banquo’s ghost at the feast’.⁶²

When a set of tactical responses contained in a rational instrument like a field manual aspires to become a universal understanding, it unavoidably promotes itself as a closed system of thought, complete with insider jargon and shibboleths, available only to its priesthood. It becomes a doctrine or a rational faith.⁶³ Furthermore, when doctrine is accepted as faith in the corridors of power, it becomes a career ladder and a vehicle for professional preferment that closes down debate about alternative ways of looking at a security problem or situation.⁶⁴

Most paradoxically, when the influence of such a doctrine/faith becomes all-pervasive, and its claim to offer a value-neutral technical solution to a complex problem is ubiquitously promulgated, it becomes profoundly political and ideological. This is somewhat paradoxical given COIN doctrine’s seeming aversion to articulating political stances. Yet, exactly because it claims to be apolitical in approach, that is a self-sufficient exercise; it promotes as incontrovertible truth positions that are by their nature contestable and which are asserted, not by evidence, falsification, and empirical testing but as inherently self-evident facts. It further maintains, against any ‘biased’ critic, that the doctrine is tried and tested – the product of an objective, impartial, reading of the ‘fundamental dynamics’ of all insurgencies.⁶⁵

Conclusion

If COIN is not a strategy, and is based on a selective use of history and a confused theoretical foundation, how can we understand its prominence in strategic discourse? From what we have seen in terms of its promotion into contemporary discursive appeal we can discern that

COIN is, in fact, not just one thing, but a conflation of a number of not necessarily clearly related things.

COIN as a story

We can see firstly that COIN is a narrative. It is a story about triumph over adversity. To illustrate by means of a cultural metaphor, it is particularly suited to the genre of the Western movie and the core myth of American foundation, and the manifest destiny to overcome both nature and hostile natives to achieve its teleological purpose. In order to position COIN in this context a distinctive group within the US military framed a view of the Surge in Iraq after 2007 as the triumph of new thinking and a new sheriff over tired old ways and a feeble and decadent establishment.

Thus, in the context of the ‘Surge’, we are treated to a Hollywood epic: the old commanders, General George Casey and others, do not talk to the natives and things are going from bad to worse on the frontier. Fortunately, a new sheriff, Marshall Petraeus, strides into town with a moral purpose and clear ideas. He cleans out the local saloon (aka Multinational Forces Iraq) and figuratively rides out on his white horse with his trusty advisers to treat with the tribal leaders and smoke the pipe of peace. This achieved, a new bond is forged, the border is settled, and the outlaws (al-Qaeda in Iraq) are put to flight.⁶⁶

It is the plot of Rio Grande, Horse Soldiers, or that of the later John Wayne heroics represented in The Green Berets,⁶⁷ adapted for the needs of a new