Every Insurgency Is Different

By PAUL STANILANDFEB. 15, 2015

CHICAGO — America faces a wide array of insurgencies across the globe, from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to the Taliban in Afghanistan, each one different in its aims, structures and strategies. So why do the United States and its allies take pretty much the same approach to all?

A “surge” briefly stabilized Iraq, but the same strategy failed in Afghanistan. Internationally backed negotiations succeeded in Bosnia, but have so far failed in Syria. Israel’s targeting of Hamas leaders has not degraded the group, even as the deaths of factional leaders have sowed confusion within the Pakistani Taliban.

This track record is spotty because the insurgents themselves vary tremendously, particularly in the social networks among their leaders, and between those leaders and the local communities in which they operate. All insurgents are not created equal, and so strategies need to be matched to the specific strengths and weaknesses of a group.

That said, it is possible to categorize insurgent groups as one of three primary types. The first, what we might call “integrated groups,” like the Afghan Taliban, rely on robust social networks to link leaders to one another and to local communities. They are resilient and cohesive: Despite various local feuds and internal disagreements, the Afghan Taliban have never collapsed into internecine warfare.

That cohesion helps to explain why the huge, decade-long American investment in counterinsurgency in Afghanistan has largely failed. Integrated groups can survive many of the standard prescriptions of counterinsurgency doctrine, leading to long, bloody conflicts. Only intense, often brutal, warfare, like Sri Lanka’s campaign against the Tamil Tigers, is likely to destroy or contain them.

Because organizations like the Afghan Taliban are unlikely to collapse quickly, governments need to consider deal-making as an alternative to protracted warfare, even if the groups pursue undesirable goals. They are cohesive enough to bargain with the government or international community, allowing them to implement agreements without splintering.

Insurgent organizations in another category, “vanguard groups,” have a tight leadership core but weak pre-existing links to local communities. They often emerge when urban, elite or foreign fighters try to mobilize parts of society with which they have few ties. Their cohesion lets them move fast and effectively, as the Bolsheviks did in Russia in 1917, or as Al Qaeda in Iraq did in the first years after the American invasion.

But unless they quickly embed themselves in local communities, vanguards are vulnerable to dissent and disobedience from below. That’s why Al Qaeda in Iraq was so susceptible to the Sunni Awakening in 2007. Similarly, the Islamic State has been able to rapidly expand as a vanguard, but its major weakness remains the possibility of counterrevolt by wary local allies.

Vanguard groups are also vulnerable to a wider range of government strategies than integrated groups. If their leadership is quickly eliminated or politically co-opted, the organization crumbles. The key to counterinsurgency against them, then, is to quickly target leaders while preventing these groups from rebuilding.

Vanguards present difficult dilemmas for peace processes, however: Even if leaders agree to a deal, they may not be able to persuade their local units to go along. Negotiating partners therefore need to actively bolster the leadership of such groups in order to prevent dissension and encourage unity — in other words, peace may require that a government support the leaders of a group it has long been fighting.

Groups in a third type, “parochial insurgents,” have a fragmented leadership splintered across powerful factions, despite existing under a shared organizational banner. They often emerge from loose alliances among distinct local networks. Their local ties make them militarily formidable, but leadership divisions leave them prone to internal splits.

The Pakistani Taliban is a classic parochial insurgent group that has been plagued by infighting, side-switching and an inability to build and maintain coherent strategies, even as it has been able to impose heavy costs on Pakistan’s government and society. These internal rivalries have triggered brutal violence against civilians to try to show a faction’s power, as in the group’s recent attack on a school in Peshawar. (Parochial groups shouldn’t be confused with truly fragmented organizations, like some of the non-ISIS groups fighting in Syria; such groups are fatally undermined by the complete absence of central leadership and are easily marginalized.)

Dealing with parochial groups presents a distinct challenge. Targeting the overall leadership — whether through violence or negotiations — is not very productive, since central control is weak. Killing top leaders may affect only their own faction, not the broader organization. Counterinsurgents are instead forced into long and messy campaigns focused on imposing state control at the local level.

Peace is also hard to negotiate and implement with parochial groups. Because of the weakness of central leaderships, local factions must be approached individually, an often protracted and byzantine process. Rather than grand bargains or overarching settlements, peace with parochial groups is built through live-and-let-live deals, cease-fires and local accommodations.

This diversity among insurgent groups means that some strategies that work in one place might be counterproductive in another. There is no such thing as counterinsurgency doctrine; rather, doctrines and strategies have to be tailor-made to unique situations, based on a careful study of the groups and the political, social and economic contexts in which they operate. Only then can America and its allies hope to stabilize conflict-weary regions of the world.

Paul Staniland is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of “Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse.”

COIN worked in Afghanistan — at least tactically

Carter Malkesian,

interviewed by Octavian Manea in Small Wars Journal:

 “To say that counterinsurgency didn’t work is not a fair assessment. If you look at a variety of places in Iraq and Afghanistan you can see that counterinsurgency tactics — particularly the ones related to the use of military force, patrolling, advising, and small projects — worked in pushing insurgents out of a specific area. From a tactical perspective, counterinsurgency worked.

“The argument that counterinsurgency didn’t work has more weight from a strategic perspective. The Afghan surge ended with the government in control of more territory than any time since 2005 and in possession of large and competent security forces. As a result, the government may yet succeed. Nevertheless, the Afghan surge did not end with Afghanistan stabilized or the government ready to stand on its own. On top of that, counterinsurgency was expensive and demanded thousands for troops, facts that will always darken its story in Afghanistan.”

Learning How Not to Scare People: The Paradox of Counterinsurgency

LILLIAN FIGG-FRANZOI, FEB 20 2015

Image by U.S. Army Garrison - Miami

With the official closure of the NATO ISAF mission at the start of the New Year in 2015, the West’s involvement in Afghanistan will demand analysis and reflection for decades to come.  As one of the most important intervention exercises in modern history, it will be essential to reflect upon the Afghanistan campaign, and its gradual unravelling. As a small contribution to this discussion, I reflect here upon a concept that, in the first decade of the 2000s, dominated the intervention’s strategic paradigm, nominally referred to as the “cult of counterinsurgency”.

The phrase “cult of counterinsurgency” was made popular by former the UK Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative to Afghanistan, Sir Sherhard Cowper-Coles. In his 2011 memoir-policy-critique, Cables From Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign, he outlined the axioms of counterinsurgency that may have contributed to stabilisation in Afghanistan from a security perspective, but through its domination of intervention strategy may have also contributed to the mission’s continued failures.

While the counterinsurgency doctrine helped war strategists adjust to street-conflict, in contrast to conventional battlefield conflict, and while the doctrine also identified the characteristics of new kinetic warfare, it has arguably overstretched itself when dealing with the very real elements that constitute the necessary “3-D” responses to modern instability, namely, defense, diplomacy and development. As pointed out by Cowper-Coles, counterinsurgency quickly became a misguided goal rather than what it was designed to be, namely, a tactic. Yet, In the case of Afghanistan, we now realise that the strategy of the long-term operation should not have been a military one that primarily involved countering insurgents (Ringsmose & Thruelsen 2010; Mikolashek & Kalic 2011); such a strategy now appears to have been overstretched.

At this pivotal point in twenty-first century global policy, at the closure of one massive modern intervention mission and the possible cusp of many more, is necessary to reconsider how much counterinsurgency can achieve and has achieved. In this manner, it is important to reflect upon the degree to which counterinsurgency operational failures are due to the primacy that counterinsurgency has in Western intervention strategies. Afghanistan may be an excellent case study demonstrating how the balanced 3-D’s—and not merely defence—are central to modern intervention success.

Afghanistan

Afghanistan is a distinct laboratory in conceptualising the 3D’s. Interlocking challenges of “state-collapse, radicalisation, population growth, social inequality and hopelessness” make necessary a future that includes a different posture than that which the armed forces adopted in the past (Surhke 2011, 10). The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was the de facto Western force in Afghanistan since 2001, acting as a multi-lateral, civilian-military organisation deployed to stabilise the country. Its mission was one of confusion, and even contention, between member-forces trying to negotiate and understand the soft and hard elements of their work.

It is important to understand the Afghanistan campaign within what is called a “New Wars” context. New Wars describes the modern form of warfare that places conflict within and amongst the people, so that battle-lines are not easily distinguishable. Mary Kaldor coined the term New Wars in 1999 and scholar Mark Duffield egged on further analysis with his major work in 2001 Global Governance and New Wars.The concept unyieldingly connects security with development. Through it, under-developed areas are understood as potential hot spots for conflict and tension, and the primacy of globalisation then classifies underdevelopment beyond a state’s borders as a potential domestic threat requiring potential action (intervention, or what we all came to know under President Bush’s Iraq’s invasion as “pre-emption”). All this is clearly illustrated in the goals of the NATO strategic concept where it is recognised that

crises and conflicts beyond NATO’s borders can pose direct threat to the security of Alliance territory and populations. NATO will therefore engage, where possible and when necessary, to prevent crises, stabilize post-conflict situations and support reconstruction.

In the Afghanistan context, this “New Wars” paradigm was overwhelmingly evident. The 2006 Riga summit clearly articulated NATO’s imperative that “there can be no security…without development, and no development without security” in Afghanistan. With development and security clearly intertwined, the question remained, what becomes the appropriate response. In theory, the popular response to New Wars was what became known as “3-D”, namely “Defense, Development and Diplomacy”.

In the context of Afghanistan, policymakers heavily relied on the Department of Defence to formulate and execute non-military tasks, which constituted elements of the non-defense 3-D approach. US military, in the words of Former US Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates, must “kick down the door” and match its ability “to clean up the mess and even rebuild the house afterwards”. Scholar Mark Moyar described that “the military would do well to enlarge its own capabilities for funding and managing development programs, to meet the large demand in this war and to prepare for going it alone in the next” (Moyar 2011, 16).

However, such an approach to intervention in modern warfare can be identified as contributing to its failure. Afghanistan needed a 3D strategy “with a better balance and better division of labour between military defence, diplomacy, and development” (3D Security Initiative 2009 (underlines graciously original)). Former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton articulated this sentiment, that the 3D approach should be used by the US to strengthen its national security policy. But she also admitted that these “D”s were not being well balanced. In 2009, correcting the balance became a firmer part of the Obama administration’s approach in Afghanistan. President Obama affirmed that in the 21^st century, “We’re going to have to use diplomacy, we’re going to have to use development.” Despite these sentiments, the Afghanistan campaign was dominated by the legacy of the military addressing the 3Ds through its “cult of counterinsurgency” which ultimately weakened the intervention’s success.

What is Counterinsurgency?

Counterinsurgency as a popular military concept arose long before the 3Ds mainstreamed into foreign policy lingo. In fact, the entire idea of what was coined “New Wars” is based on experiences that arose throughout the post WWII environment, throughout Cold War developments.

Counterinsurgency is itself an elusive concept. In the words of one of its founding fathers, David Galula, it “cannot be defined except by reference to its cause”. Summarily, insurgents in a specific context generally try to undermine the legitimacy of a host government. The engagement between insurgents and the forces countering them revolves largely around who has the population’s trust (Wenneberg 2011; Chandrasekaran 2011). Counterinsurgency therefore involves a combination of kinetic (that is active military) engagement of insurgents and winning population support. Kinetic practices include night raids, targeted killings and air or drone strikes which are then coupled with quick impact projects (QIPs) aimed towards winning hearts and minds (WHAM), peace support operations (PSOs) and civilian and military coordination (CIMIC) which aid in reconstruction and development. Through counterinsurgency, it becomes the role of the military and its soldiers to make the intervention, as a whole, a success.

Alphabet Soup for the Military

The ever-expanding alphabet soup of counterinsurgency (QIPs, WHAM, PSOs and CIMIC) epitomise how soldiers are to take charge of a non-ending list of non-military work in their operations.  Despite extensive modern training, the core issue here is whether soldiers are wholly unequipped to complete these assistance projects which in and of themselves are befuddling and contradictory.

Counterinsurgency doctrine places primary importance on “protecting populations”. According to US Special Operations Commander, Chief Admiral Eric Olson, counterinsurgency has become “a euphemism for non-kinetic activities” like those listed in the alphabet soup above. Olson contends that counterinsurgency doctrine is an oxymoron, because it dilutes its kinetic value by attempting to involve all sorts of activities with which the military is unequipped to govern. This includes development work, humanitarian assistance and political engagement. He further states that there is a false assumption that the military has vast civilian-sector capabilities, which covers governance-enhancement, forming youth groups, infrastructure building, teaching locals and even what has been called “armed social work”. But frankly, soldiers are misplaced to fulfil jobs like those listed in US-FM 324’s Tactics’ chapter, where in-depth cultural awareness of local wages is expected to accompany guerrilla-sweeps. The doctrine ultimately expects soldiers to switch back and forth between development and combat work within days or hours, which understandably confuses both soldiers and the effected populations regarding the military’s goals and the primary objectives of the intervention as a whole.

The Afghan mission, like many modern interventions, was consistently in need of increased civilian capabilities (Benashel et al 2009). These, if provided, could have better contributed to organising the alphabet soup of politicised development. Yet the important point to make is that this additional capacity should not have been incorporated under the umbrella of counterinsurgency. Public diplomacy, capacity training, understanding local social fabric, and infrastructure development must be understood as tactics and knowledge separate from counterinsurgency.

Learning How Not to Scare People

Fulfilling the duties of the alphabet soup should not only not be the responsibility of soldiers, but this expectation is also a fundamental problem. Soldiers should not be expected to commit to political engagement or be expected to affect Afghanistan’s social fabric. The Field Manual 324 asserts that soldiers should “serve as a moral compass which extends beyond the coin force and into the community,” but this seems to be not only naïve but dangerous to military and development work by conflating and confusing the aims and goals of specific missions (see Waldman 2009). The directive that “many people find rifles, helmets and body armour intimidating” so soldiers should “learn how to not scare [these people]” is not only an incredible directive in a Field Manual, but wholly disconcerting.

In 2003, ISAF was increasingly frustrated by the inability of the civilian aid apparatus to deliver appropriate assistance that would counter the Taliban delivery of public goods and support central government capacity. The 2006 Comprehensive Approach called for closer integration between development, governance and military strategy, putting the military in charge of delivering aid and public services. As Former Norwegian Defense Minister, Espen Barthe Eide said, “we must not shy away from robust action when such action is called for.” And it is essential to recognise that many military-based efforts provide the necessary foundation for development, but  development cannot be a tactic beneath counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency, with its short-term perspective of “secure and hold” is not conducive to building, which constitutes a long-term endeavour.

Rhetorics of War-fighting: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Disagreements over the extent to which Afghanistan is or should have been primarily a development project, a “Responsibility 2 Protect” intervention, a peacekeeping mission, or a defensive military strike, are long-standing and still unsolved. In fact, it can be argued that each country involved in the NATO-ISAF operation had a distinct view of what kind of mission they were conducting. States like Norway and Canada considered it primarily a politicised development project (Cabrera 2006; Ravndal 2009), with the UK serving in a peacekeeping mission (Cooper-Coles 2011) and the US engaged in a muddled military strike and nation-building project (Dobbins 2009).

Defining Afghanistan as a development or humanitarian mission may make the project more palatable, because soft projects for peace are often easier for domestic populations to digest and politicians to advance. But again, as poignantly stated by Norwegian scholar and critic Janne Haaland Matlary, “to die for a development project is hardly acceptable.”

This sentiment highlights the reluctance of major powers to downplay the military aspects due to the need to defend the rationale for their troops’ presence in the conflict area, and why their citizens are dying. For smaller countries, governments find it especially difficult to justify to their citizens why their soldiers are dying for a mission classified primarily in development or peace support operations terms.

Clearly, Afghanistan was never merely a development project; indeed, rebels and fighters still disrupt security and governance on a daily basis. However, framing the mission as primarily a military strike complicated the work being conducted because it became too heavily driven by inappropriate military strategies, with actors misapplied to certain areas of work.

As argued here, counterinsurgency is not appropriate as a development strategy; it is incapable of delivering a political victory. The entire project is both humanitarian and military, where “the military tool is simply one ‘normal’ tool in the toolbox of democracy-building and stabilization” (Matlary 2006, 108). The simple fact is that the military is better equipped to deal in “stick” approaches, such as countering insurgents kinetically, while diplomatic or development approaches function better using “carrots”, such as building local capacity, enhancing spaces for political engagement, and helping with appropriate livelihood projects. If we acknowledge that Afghanistan was not merely humanitarian or military in nature, but both, we may then be better able to recognise the dangers that have arisen in this case regarding the experienced counterinsurgency-as-strategy approach. In essence, military engagements used for humanitarian and development projects often contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the situation becomes over securitised, over-militarised, and politically constricted.

Admitting the Issue: Commitment and Prestige

A central element of the Afghan mission’s continued failure was the lack of commitment by international actors. It does not matter whether the mission was dominated by a hubristic military viewpoint or a naive development paradigm when neither of these have the necessary resource-support from contributing donor governments. While coordination and balance within the mission in determining its goals and tactics was obviously a problem, arguably the greater problem was the commitment of actors to make decisions regarding the mission’s fundamental nature. Without agreement on what the mission was about, it was a forgone conclusion that the principal actors would fail in contributing the necessary funding, equipment, training, and long-term perspective in achieving semblance of success.

Distractions from neighbouring Iraq conflict, dwindling domestic support for military engagements abroad during the financial recession, and changing political leaders all contributed to failures in the massive and complex endeavour that was the Afghanistan intervention. While solving the coordination issue of balancing appropriate tactics and thinking about the conflict in a manner conducive to mission-success is important, the operation will always be at a loss unless international commitment to the project is increased and sustained.

In this vein, it is ultimately naïve to discuss the 3Ds in a way that implies that all have the same funding, limelight and prestige. Defense has historically been the central stage of any country’s foreign policy. The current New Wars context, while demanding a change in how security is implemented, does not automatically equate to principal actors realising the necessity of changing military strategies to complement but not supersede parallel work in campaigns. In the same vein, asking the military to step down its activities in a violent context to make room for development and diplomacy work is no simple task. Telling a military official that his or her work on countering insurgents in a security context is not the primary goal of the mission will not be easy when agencies, ministries and actors are competing for resources. Nor is this easy to do when lives are at stake.

This all being said, scaling down the revered cult of counterinsurgency in our future interventions, recognising counterinsurgency as a kinetic tactic contributing to an overarching political goal, may be the only way to provide similar missions with a sense of real international purpose. It will be important for this purpose to rise above not scaring the populations we are trying to help, but instead putting the welfare of these populations directly at the centre of our 3D approaches, by better reforming our strategies and tactics to contribute to intervention success.

References

3D Security Initiative. (2009). “Civil society perspectives on US policy in Afghanistan”. 3D Security Policy Brief. 

Cabrera, R. (2006). “Adjusting military forces to the new security environment: the case of three middle powers: Australia, the Netherlands and Norway”. Real Instituto Eleano. Area: Security & Defense. 

Chandrasekaran, R. (2011). “Is NATO’s Counterinsurgency strategy working in Afghanistan? A case study”. Centre for International Policy Studies. Policy Brief No 11 

Dobbins, J. F. (2009) “Nation-building and counterinsurgency after Iraq” in Grimmingsrud, T. & Pedersen, H-. M. Small Nation, Big Difference: How the Norwegian armed forces should conduct counterinsurgency operations. Naval Postgraduate School.

Kaldor, M. (1999). New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Kalyvas, S. N. (2011). “New and Old Civil Wars: A Valid Distinction?” World Politics, Vol. 54 (1): 99-118.

Matlary, J. H. (2006). When Soft Power Turns Hard: Is and EU Strategic Culture Possible? Security Dialogue, Vol. 37: 105-121. 

Mikolashek, J & Kalic, S. N. (2011). Deciphering Shades of Gray: understanding counterinsurgency.Small Wars Journal. 

Moyar, M. (2011). “Development in Afghanistan’s Counterinsurgency: A new Guide”. Orbic Operations:1- 17.

Ravndal, J. A. (2009). “Counterinsurgency- when theory meets reality: Seminar report”. Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI).

Richards, D. & Mills, G. (2011). Victory Among People: Lessons from Countering Insurgency and Stabilising Fragile States. London: RUSI Publications. 

Ringsmose, J., & Thruelsen, P. D. (2010). “NATO’s Counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan: Are classical doctrines suitable for alliances?”. UNISCI Discussion Paper No 22: 56-77.

Suhrke, A. (2011). “Disjointed incrementalism: NATO in Afghanistan”. PRIO Policy Brief 11, no pagination specified.

(2007). “Democratization of a dependent state: the case of Afghanistan”. Chr Michelsen Institute Working Papers.

Waldman, M. (2009). “Mission Impossible? Deconstructing Counter-insurgency in Afghanistan”. Talk given at Carr Centre 4 November.

Wenneberg, R. (2011). “‘NATOs nye counterinsurgensy doctrine: kan den etterleves av norske styrker?”.Forsvarsakademiet Institut for Militære Operationer Stabskursus 2010-2011.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR (LILLIAN FIGG-FRANZOI):

Lillian Figg-Franzoi currently works in the Peace and Security Cluster, a division within the United Nations Office for Project Services, where she supports logistics and management of projects engaging in post-conflict and conflict-intervention environments. She has previously worked with research institutes and non-profit organisations in development, gender and migration. Her publications include journal article, Malahat, the State and the People: Opium Use in the Republic of Iran and online contributions on Complex Emergencies: Programming Based on Sexual and Reproductive Rights. She holds a MSc in Defense, Development and Diplomacy from Durham University (UK).

TAGS: AFGHANISTAN, CIMIC, COUNTERINSURGENCY, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ASSISTANCE FORCE, ISAF, MILITARY, NATO, PSOS, QIPS, WAR-FIGHTING, WHAM

The Strange Death of the Counter-insurgency Era

What lessons can we learn from the counter-insurgency era that spanned the US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq? As M L R Smith and D M Jones see it, COIN was more of a narrative than an empirical concept, it concealed ideologically-tainted modernization projects that worked at cross purposes with actual needs, and much more.

By MLR Smith and David Martin Jones for ISN

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The notion of counter-insurgency is an elusive idea that in general terms simply denotes the attempt to confront a challenge to established authority, but which came to function as a synonym for long-term external armed interventions by Western states, most notably in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the mid-2000s, ‘COIN’ was elevated to a position of explicit importance in defence thinking and became a source of endless fascination in analytical circles. The ‘classical’ thinkers of counter-insurgency were resurrected from a largely forgotten past and became an object of reverence. COIN became the defining military practice of the age.

Since 2011 Western forces have been withdrawn from major theatres of operation. In 2014 Western nations ended their major combat roles in Afghanistan. Once heralded as an almost universal formula for success in complex interventions, the costs, consequences, and controversies associated with the counter-insurgency era have left an ambiguous and unfulfilled legacy. Analytical opinion has already moved on. The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan that once loomed large in political life have already begun to fade from view, displaced by new and different crises on the world stage. Few have stopped to ponder the aftermath. Now that most of the troops have gone, what should we make of the ambiguous COIN era?

In particular, commentary still struggles to answer the most fundamental question: what, exactly, is counter-insurgency? COIN’s ambivalent character is partly explained by the lack of clarity of the term it is intended to counter: ‘insurgency’. Analysts and practitioners have deployed terms as various as small wars, irregular war, unconventional war, guerrilla or revolutionary war in an attempt to capture this indistinct phenomenon. These various terms have rarely succeeded in clarifying what precisely an insurgency is. Accordingly, the notion of counter-insurgency is rendered equally obscure and malleable, one that can cover anything from policing operations to large-scale military combat.

COIN as narrative

Dissecting the term counter-insurgency reveals not so much a concept as a narrative. Its actual meaning may be contested, but as an explanatory mechanism through which the past can be filtered, it becomes a powerful tool. For example, between 2007 and 2011, the COIN narrative maintained that the confusion and complexity of Iraq’s post-invasion civil strife could be reduced to a single understanding: ‘an insurgency’. This required applying the recently re-discovered tactics of classic population-centric Cold War counter-insurgency, distilling them into The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The decline in violence in Iraq after the 2007 ‘surge’ seemed to vindicate the approach. Irrespective of a genuine causal connection, Western militaries extolled the virtues of COIN. The counter-insurgency school became an intellectual movement, advancing through the corridors of power, think tanks and academe.

The narrative power of COIN lay not only in that it offered a simple, if deceptive, explanation of the decrease in violence in Iraq after 2007 but that it purported to identify recurrent patterns of conflict that yielded enduring tactical lessons for operational conduct. This claim rested on the analysis of supposedly ‘classic’ counter-insurgency campaigns, most notably the British conduct of the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960) and French practice during the Algerian War (1954–1962). Other cases also made appearances in the narrative, either as positive or negative examples. These included the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya (1952–1960), the Northern Ireland conflict (1968–1998) and Vietnam (1965–1975). The somewhat arbitrary conflation of these diverse conflicts under the rubric of COIN gave historical veracity to the narrative.

COIN as apolitical science

Thus, COIN’s centrality to contemporary debate over armed conflict derived from the apparent proof that past practice yielded lessons for current and future wars. That the theory identified a distinct form of conflict, characterised as insurgency, led naturally to the assertion that a series of palliative methods and core operational principles could be implemented that would, if correctly applied, ensure success. These practices invariably included: securing the loyalty of the population; grievance reduction; the integration of civic action plans; democracy and human rights promotion; and the minimum application of military force in overarching programmes described in terms of ‘clear, hold, and build’. This emphasis on technique, however, came at the expense of the contingency of political decision-making that always gives rise to war and which exerts a continuous influence over military operations.

The methodology of COIN, therefore, reflected an attempt to scientifically rationalise warfare into a series of steps or procedures, promoting the technical ‘how’, over the political (and more complicated) ‘why’. The overriding concern for the ‘how’ of operational conduct thus pre-empted vital strategic questions about proportionality: for example, what crucial political values are at stake in interventions and what costs are worth incurring to defend them? The ‘why’ question is political and depends upon contingent circumstances. COIN theory not only had no answer to the question, it never saw fit to even pose it.

The ideology of COIN

This leads onto another of the characteristics of the COIN advocacy, that although it eschewed overtly political statements, it was, paradoxically, highly ideological. On the surface, COIN theory wished to present itself as apolitical: offering an historically proven set of techniques for action across time and space. According to this understanding, counter-insurgency responded to the timeless dynamics of insurgency with an equally timeless set of rules for action. Such claims to universal applicability, however, concealed a normative project, namely, modernization.

Though remaining unarticulated, the ultimate goal of counter-insurgency theory as it evolved in the United States and Europe after 2003, was to propel conflicted societies mired in customary practice or authoritarian political cultures along the road of socio-economic improvement and democratic development. Yet, the question of whether non-Western, tribal and ethno-religiously divided political cultures in the Middle East or South Asia were susceptible to such nation-building schemes and worth the long-term costs of Western efforts in modernizing them was never asked. Buried within Western counter-insurgency discourse was an ideology, which asserted that successful nation building would facilitate a liberal democratic ‘end of history.’

Mythologising the past

This brings us to a final characteristic of counter-insurgency thinking, which is that its underlying end-of-history teleology exhibited a capacity to mythologise the past, disfigure historical understanding and obscure complexity. The promotion of an assumed British expertise in small war and counter-insurgency evinced all these limitations. Analysts repeatedly credited the British armed forces with an almost gnostic counter-insurgency expertise based on their experience with colonial warfare, particularly in winning over the population through techniques of minimum force and hearts and minds. Rarely was this reputation scrutinised. Commentators simply assumed the practice they needed to demonstrate.

The British armed forces never officially extolled any innate expertise in COIN. Yet the constant repetition by external commentators of a British facility for this supposedly distinctive form of warfare meant that by the first decade of the twenty first century sections of the British military and political establishment came to assume that they did indeed possess a distinctive competence in this sphere. Prior to the end of the Cold War, the armed forces tended to view its colonial encounters in terms of orthodox demonstrations of hard power to curtail rebel activity. As a consequence of buying into this myth, when shortcomings in British military interventions became evident, most notably in southern Iraq in the mid-2000s, commentators expressed dismay at the demise of this non-existent tradition of COIN excellence.

Such myth making, moreover, obscured a more prosaic but important reality, namely that Britain had prevailed in many of its ‘small’ wars, not solely because of innovative tactics on the ground, but primarily as a result of a government commitment to see these campaigns through so that stipulated political objectives were met. Ironically, COIN’s cherry picking of the historical record misrepresented the tactical proficiency that the British did possess. This proficiency, far from demonstrating a flair for minimum force, invariably exhibited a talent for escalation into the dark arts of intelligence-led Special Forces operations and the penetration of rebel networks—from Malaya to Northern Ireland to the back streets of Baghdad. This is where Britain’s capacities really lay and continue to reside.

Conclusion

Ultimately, what a careful unpacking of counter-insurgency illustrates is a simple but important truth: COIN-think is symptomatic of a fallacy at the heart of much contemporary Western social inquiry, which is the attempt to impose a structure on the contingent complexity of the past. These structures of thought were never present at the time. In this respect, counterinsurgency ‘theory’ is little different from many other attempts to read the past through an understanding of a social or political ‘science’ as if it were possible to identify timeless patterns, lessons and principles. In this regard, counterinsurgency is a distorting lens that narrows an appreciation of the past, over-simplifies the present and over-determines the future. COIN is therefore a false narrative and should not be regarded as a formula for prescribing the principles of action to be used in future wars. COIN-centric readings of history, like all grand social science theorising, should be treated with scepticism.

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M.L.R. Smith holds the Chair in Strategic Theory, Department of War Studies, King’s College London. His book, co-authored with David Martin Jones, The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency: Strategic Problems, Puzzles and Paradoxes will be published in May 2015 by Columbia University Press.

David Martin Jones is Visiting Professor, Department of War Studies, King’s College London. His book, co-authored with M.L.R. Smith, The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency: Strategic Problems, Puzzles and Paradoxes will be published in May 2015 by Columbia University Press.

Learning from the CIA's Village Defense Program in South Vietnam

Local defense forces and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan: learning from the CIA's Village Defense Program in South Vietnam

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DOI:

10.1080/09592318.2014.959772

Jon Strandquist^a*

pages 90-113

Publishing models and article dates explained

• Received: 26 Jan 2013
• Accepted: 5 Jun 2013
• Published online: 12 Dec 2014

Article Views: 190

Abstract

This research note makes the case that if the US and its international allies are to successfully use ‘Local Defence Forces’ (LDF) to overcome counterinsurgency constraints in Afghanistan, current initiatives need to be significantly modified. A key issue is that the Village Stability Operations/Afghan Local Police (VSO/ALP) LDF program is unlikely to be effective in filling security gaps in rural Afghanistan because, much rhetoric to the contrary, it is essentially focused on militarily combating the insurgency rather than fully developing local communities as counterinsurgency resources by winning their support for the Afghan central government. The CIA's Village Defense Program in South Vietnam, a counterinsurgency program that has thus far received cursory attention in current LDF literature, provides a useful counterpoint. Through a comparison of the VDP and VSO/ALP operational patterns, implications are drawn for current and future US counterinsurgency practice employing LDF components.

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Keywords:

• local defence forces, 
• Afghan Local Police, 
• US Special Operations Forces, 
• counterinsurgency, 
• Central Intelligence Agency, 
• Vietnam

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