On CT vs. COIN
On CT vs. COIN
by Andrew Exum, Small Wars Journal Op-Ed
On CT vs. COIN (Full PDF Article)
In advance of the Obama Administration’s forthcoming review of policies toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, much of the commentary has focused on whether or not the Obama Administration will adopt a long-term, hugely expensive population-centric counter-insurgency (COIN) campaign or whether the administration will instead opt for a lower-cost counter-terror (CT) strategy. Fred Kaplan, in a typically well-informed piece for Slate, framed the debate as an either/or dichotomy in which the Obama Administration had to choose one or the other vis a vis Afghanistan.
The distinction between COIN and CT, however, is poorly understood. For one, there is no hard and fast dichotomy between the two — a fact that Kaplan and other longtime defense correspondents largely understand but which policy-makers must understand as well. If what Kaplan writes is true, and policy-makers are stuck thinking of their policy options as either/or propositions, we are in more trouble in Afghanistan than I thought.
