COIN Confusion

The ongoing discussion of the attempted Times Square bombing in New York has been unsurprisingly colorful. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg invoked the old saying that terrorists only need to be lucky once, while their opponents need to be lucky every time -- and this time, we were "very lucky." The New Republic's Jonathan Chait and former NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism Michael Sheehan noted the incompetence of most plotters: Chait with the memorable assertion "terrorists are basically dolts," Sheehan suggesting that "lone wolves" are generally "as incompetent as they are disturbed."

Luck and incompetence are interesting concepts, especially hard on the heels of al Qaeda's failed underpants bomber, but they're hardly substitutes for good counterterrorism planning. Indeed, for Sheehan, chance favors the prepared. He lauded the NYPD for its counterterrorism acumen: "No other city even attempts to do what New York has accomplished," he wrote, conceding that "money and political risk" limit how far most cities can go when it comes to preventing what, at the end of the day, is a marginal phenomenon. But there are some obvious limits to the logic of Sheehan's point, and as the investigation into the attack deepens and more of Faisal Shahzad's suspected terrorist associates are rounded up inside and outside the United States, things start to get murky.

Case in point: the debate, early in Gen. Stanley McChrystal's tour as top commander in Afghanistan, over whether violence in Afghanistan is best addressed using counterterrorism (CT) or counterinsurgency (COIN) methods. Last fall, when the Obama White House was trying to decide how best to proceed in the region, pundits and policymakers alike were positively animated over the two and how they might be combined to mitigate the twinned challenges of al Qaeda and Afghanistan. Vice President Joe Biden pushed for a "counterterrorism plus" option, and Obama "dithered," finally settling on a compromise plan, the principal rationale of which was to neutralize al Qaeda. Michael J. Boyle, a lecturer in international relations at the University of St. Andrews, provides a highly readable account of the deliberations in a recent issue of the journal International Affairs. The title says it all: "Do Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency Go Together?" ...

Much more at Foreign Policy.