The Making of Michèle Flournoy

“This center (CNAS) began to house a group of emerging scholars who advocated a method of warfare called counterinsurgency — also known as COIN — a maddeningly different hybrid of politics and war that considered the political and economic development of an affected population to be a more durable guarantor of peace than killing insurgents.

It is well past time that we come to realize that this approach can be more of a guarantor of war than of peace.

Herein, we must come to admit that the “root cause of the insurgency” often is not inadequate political and economic development but, rather, our attempt to subjugate the desires of the population (maintain much/most of the status quo) to our ambitions (achieve substantial and fundamental state and societal change — and only in the direction we desire).

In our effort to “liberalize” these nations (to cause them to become, like us, more-open, more-accessable, more-useable, more-cosmopolitan and more-global economy-accommodating), we are likely to incur the wrath of certain of these more-conservative states, societies and populations.

In circumstances such as these, fighting and killing an unending array of insurgents — for a significantly long period of time — may be all that is really left to us.

Why? Because, as I have attempted to show above, our efforts can — and often do — cut against the grain re: these populations wants, needs and desires (as perceived by them — not by us).

Accordingly, if we wish to transform and incorporate certain of these outlier states and societies, then it would seem that we would need to look to a method other than the COIN approach described in Paragraph One above.