On Teaching the COIN Canon and Speaking Truth through Fiction

In “Teaching COIN to a (Mostly) Non-Practitioner Audience,” Dr. Robert Farley discussed his experiences teaching a class on counterinsurgency at the Masters level.[1]  His intent is to give would-be instructors “a sense of the promise and possibilities of a Counter-Insurgency course.”[2]  Nearly ten years into the United States’ multiple interventions following 9/11, the promise and possibilities of such a course should be self-evident to those who have devoted themselves to the serious study of counterinsurgency across the diverse practical and philosophical spectrum of its proponents and critics.  What remains are some serious questions that have been left unexplored in regards to the pragmatic and canonical choices in teaching counterinsurgency to practitioner and non-practitioner alike.

What is the value of teaching counterinsurgency—especially to non-practitioners?  According to Farley, knowledge of counterinsurgency will “help them get jobs and (more importantly) excel at the jobs they got.”[3]  With troop levels declining abroad and a rash of civilian hiring freezes in federal agencies and departments, these good intentions may be two or three years too late.[4]  Moreover, the value of counterinsurgency expertise may be flagging if history repeats itself.[5]  Few would dispute Rupert Smith’s contention that the wars of the future will be “amongst the people,” but the shadow of budget cuts will likely mean the Obama Administration will look to more limited and indirect options than the costly, time-intensive counterinsurgency proposed by some.[6]  Better advice to students might be to adapt that experience into a broader specialty less sullied in the strategic and political debates of the last decade such as “irregular warfare.” 

However, there are larger lessons to draw from that thing we call “COIN”—and they are not limited to counterinsurgency operations.  Farley writes, “If we know anything about counter-insurgency, we know that it fails when there is insufficient cooperation between civilian and military agencies.”[7]  Indeed, so do other operations of strategic import.  When the BATFE allowed thousands of small arms across the border and into cartel control during “Project Gunrunner,” it did so without cooperation of the Department of State, Central Intelligence Agency, and their counterparts in the Mexican government. [8]  As such, a select few damaged the credibility of an entire agency and produced a disastrous strategic outcome with considerable domestic and foreign blowback.  Teaching counterinsurgency is less about assembling a list of ‘what works’ as it is fostering creative and critical thinkers regardless of “pay grade.”[9]  These are not only the “strategic corporals” but also the strategic analysts, strategic FSOs, strategic policymakers, and strategic citizens who constitute the bulwark of national security.[10]

Secondly, what theorists do we select?  Farley offers his selection of ‘classical’ and contemporary counterinsurgency texts; John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus have theirs.[11]  However, choosing among the various theorists of counterinsurgency and their theoretical and practical frameworks—“population-centric,” “enemy-centric,” “leader-centric,” or the multitudes of others—matters less than the critical lenses we apply to them. With the uniqueness of every conflict and each stage within those conflicts, a counterinsurgency course must examine the inevitable gaps and blind spots in selecting such a reading list.  As Sebastian L. v. Gorka and David Kilcullen have argued, the American brand of “COIN” has been based largely upon the superficial study of a small, selective sample of conflicts.[12]  Furthermore, these conflicts are rooted in a long history of foreign intervention.[13]  If this history goes unexamined, students of counterinsurgency—particularly those who have not fought on its battlefields—will not grasp its ugliness.

Among the texts Farley selected for his course were two novels, Sadie Jones’ Small Wars and Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn.[14]  Farley also included the films The Wind that Shakes the Barley, The Battle of Algiers, and Stephen Soderbergh’s Che.  This broaches an important pedagogical question:  What is the value of fiction in teaching counterinsurgency to current and future stakeholders?

We have all read accounts of Pashtun tribesmen and their handlers in intelligence services making the liminal passage between Pakistan and Afghanistan; however, Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel Kim reminds us that—while some of the players have changed—we continue to relive the strategic and political decisions of a British India long gone from the map.  We can read the policy papers on the long-standing antipathies between Pakistan and India, but would they express the anguished legacies of colonialism and the tragedies following partition better than Salmon Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children?  Like any text of counterinsurgency, these two have their blind spots, but coupled with a broad multidisciplinary analysis they can give depth and complexity lost in Political Science journals and cube farms in Northern Virginia.

Certainly, misreading a novel or film can lead to a poor understanding of the conflicts they represent.  The famous—indeed, infamous in many circles—Department of Defense screening of The Battle of Algiers has been critiqued as giving the wrong ideas about what constitutes a successful counterinsurgency.[15]  The film’s director, Gillo Pontecorvo, was an adamant critic of the French intervention including the use of torture to—in contemporary terms—“dismantle the network.”  As interrogators piece together the pyramid of the insurgency, Pontecorvo casts a shadow of doubt on these confessions.  Very clearly, his sympathies lie with the meek Algerian man who ‘gives up’ another name, leaving us to wonder if the confession can trusted.  Has he turned over an individual with whom he had some long-standing grievance as has happened in even the most benign interrogations of Afghanistan or Iraq or has he simply said anything to make the pain stop?  Such readings are best accompanied with thoughtful and measured explorations of torture such as Mark Bowden’s 2003 article “The Dark Art of Interrogation” and Christopher Hitchens’ 2008 op-ed “Believe Me, It’s Torture.”[16]

More importantly, teaching The Battle of Algiers offers instructors and students in the United States an opportunity to explore their own sometimes-hidden, sometimes-overt enmities and prejudices as Americans who have lived through the conflicts formerly known as the Global War on Terror.  In undergraduate classes, it is not uncommon for a student to respond, “I wasn’t sure who to root for.”  I suspect this reaction is not unique to undergrads; even counterinsurgent extraordinaire Director of the CIA David Petraeus is renowned for his affection for General Bigeard and his paratroopers.[17]  At least for audiences in the United States, the French paratroopers may be a tempting protagonist when juxtaposed against the Arab nationalists of the FLN.  Cultural competency—so prided among civilian and military practitioners of counterinsurgency—must not stop at the recognition of difference but also extend to a critical examination of how we react to those differences.  How do we react to the wails of the casbah?  Is it alienating or do we see the creation of so many “accidental guerrillas” in a revolution against a colonial power every bit as entangled in religion and politics as was our own?[18]  What is our response to the Algerians’ hijab?  We cannot be trusted to speak truth to power if we cannot speak truth to ourselves about those different than us who we may leap to defend whether they ask for it or not.

The fact is that every genre in the counterinsurgent’s repertoire is itself a kind a fiction.  Each work is but a theory; each text is but a story told through a solitary and incomplete vision of complex conflicts for those who choose to study them as well as those who must endure them through duty or misfortune.  The ultimate lesson we ought to learn—and teach—when we take upon the study of “COIN” is that we must not only speak truth to power but challenge the ‘truths’ we find in the theory and practice of ourselves.