Front Row Seat: Watching COIN Fail in Afghanistan
Front Row Seat: Watching COIN Fail in Afghanistan by Evan Munsing, War on the Rocks
… Current counterinsurgency doctrine presumes a national solution to local problems: that a national army, usually with the aid of local police or militias, can come into a fractious area and convince unfriendly locals to ally themselves with the state by bringing security and certain amenities like electricity or economic programs. This strategy requires a functioning and legitimate government and a skilled and disciplined military that can effectively target insurgents who hide amongst the civilian population without causing collateral damage. It assumes that all enemy strongholds must be retaken and that unless the insurgency is defeated in all its parts, the nation cannot survive.
Rather than allowing the Afghans to find their own solutions to the insurgency, the United States bequeathed its ally a reductionist approach. Thus, “the insurgents” were identified with the “Taliban” and the “Taliban” with those who most closely resemble the Taliban of Mullah Omar’s failed state. Although the insurgency is strengthened, fueled and spread partly through religious networks, it is fundamentally a localist and anti-government movement. Conservative rather than radical and tribal rather than religious, the insurgency is less a religious or political organization and more a classic peasant revolt of isolated, anti-modernist and largely landless individuals. These individuals’ only familiarity with the central government comes from being taxed and subjected to its military force. The dispersed and decentralized nature of the insurgency is not, as is sometimes argued, evidence of what is fashionably termed “chaoplexy” or otherwise indicative of an advanced cell-based structure. Rather, the insurgency is dispersed and decentralized because there are too many actors with too many different personal agendas dispersed over too large an area with too few communication tools for it to be a unified or coherent political opponent—and it is precisely this that makes it so durable and so difficult to defeat using our current policies…
Commentaries like this about ‘COIN’ failing or ‘peasant revolts’ or whatever fool thing the intelligentsia dreams up have driven me beyond the edge of rational argument and politeness. The only thing left is parody.
There is wounded Afghanistan, gravely torn and barely clinging to life. The noble American doctor performs surgery using all of his skill and even some things never thought of before, brilliant things the result of inspiration. The surgeon struggles long, without rest or pause. The patient’s will to live is incredible. He should have died repeatedly but his strength and the doctor’s skill and determination combine to keep him clinging to life. But alas, despite the heroic struggle of both doctor and patient, Afghanistan expires. The doctor is crushed but realistic. He draws the obvious conclusions and, as he steps away from the table, he says to the Pak Army/ISI surgical assistant who stuffed 3 socks in the patients mouth at the start and has worked up a sweat pinching shut the patient’s nostrils throughout the procedure, “Well, I guess surgery doesn’t work.”
The problem is not that Coin does not work, the problem is that we think of insurgency as something an insurgent coerces or brainwashed a population to do rather than recognizing insurgency as a natural condition that grows within a population when certain negative perceptions of the governance affecting their lives grow to an intolerable level.
COIN works fine when done by the actual system of governance at fault, and when focused on curing (rather than punishing or bribing or suppressing the symptoms) the actual drivers of those conditions.
Products like the recent RAND study that define “winning” as government remaining unchanged and the insurgent organization defeated are counterproductive at best.
The problem for the US in Afghanistan is that the conditions we established up front as best for us, and then dedicated ourselves to preserve are also the primary drivers of the current conflict. We are trapped in a Catch-22 of our own design.
What this author offers is merely a different route into the briar patch, not a better one.
“Current counterinsurgency doctrine presumes a national solution to local problems: that a national army, usually with the aid of local police or militias, can come into a fractious area and convince unfriendly locals to ally themselves with the state by bringing security and certain amenities like electricity or economic programs.”
Current COIN theory, one might suggest, is based on the understanding that:
a. Insurgencies, in the modern world, are often considered to be problems for the world at-large.
b. Insurgencies, today, are often considered to be pathologies of states and/or societies that are not adequately organized, ordered and oriented along modern western political, economic and social lines. And that, accordingly, in order to “cure” and curtail these unnecessary maladies,
c. One need only step in and help organize, order and orient — along modern western lines — these outdated, malformed (and, therefore, malfunctioning) states and/or societies.
Now to the question: Should what has been portrayed by me above, if correct, be properly understood as (1) “local problems” requiring (2) “a national solution?”