Interviewing General David Petraeus, the commander widely seen as the architect of the revival of the theory and practice of counterinsurgency in the U.S. armed forces, the journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran found that Petraeus “was defining COIN to include every military tactic in his arsenal except the use of nuclear weapons.”1 Chandrasekaran evidently had some reservations about Petraeus’s claims for COIN. His skepticism was warranted because shortly after Barack Obama was elected to the U.S. presidency in 2008, he initiated a high-level debate about whether a comprehensive COIN approach to the U.S.-led NATO effort in Afghanistan should be adopted and in particular whether troop numbers should “surge.” Convinced of the success of counterinsurgency and surge tactics in Iraq, Petraeus and his top commanders assured the new administration of COIN’s potential efficacy in Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, a group of civilian advisers and politicians in the administration led by Vice President Joe Biden questioned this line of reasoning. They argued that shifting sectarian alliances and the Sunni tribal awakening that rejected al-Qaeda’s indiscriminate violence in Iraq accounted for the reduction in violence in the country between 2006 and 2007, not COIN tactics.2 Moreover, as Chandrasekaran observed, the Afghanistan challenge demanded something more than separating the warring factions in a civil war. The challenge involved persuading the traditionally rebellious Pashtuns to “cast their lot with the Karzai government instead of [with] the insurgency.” He continued: “The problem was that Karzai’s administration was often more rapacious and corrupt than the Taliban. How could COIN work when the locals were turning to the insurgents to protect them from their supposed protectors?”3 A memorandum from Biden to Obama following a conference on Afghanistan among the president’s top aides and military staff in October 2009 crystalized the concerns within the administration. Biden argued:
I do not see how anyone who took part in our discussions could emerge without profound questions about the viability of counterinsurgency. Our military will do its part: They will clear anything we ask them to clear. They will hold anything we ask them to hold. But no one can tell with conviction when, and even if, we can produce the flip sides of COIN that are required to build and transfer responsibility to the Afghans: an effective and sustainable civilian surge, a credible partner in Kabul, basic governance and services, and competent Afghan security forces.4
Biden’s reservations were underlined two years later, in May 2011, when a Navy SEALS operation, sanctioned by President Obama, brought al-Qaeda’s emir, Osama bin Laden, “to justice.”5 The al-Qaeda jihadist network in Afghanistan that originally nurtured the 9/11 conspiracy had been the ostensible justification for the U.S. invasion in late 2001 and the subsequent NATO coalition operation to stabilize the Karzai regime.6 But with the elimination of bin Laden and the remnants of al-Qaeda’s Afghan organization “in tatters,” the rationale for a long-term counterinsurgency commitment was rendered increasingly elusive.7 The fact that a precision intelligence and Special Forces operation had traced bin Laden to a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, further questioned what a long, costly COIN campaign in Afghanistan was actually meant to achieve.
In fact, raising this question reveals the constituting difficulty in defining just what counterinsurgency is as a concept and practice. Despite driving military operations in Afghanistan and before that in Iraq, exercising a dominant influence on the military thought and planning of the major Western powers, as well as fomenting a thriving intellectual industry in academia and think tanks,8 COIN remains an ambiguous concept. The puzzle that this chapter addresses therefore is simple: What precisely is COIN? The chapter examines the assumptions and relevance of the thinking behind understandings of contemporary counterinsurgency as they have evolved among the major military actors in the West, notably the United States and United Kingdom. In particular, it poses a crucial question: Is COIN a military doctrine or a strategy? Advocates of counterinsurgency contradictorily imply that COIN is both. What this chapter demonstrates is that the effect of much COIN advocacy reduces the highly contingent nature of war, highlighted in the previous chapter, to a series of techniques. Whenever states confront conflicts defined as insurgencies, the argument goes, the application of these techniques is warranted. This assumption preempts difficult strategic judgments about how to ensure that proportional means are directed to achieve political ends in specific circumstances.
Is Counterinsurgency a Strategy?
The so-called Surge in Iraq in 2007 was the seminal event in modern counterinsurgency. The policy of doubling the number of troops and deploying them in population-centric roles rather than only in kinetic operations was widely accredited with reducing the violence and returning Iraq to a condition of security and stability.9 As a consequence of this credit, COIN became the defining orthodoxy governing the Western state military response to purportedly low-intensity conflicts, small wars, and global asymmetric threats. Kimberley Kagan summed up the orthodoxy that emerged after 2007: “The Petraeus doctrine was innovative not so much in its emphasis on non-kinetic operations, as in recognizing the essential synergy between the kinetic tasks of providing security to the population and the non-kinetic tasks that had already been receiving the attention of American commanders and civilian leaders.” Kagan added: “Petraeus emphasized that establishing security—with all of the risks, losses, and damage to the local population and their infrastructure attendant on combat—was not a distraction from the ‘main effort’ of the non-kinetic operations, but a key element that first made those operations possible and helped them succeed.”10
Kagan represented General Petraeus’s campaign as a “doctrine” of thought and action. Somewhat differently, other commentaries considered it a “counterinsurgency strategy.” Both the media and larger discussions of U.S. and Coalition approaches in Iraq and Afghanistan used this phrase extensively. Thus, a U.S. Army War College workshop in 2007 was entitled “COIN of the Realm: US Counterinsurgency Strategy.”11 In a similar vein, in 2009 the Guardian reported that “the US military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has quietly launched a new counterinsurgency strategy aimed at bolstering popular support for the government in Kabul.”12 And as we have seen, in October 2009 the Obama presidency debated whether a surge should be applied to Afghanistan. The choices were presented in terms of either a “counterterrorism strategy” or a “counterinsurgency strategy.”13 Doctrine and strategy, conventionally understood, are very different things. So what is COIN: doctrine or strategy? Let us first consider whether COIN can be construed as a strategy rather than a doctrine.
In the introduction, we saw that COIN may be defined as an attempt to confound a challenge to established authority. It builds upon the notion that an insurgency (from the Latin term insurgere, “to swell or rise up”) is a challenge to the legally constituted government. Insurgency is thus a somewhat nebulous term. For instance, it is not clear from such a capacious definition whether an insurgency has to be an armed challenge to authority. Can it be an unarmed challenge or constitute any form of dissent ranging from peaceful demonstrations to civil riots? Construing such action as insurgent in character, the definition stretches the concept to embrace any potential opposition, peaceful or violent. In theory, then, the terms insurgency and its antonym counterinsurgency are so all encompassing that any government, irrespective of its ideological and political composition, might be said to exist in a permanent condition of counterinsurgency to ensure its continuing authority. From such a stretched conceptual perspective, nonauthoritarian, democratic governments that minimize discontent that threatens their authority and legitimacy conduct counterinsurgency.14
Fortunately, The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and its British Army counterpart narrow the meaning of how counterinsurgency is understood in policy-making circles. These publications provide official statements of COIN theory and offer specific definitions. According to the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, an insurgency is “an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict.” Counterinsurgency consequently is the “military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat an insurgency.”15 Such definitions offer some specificity to an otherwise elastic term. If, however, the less-euphemistic word combatant were inserted in place of the term insurgency and war in place of counterinsurgency, we would arrive at the following statement: “War involves military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat a combatant.”
By this somewhat circuitous route, we arrive at a definition that applies, in fact, to all war, not simply to those conflicts that are termed insurgences. Yet the Field Manual calls for a uniform military response to all cases of what it has defined as an insurgency. The document informs us that “most insurgencies follow a similar course of development. The tactics used to successfully defeat them are likewise similar in most cases.”16 In other words, although the Field Manual ostensibly provides guidance for military conduct, it seems to maintain that counterinsurgency is a universal strategy—that is to say, a method that can be applied across time and space, regardless of contingent factors. The question follows: Does counterinsurgency as the set of principles set out in publications such as the Counterinsurgency Field Manual and the British army manual Countering Insurgency represent a coherent strategy?
As we defined strategy in the introduction to this volume, it denotes the attempt to attain goals with available means.17 In a military context, this attempt entails the process by which armed force is translated into intended political effects.18 Strategy is a practice guided by military planning that should not, at least in a functioning democracy of appropriate checks and balances, be determined by the military. This is because strategy requires answers to the following existential questions: What principles, values, and outcomes are being sought? How can the means available help attain desired outcomes? How will it be known when those outcomes have been achieved? How can those outcomes be achieved or maximized,19 at what proportionate cost and without causing further problems later?20 Ultimately, strategy in war can be distilled into two simple questions: For what is one fighting, and is that object likely to be worth the fight?
These questions are simple, but by their value-laden nature difficult to answer. Problematically, despite asserting COIN to be a strategy for combating insurgencies across time and space, neither current U.S. and British counterinsurgency manuals nor the commentary by COIN specialists addresses these strategic questions. Nowhere in these works on COIN do they expound why forces should be confronting insurgencies. Why, for instance, were Coalition forces fighting in Afghanistan, or why did they remain in Iraq? These works do not identify the political object of fighting or how to achieve strategic goals, however defined. They do not identify what success entails or offer any method for assessing proportionality. These questions are not raised or answered, it would seem, because they involve or require a political judgment. If, as we outlined in chapter 1, all wars are unique, all political judgments are contingent on the inimitable social setting of each and every instance of conflict. Any judgment about what and how to achieve outcomes through war should therefore rely on assessments of how armed forces can be used in circumstances that will never be repeated.
Contemporary COIN analysis is, however, silent about the political intent informing the recourse to armed force. Counterinsurgency, both as a concept and as an understanding outlined in COIN manuals, therefore cannot constitute a strategy. We explore the political lacuna at the heart of counterinsurgency further in subsequent chapters, but for now we confine our deconstruction of claims that COIN functions as a timeless prescription for insurgency by examining its equally difficult relationship with notions of doctrine.
Is Counterinsurgency a Doctrine?
If COIN is not a strategy, is it a doctrine? If we accept the idea that statements contained in military manuals compose tactical advice, then COIN nominally functions as military doctrine. So what is doctrine in this context? According to the U.S. military, doctrine constitutes the “fundamental principles by which the military forces or elements thereof guide their actions in support of national objectives.… It is authoritative but requires judgment in application.”21 Doctrine seeks to develop a set of agreed-upon methods by which the armed forces will conduct their operations and establish a common language for doing so. In this manner, it seeks to render military action and its effects predictable. In doing so, the notion of military doctrine not only functions as a rationale for the existence of armed forces and their respective budgets but possesses broader appeal, particularly for political leaders uncomfortable with the prospect of exercising “judgment in application” over the use of force but who see in detailed doctrine a set of ready-made, off-the-shelf answers. For such reasons, recent decades have seen the growing dominance of doctrine in all spheres of military activity. Military doctrine now encompasses all facets of operational activity—maritime doctrine, air power doctrine, land warfare doctrine, and, new in the twenty-first century, space and cyber doctrine.22
But what, it may be asked, does the term doctrine mean? Significantly, it derives from the tenets and structure of religious thought laid out in a set of practices that the official priesthood inculcates as the correct and orthodox path of belief. Thus, at its core, doctrine is a system of faith, and faith ought by its nature to be unyielding. As a consequence, someone who is rigid and inflexible in their orthodoxy is described as dogmatic or even doctrinaire. Clearly, then, there is a semantic tension between an understanding of a level of military preparations conceived as doctrine and the practical and philosophical essence of war.
If, as discussed in the previous chapter, we accept Carl von Clausewitz’s conception of war as “more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to any given case,”23 then all wars are exceptional in their origins, shape, and direction. Each is fashioned by its time and place. What governs each instance of war and the way the observer perceives it are always different, reflecting each case’s contingent circumstances. At the same time, Clausewitz also maintained that in its ultimate purpose war is the same: the pursuit of political ends through violent means.24 Yet each war’s character is always unique, formed by an ever-changing, unpredictable, and never reproducible mix of the variables of time, place, and the trinity of passion, chance, and reason.25 Here lies a puzzle that confronts all strategic formulation: If each war is unique, how is it possible to plan for it? How can military planners and policy makers make stable assumptions about the likely course of the future wars they might have to fight?
The paradox is that all war is unique, yet all doctrine is—in theory—fixed. This paradox, it seems, can never be fully resolved. The course of any war cannot be predicted beyond the Clausewitzian formula of a known set of independent variables (passion, chance, and reason), which regulate all war. How those variables will interact in each instance is always unknown beforehand. Applying this understanding, we can see the tension between the claims made by counterinsurgency advocates and Clausewitzian theories of war.
COIN, according to its exponents, is a set of ideas and practices derived from the observation of historical cases, the lessons learned therein, and the identification of permanently operating factors in a specific area of war known as “insurgency.” The core instrumental assumption of contemporary COIN doctrine is that, contra Clausewitz, there exist distinct “types” of war demarcated by their external, tactical manifestation. These types of war are repeated through history, so one can divine a robust set of prescriptions based on this typology. For those who believe in the validity of COIN, therefore, insurgencies are informed by a uniform set of “dynamics.”26 As a consequence, “insurgencies, like other forms of armed conflict, are better defined by their associated methodologies than by ideologies.” Accordingly, “while causes change regularly, the fundamentals of insurgent methodology remain relatively constant.”27 For its advocates, then, counterinsurgency constitutes a military template that can be applied whenever a state recognizes that it confronts an insurgency. COIN thought thus assumes that there are enduring principles of action that underlie and inform the success of anti-insurgent campaigns. In particular, all insurgencies, it is maintained, are informed by similar practices. The timeless dynamics of insurgency, therefore, are the key to the timeless response of successful counterinsurgency. In this way, counterinsurgency is presented as a doctrine: an unyielding set of precepts that should guide thought and action throughout time.
Chapter 1 noted that such typologizing represents at best an over-simplification, illustrative as it is of an urge to classify the unclassifiable. Is “insurgency” a distinct and recurrent type of war? If so, how does insurgency differ from other forms of internal conflict such as civil war? And, indeed, how is insurgency differentiated from war per se? What are the factors that identify the type of conflict faced? Is there a standard matrix that can be discerned for all manifestations of internal war? Many years ago Bernard Fall, a notable commentator on counterinsurgency, criticized this penchant for classifying hostilities: “The [use of the] terms ‘insurgency,’ ‘paramilitary operations,’ ‘guerrilla operations,’ ‘limited warfare,’ ‘sublimited warfare’ ” is, he noted, similar “to the position of the doctor faced with a strange disease. Whenever doctors are faced with a strange disease they give it a long name. It does not cure you, but at least it makes you feel good because you think they know what they are talking about.”28
This lexical thicket underscores the incoherence at the heart of counterinsurgency thinking. Harry Eckstein, one of the most prominent scholars of “internal war,” argued in the mid-1960s that “the term ‘internal war’ denotes any resort to violence within a political order to change its constitution, rulers, or policies. It is not a new concept.… Nor does it mean quite the same thing as certain more commonly used terms, such as revolution, civil war, revolt, rebellion, uprising, guerrilla warfare, mutiny, jacquerie, coup d’etat, terrorism, or insurrection. It stands for the genus of which the others are species.”29
Eckstein’s definition of internal war is strikingly similar to the definition of insurgency in The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. It is unclear whether the term counterinsurgency in the twenty-first century is intended to be synonymous with Eckstein’s term internal war and, if so, whether one should conclude that the Counterinsurgency Field Manual and similar manuals offer cures to internal conflict of any variety. The implication in the Field Manual, with its assertions that all insurgencies follow a similar direction, is that COIN should be regarded as an all-encompassing doctrine, applicable in each case irrespective of context.
This claim, though, would be ambitious, particularly for a military manual. According to one commentator, “the probably accurate if pessimistic conclusion that the vast differences in the origins and nature of civil conflict make it difficult, perhaps even impossible, to achieve overarching solutions; [such solutions] are inevitably too general to be useful or too specific to apply to most or many cases.”30 In other words, if we follow Clausewitz’s thinking, we must conclude that the uniqueness of such conflicts defies the development of a fixed, comprehensive doctrine.
Practitioner-Led Theory
The fact that counterinsurgency thought purports to be both strategy and doctrine reflects its origins and evolution in a policy-making community. COIN is not a product of the academy but emerges from the world of “practitioners,” a designation many modern COIN theorists use to describe themselves. The traditional authorities in COIN thought who came to prominence after 1945—David Galula, Roger Trinquier, Robert Thompson, Richard Clutterbuck, Frank Kitson,31 and others—were serving or retired French and British military or colonial officers. Likewise, the perceived forerunners of modern counterinsurgency theory and practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries similarly possessed military backgrounds,32 such as the French empire builders Joseph Gallieni and Hubert Lyautey33 and the British writers on colonial pacification Charles Callwell and Charles Gwynn.34 With few exceptions, the more renowned contemporary COIN advocates tend to follow this pattern of being soldier-scholars, such as H. R. McMaster, John Nagl, Peter Mansoor, and David Kilcullen.35
The colonial origins of COIN also explain why many of its contemporary enthusiasts look to past conflicts in order to extract “lessons from history.” As COIN thinking has evolved in contemporary American understandings, commentators have tended to rest their claim to COIN’s efficacy and fundamental dynamics upon a dominant case: the British campaign in Malaya between 1948 and 1960 against a determined Communist revolt. The Malayan Emergency, in which British forces overcame the Communist rebellion via an interlocking program of military, economic, and social measures, constitutes the locus classicus of how a democratic state can win against a seemingly intractable insurgency through a policy of winning “hearts and minds.” COIN advocates have thus tended to apply lessons generalized from the Malayan Emergency to instances of insurgency after 9/11, as evidenced in the enthusiasm for population-centric approaches and the illocutionary “hearts and minds” rhetoric.36
In particular, a number of American soldier-scholar commentators drew on the British experience in Malaya to contrast it with the failure of U.S. efforts at countering the Communist insurgency in Vietnam.37 John Nagl’s 2002 book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam exemplifies this approach. Learned though many of the COIN soldier-scholars undoubtedly were, they and like-minded commentators often treated the Malayan case not as a historian might, examining the causes of the insurgency and the plausible reasons for the failure of what Richard Clutterbuck termed “the long long war,”38 but as a repository of methods and tactics that could be recycled and adapted to the analogously long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Abstracted from the counterinsurgency conducted by the British in the 1950s via Nagl’s demonstration of the superiority of the British Army’s adaptable small-wars organizational culture, COIN could be presented as socially and democratically palatable.39 In this rendition, British success rested on the effective capturing of hearts and minds through programs such as the Briggs Plan to build safe new villages and relocate the squatter population from the edges of the jungle and plantations. Meanwhile, the tactic of securing “white areas” and then concentrating on the more troublesome “black areas” after 1955 resonates with the contemporary tactic of “clearing, holding, and building.”40 In Afghanistan, this practice took the operational form of Provincial Reconstruction Teams, comprising in part social anthropologists and aid workers who identified the levels of the frontier peoples’ social needs and economic development.41
The use of the Malayan Emergency as the precursor COIN model, however, obscures the manner in which it cherry-picks the historical record. It ignores critical aspects of the campaign that were crucial to British success. First, it fails to recognize that the Emergency measures were conducted under conditions of colonial governorship. The United Kingdom might have been a democracy, but it conducted the “long long war” as a colonial power. Moreover, as Karl Hack argues in a revisionist account of Emergency historiography, the prelude to “hearts and minds” required forcefully “screwing down” the Communists and their supporters.42 That is to say, coercive military power preceded the socioeconomic reforms that gave rise to the hearts-and-minds myth.43 Notably, at the level of civil society and the British administered rule of law, the prelude required recourse to a highly repressive Internal Security Act (ISA). The postcolonial nations of Singapore and Malaysia have never repealed the ISA since 1965. Indeed, in these single-party-dominant states, the political elites maintain that the ISA constitutes the basis for social cohesion, internal resilience, and political stability. Nowhere, of course, do these new states advocate pluralism, accountability, and transparency.44 Little acknowledgment is made in modern COIN advocacy of the utility of repressive legislation to curtail Communist Front activities or of the hard-power underpinnings of classic colonial era counterinsurgency success.45 COIN devotees never advocate, for example, introducing a repressive internal-security regime, which would indeed be following the example of the British in Malaya.
A further feature of practitioner-led understandings of COIN is that they anachronistically distort the historical record in order to support less coercive uses of hard power.46 This in turn supports a practitioner preference for grievance settlement as the default solution to winning hearts and minds. In the instrumentalist understanding of COIN, the rhetoric of hearts and minds in contemporary doctrine discloses an interesting syllogism:
• All insurgencies are a result of social contradictions.
• All social contradictions are a result of local grievances.
• All insurgencies are a product of local grievances.
From this syllogism, a number of false conclusions follow. Leading COIN advocates assume, for instance, that all socially produced grievances are in some manner legitimate and therefore deserve to be either remedied or appeased.47 Thus, John Mackinlay asserts: “A dangerous insurgency … usually has legitimate grievances or cause [requiring a] change in direction in order to remove the pressure of the grievance.”48 Remedy the grievance, advocates contend, and the insurgency is substantively resolved. David Kilcullen notes that counterinsurgency ultimately requires a form of “armed social work.” COIN, he argues, is “an attempt to redress basic social and political problems while being shot at. This makes civil affairs a central counterinsurgency activity, not an afterthought.”49 John Nagl and Brian Burton reinforce the emphasis on social grievance as the principal driver of insurgent actions:
Political disenfranchisement, lack of economic opportunity, and social alienation at the personal level are more widespread within these [western Muslim] communities. For many of the young men who end up joining militant groups, the commitment to jihad is less important than the feeling of belonging and chance to avenge perceived indignities of the past. The militant “cause” may be couched in Islamist terms, but it is not simply bred into individual would-be jihadists with tabula rasa minds. They have pasts, grievances, and personal justifications for their actions that run deeper than the veneer of extremist religion.50
The grievance–resolution approach is not always wrong. Clearly, any sophisticated and humane policy response should address the social factors that may fuel a conflict. Yet although grievance settlement may constitute a set of practical responses on the ground, it should not function as a substitute for political judgment because, as we learned in chapter 1, the political circumstances of each war are always different, subject to the infinite variation of passion, chance, and reason. War is thus ever changing, and assertions that insurgencies are the product of grievance, political disenfranchisement, socio-economic deprivation, or thymotic disregard, each of which requires redress in the form of armed social work, consequently do not hold as statements of timeless verity. Yet COIN thinkers regularly assert such monocausal explanations, which implicitly forms a political judgment. But political judgment in war is by its nature always contingent on war’s unique social and geographical setting and not amenable to such reductionism. COIN advocates’ assertions about the causes of conflict are therefore highly contestable, and the solutions they promote are not evidently applicable to each and every instance of so-called insurgency. They are not timeless principles of understanding. The fact that such claims aspire to universal truths about the causality of insurgency, however, leads COIN theorists into a curious and paradoxical relationship with the concept of politics.
COIN’s Antipolitical Relationship with Politics
COIN thus enunciates policies that have profound political implications. Yet contemporary American and British COIN manuals primarily offer only tactical and operational advice. The reader struggles to find any discussion of overt political goals or ideals for which a counterinsurgency campaign might be fought. Although COIN thinkers claim to understand the causes of insurgency (social, political, and economic grievances), these documents as well as much commentary on the subject eschew articulating any higher purpose for the wars fought. Political considerations involve complex calculations about the outcomes sought, and the sometimes coercive means to achieve them may entail actions that require a degree of dissimulation. At the same time, the deliberations that lead a democratic polity to pursue war or peace require presentation in a persuasive manner.51 Above all, the political aim requires the state—or other social actor—engaged in war to articulate the values it upholds and wishes to secure. In this context, COIN manuals share a curious family resemblance to a recipe book by a fashionable TV chef inducting the amateur enthusiast in the arcane skills of cordon bleu cookery. But, unlike these technical cookbooks, counterinsurgency manuals can never guarantee the perfect COIN mix because they deny the critical ingredient in all war—political judgment, the prerequisite for all successful strategy.
Paradoxically, therefore, while offering somewhat simplistic political evaluations about the causes of war, COIN advocates nevertheless characterize themselves as disinterested connoisseurs of combat, neutral observers beyond the compromises of quotidian politics. COIN thinkers seek to assume the impartial role of an engineer who offers technical solutions to fix problems. The COIN image repertoire epitomizes an apolitical style of policy making that is bureaucratic or, more precisely, technocratic.52 It abjures anything that compromises this rationalist character. As Michael Oakeshott explains, such “rationality in conduct” is the product of “a determinate instrument, and asserts that the ‘rational’ way of going about things is to go about them under the sole guidance of the instrument.”53
The technocratic instrument in the case of contemporary warfare is COIN doctrine, and, like all such antipolitical rationalism, COIN doctrine seeks to break up human behavior “into a series of problems to be solved, purposes to be achieved and a series of individual actions performed in pursuit of these ends.”54 This perspective informs the seemingly objective consideration of every project. As Oakeshott shows, however, the rationalist’s craving for this sort of “mistake proof certainty” and the “instrumental mind it reflects may be regarded in some respects as the relic of a belief in magic.”55
Two distinguishing features of the counterinsurgency discourse clearly illustrate both this instrumentalist approach and its antipolitical consequences. First, the antipolitical character of the COIN “instrument” is evident in the attempt to deny the Clausewitzian conception of war—namely, that war always has a political object. A London-based COIN consultative group that met in 2007 to discuss the development of British Army counterinsurgency doctrine concluded its attempt to reframe doctrine with the injunction: “Be wary of Clausewitz … some of his theories complicate rather than inform an effort to explain the complexity of the current version of insurgency.”56 But the group never explained why it considered Clausewitz’s thought problematic. Montgomery McFate, the anthropologist who assisted the U.S. military in formulating its field manual, similarly maintained: “Neither Al-Qa’eda nor insurgents in Iraq are fighting a Clausewitzian war, where armed conflict is a rational extension of politics by other means.”57
Why is Clausewitz treated so disparagingly? On one level, such indifference or even opposition almost always reflects numerous commentators’ misunderstanding of Clausewitz’s view of war, assuming that the Prussian general was concerned only with third-generation or nation-state warfare.58 Concealed within this nescience, though, is a more compelling reason for COIN analysts to reject Clausewitz: Clausewitz emphasizes the centrality of politics in war. Politics—that is, the values and goals of the state’s higher decision-making echelons—and the contingent political circumstances that govern such decision making render war uncertain and ensure that war manifests itself in different guises on each and every occasion. The chameleon-like nature of war negates the view that there exists a precise, universal, and rational template to guide conduct in warfare, regardless of any superficial tactical similarities (such as those that manifest themselves in insurgencies). Clausewitz’s conception of war therefore rejects the view that terms such as counterinsurgency possess meaning or applicability beyond any single instance of war.
Strategy, Doctrine, and Counterinsurgency
As chapter 1 argued, what governs any instance of war is always different in some degree, reflecting each case’s contingent circumstances. For Clausewitz, the unique character of war is the result of the “paradoxical trinity” arising from the interplay of “primordial violence, hatred and enmity … the play of chance and probability with which the creative spirit is free to roam: and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.”59 In Clausewitz’s estimation, the foremost influence on war is politics. When he describes war as a continuation of politics by other means,60 he means not only that politics gives rise to war, but that it also exerts a primary influence over the manner in which war is conducted. As a consequence, warfare can never be, as COIN theorists contend, a set of technical/operational practices but rather is always an activity that must be shaped in accordance with the overriding political purposes for which it is fought.
The complex contingency of war creates difficulty for strategy—that is, the process by which armed force is translated into political ends. The process of translating military means to serve political ends is subject to the competing demands of military necessity (often perceived as the demand to win quickly), with the requirements of policy possibly demanding more moderate or subtle forms of action and communication to attain desired ends. These imperatives are not obviously compatible. Strategy therefore acts, in Colin Gray’s words, as the “bridge” between tactical actions on the ground—the violent actions of combat—and the higher purpose to which those acts are directed.61 Strategy must therefore be capable of providing timely direction for military activity in the midst of war. For although peacetime militaries spend a great deal of time planning for war, these plans are often overtaken by events once hostilities commence. Military professionals have long recognized this problem. As Chief of the Prussian General Staff Helmut von Moltke remarked, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”62 At the same time, strategy must also remain sensitive to the broader political context within which war is conducted if it is to produce military outcomes that are not disproportionately costly in relation to the value attached to victory. The imperative to do something quickly, in other words, should not override the need to do something that is commensurate with the political context.63
In order to reduce the uncertain landscape arising from the contingency of war, policy and military professionals have sought to address the problems associated with the need to plan and rapidly revise plans by developing doctrine as a source of guidance for action. This doctrine may be informal, ad hoc, and based on past experience, or it may be, as it is increasingly in modern bureaucratic polities, codified in military manuals. The evolution of counterinsurgency theory in the first decade of the twenty-first century evidently attempted to provide some kind of strategic bridge between past experience, present campaigns (in Iraq and Afghanistan), and probable wars of the future in which the major Western powers might find themselves engaged. This was the purpose guiding the publication of both The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual in 2007 and the British Army’s Countering Insurgency manual in 2009.64
In theory, military doctrine is utilitarian. It provides a set of directional propositions for action distilled from the “lessons” of the past and applied to inform decision making in the current era. In this way, doctrine is intended to replace the requirement of deriving plans and courses of action from first principles. As Geoffrey Till has stated, doctrine is “something designed to provide military people with a vocabulary of ideas and a common sense of purpose about how they should conduct themselves before, during and after the action.” Accordingly, “if strategy is about the art of cookery, doctrine is concerned with today’s menus.” In the absence of doctrine, Till observes, “commanders would have either to rely on luck and blind instinct or to convene a seminar to decide what to do when the enemy appears on the horizon.”65
If doctrine is to possess validity as a guide to strategic decision making, its “vocabulary of ideas” and “common sense of purpose” must nevertheless be subordinated to political considerations. The successful application of appropriate military doctrine, in other words, requires prudence, the practice of judgment in light of prevailing circumstances. As another British Army document explains, doctrine is about “how to think; not what to think.”66 This is an important distinction because without the prudential application of judgment, doctrine has a tendency to degenerate into dogma—that is, a rigid assertion of rules of questionable relevance to any given instance of war and functioning as the harbinger of poor policy making.
A brief examination of current official U.S. and British doctrinal publications on insurgency reveals the problems experienced in reconciling the tensions between the differing imperatives of politics, strategy, and doctrine. The British COIN manual Countering Insurgency superficially appears more attuned to the centrality of politics than does the U.S. Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The British document acknowledges, albeit cursorily, the primacy of political purpose in counterinsurgency. Yet it misconstrues the notion of political purpose, presenting it solely in terms of nonmilitary operations supporting social developments to drain sympathy away from the insurgents. The manual does not conceive politics in terms of the state’s pursuit of objectives based on a prudential calculation of costs, interests, and values. Thus, tactical advice is accentuated over the core political calculations of the relationship of means to ends, proportionality, and the definition of success.67 The manual’s hostility toward Clausewitzian postulates becomes further apparent in its enthusiastic quotation of somewhat vacuous statements by David Miliband, the British foreign secretary at the time the manual was published. Miliband asserted in July 2009 that “people like quoting Clausewitz that warfare is the continuation of politics by other means. But in Afghanistan we need politics to become the continuation of warfare by other means.”68 Miliband apparently was suggesting that nonmilitary operations can be considered acts of war within the context of counterinsurgency. Such comments might be deconstructed to mean that building schools and hospitals and inculcating democratic values might help undermine the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. At the same time, however, they also obscure Clausewitz’s appreciation of the relationship between warfare and political ends, which firmly subordinates the former to the latter.
Clausewitz prioritized the political in an attempt to ensure that the resort to war would produce better outcomes than those that preceded war. In the context of Afghanistan, this political outcome should not entail a limitless commitment of troops and material to a weak state that, absent al-Qaeda, possesses little strategic interest. Here COIN’s focus on winning hearts and minds through nonkinetic operations (social programs, the building of schools and hospitals, etc.) confronts the principle of proportionality. More than a decade after 9/11, this focus resulted in a mission stalled in the Pashtun tribal hinterlands, where the Taliban enemy received covert support from Pakistan.69 Yet the United States regards Pakistan, locked between the rising powers of China and India on the one side and a reinvigorated Russia on the other, as a crucial pillar upholding the stability of South Asia.70 The negative impact of waging a long counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan has been disproportionate because the outcomes are of little real political value. Indeed, the counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban has drained financial and material resources, damaged Western credibility, and succeeded only in destabilizing Pakistan.
Similar limitations permeate the U.S. Counterinsurgency Field Manual. As noted earlier, the manual confidently asserts that most “insurgencies follow a similar course of development” and that the “tactics used to successfully defeat them are likewise similar in most cases.” The manual thus conceives itself to be comprehensive in its potential application across time and space. In other words, the Field Manual ostensibly provides rules for action, which all too frequently become dogmatic. In doing so, it too ignores the importance that Clausewitz attached to the shaping of actions with regard to the wider political context in which a social actor seeks to use the military instrument to achieve its goals.71 Contemporary COIN analysts reinforce this view, holding that “while causes change regularly, the fundamentals of insurgent strategy remain relatively constant.… So too do the fundamentals of counterinsurgency.”72 COIN’s emphasis on the tactical means a combatant employs rather than on the comprehension of the broader political reasons that motivate an adversary to fight ultimately preempts effective strategic judgment.
COIN Discourse
We understand that armed forces doctrine has an important role to play in facilitating military decisions under time constraints by providing some ready-to-hand generalizations as a guide to action. Doctrine cannot, however, be a substitute for the application of judgment in relation to strategic matters. Effective strategic decision making must be made with reference to war’s political dimension.73 It is the political dimension that confers on war its chameleon-like characteristics. Yet COIN doctrine habitually descends into dogma and thereby impedes the formulation of strategy. Doctrine as dogma is attractive quite often because it is bureaucratically more acceptable to rely on checklist solutions than to venture into the shifting, prudential, and contingent domain of politics.74 The exercise of judgment, after all, is difficult and can provoke deep misgivings, especially when a great deal may rest on the outcome of decisions made. It is far easier, therefore, to apply a known formula that can be followed under all circumstances. The Western embrace of counterinsurgency after 2007 can be readily explained, perhaps, by the desire to believe that a technical formula drawn from the “lessons of history” can replace the complex strategic decisions associated with prosecuting difficult wars in far off places.
But if COIN is not a strategy, based as it is on a selective use of history and a confused theoretical foundation, how can we explain its prominence in strategic discourse? After all, insurgency is assumed to constitute the likely challenge that the major Western powers will confront in the future and is almost synonymous with war in current thinking.75 From what we have seen of COIN’s promotion into contemporary discursive appeal, we can discern that COIN is, in fact, not just one thing, not just a doctrine or a strategic pretense, but a discursive conflation of a number of not necessarily clearly related things.
We can see, first, that COIN is a narrative. It is a story about triumph over adversity. To illustrate by means of a cultural metaphor, it is particularly suited to the genre of the Western movie. It also fits with the foundational American myth of a manifest destiny to overcome both nature and hostile natives to achieve the teleological goal of liberal democratic enlightenment. In this context, Petraeus’s advisers framed a view of the Surge in Iraq after 2007 in terms of innovative thinking and a new commander breaking up a sclerotic establishment.76 Thus, COIN advocates present the Surge like a Hollywood script: the old commanders, General George Casey and others, fail to speak to the natives, and things are going from bad to worse on the frontier. Fortunately, a new sheriff, Marshall Petraeus, strides into town with a new purpose and clear ideas. He cleans out the local saloon (a.k.a. Multinational Forces Iraq) and with his trusty advisers treats with the tribal leaders and smokes the pipe of peace (the “Sunni Awakening”). A new bond is forged, the border is settled, and the outlaws (al-Qaeda in Iraq) are put to flight.77
The triumph-over-adversity narrative, along with its associated historical and cultural references, is easily detectable in American public discourse. After 2007, the story of the Surge was retailed to a popular audience seemingly eager to believe in a tale of ultimate success after so much carnage and pessimism.78 “There are lessons to be learned from the dazzling success of the surge strategy in Iraq,” proclaimed media commentator Michael Barone in late 2007: “Lesson one is that just about no mission is impossible for the United States military. A year ago it was widely thought, not just by the new Democratic leaders in Congress but also in many parts of the Pentagon, that containing the violence in Iraq was impossible. Now we have seen it done.” Discerning a historical pattern, Barone suggested: “We have seen this before in American history. George Washington’s forces seemed on the brink of defeat many times in the agonizing years before Yorktown. Abraham Lincoln’s generals seemed so unsuccessful in the Civil War that in August 1864 it was widely believed he would be defeated for re-election. But finally Lincoln found the right generals. Sherman took Atlanta and marched to the sea; Grant pressed forward in Virginia.” Extending the historical parallel, Barone noted: “George W. Bush, like Lincoln, took his time finding the right generals. But it’s clear now that the forward-moving surge strategy devised by Gens. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno has succeeded where the stand-aside strategy employed by their predecessors failed.”79 In more measured but no less emphatic terms, scholar and National Security Council adviser Peter Feaver similarly asserted: “Over the past sixteen months, the United States has altered its trajectory in Iraq. We are no longer headed toward a catastrophic defeat and may be on the path to a remarkable victory.”80
As such statements illustrate, the narrative tradition is not confined to recent conflicts, nor—it should be observed—is it something peculiar only to U.S. national stories. In fact, COIN’s most celebrated historical cases reflect comparable portrayals. The traditional narrative of Malaya holds that General Gerald Templer’s inspirational leadership saved the operation from his predecessor’s mistakes (when in fact his predecessor, conveniently assassinated, had established the groundwork for later success).81 Analogously, in Vietnam, according to popular accounts such as Lewis Sorley’s 1999 book A Better War,82 General Creighton Abrams arrived almost in time to save the disastrous situation created by a decade’s worth of political mismanagement and General William Westmoreland’s failure to implement an effective counterinsurgency plan.83
Following the setbacks after the years of supposed failure by the Coalition in Iraq, the public’s reception of the triumph narrative fed the idea that the Surge led by Petraeus fitted the notion of “a better war.” Although much derided by later critics such as Gian Gentile for its oversimplifications,84 the notion of “a better war” undoubtedly arrests the American collective unconscious. It is the plot of John Ford’s films Rio Grande (1950) and The Horse Soldiers (1959) as well as later John Wayne war vehicles such as The Green Berets (1968),85 crafted for the needs of a new U.S. command and for mass commercial consumption. Somewhat differently in the UK context, it plays instead into the continued British quest for colonial adventure. In the latter case, the image repertoire drawing upon the practice and legend of T. E. Lawrence, classically evoked in David Lean’s cinematic masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia (1962), informs the romance of British COIN. Quixotic advisers hang out with the natives, learn their ways, and ride with the camels to create a new tribal dawning.86 It is no surprise, perhaps, that the front-cover photograph on the British Army manual Countering Insurgency features a rugged British officer conversing with a group of tribal elders in a local village somewhere, presumably in the Afghan hinterland. The COIN narrative, in other words, not only attempts to provide guidance for military conduct but also communicates a myth for popular consumption. It reassures public opinion that difficult wars can be prosecuted successfully provided the right leaders follow the right tactics: the tactics of counterinsurgency.
COIN AS SUBTEXT—MODERN ARMIES MUST BE FLEXIBLE
Grand narratives are of course important, especially in mass-media-driven, modern democratic polities. They provide the myths that generate popular support for preferred courses of action. COIN discourse in this respect can also be understood as providing a subtext—that is to say, it contains an underlying theme or message belied by its immediate surface manifestation or its apparent technical sophistication. COIN analysts, we would argue, may privilege doctrine and technique at the expense of strategic understanding. They may, in our view, be excessively simplistic. Yet we equally maintain they are not disingenuous. They want to promote an unequivocal message that speaks to extant foreign-policy and security concerns. Unlike, for instance, the radically pacifist normativism and critical security theory that prevails in departments of international relations on Western university campuses,87 the motivation of most COIN advocates is that they wish to ensure that modern armed forces are mentally equipped to prevail in the kinds of wars that the West currently fights and might wage in the future.88 Informing all COIN thought, then, is often a simple message: modern Western armies must be flexible.
This message—the need for flexibility—comes across clearly in The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and in John Nagl’s study of colonial and postcolonial insurgencies, Learning to East Soup with a Knife. Nagl’s study marks a seminal moment in the theoretical evolution of contemporary counterinsurgency. Although he subsequently somewhat overidentified with the prescriptive formulae of COIN doctrine, he initially showed some sensitivity to the view that U.S. military theorizing had often misrepresented Clausewitz’s ideas. Nagl noticed that “soldiers—and most statesmen—are uncomfortable with ambiguity, with Clausewitzian ‘it depends’ answers.”89 In fact, Nagl’s early work did not assert that colonial-era conflicts and the way they were fought afforded a model counterinsurgency, extrapolated from the Malayan jungle onto a global canvas. Instead, Nagl argued that British success in Malaya reflected the British Army’s facility for patient, adaptive learning and that this quality is something to be admired and emulated. It was the example of organizational flexibility, not the instances of “on-the-ground” counterinsurgency experience that really served as the crucial “lesson” of Malaya, according to Nagl.90
COIN AS A STATEMENT OF THE OBVIOUS
Understanding the subtext embodied in much COIN discourse leads to the revelation of the key point about contemporary COIN doctrine: it offers an attractive repackaging of statements of the militarily obvious. It is self-evident that any military organization should be supple, learn from mistakes, and jettison old ways of doing things as the unique circumstances of war demand. Indeed, Colin Gray notes somewhat caustically that the contemporary fascination with military precepts about the asymmetry of conflict involve little more than “the rediscovery of the stunningly obvious.”91 We can demonstrate this pursuit of the obvious from The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which advocates the following tactical practice:
• Develop COIN doctrine and practices locally.
• Establish local training centers during COIN operations.
• Regularly challenge assumptions, both formally and informally.
• Learn about the broader world outside the military.
• Promote suggestions from the field.
• Foster open communication between officers and subordinates.
• Establish rapid avenues of disseminating lessons learned.
• Coordinate closely with governmental and nongovernmental partners at all command levels.
• Be open to soliciting and evaluating advice from local people in the conflict zone.92
Such advice applies to all war. In the sense that this advice outlines nostrums of positive practice, it offers rules of conduct that any professional armed forces would adopt, regardless of context.93 This advice suggests that people should be encouraged to talk to each other, share information, and be receptive to the new and unusual. There appears in COIN thinking a commitment to “talking diversity” and for armed forces to be operationally flexible and learn what does and does not work in a particular context. Regardless of the virtue of such obvious counsel, it ultimately fails to formulate effective strategy that functions as the bridge between military conduct and the political effects sought through war.
COIN AS POLITICAL SPIN
It is no coincidence that COIN doctrine rose to prominence at the same time as the Surge, a politically controversial decision by the Bush administration to double-down troops in Iraq in early 2007. The new Field Manual, first issued in December 2006, was seen as the new commander in Iraq David Petraeus’s playbook. It is significant that he played a key role in the writing team that authored the document. The subsequent decline in violence in Iraq seemed to validate not only the Bush administration but COIN doctrine itself.
Significantly, this manual was drafted and presented very differently from the way prior manuals of military doctrine were. The drafting process was widely advertised as “inclusive,” involving groups traditionally suspicious of military action and opposed to the operation in Iraq. The drafting team even included the director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.94 The doctrine, moreover, satisfied a remarkably broad constituency with its emphasis on “protecting the population.”95 It appealed not only to neoconservative advocates of muscular American interventionism for democracy promotion (by force if necessary) but also to liberal internationalists and even human rights organizations. Subsequent evaluations of the Surge have questioned whether the fall in violence in Iraq did indeed correlate with Petraeus’s arrival and the implementation of a fully-fledged counterinsurgency campaign, but to its architects the connection was beside the point.96 The construction of the doctrine served the Machiavellian purpose of providing ethical cover to sell the continuation of a controversial war to an increasingly skeptical public.
Overall, the constituent components detected in the counterinsurgency narrative leads to the conclusion that COIN is an insoluble paradox. Doctrines, as we suggested at the start of this chapter, by their nature lend themselves to inflexible assertions of principle. COIN doctrine supports unfalsifiable statements of the obvious that hold that military organizations should stay flexible. Although armies should always adapt, COIN doctrine maintains contradictorily that all insurgencies are similar and can be countered by a standard COIN methodology. In essence, COIN doctrine, as it has evolved among the major powers of the West, purports to uphold the need to be flexible but yields to the underlying momentum of doctrine—namely, dogmatism.
As the first chapter showed, the contention that insurgencies and counterinsurgency can be defined by a uniform set of dynamics assumes that manifestly disparate conflicts compose a distinct category of war on the basis of tactical similarity. It further assumes that all insurgencies share predetermined commonalities. Counterinsurgency thinking is a paradox because it tries to apply rigid doctrine to circumstances that defy rigidification. Further, as this chapter has argued, it cannot resolve this paradox because it is not a strategy.
Ultimately, as we have demonstrated, insurgency and counterinsurgency are not separate, exclusive categories of conflict. What COIN should more modestly claim requires returning to Clausewitz and appreciating that each war is unique and that military establishments must be prepared to encounter war at any level based on the political effects and goals sought. Yet, we would argue, one does not need COIN doctrine to appreciate this point because, in the end, there is only one meaningful category of war, and that is war itself.