The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency: Strategic Problems, Puzzles, and Paradoxes

The classic vision of effective counterinsurgency practice—as David Petraeus, the U.S. Army commander of the 101st Airborne Division in the Mosul region of Iraq between 2003 and 2004, emphasized—required rebuilding the local infrastructure and economy as the essential accompaniment to long-term stability.¹ According to John Nagl, writing the foreword to the University of Chicago edition of The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Petraeus inspired “his command with a question: ‘What have you done for the people of Iraq today?’ ” Nagl continued: Petraeus “worked to build Iraqi security forces able to provide security to the people of the region and quickly earned the soubriquet Malik Daoud (King David) from the people of Mosul.”²

Such praise suggests that in addition to the narrative, subtext, spin, and paradox involved in modern counterinsurgency, COIN also entails an ideology, or what Eric Voegelin terms a “political religion.”3 Former diplomat Sherard Cowper-Coles intimates this aspect of COIN when he observes, “Like its first cousin, stabilisation, counterinsurgency, or COIN, has acquired some of the characteristics of a cult.” COIN’s “disciples speak of its properties with evangelical fervour. There are different routes for gaining admission to its mysteries, but most involve field experience in a conflict zone, recently in Iraq or Afghanistan, and a period of post-graduate study of uneven rigour. Qualifying involves at least as much faith as works.” Summing up the political faith that permeates COIN, Cowper-Coles contends that “associated with the cult is a vast literature of pseudo-academic tracts. Many refer back to historical experience of counter-insurgency campaigns in Southeast Asia, Ireland and Algeria, to name only a few. For serious historians or political scientists, the revelations offered by the new apostles are seldom new, or far removed from common sense. The COIN cult’s main contemporary source of revelation is the U.S. Army Field Manual No. 3-24, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, the fruit of General Petraeus’s tour at Fort Leavenworth in 2005–6.”⁴

Other commentators also suspect that COIN represents an ideologically closed system of thought rather than a coherent strategic concept. Gian Gentile, for instance, criticizes the “cult of counterinsurgency” because it “lulls people into thinking that war is about soft power, that American soldiers sent overseas to tame a civil war or stop an insurgency will do so in a less harmful way.”⁵

If COIN is a cult or political religion, the question is, Of what kind? Cowper-Coles and Gentile, in part, view counterinsurgency as a personality cult; in the case of Iraq, it was focused on Petraeus at the height of his career. The personality cult feeds into a familiar military hagiography that requires “savior generals.” Such cults simplify historical narratives, projecting a distorted myth of war. This perspective presents wars initially going awry as a result of unimaginative military leadership but providentially saved from the jaws of defeat by the appointment of a flexible, innovative, and inspirational commander. The mainstream accounts published in the wake of the Iraq Surge follow this pattern, such as Thomas Ricks’s The Gamble and, indeed, Victor Davis Hanson’s The Savior Generals.⁶

However, there is more to COIN’s cult status than an excessive reverence for the “great man” theory of history. Rajiv Chandrasekaran suggests that ideological and structural forces reinforced the ascendancy of counterinsurgency thought after 2006. Like Cowper-Coles, Chandrasekaran notes that following the Surge into Baghdad in 2007, “America’s military leaders embraced COIN with the fervour of the converted.” He perceives that “it became their defining ideology, just as free-market economics and Jeffersonian democracy were to the neo-conservatives who had led the United States into Baghdad.”7 COIN, then, has an ideological dimension imbued with a distinctively American liberal philosophical and political self-understanding. The promotion of Jeffersonian notions of democratic enlightenment, as Chandrasekaran implies, characterizes this system of thought. Indeed, it is plausible to infer that a cult of democratic modernization—an ideology of development—that dates back to the early decades of the Cold War forms the problematic milieu to U.S. understandings of COIN.

“Success in counterinsurgency (COIN) operations,” the Counterinsurgency Field Manual declares, “requires establishing legitimate government supported by the people and able to address the fundamental causes that insurgents use to gain support.” Fundamental to defeating an insurgency, it asserts, is to “render [insurgents] irrelevant” through the rule of law and the provision of essential services and security for the bulk of the population.⁸ The premise informing such assertions, as David Kilcullen explains, is that insurgencies arise largely as a result of “bad government policies or security forces that alienate the population.”⁹ As a consequence of this view, the Field Manual again avers that the “primary aim of any COIN operation” is to foster “legitimate government.”¹⁰ These and similar asseverations permeate formal documents such as the Field Manual and consistently figure in the advocacy of academic and military COIN supporters. Ultimately, they consciously invoke restatements of modernization theory.

As the term implies, modernization constitutes a process by which societies move from tradition to modernity, from status to contract, and from rural to industrial and urban socioeconomic forms of organization. Modernization further assumes this process of change to be necessary and progressive. Whereas nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century political and social theorists as various as Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber drew attention to this stadial pattern of modern historical development, a distinctively American social science methodology arose in the 1950s to explain how industrial nations in Western Europe and North America evolved into complex societies through changes in technology, productivity, education, and communications.

The development of modernization theory in the United States also considered how these processes might apply to the developing, non-Western world. More precisely, modernization as a social system and how it might apply to the developing world in the Cold War defined the research activity of the U.S. government–supported Committee on Comparative Politics (CCP) of the Social Science Research Council and the Center for International Studies (CIS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from the early Cold War years through to the 1970s. Building on the work of Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils conducted at Harvard University’s Department of Social Relations in the 1930s and 1940s, modernization theory dominated the U.S. social sciences during the Cold War. Its attraction to government lay in its confident assumption of the inexorable course of development and its willingness to define plans for entire societies to move along a universal path from tradition to modernity. From the late 1950s, the CIS and CCP offered policy programs that showed how elites in developing states might facilitate what the CIS termed the “modernity syndrome.” From this perspective, as Daniel Lerner, quoting Andre Siegfried, explained in The Passing of Traditional Society (1958), “ ‘the United States is presiding over a general reorganization of the ways of living throughout the world.’ ”11 Nils Gilman argues that modernization theory in the 1960s became the U.S. “foreign policy equivalent to social modernization at home.”¹² It assumed that a rationalist, technocratic state could solve all social and economic ills. Academic scholar-bureaucrats who came to occupy key advisory or administrative roles in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, such as Robert McNamara and W. W. Rostow, reinforced the assumption that modernization had to be guided by elites. In this view that came to influence both the conduct of U.S. counterinsurgency thinking during the Cold War and the rebirth of neoclassical COIN after 2003, Western-trained “mandarins of the future” could impose the modernization syndrome upon the masses by coercion if necessary. How, then, did modernization theory evolve into modern counterinsurgency’s default ideological drive?

Tracing the evolution of modernization theory, Samuel Huntington contended in the early 1970s that prior to the 1950s “political change tended to be ignored because comparative politics tended to be ignored.” A renewed postwar American interest in “the comparison of modern and traditional political systems” consequently engendered a “renaissance in the study of comparative politics.”13 However, in order to map the various paths, routes, and stages that facilitated the transition from tradition to modernity, the emerging disciplines of comparative politics, political sociology, and historical sociology had to identify the characteristic features or “systems” that distinguish traditional from modern society. This concern with system, syndrome, and structure reflected a growing interest in “a more scientific practice of political inquiry.”¹⁴ Leonard Binder, reflecting on the natural history of liberal development theory, contends that it consisted in the aspiration that the dominant “pragmatic pluralist system” in American political science “could be the basis of a universal political science.”¹⁵

To this developing process of scientific redescription, Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils contributed the factors that governed the pattern variables or values within which political actors structured their social action.¹⁶ In the mature Parsonian scheme, the social system consists of “interdependent elements that cohere into a self-regulating whole.”¹⁷ As a consequence, the functions of adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latent pattern maintenance sustain the social system. In this context, pattern maintenance, otherwise known as “values,” engender a hierarchy of “cybernetic” controls that support the “homeostatic” propensity of social systems.

According to modernization theory, modern societies, unlike primitive or less-developed ones, had evolved highly differentiated social systems that enable concrete subsystems to develop. The success of the modern condition consists in the integration of subsystem complexity through an institutionalized normative culture. The secret of modernity, then, is the movement from ascription to functional differentiation, mobility, and specialization. Central to the success of this transformation is the manner in which the normative order adjusts to new realities without abandoning basic understandings upon which the system depends.

The problems that modernity generated, therefore, were not primarily cultural, but inclusionary and institutional. In particular, modernization posed the question of how the culture of a modernizing elite can be integrated with that of the mass society. Inclusion and the effective transmission of modernizing values require institutionalization. Modernization consequently sought to establish inclusionary values that transcend local or traditional attachments of religion, kin or ethnicity, while at the same time adapting those understandings to the process of development. Parsons saw democratic citizenship, industrialization, and education as inclusionary processes central to creating new institutional forms, legal structures, market mechanisms, and bureaucracies that bring isolated and dependent populations into normatively regulated social participation. Parsons somewhat optimistically considered these institutions to have such “great adaptive capacity as to suggest that they will ultimately dominate the social life of all modern societies.”18 From a cybernetic perspective, Karl Deutsch subsequently emphasized the fact that political systems are networks of decision and control “dependent on processes of communication” resembling aspects of man-made communication equipment because they depend on the processing of information.¹⁹

The problem of political development, according to Deutsch, thus consists in “the integration of sets of autonomous units with their own strategic value; and the success or failure of political integration could also be evaluated in terms of the presence or absence of a second-order strategy of value, or a ‘common spirit’ that could be identified in the different value patterns and steering systems of the smaller autonomous units.”20 Attention to the processing of information and the transmission of values ineluctably leads to considerations of national character, culture, and nation building, which all political elites, in particular modernizing ones, have to address. In functional terms, the stability of the system requires not only an inclusionary group of shared values but a shared language. In other words, modernization needs a people constituted as a nationality that can be cybernetically ordered. From this functionalist viewpoint, shared ethnicity or history is tangential to order. All the political system requires is a people who possess “a wide complementarity of social communication.” Communication makes a people cohere. In the structural functional view, the modernization process accordingly involved greater inclusiveness achieved through the institutionalization of norms in an evolving network of communicatory practice. Ultimately, this liberal theory argued that “modernization, and hence democracy[,] would result in the short or long run so long as change was introduced into any part of the social system.”²¹

Even so, these lucubrations upon the social system shed little direct light on the process of modernization. What did modern conditions actually entail, and how were they distinguished from tradition and the practices that linked or inhibited the transition from one to the other? These questions became an area of growing scholarly attention in the course of the 1960s coincident with the growing U.S. entanglement in Vietnam and the growth of classical counterinsurgency thinking. By 1971, the CCP contended, a modern polity called for, among other things, a differentiated and functionally specific system of government; a prevalence of rational and secular procedures; efficacious administrative decisions; popular identification with the state’s history, territory, and national identity; the allocation of roles by achievement rather than by ascription; and an impersonal and secular legal system.22 Bridging what Huntington termed the “Great Dichotomy between modern and traditional societies” required the “Grand Process of Modernization.”²³ This process involved a bewildering variety of procedures and processes as well as elite guidance imposed by force if necessary.²⁴ From a structuralist perspective, it required the shift from uniformity to differentiation and from ascription to achievement. For Marion Levy, modernization was a “universal social solvent” that involved a shift in the ratios of inanimate to animate power.²⁵ For Dankwart Rustow, more prosaically, it included “industrialization, rationalization, secularization and bureaucratization,”²⁶ and for David Apter it required commercialization and, in its noneconomic dimension, embodied “an attitude of inquiry and questioning about how men make” moral, social, and personal choices.²⁷ Summarizing the practices involved, Huntington contended that modernization was revolutionary, inducing “total change in the patterns of human life”; complex; systemic; global; lengthy; phased, in terms of the stages of the process; homogenizing toward interdependence among societies so constituted; irreversible and ultimately progressive.²⁸

Increasing attention to this process revealed a number of difficulties in earlier structural models. Later developmental theorists argued that the cybernetic model failed adequately to capture what Samuel Huntington termed the “change to change.”²⁹ In The Passing of Traditional Society, Daniel Lerner had proposed in the late 1950s the sequence of urbanization, literacy, extension of mass media, wider economic participation, and political participation as the natural order of political modernization.³⁰ By the 1960s, however, it had become evident to CCP members that all political systems are in some senses transitional, combining elements of modernity and tradition. Following Gabriel Almond and James Coleman’s collected volume The Politics of Developing Areas,³¹ the Social Science Research Council on comparative politics gave increasing attention to the dynamics of the development process.

The identification of sequences and crises further facilitated the differentiation of political development as a concept for policy purposes. By the early 1970s, Lucian Pye and James Coleman identified a “development syndrome” that promoted increasing equality, capacity, and differentiation within the political system. Nevertheless, somewhat problematically, it was never entirely clear whether the syndrome represented a description of processes transforming a system in transition or a teleological destination for the system.³²

Given the different dimensions of the development syndrome, it became incumbent upon the CCP to identify the sequential character of development and the crises that might afflict a system. This problem became increasingly acute, for, as Huntington observed, “political decay and political instability were more rampant in Asia, Africa and Latin America in 1965 than they were fifteen years earlier.”33 It was argued that, given that political development ultimately understands “the prerequisite political environment essential for economic and industrial development,”³⁴ the failure to traverse the Great Dichotomy constitutes a problem that resides in the “crisis and sequences in political development,” as another CCP work intimated.³⁵ For Dankwart Rustow, a sequence of national identity, state authority, and equal participation represented the least-traumatic modernization sequence.³⁶ By 1971, the CCP had arrived at five potential sequential crises that the modernizing state has to negotiate: identity or nation building, state legitimacy, penetration of the wider society by a state bureaucracy, political participation, and the effective distribution of resources as a consequence of the development process.

The evidence of the friability of new states created in the wake of decolonization after 1945 elicited additional concern with the character of political stability, the preconditions for economic development and their relationship to the political variety, and the role of culture in the development process. This concern, too, had implications for the practice of what was later to be described as “neoclassical COIN” after 2003. In his 1968 study Asian Drama: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Nations, Gunnar Myrdal located the obstacles to economic development in the “inefficiency, rigidity and inequality of the established institutions and attitudes.”³⁷ The internal weakness handicapping developing South and Southeast Asian states demonstrated the need to consolidate the state. These states were “soft” in that they lacked the penetration to implement policy. For Myrdal, “national character” and a variety of “Asian values” that emphasized consensus and agreement as well as religious inertia and ignored legal procedure, together with lack of access to world markets, had inhibited Asia’s economic “takeoff.”

From a related perspective, Rostow also considered national stability and legal procedures necessary political preconditions to economic growth. Elaborating on the politics that shape the “stages of economic growth,” as his 1958 book put it, Rostow maintained that it was the British economic takeoff from the 1780s and the subsequent diffusion of this model that broke a preindustrial “cyclical pattern of expansion and decline.” A sense of national identity forged by external threat and institutions engendering a sense of national consensus “formed part of the back-drop for the take-off in the 1780s.”38 Subsequent takeoffs reflected a purposeful modernizing elite’s response to actual or threatened foreign intrusion. Significantly, Rostow maintained that “the troubled and contentious nature of the transition from a traditional society to one capable of sustained industrialization did not lend itself easily to stable democratic rule.”³⁹

The 1970s thus witnessed a shift in developmental thought toward establishing the legitimating preconditions for economic development and the crises that could lead not to political stability but to political decay as latecomers embarked upon an increasingly fraught transition to modernity. For Samuel Huntington, modernization theory neglected the fact that “as social forces became more variegated, political institutions had to become more complex and authoritative.” Worryingly, according to Huntington’s view, in the newly industrializing economies “the development of the state lagged behind the evolution of society.”⁴⁰ As the comparative method evolved, it became apparent that a frequently overlooked distinction existed between “political modernization defined as movement from a traditional to a modern polity and political modernization defined as the political aspects and political effects of social, economic and cultural modernization.”⁴¹ The gap between the two could be vast. “Modernization in practice,” Huntington contended, “always involves change in, and usually the disintegration of, a traditional political system, but it does not necessarily involve significant movement toward a modern political system.” Instead, it might involve an “erosion of democracy” and the promotion of autocratic military regimes and one-party states.⁴²

Furthermore, whereas those states that had achieved modernity tended to be wealthy, liberal democratic, and stable, those seeking to achieve modernity frequently encountered political disorder and political decay. Hence, although modernity meant stability, modernization often meant the opposite. As Huntington suggested, it was “not the absence of modernity but the efforts to achieve it which produce political disorder.”43 This disorder, it now seemed, reflected the failure to develop stable political institutions to deal with the economic, social, and psychological demands generated by rapid development, the frustration of rising expectations, and the growing economic disparities between rich and poor, town and country. In most modernizing countries, therefore, the lack of “mobility opportunities,” the absence of mechanisms for political participation, and “the low level of political institutionalization” threatened to produce “a correlation between social frustration and political instability.”⁴⁴ Significantly, Huntington further contended that the extent to which a society undergoes “complete political decomposition during the modernization process” reflects the character of its traditional political institutions.⁴⁵

Despite these difficulties, however, it appeared by the late 1980s that a number of non-Western societies, notably in Pacific Asia, had made the transition across the big ditch that separated tradition from modernity. Modernization theory further held, therefore, that effective economic modernization creates an irresistible pressure for liberal democratic political change. Authoritarian rule may offer the initial stability necessary for economic growth, but as fully developed modernity approaches, it becomes increasingly redundant and reluctantly withers away. Depending on one’s theoretical preference, the overt or covert hand promoting this change is an articulate, urban, and self-confident middle class. In the argot of development studies, the presence of this new socioeconomic phenomenon intimates both liberalization and democratization. As Seymour Martin Lipset, an early proponent of the modernization thesis stated, “the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances it will sustain democracy.”⁴⁶

Modernization theory has been the subject of much debate since the 1960s. It suffered from its association with Kennedy-era foreign policy and the application of modernizing COIN ideas “as rationales and strategies for foreign development aid and military action.”47 Meanwhile, from an academic perspective, the criticism that modernization theory presented a too mechanistic account of political and economic development caused it to fade but never disappear from the comparative study of politics. Indeed, its animating concerns came to inform a particularly American conception of the international environment, one that Walter A. McDougall has described as “global meliorism.” It assumes that the world can advance through the application of human effort and, as the CCP contended in the 1960s, that America has a “responsibility to nurture democracy and economic growth around the world. It is all about Doing and Relating … and [is] designed to give America the chance to shape the outside world’s future.”⁴⁸ The vision accepts that, modernization difficulties notwithstanding, the course of human development will ultimately lead to an interconnected and integrated world characterized by the values of liberal institutionalism.⁴⁹

At the end of the Cold War, a revived and revised version of modernization theory and America’s mission to promote it experienced a notable renaissance. The fall of communism in Eastern Europe, Francis Fukuyama optimistically believed, witnessed the triumph of liberal democracy over its ideological rivals, communism and fascism, resulting in a polyarchic end of history.⁵⁰ In its most anodyne form, this Jeffersonian version of manifest destiny held out an essentially benevolent view of human development where modernization would lead to a convergence of shared political and economic norms, resulting in a liberal democratic universalism. At its core was the “assumption that America can, should, and must reach out to help other nations share the American dream.”⁵¹ After 9/11 and more particularly the invasion of Iraq in 2003, though, critics of U.S. hyperpower detected a more aggressive project to advance the end of history by force if necessary. Driven by a globalizing neoconservative ideology, the Bush presidency advanced the U.S. Empire of Freedom and sought to impose democracy and open markets by both hard and soft means.⁵²

It was out of these ideological and political paradigms that modern counterinsurgency evolved. The rediscovery of COIN after 2001, in other words, possesses elective affinities with the U.S. modernization agenda following that agenda’s revival in the 1990s under the influence of the “end of history” and democratic convergence thesis. Informing U.S. counterinsurgency thinking was a modernization mission to transform traditional societies into modern, market friendly, pluralist arrangements. This project, as with classic Cold War iterations of the theory, required a program of nation building through both military and civilian measures to convert broken or failing autocracies into stable states and fledgling democracies.

As we have noted, writers as various as Cowper-Coles and Chandrasekaran, among others, show how inapplicable American developmental approaches have been to failing states such as Afghanistan and Iraq. This chapter, by contrast, explores a broader question: Why was the rediscovery of COIN connected with an ideological program that dated from the Cold War and the policy misadventures that flowed from it? COIN’s revival in the post–Cold War era evinced a continuing U.S. political elite preoccupation with promoting modernization and the purportedly universal enlightenment values upon which it is premised. However, its reappearance in Baghdad and Helmand also conjured up darker Cold War avatars, in particular the sometimes brutal application of rigid, apolitical, and doctrinaire techniques to facilitate the ineluctable goal of modernity.

The modernizing project even informed the conduct of counterinsurgency in theater. It found quotidian exemplification in the attempt to combine military tactics with civic actions. The Counterinsurgency Field Manual made this clear: “Long term success in COIN depends on the people taking charge of their own affairs and consenting to the government’s rule.” Fundamentally, therefore, it is the role of the “counterinsurgents to enable a country or regime to provide the security and rule of law that allow the establishment of social services and growth of economic activity.”53 Sarah Sewall spelled out what this dictum entailed in practical terms in her introduction to the Field Manual: “COIN relies upon nonkinetic activities like providing electricity, jobs, and a functioning judicial system.” This means “preparing ground forces to assume the roles of mayor, trash collector, and public works employer.”⁵⁴ Likewise, Kilcullen, in his tract “Twenty-Eight Articles: The Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency,” emphasizes that “counterinsurgency is armed social work; an attempt to redress basic social and political systems while being shot at. This makes civil affairs a central counterinsurgency activity, not an afterthought.”⁵⁵

Such emphasis on civic action and de-emphasis on hard, kinetic operations sit somewhat uneasily with customary notions of military power. For the U.S. Army especially—an institution steeped in traditions of force concentration and the ability to bring combat power and technology into symphonic conjunction, demonstrated consistently in practice from World War II to the Gulf War of 1990—the notion of participating in a “Wilsonianism with boots on” mission should have possessed little appeal.⁵⁶ For this reason, COIN’s rise to prominence in Western military thought and its complex, sometimes subtle relationship with modernization theory deserve further investigation. What we observe, in the first instance, are industrially advanced bureaucracies performing progressively through an interrogation of their own past assumptions and practices.

In 2007, Lieutenant General Sir John Kiszley of the British Army summarized the reasons traditional military thought evinced an ingrained antipathy toward insurgencies. Kiszley maintained that counterinsurgency comprises “features with which the pure warrior ethos is uneasy: complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty; an inherent resistance to short-term solutions; problems that the military alone cannot solve, requiring cooperation with other highly diverse agencies and individuals to achieve a comprehensive approach; the need for interaction with indigenous people whose culture it does not understand; and a requirement to talk to at least some of its opponents, which it can view as treating with the enemy.” He continued:

Such a military sees its task hedged about with unfair constraints; over-tight rules of engagement, negating the use of its trump card—firepower; perceived overemphasis on force protection and its disciplinary consequences; the need to accommodate the media. Moreover, in the eyes of the warrior, counterinsurgency calls for some decidedly un-warrior like qualities, such as emotional intelligence, empathy, subtlety, sophistication, nuance and political adroitness. Armies that find difficulty with these unwelcome features tend to view counterinsurgency as an aberration, look forward to the opportunity of returning to “proper soldiering,” and see subsequent training as an opportunity to regain their warfighting skills rather than to learn the lessons of counterinsurgency.⁵⁸

In the United States, the armed forces, scarred by memories of the Vietnam War, demonstrated this reluctance to address anything that smacked of insurgency. For the latter part of the twentieth century, decisions about military action were ruled by the “Powell–Weinberger Doctrine,” which emphasized the precision application of military power for clearly defined and time-limited purposes. Getting embroiled in dirty wars that lacked popular support, firm objectives, and a clear exit strategy were to be avoided, for this route had led to the disaster of Vietnam and other foreign-policy misadventures, such as the troubled intervention in the Lebanese Civil War, which witnessed the loss of hundreds of U.S. personnel in 1983.59 Mistaken interventions abroad and the apparent lessons for the United States that it evidently held for the future reinforced the assumption that counterinsurgency constituted a form of warfare from which no good could come. “After the Vietnam War,” according to General Jack Keane, “we purged ourselves of everything that had to do with irregular warfare or insurgency, because it had to do with how we lost that war.”⁶⁰ Even so, as David Ucko argues, the U.S. military’s post-Vietnam “aversion to counterinsurgency and stability operations” in fact “confused the undesirability of these missions with an actual ability to avoid them.”⁶¹ The aftermath of the 9/11 attacks by al-Qaeda-sponsored jihadists dictated a policy of preemptive intervention to forestall emergent threats to U.S. security and thus served to buttress the point that avoidance was not a realistic policy proposition.

The most graphic expression of the commitment to preventive war was, of course, demonstrated first in the invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 and then by the ousting of the Saddam regime in Iraq in 2003. It was the U.S.-led Coalition’s subsequent failure to stabilize Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion that prompted a radical reevaluation of traditional military priorities.62 The breakdown of civil society, the descent into lawlessness, and the tenacity and brutality of organized resistance to both the occupying forces and the fledgling Iraqi government presented the United States and its allies with a desperate problem.⁶³ From the military perspective, according to John Nagl, then a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, the difficulty in dealing with the evolving chaos stemmed from a failure to identify “a common understanding of the problems inherent in any counterinsurgency campaign.” This in turn reflected the army’s institutional culture and orientation, which discouraged the study of such conflicts. As a consequence of this orientation, the military establishment ignored both the lessons of such wars and the “ways to achieve success in contemporary counterinsurgency campaigns.” Nagl insisted in 2007: “It is not unfair to say that in 2003 most Army officers knew more about the U.S. Civil War than they did about counterinsurgency.”⁶⁴

The U.S. Department of Defense’s eventual recognition in 2004 that a deep-rooted insurgency prevailed in Iraq constituted the prelude to an impressive period of learning and adaptation within the American military establishment.⁶⁵ Ucko notes that “an uncommon level of humility and lack of chauvinism” informed this learning process.⁶⁶ In the course of 2004–2005, the U.S. armed services and Coalition partners such as the United Kingdom undertook a critical examination of military conduct in Iraq.⁶⁷ This process of critical reevaluation culminated in 2007 in the publication of the joint U.S. Army/Marine Corps manual on counterinsurgency, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, one of the most comprehensive operational documents published on COIN operations. More importantly, the new thinking reflected ongoing changes in operational practice taking place on the ground in Iraq, along with more general shifts in military policy in Iraq that culminated in the so-called Surge. As a result, discernible improvements in the security situation were evident after 2007. Iraq was stabilized, and an impending catastrophe averted.

In contemplating the renaissance of counterinsurgency thinking within U.S. military institutions, it is possible to identify two distinctive schools of thought. Writers such as Frank Hoffman called one of these schools “neo-classical counter-insurgency.”68 The term neoclassical refers to the rediscovery of an underlying set of verities about COIN that drew on canonical case studies and key thinkers once overlooked or forgotten but whose relevance now appeared irresistible. This school conceived the challenge presented by insurgencies as one that operated within a Maoist framework, seeking to win the allegiance of the population to the rebel cause. From this perspective, the practice of counterinsurgency demanded an appreciation of the social and political conditions that pertained in a given territorial space and a strategy that tailored this knowledge to military and socioeconomic policies in order to contest the insurgents’ claim to popular support. It is this school of COIN that most closely drew on the principles that underlay modernization theory for its inspiration and practice.

By contrast, a second, though related, school of thought reflected an ambitious attempt to draw connections between the specifics of local insurgencies and broader currents at work in the international system after 9/11. It viewed deterritorialized Islamist jihadism as a “global insurgency.” It further perceived such insurgency as “post-Maoist,” unbounded by space, where the local and global interact to produce a transnationally networked resistance movement. This second school presented an altogether more radical appreciation of insurgency. The evolution of this global insurgency school is explored more fully in chapter 4.

Taken together, however, these schools might be described as “neocounterinsurgency,” or “neo-COIN” for short. Although the neoclassical and global counterinsurgency schools involved elements of overlap and frequently asserted similar programs, they are nonetheless worth examining individually. The analytical separation permits us to reveal the complexity and differing perceptions at work within neo-COIN thought and how their complex interplay leaves us with a confused understanding of the phenomenon. The remainder of this chapter therefore addresses the impact of modernization theory on the neoclassical school of counterinsurgency.

Systems of thought rarely evolve in a vacuum or as an immediate response to a crisis. They have origins that are often deep rooted and highly contingent. The rise of neo-COIN thought did not begin with the failure to stabilize Iraq. Indeed, its genesis preceded the invasion of Iraq by at least a decade. The premonitory snuffling of neo-COIN appeared in the 1990s, which in itself throws an interesting light onto the evolution of the counterinsurgency debate after the turn of the millennium.

In other words, if the immediate cause of a popular revival in COIN was the evident failure of the Coalition’s occupation of Iraq, those reviving this interest drew upon evidence derived from a number of post–Cold War events. The two seminal sources of modern counterinsurgency thinking derived first from the attempt to understand why the Northern Ireland conflict ended in the manner it did and second, somewhat relatedly, from the wider study of the number of asymmetric challenges to the post–Cold War international order.

The settlement of the seemingly intractable insurgency in Northern Ireland inspired a number of scholarly and journalistic studies from the mid-1990s on.69 Almost certainly the most significant figure in influencing later neoclassical COIN thought after 2003 was American anthropologist Montgomery McFate.⁷⁰ McFate had lived and studied in Northern Ireland’s Republican community in the early 1990s while conducting fieldwork for her doctoral thesis. Early on she recognized the importance of acquiring “cultural knowledge” as a means of “enhancing military prowess.”⁷¹ In a series of papers written for U.S. military periodicals and published in the years following the invasion of Iraq, McFate reiterated the need for the nuanced appreciation of the social milieu from which insurgencies arose. In the Iraqi context, this meant understanding the nature of Sunni tribal networks.⁷² She argued that U.S. “military operations and national security have consistently suffered due to lack of knowledge of foreign cultures,” and so she urged the development of specialist centers in the Department of Defense to “produce, collect, and centralize cultural knowledge, which will have utility for policy development and military operations.”⁷³ The Counterinsurgency Field Manual readily repeated these strictures, noting that “cultural knowledge is essential to waging a successful counterinsurgency” and stressing that “American ideas of what is ‘normal’ or ‘rational’ are not universal.”⁷⁴

The second source affecting the post-2003 focus on counterinsurgency developed in the late 1990s.75 It focused on the nature of asymmetric conflict as it appeared to evolve in the decade following the first Gulf War of 1990–1991. Military and strategic thinking after the Gulf War concentrated on the Revolution in Military Affairs and Fourth Generation Warfare, the technology of precision-guided weapons, and integrated all-arms combat. Some analysts, however, questioned this revolution. They questioned in particular whether major battlefield operations represented the most likely form of confrontation for Western states in the future. Skeptical commentators, such as Rupert Smith, observed that those wishing to test the resolve of the major powers would be unlikely and arguably extremely foolish to confront Western and especially U.S. military and technological superiority through face-to-face combat. Instead, an enemy would attempt to mount assaults below the level of conventional combat operations, avoiding open confrontation with these materially superior opponents.

These analysts contended that the wars of dissolution that befell the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, along with the increasing number of civil wars and violent nonstate actors in failed and failing states, notably in Africa and Central Asia, which sometimes compelled Western forces to intervene in humanitarian and peacekeeping or peace enforcement roles, meant that accepted understandings of military power required radical rethinking.⁷⁶ Specifically, they perceived a need for a more flexible military capable of adapting quickly to multiple and diverse roles in “out of area” operations, and this capability implied, among other things, the necessity of contemplating tasks that were perceived to fall into the category of counterinsurgency.⁷⁷

The key texts on asymmetric warfare, out-of-area operations, and the changing nature of military power were published from 2001–2002 on, although almost all their research data derived from pre-9/11 source material. If Montgomery McFate’s work epitomized the renewed interest in insurgency/counterinsurgency deriving from the latter stages of the Northern Ireland conflict, then John Nagl’s 2002 book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam exemplified this second trend in the evolution of neoclassical COIN. Nagl’s principal concern was how military institutions innovate and adapt or sometimes fail to adapt to military challenges. Contrasting what he saw as the very different organizational cultures of the British and American armies, Nagl observed that the British preference for patient and adaptive learning, small-unit forces, and decentralized command as well as willingness to embrace civil–military cooperation could explain the relative success they enjoyed in the Malayan Emergency compared with the American army’s rigid adherence to “big-unit” concepts in Vietnam that invariably emphasized firepower to resolve what were essentially deeply entrenched political problems.78

From these two distinct strands of thought arose a growing admiration for the British approach to COIN, which in historical terms accentuated ideas of proportionality and long-term commitment.⁷⁹ Nagl argued that the British Army’s institutional culture forged over centuries of colonial war “reflected varied experiences outside conventional conflicts on the European continent” and explained its capacity to adapt to new challenges. “The leadership of the British army,” he stated, “shared a common belief that the essence of the organization included colonial policing and administration.” Thus, when “conventional tactics and strategy failed in Malaya, the British Army had few problems creating an internal consensus that change was needed and that political rather than purely military solutions were well within the purview of the British Army.” Nagl concluded that “an innovative and varied past created a culture amenable to the changes in organizational process required to defeat a complex opponent in a new kind of war.”⁸⁰

By contrast, McFate’s respect for British methods derived primarily from the British Army’s ability to acquire deep cultural knowledge of its adversary. In her attempt to persuade the American armed forces to take anthropological approaches seriously, McFate related “an epiphany” she experienced while living in Belfast. “The common view of the Troubles as a battle between Catholics and Protestants, or Loyalists and Republicans, or even terrorists and the government was not how the warring sides saw it.”⁸¹ Irish Republicans legitimized their campaign of violence out of a belief that they formed part of a continuous resistance movement against eight hundred years of British military occupation. Yet, rather than deny this perspective, the British Army understood the Irish Republican myth that inspired Irish Republican Army (IRA) actions. “They may think that these people are terrorists and despise them, but they understand what’s motivating it,” McFate reflected. “They [the British] could not have built an effective strategy in Northern Ireland as they did without having a very full understanding of their enemy, which by the way, it took them 30 years to get.”⁸²

The rise of neoclassical counterinsurgency thus had its origins in the United States and had developed its thinking well before 9/11. Grappling with the troubled occupation of Iraq after 2003, elements in the U.S. military establishment, as a matter of course, turned to those who had established their credentials in the field prior to the invasion. It was natural, too, that those associated with the neoclassical school would advocate the American embrace of COIN. Indeed, they were soon at the forefront of deliberations on improving Coalition strategy in the face of what, by 2005, seemed an increasingly intractable insurgency. It was no surprise, therefore, that John Nagl, a serving officer in the armored divisions of the U.S. Army with firsthand experience both of the original invasion of Iraq during Operation Desert Storm and later with occupation forces in Khalidiyah Province, played a seminal role in shaping the debate over U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine,83 eventually writing a foreword to the Counterinsurgency Field Manual.⁸⁴ Analogously, Montgomery McFate actively promoted the view that “cultural and social knowledge of the adversary” should be on the American counterinsurgency agenda. As she argued, “In a counterinsurgency situation such as the United States currently faces in Iraq, ‘winning’ through overwhelming force is often inapplicable as a concept.… Winning on the battlefield is irrelevant against an insurgent adversary because the struggle for power and legitimacy among competing factions has no purely military solution.”⁸⁵

For some commentators, the fact that McFate and others had to restate established maxims of counterinsurgency reflected the inertia in Western armed forces thinking.⁸⁶ The neglect of insurgent warfare meant that even the British Army, with its “repeated engagement in counterinsurgency, has historically found it difficult to internalize the lessons drawn from these campaigns necessitating quick adaptation on the ground with each new engagement [rather than being able to draw upon a strong institutional memory and systematic operational doctrine].”⁸⁷ The problem was even more acute for the U.S. military, deeply imbricated in an institutional culture that predisposed it toward thinking almost exclusively in terms of application of combat power above all else.

The institutionalized neglect of counterinsurgency therefore demanded the reiteration of the basic principles of counterinsurgency. In the context of the failure of the Coalition’s policies in Iraq, necessity was the mother of reinvention. The neoclassical school of thought in effect reinvented the study of counterinsurgency as a core rather than a peripheral focus of military practice. It is “neoclassical” in the sense that it reinvigorated traditional counterinsurgency principles. The influence and authority of this neoclassical school was first evident in military and scholarly research that rediscovered the major counterinsurgency campaigns of the later twentieth century. Much of the research in this area highlighted the largely successful British campaigns in Malaya (1948–1960) and Northern Ireland (1969–1998), but it also looked at the failed but no less instructive French tactics in Algeria (1954–1962).88 American military commentators in particular drew inspiration from the overarching strategies adopted by the British in their campaigns, while admiring aspects of French doctrine and operational technique. The republication of key texts from the 1960s, ranging from David Galula’s reflections on the Algerian War in Counterinsurgency Warfare, originally published in 1964, to John McCuen’s seminal 1966 publication The Art of Counter-Revolutionary Warfare, exemplified this growing interest in colonial-era insurgencies.⁸⁹

Interestingly, those with an established track record in this area predating the 1990s were often skeptical of this renewed interest in matters counterinsurgent.90 Colin Gray observed: “In the history of strategic ideas, the contemporary American fascination with asymmetry comprises the rediscovery of the stunningly obvious.”⁹¹ A restatement of the obvious, nevertheless, seemingly constituted a necessary prerequisite to raising awareness in the U.S. armed forces. More importantly, this renaissance in counterinsurgency produced a series of thoughtful articles about how to develop U.S. counterinsurgency practice in Iraq.⁹² According to Sarah Sewall, these works established the terms for a critical analysis aimed at “breaking the conventional paradigm.” “For decades,” she maintained, “the US Army in particular had discounted the need to prepare for counterinsurgency—a messy, hydra headed conflict that can, by its very nature, only be won incrementally.” “American culture and US military doctrine,” Sewall averred, “prefer a technological solution and the overwhelmingly decisive blow. Americans have a penchant for black-and-white clarity and have historically shown little patience for complexity and extended commitment.”⁹³ Commentaries such as Sewall’s soon established a COIN narrative. It held that progressive military commanders such as Generals David Petraeus and Peter Chiarelli, who had experienced the “messy” realities on the ground in Iraq, “recognized a responsibility to prepare troops to meet the wars that call them, not the wars they might prefer to fight.”⁹⁴

Yet the preparation of American troops to confront insurgent conflicts accounted only in part for the revival of COIN. The U.S. armed forces’ unprecedented willingness to open themselves to criticism provided space for both soldiers and scholars to reflect upon the conduct of U.S. military operations in Iraq and what needed to be done to prevail in the long run. This openness to criticism represents one of the most remarkable aspects of the COIN revival. Thus, writing in the U.S. Army journal Military Review in 2005, John Lynn of the University of Illinois vigorously condemned orthodox military approaches in Iraq:

The most short-sighted statements I hear are: “They only understand force.” Or, “If only we could take the gloves off, we could win.” The truth is that everyone understands force, and everyone can be battered or intimidated by violence, but such use of violence generates the three “Rs”: resentment, resistance, and revenge. People who argue that the enemy only understands force imply that force wins respect. In reality, force usually only instills fear. We are not trying to recreate Saddam’s regime of fear, so we must use more than force.⁹⁵

“The wisest analysis of the counterinsurgency,” Lynn continued, “came from an unidentified colonel on CNN who state[d] that we cannot really win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis but we can provide security and establish trust. In security lies the support of the majority and the environment in which a new and better state may emerge.”96 As Lynn suggested, providing a critical framework that questioned conventional wisdom was one thing, but it was the experiences of military commanders on the ground in Iraq, combined with the new reflective mood, that decisively reoriented military thinking. Critical reflection, moreover, quickly assumed a distinctively modernizing cachet. Officers returning from tours of duty in Iraq offered practical insight into dealing with insurgent forces and the local communities that afforded them succour.⁹⁷ Lieutenant Colonel Chris Gibson, for example, writing of his experience in Nineveh Province, maintained that COIN forces needed to “be able to convince the people that they can provide security.” “Without that,” he contended, “locals will not associate themselves with—or even be seen in the presence of—security forces.… Once security is established, however, locals can see that COIN forces offer a better vision for the future than insurgent forces do.”⁹⁸ Building on these affirmations, other serving officers offered practical evidence to support McFate’s call for cultural knowledge and the need to attain practical awareness of the particularities of the local surroundings. In this context, the experience of Captain Travis Patriquin (who was later killed in action in Tikrit in December 2006) was particularly notable. Patriquin developed a practical understanding of how to work among and obtain the cooperation of the traditionally pro-Baathist Turkomen population of Tal Afar.⁹⁹

Although the neoclassical school of thought began by reclaiming the insights of previous counterinsurgency campaigns, the experience of the Iraq insurgency also meant that this renewed interest quickly led to the reorientation of much mainstream military thought in the United States.¹⁰⁰ The publication of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual apotheosized this influence.¹⁰¹ The regeneration of COIN thinking also moved from general restatements of principle to the promulgation of theoretical and practical insights that raised the standard of in-theater operational analysis. Reflecting on the experience of stabilization efforts in Iraq and applying it to the traditional principles of counterinsurgency, both soldier and civilian analysts developed technical, doctrinal, and operational understandings in such areas as equipping COIN forces; understanding tribal networks; denying sanctuary; developing negotiation strategies; and implementing population control.¹⁰² The experience also facilitated the examination of what constituted the center of gravity in such operations and its implications for existing conventional forces.¹⁰³

Curiously, however, the “techniques and processes” identified do not appear to be especially novel or adaptive. To the extent, moreover, that they incorporate the “lessons learned,” these techniques were not drawn from particularly successful historical examples of COIN campaigns. Colin Jackson compares the conduct of French forces in Indochina and Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s with American experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and finds a “familiar theory of influence” playing itself out: a belief that the “provision of humanitarian relief and public goods” will win “over [the] ‘hearts and minds’ of the liberated population.”¹⁰⁵ This belief assumed the form of remarkably similar operational tactics, wherein “small groups of military advisers and civilian bureaucrats [are] inserted to restore the formal institutions of the state, distribute public services, and rebuild the authority of the government through benevolent administration.”¹⁰⁶ Examining the performance of Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan, Jackson argues that these teams—like the other examples he studied—did little to boost the central government’s authority and win over the people. He found that local communities cooperated with the teams simply to capture the benefits of Western aid. The teams had no impact on altering traditional tribal allegiances and undermined rather than reinforced the role and authority of the central government in Kabul.

Why did the Americans embark on a course of action that had ultimately been unsuccessful for the French fifty years earlier? Jackson contends that the similarity arose from common theories of victory and influence in civil war that were reflected in contemporary counterinsurgency ideas such as “clear, hold, and build” and adhered to a standard paradigm: separate the insurgents from the people, then reintroduce good governance and public services. Effective administration and the provision of material incentives, so the theory goes, will dampen resistance, loosen ties with the insurgents, and shift allegiances to the state. Such thinking assumes material inequality accounts for resistance movements and that the source of political authority consists in a functioning state bureaucracy delivering efficient administration and distribution of welfare. The paradigm possesses an enduring appeal for Western theorists, Jackson suggests, because of its apparent logical consistency and the progressive modernizing outlook that assumes good works improve the lot of the citizens.107 The problem, however, is that this outlook is a “technocratic conceit.” Counterinsurgency experts from established states assume that resistance results from a failed social contract. According to Jackson, these theorists, following thinkers such as Steven Pinker,¹⁰⁸ “regard the outbreak of resistance as a reflection of the failure of governance and the absence of material prosperity. Based on this understanding, they believe that a combination of population security, improved local and national governance, and economic development will induce collaboration and restore a durable political order.” Crucially, Jackson observes that in this understanding, “politics … is an essentially technocratic problem of imposing formal institutions, introducing competent and virtuous administration, and delivering public services and prosperity.”¹⁰⁹

Thus, far from developing “cultural knowledge” in order to understand different ideas of rationality, Western-style counterinsurgency thinking imposes an ideology of modernization upon societies that may, for deep-rooted cultural reasons, resist them. This assessment applies particularly to a custom-based tribal society such as Afghanistan, where a sense of national identity or belief in central state authority is lacking or nonexistent. The ideology convinces its adherents that counterinsurgents act out of progressive motives, seeing themselves, in Kilcullen’s words, as in “competition with the insurgent for the right and ability to win the hearts, minds and acquiescence of the population,” where the “most beneficial actions are often local politics, and beat-cop behaviors.”110 Benign though this approach sounds, it stems from a paternalistic, if not mechanistic, attitude that reduces the population to passive recipients. “COIN is fought among the populace,” the Counterinsurgency Field Manual pontificates. “Counterinsurgents take upon themselves responsibility for the people’s well-being in all its manifestations.” This responsibility includes, inter alia, the provision of security, policing, economic and health needs, public utilities, and cultural and welfare services.¹¹¹

Even while asserting cultural sensitivity and humanitarianism, a Eurocentric and secularist ideology informs Western COIN. Its underlying modernization agenda, far from empowering the local populace, reduces it to dependence. Sarah Sewall, somewhat paternalistically, holds that COIN’s belief in the civil reconstruction of a conflicted society “is not a responsibility that can be left to a beleaguered host nation.” For Sewall, an “unwillingness to govern other nations” is not something admirable, but a shortcoming in national policy.¹¹² As a consequence of the military’s reluctance to embrace “foreign policy as social work” during the 1990s, she maintains, the “US failed to develop critical nation-building capabilities that could have proved crucial in Iraq.”¹¹³ Nation building is the concrete expression of a developmental dogma. COIN, therefore, rediscovers and reasserts Cold War U.S. assumptions about the virtue of nation building. Thus, Sewall contends, “counterinsurgents must harness the ordinary administrative functions to the fight, providing personnel, resources, and expertise,” and assume the “enormous demands that governance and nation-building place not simply upon military forces but also on civilian agencies.”¹¹⁴ Sewall, however, like other COIN analysts, suffers from an acute case of historical amnesia. Nation-building COIN led the United States in particular into its most disastrous foreign-policy encounters. South Vietnam, in particular, was perceived as a “beleaguered host nation” demanding modernization.

The default assumption that nation building is the answer to the complex social conditions in which insurgencies invariably arise demonstrates most graphically the fallacies inherent in modern Western notions of counterinsurgency. It returns us to the “managerial rationalism,” that chapter 2 identified as central to contemporary COIN. As Jackson argues, a technocratic approach to instrumentalizing bureaucracy and governance negates and simplifies the complex politics of insurgency. COIN theory and doctrine address the problem of how to implement a program of civic development. They ignore and exclude first-order questions of why an insurgency happens or why an intervening power should choose to become involved and with what ends in mind. COIN’s reductionist view of policy options, moreover, overlooks the fact that some individuals will hold multiple loyalties simultaneously and that although some members of a population may be able to alter their loyalties, others never can.

Avoiding the why questions arises from a managerial rationalism that assumes that the instrumental mind bled of all prior assumptions can efficiently address problems. The flaw in instrumental rationalism and the mechanistic assumptions at work in modernization theory occur because these two ways of thinking give the answer in advance of the question. As Michael Oakeshott observed of this disposition, “To call an activity rational on account of its end having been determined in advance and in respect of its achieving that end to the exclusion of all others” is erroneous “because there is in fact no way of determining an end for activity in advance of the activity itself.”¹¹⁵ The truth is that to understand the how you must first understand the why.

Concentrating on the second-order instrumentalist how without serious consideration of the first-order why further invites a rationalist preoccupation with highly technical, jargon-heavy, and abstruse discussions of tactical minutiae. From David Galula’s classic discussion of counterinsurgency technique in the Algerian War in Counterinsurgency Warfare to more recent neoclassical accounts, managerial rationalism permeates the COIN literature. COIN instrumentalism requires a managerial vocabulary complete with flow diagrams that rhetorically reinforces its claim to expertise. The COIN argot—with its population-centric approaches, discussions about centers of gravity and hearts and minds, and accounts of how to win the confidence of tribal hinterlands—forms a technical vocabulary available only to an elite who speak this exclusive language.

As noted in chapter 2, Oakeshott considered rationalism the basis of modern ideological faith. In 1964, Jacques Ellul similarly identified “the technique of a more or less spiritual nature that we call magic,” which is “basically a ‘scholasticism of efficiency.’ ”¹¹⁶ COIN’s propensity for ex cathedra statements that assert as fact what is in fact supposition or opinion reflects this character. The Counterinsurgency Field Manual’s mechanical assumption that the host population is an inert mass illustrates this predilection. “In almost every case,” the manual declares, “counterinsurgents face a populace containing an active minority supporting the government and an equally small militant faction opposing it.” If the government is “accepted as legitimate by most of that uncommitted middle, which also includes passive supporters of both sides,”¹¹⁷ then success against an insurgent campaign is guaranteed. Nowhere is this ruling assumption tested or falsified; it is merely asserted as truth. The simplistic division of the “population” into three groups according to their presumed view of the insurgency (insurgent supporters, neutral or passive, and pro-government)¹¹⁸ implies a deterministic, causal link between counterinsurgent actions along “lines of operation” and change in public opinion. These rationalist assumptions inform both contemporary COIN manuals and the writings of prominent theorists. The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, with its list of eighty-four different “tables, figures and vignettes,”¹¹⁹ exemplifies this scientistic technology of practice.

COIN tactics may, of course, have some utility at the operational level and may indeed be relevant in specific theaters of conflict. However, once COIN’s modernizing rationalism is exposed, it becomes possible to challenge the idea that this localized tactical knowledge has wider strategic application. Creating universal principles from local techniques and abstracting them into a universally applicable instrument do not constitute a stable basis for prediction. Instead, at best, such rationalism recites bland injunctions, and, at worst, the erroneous application of the instrument to a situation in which it does not apply has potentially disastrous consequences.

In its fullest application after 2007, COIN’s modernizing project involved, among other things, military governance, law and order, infrastructure, building the Afghan National Security Forces, and development. Ironically, employing the lessons of Malaya to capture “hearts and minds” led, by a curious process of mission creep, to the same type of the nation building and economic and social reconstruction program associated with the disastrous intervention in South Vietnam.120 It is precisely toward more drawn-out involvements along Vietnam lines that much current counterinsurgency thinking inexorably leads. The lure of modernization ideology and its predisposition toward nation building appeals to an American mindset predisposed to global meliorism and manifest destiny. Gian Gentile, for example, points to General Tommy Franks’s remarks to the House Armed Services Committee in February 2002 that defeating al-Qaeda required a commitment to pursue a “permanent solution … based on strengthening Afghanistan’s capacity.” For Gentile, the reference to restoring the capacity of the Afghan state’s resources and institutions revealed that the “United States has been in the nation-building business from the start.”¹²¹

In the 1960s, the prevailing paradigm in American political science held that the transition from tradition to modernity in the developing world demanded U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia to forestall the threat of communism. Walt Rostow observed in his classic modernizing study Politics and the Stages of Growth that opposing communism would grant “to the rest of Asia a decade to find its feet and begin to fashion a framework of progress and cooperation which might balance in the long run the power and influence of … China.”¹²² In this understanding, political stability and security constituted the necessary preconditions for investment in developing states, and “finding the terms on which private capital flows can make a rational contribution to development” would lead to economic takeoff and political as well as economic development.¹²³

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy sent Rostow, one of his key national-security advisers, to South Vietnam to assess conditions and propose recommendations. Rostow suggested sending more advisers and equipment and recommended a fundamental “transition from advice to partnership” with South Vietnam.¹²⁴ A nation-building and modernizing agenda thus superseded any limited advisory commitment. By 1962, it was the “clearly stated objective of the Kennedy administration,” according to Robert McNamara, “to train the South Vietnamese to defend themselves.”¹²⁵ In the same year, a RAND Corporation Symposium on counterinsurgency agreed on, among other things, the need to “identify and redress the political, economic, military and other issues fueling the insurgency” and to “gain control over and protect the population which the counterinsurgent must see as the prime center of gravity.”¹²⁶

COIN methodology and its ideological commitment to modernization consign its adherents to historical amnesia and doom them to repeat foreign-policy mistakes. Advanced as a standard model for guidance, COIN’s instrumental rationalism leads to flawed judgments and commitments. It reduces insurgencies to their “methodologies”—that is, their tactics. Accordingly, all the respondent requires to solve the problem are countertactics. COIN theory negates political judgment because it can never identify the interests that need securing with these tactics, and as a matter of instrumental rationalism there is no clear criterion to judge political success. Technique is not a substitute for strategy.

By 1965, analysts such as Hans Morgenthau were already questioning the expanding American commitment to South Vietnam. Morgenthau presciently observed that the American approach treated the complexity of the war as a “self-sufficient, technical enterprise, to be won as quickly, as cheaply, as thoroughly as possible and divorced from the foreign policy that preceded and is to follow it.” He continued: “Thus our military theoreticians and practitioners conceive of counterinsurgency as though it were just another branch of warfare, to be taught in special schools and applied with technical proficiency wherever the occasion arises.”127

COIN’s reductionist rhetoric is heard in modern-day injunctions such as “clear, hold, and build.”¹²⁸ But this slogan never actually explains what requires clearing, holding, or building. More to the point, if it is recognized that NATO forces need to clear the enemy from an Afghan province and then hold it at great cost, such a formula never offers a means of rhetorically framing why this is being done, to achieve what end, and for how long. COIN analysis cannot establish, given its constituting instrumentalism, when NATO in Afghanistan—or any other theater for that matter—will have sufficiently cleared, held, and built and thus achieved its strategic goal.

Only politics can determine what success entails. But this is now a problem. For as we have seen, the modernizing, technical discourse sounds plausible and compassionate: it promises a universal panacea for insurgencies regardless of context. The politics of war is discounted in favor of the application of the rationalist technique of an instrument to guide conduct. Such rational instrumentalism appeals to both liberal-minded policy makers and military practitioners alike because it offers the seductive blandishment of predetermined remedies to otherwise complex political problems. Whether in Vietnam or in Iraq or Afghanistan, the cheap, self-sufficient, technical enterprise described by Morgenthau so many years ago subtly appeals to those inculcated in the ideology of modernization.

This chapter has shown that the instrumentalist, reductionist, technocratic character of modern COIN thinking reveals an apparent contradiction at its center, arising from a Western commitment to developmental goals. COIN assumes that the population is the “center of gravity.”129 Counterinsurgent forces must win the population’s loyalty, which is the key to defeating insurgents, and this imperative must drive all operations. As the Counterinsurgency Field Manual makes clear, “At its core, COIN is a struggle for the population’s support. The protection, welfare, and support of the people are vital to success.”¹³⁰ From this axiom all other requirements flow, most notably the felt need to develop a deep understanding of the local cultural, linguistic, and sociological context, which in Alex Marshall’s words represents a “powerful military-anthropological tradition, one which remains an active part of most European counterinsurgency doctrine even today.”¹³¹

But COIN theory also asserts the irrelevance of specifics. All insurgencies, it is claimed, possess similar dynamics and the solution to each is the same throughout time and space. The U.S. counterinsurgency “strategy” for Afghanistan, leaked to the press in late 2009, made this clear. As Ambassador Robert Blackwill declared, “I notice that in the entire treatise, more than 23,000 words, the … Pashtun, who are after all the primary objects of that strategy, [are] mentioned exactly once. Unless all references to them are redacted and extensive, those folks are Banquo’s ghost at the feast.”¹³²

Thus, a set of tactical responses, contained in a rational instrument such as a field manual, aspires to the status of a universal understanding. It promotes itself as a closed system of thought, complete with its own distinctive language, available only to the cognoscenti. It is, in other words, a cult.133 Furthermore, when doctrine is accepted as faith in the corridors of power, it affords a vehicle for professional preferment that silences debate about alternative ways of analyzing a security problem.¹³⁴

COIN’s mutation from tactical guidance into a faith is, however, a symptom of a wider ideology. The ubiquitous promulgation of its doctrinal faith offering value-neutral technical solutions to complex problems inexorably assumes the character of a modernizing ideology. This is somewhat paradoxical given COIN doctrine’s aversion to politics. Rhetorically presented as apolitical technique, COIN ultimately promotes contestable positions as incontrovertible truths, somewhat conveniently unsupported by evidence or empirical tests.