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

The U.S. Counterinsurgency Field Manual consistently refers to American forces supporting the “Host Nation.” In fact, the phrase is so commonplace in the manual that it acquires an acronym: HN.¹ The implication is clear: counterinsurgency is practiced on others elsewhere. “The primary objective of any COIN operation,” the manual declares, “is to foster development of effective governance by a legitimate government.” Legitimate government, “in the Western liberal tradition,” the manual helpfully explains, “derives its just powers from the people and responds to their desires while looking out for their welfare is accepted as legitimate.” The manual clearly separates the counterinsurgents from their hosts. Thus, we find that “both counterinsurgents and the HN government ensure that their deeds match their words.” Analogously, both “counterinsurgents and the HN government … carefully consider the impact on the many audiences involved in the conflict and on the sidelines.”² Patently, the counterinsurgent and the host are rarely, if ever, one and the same.

In other words, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual for the most part unambiguously situates itself within the neoclassical tradition that assumes Western nations intervene in distant conflicts in a quasi-imperial role. Yet the post-9/11 epoch revealed that threats to the security of the state did not necessarily originate in far-off places. The events of 9/11 announced the arrival of transnational, deterritorialized jihadism, which could asymmetrically strike stable and legitimate, or at least presumed stable and legitimate, Western nations. The threat had gone global.

To appreciate the emergence of the global counterinsurgency school, it is necessary first to grasp what globalization entails from a security perspective and its relationship to the modernization thesis that the previous chapter identified. Western policy makers, as we have seen, considered modernization crucial to an effective counterinsurgency program. As Anthony Giddens explains, the notion of globalization may be understood as the “intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.”3 Globalization is, in this respect, associated with a rapid quickening in the speed and volume of international communications, electronic or physical. The increase in the pace of transnational connectivity compresses time and space.⁴ It also facilitates the formation of networks of associations that possess the potential to alter and remake patterns of social relations. Because globalization entails a “process by which events, decisions and activities in one part of the world can come to have significant consequences for individuals and communities in quite distant parts of the world,”⁵ it has profound social, economic, and political implications.

Globalization since the end of the Cold War, moreover, is often seen as an outgrowth and validation of the modernization process. From this perspective, the creation of an integrated international order is something desirable. Globalization, according to Thomas Larsonn, announces “a world shrinkage, of distances getting shorter, things moving closer. It pertains to the increasing ease with which somebody on one side of the world can interact, to mutual benefit, with somebody on the other side of the world.”⁶ From a positive perspective, globalization presages a harmonious global convergence and a neoliberal order based on the rule of the free market, democracy, and universal humanitarian values. Francis Fukuyama’s post–Cold War declaration of “the end of history” and Thomas Freidman’s identification of a flat world in The Lexus and the Olive Tree are two of the more influential endorsements of this process.⁷

In the debates on globalization at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, those of a more historically minded disposition questioned this meliorism. They considered globalization a fluid process with no necessary endpoint. Jan Nederveen Pieterse saw globalization as a product of modernity and transformational in its impact but considered its effects uneven and contradictory.⁸ The world is increasingly interconnected but by no means integrated, and the outcomes might be negative. The new dispensation raised “economic, social and ecological questions.” The resulting anxiety and uncertainty exacerbated problems ranging from “pollution, human rights, drugs and terrorism.”⁹

To its more vociferous critics, the globalization and modernity nexus appeared a vehicle for Western imperialism or, more accurately, the Americanization of discourse, culture, and values across the political, economic, and social spheres. Such homogenization might evoke resistance rather than be welcomed.10 The rise of the antiglobalization movement—a paradoxical term in itself—in the course of the 1990s exemplified this opposition.¹¹ After 1990 antiglobalization was first associated with what Bernard-Henri Lévy termed a new Zombie, left, anticapitalist, anticonsumerist, and environmentalist movement,¹² which inspired anarchistic violent protests at G8 summits and elsewhere. However, it was the rise of international jihadi violence that constituted the gravest and most violent reaction to the globalization process.

Some assessments presented the rise of al-Qaeda as a hybrid form of resistance—a transnational insurgency—by the weak and oppressed of the “global South” against the exploitation of a hegemonic and homogenizing “West.”¹³ More accurately, violent jihadist activity was a by-product of the slow-motion collision between modernity in its more recent globalized form and an Islamic social character. This collision has been fateful but little understood and less researched.

Modernization, extending from the European Enlightenment to the late twentieth century, advanced a vision of science, education, and technology that would tame the passions of traditional society.¹⁴ The civilizing effects of modernity would result in a democratizing, modular, but above all secular order. Overcoming religious customs as the basis for ordering society was the inexorable outcome once the forces of modernization had been unleashed. Yet more acute observers realized that the secular assumptions governing Western thinking about modernization could not explain social and political developments in the contemporary Muslim world. Thus, Ernest Gellner observed that Islam’s engagement with modernity had led Islam to grow stronger and purer since its nineteenth-century encounter with the West.¹⁵ He noted that Islamic societies had avoided secularization even as they assimilated many other nonreligious modes of modern technological, scientific, and social conduct. Gellner contended that modernization—“the deadly angel who spells death to economic inefficiency”—was as a consequence “not always at the service of liberty.”¹⁶

We can therefore provisionally suggest the lineaments of a plausible sociology based on Gellner’s neglected insights. From at least the early nineteenth century, what was considered the predicament of Islam (its evident political and economic weakness and the psychic pain this engendered) required reopening the gates of ijtihad, or interpretation of what the Prophet’s message might entail for the challenge modernity presented. The challenge elicited a range of responses, from the privatization of religion to create an Arab equivalent of the modern European nation-state (the Atatürk/Pan-Arab/Baathist response) through a moderate program of moral reform to a radical transformation that would strip Islam of any cultural accretions it had acquired over time. It is the latter response, taken in a notably ideological or political direction in the course of the twentieth century, that concerns us here.

In this reformist context, authority moved from clan elder to mullah, mosque, and madrassa, while standards were transmitted via the printed page and later the Internet site rather than through oral tradition leavened by local customary practice. In Islamic terms, this movement was advancement. Indeed, it was modernization. In the postmodern, postcolonial, globalized world, identification with scripturalist high culture became the hallmark of urban sophistication. This evolution, which required a specific form of self-disclosure and self-enactment but did not necessarily entail violence to achieve it, nevertheless bulged with paradox. It exemplified a network-based social order without a real society that was atomized without individualism.17

From this neo-orthodox perspective, the path of Westernization was one of jahaliya—a debased state of ignorance—and so this perspective looked to scriptural certitudes to codify an Islamic response to a decadent and increasingly secularized modernity.18 Although the return to authenticity was initially a call for spiritual rejuvenation, the purification of Islamic thought and practice inevitably acquired political overtones that transformed it into an ideological system (nizam) that demanded individual and societal fidelity to holy law, a movement now commonly termed “Islamism.”¹⁹ For Islamism’s most important ideologist, Sayyid Qutb, the revival of Islamic purity involved the Manichean division of humanity into the sphere of Islam (darul Islam) and the “house of war” or the sphere of “not Islam” (darul harb) that existed in a condition of ignorance (jahaliya). In Qutb’s view, it was the complete “submission to God alone in its beliefs, in its observance and its legal regulations” that constituted “the only civilised society.” The Islamist, therefore, seeks a condition where “sovereignty belongs to God alone, expressed in obedience to the Divine Law,” for “only then is every person in that society free from servitude to others, and only then does he taste true freedom.”²⁰

This Manichean worldview inevitably invited an activism that legitimized the use of violence to bring about the will of Allah.²¹ Qutb, for example, considered it the duty of all Muslims to struggle against jahaliya in order to replace infidel arrangements with Quranically approved alternatives.²² Over time, the ideology fashioned a confrontation that relied increasingly upon a deterritorialized transnational umma (community of believers) to lead the assault against what one of al-Qaeda’s most prominent theorists, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called “domineering western enslavement.”²³ In its most apocalyptic form, Islamism’s all-embracing ideological system encouraged a will to action—a holy war (jihad)—that affirmed the right to “slaughter” unbelievers “like lambs.”²⁴ An Islamist training manual declared in the 1990s: “Islamic governments have never and will never be established through peaceful solutions and cooperative councils. They are established as they always have been … by pen and gun … by word and bullet … by tongue and teeth.”²⁵

The evolving militancy associated with the program of Islamism in its clash with secularized modernity reflected the political repression that groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood had encountered in Egypt and Syria from the 1960s onward. After Qutb’s arrest and subsequent execution by the Egyptian regime in 1966, his spiritual followers, such as Muhammud Abd al-Salam Faraj, and militant organizations such as al-Jihad (Holy War) rendered explicit the neglected duty of waging jihad against the infidel in order to establish the Islamic realm by direct action.26 The economic failures of the corporatist nation-state model in the Middle East as well as the region’s growing corruption, defeat by Israel in 1967 and later 1973, and inability to solve the problem of Palestine only reinforced the call for a purified utopian Islamic revival. It was in the aftermath of the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in Egypt in 1981 and the suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria that Islamists such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam sought to internationalize their struggle. According to Zawahiri, they sought to launch a new force “outside the international order.”²⁷ To set in motion this new force, Zawahiri’s group broke with the increasingly pragmatic Muslim Brotherhood and joined with the Arab Mujahideen in Afghanistan and Pakistan, sponsored by Osama bin Laden after 1988 in order to establish the lineaments of what we now call al-Qaeda.

Mackinlay identified in al-Qaeda the features of a global insurgency, which required a response that went beyond anything that the renaissance in classical counterinsurgency proposed.²⁹ Global counterinsurgency as a concept that took shape after 9/11 thus offered a distinctively original interpretation of the global war on terror, which provided a more complex analysis of the phenomenon that accepted Zawahiri’s claim that al-Qaeda embodied a new force in the international order.

Nevertheless, proponents of the global counterinsurgency thesis could not be initially separated from those who promoted the neoclassical approach that set the terms of debate in North America and Europe after 2003 as the challenging occupations of Iraq and later Afghanistan preoccupied Washington and its closest allies. Exponents of neoclassicism and global COIN shared a common desire to rehabilitate counterinsurgency thinking and advance its status within defense circles.30 In this context, David Kilcullen represents a crossover analyst who accepted many features of neoclassical thinking as exemplified in The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Kilcullen empathized with the neoclassical commitment to deep, anthropological understanding of local conflicts,³¹ and his professional soldiering background enabled him to write “Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency,” a treatise admired by neoclassicists for its distillation of practical counterinsurgency methods for armed service personnel. However, Kilcullen also recognized that counterinsurgents did not function in terms of Cold War verities and required an appreciation of the globalized condition in which they were compelled to operate. “One of the biggest differences between the counterinsurgencies our fathers fought and those we face today is the omnipresence of globalized media,” he wrote, adding: “Beware the ‘scripted enemy,’ who plays to a global audience and appeals to the court of global public opinion.”³² His awareness of the global environment that affected the conduct of counterinsurgency subsequently broadened into more explicit misgivings about the neoclassical school. He argued the “re-discovery of classical, ‘proven’ counter-insurgency methods” had been “misplaced.” “Today’s insurgencies,” he declared in another article, “differ significantly at the level of policy, strategy, operation art and tactical technique—from those of earlier eras.” In fact, the classical paradigm and the “prescriptive application of ‘received wisdom’ derived from the classics … cast a long shadow.” Yet in the era of globalization “the ‘classic’ version of counter-insurgency is less relevant to current conflicts.”³³

Kilcullen became a consultant on counterinsurgency thinking with the U.S. State Department after 2005 and then an adviser to General David Petraeus in 2007. His influence can be discerned in a number of key passages in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual that recognize the global COIN case. These remarks reveal difficulties with the prevailing neoclassical understanding that informed the rest of the document. “Today’s operational environment,” the manual stated, “also includes a new kind of insurgency, one that seeks to impose revolutionary change worldwide. Al Qaeda is a well-known example of such an insurgency.” Noting the capacity of al-Qaeda-linked groups to exploit “communications and technology” to harness local causes to the broader goal of recreating a new, purified, Islamic caliphate, the manual continued: “Defeating such enemies requires a global, strategic response—one that addresses the array of linked resources and conflicts that sustain these movements while tactically addressing the local grievances that feed them.”³⁴

Although the manual conceded the theoretical case for a new appreciation of counterinsurgency, the notion of global COIN was not elaborated and was elsewhere given short shrift. Sarah Sewall cynically remarked in introducing the volume: “Increasingly, analysts argue that the Al Qaeda–inspired Salafist terrorism network functions as a modern-day global insurgency.… Some have warned that classical counterinsurgency theory is insufficient for tackling the modern terrorist threat. The most prescient critics are ahead of themselves, since not even the U.S. military has yet internalized the new field manual.”35 Sewall insinuated that although global COIN theorists might have an intellectual point, it was irrelevant to the current crisis. For the U.S. military, the imperative was to stabilize the host nation—in this instance, Iraq. In fact, Sewall contended that although a distinction of sorts might be drawn between efforts to tackle interventions such as those in Iraq and those to defeat al-Qaeda, nevertheless, “the overall strategic problem is uncannily parallel: sustaining the statist norm in the face of radical and violent revolutionaries.”³⁶ The notion of global counterinsurgency, in other words, was irrelevant.

Others did not share Sewall’s skepticism. Indeed, the distinction between global and classical COIN thinkers constituted a fault line that increasingly divided analysts. Former U.S. Marines officer Frank Hoffman, despite belonging to the team that wrote the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency doctrine, expressed misgivings about neoclassicism’s influence over the manual. Echoing Kilcullen, he claimed that the neoclassical position focused, “myopically, on the glorious heyday of revolutionary warfare in the 1950s and 1960s.”³⁷ The Field Manual failed, therefore, to deal with the reality that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan formed part of a broader global insurgency, evidenced by the involvement of foreign and local Sunni fighters in Iraq’s civil war who were progressively associated with the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria and who were more commonly called “al-Qaeda in Iraq.”³⁸

More specifically, critics considered both the manual and much contemporary writing on counterinsurgency overdetermined by what David Betz called a “Maoist-style People’s Revolutionary Warfare, which is not the sort of insurgency now being faced.”39 The Maoist paradigm held that insurgency occurred within a defined territorial space. For Frank Hoffman, “the classicists ignore the uniqueness of Maoist or colonial wars of national liberation, and over-generalize the principles that have been drawn from them. Today’s insurgent is not the Maoist of yesterday.”⁴⁰ Maoist theories of revolutionary war certainly exerted a formative influence over much neoclassical writing. Sustaining a modern parallel with the war in Iraq, Montgomery McFate, for example, quoted Mao’s aphorism that the “ ‘people are water, the Red Army are fish; without water, the fish will die.’ ”⁴¹ Similarly, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual acknowledged Mao’s thinking about protracted people’s war and was predicated upon the Maoist assumption that counterinsurgency is about the domination of a given geographic setting.⁴²

The global COIN school maintained that excessive reverence for Maoist theories of guerrilla warfare ultimately led neoclassicism into a strategic, Iraq-centric (and later Afghan) dead end. Hoffman argued that classical precepts were either “blatant flashes of the obvious”⁴³ or else simplistically one-dimensional. His criticism and the criticisms coming from the global counterinsurgency tendency more broadly could certainly validate their claims. Indeed, much COIN writing in the early 2000s presented clichés as insights. Hence, a monograph of the neoclassical persuasion published in 2007 somewhat adventurously criticized the British campaign in Malaya on the grounds that the “promise to withdraw once the situation was stabilized” intimated the campaign’s failure. This was because “the British had to surrender their role as occupier to defeat the insurgents.”⁴⁴ Such a view naively equated success with the retention of territory rather than with the attainment of political objectives, which not only repeated a view first articulated by the radical journalist Robert Taber in War of the Flea in 1970⁴⁵ but implied that any concession, no matter how minimal, represented a victory for the insurgent.⁴⁶ Such reductionism ultimately leads, as the global COIN critics observed, to a rudimentary Maoist/counter-Maoist dialectic that assumes that holding onto physical territory, no matter the cost, is the supreme goal of any combatant.

The outdated approach evident in neoclassical counterinsurgency texts represented a legitimate concern. These texts implied that any withdrawal of forces from an occupied territory constituted a defeat. They also risked repeating French approach to COIN during the Algerian War (1954–1962) and similarly disastrous consequences. Given the excessive reverence for French COIN thinkers such as David Galula exhibited in much neoclassical writing,47 the global counterinsurgency advocates were right to signal their disquiet. Somewhat worryingly, the French military had presented its conflict with the Front de Libération Nationale as a war to save Western civilization. Such a misrepresentation resulted in great brutality and loss of life on all sides and witnessed during the campaign the creation of a clandestine bureaucracy that institutionalized policies of torture and atrocity.⁴⁸ This approach did not have much to recommend itself to Coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly in the wake of the political damage caused by revelations of prisoner abuse in the notorious Abu Ghraib (Baghdad Central Prison) detention facility.⁴⁹

Thus, the questions global COIN theorists raised about the requirement for military awareness of changing operating environments, the impact of greater media intrusiveness, the need for strategic messaging, and the broader threat inherent in transnational jihadist activism were by no means inconsequential. In fact, much writing in the neoclassical idiom represented an attempt both to understand and to rectify the failures arising from the Iraq occupation and to that extent often exhibited only minimal awareness of the wider implications of threats to the international system. Most important for this idiom was that the renaissance of classical counterinsurgency thinking possessed direct utility for the U.S. armed forces, facilitating an appreciation of, for example, small-unit operations, effective collation of intelligence, and cultural understanding of and engagement with local communities in order to contain the threat posed by a concerted rebellion.

However, in an age of transnational threats that emanated from deterritorialized jihadist groups, the wider applicability of neoclassical maxims beyond the theaters of Iraq and Afghanistan were open to question. Global COIN theorists were therefore right to doubt the underlying assumption of neoclassical thought that insurgencies happen “somewhere else,” requiring support to the “host nation.” This perspective meant that insurgencies represented external threats that resided beyond the realm of the modern liberal democratic state: over there, but not here. It reflected neoclassicism’s overdependence on a view of COIN practices that derived from the twentieth-century experience of colonial struggles wherein imperial powers sought to suppress violent opposition to their rule.

Yet as the twenty-first-century experience demonstrated, treating counterinsurgency as a foreign affair was untenable when threats, plots, and physical attacks emanated not only from the Middle East and from South and Southeast Asia, but also from the modern urban landscapes of Europe, North America, and Australia. The theorists of global COIN were thus correct to see the modern insurgent phenomenon as an existential reality that had the capacity to be not somewhere else, but everywhere.

Although the global counterinsurgency school invited analysts to question their understanding of the sociology of contemporary Islam, it failed to answer the challenge that the contemporary Islamist posed to Western secular, pluralist modernity—namely, how to integrate diaspora communities into secular, postnational, market states.50 As a consequence, the global COIN thesis ignored the manner in which an ascetic, militant brand of Islam had since the 1970s promoted its appeal to migrant communities in Europe and North America, as manifested in the indiscriminate bombing and shooting attacks from Madrid and London to Fort Hood after 2001 that demonstrated that the counterinsurgent and the “host nation” could be one and the same thing. The constituting weakness of global COIN was that although it accurately described the problem, it offered no real answer. It shared, in this respect, the shortcomings of the neoclassical school, particularly in its negation of ideological motivation, its confused relationship with strategy and notions of terrorism, and its elevation of technique above political understanding.

Despite its more perceptive characterization of the threat posed by a transnational Islamist insurgency, global COIN analysis and policy prescriptions were vague. What, we might wonder, did a “global counterinsurgency” campaign entail in practice? Its proponents appeared unable to define such a program with any precision. As a result, global counterinsurgency seemed long on assertion but short on specificity. David Kilcullen offered perhaps the most plausible outline of what a global COIN plan entailed. His concept of “disaggregation” sought to “interdict the Al Qaeda core leadership’s ability to influence regional and local players—by cutting off their communications, discrediting their ideological authority, and global operations to keep them off balance. At the regional level, disaggregation would isolate theater-level actors from global sponsors, local populations and local insurgent groups they might seek to exploit in support of the jihad.”⁵¹

The global counterinsurgency agenda, according to Kilcullen, would among other things encompass “attacking the ‘intricate web of dependency,’ which “allow[s] the jihad to function effectively”; “interdicting links between theaters of operation within the global insurgency”; “denying the ability of regional and global actors to link and exploit local actors”; “interdicting flows of information, personnel, finance and technology (including WMD [weapons of mass destruction] technology) between and within jihad theaters”; as well as “denying sanctuary areas (including failed and failing states, and states that support terrorism) within theaters.”⁵² These suggestions have aspirational validity, but how to operationalize them in practice across the globe remained worryingly unclear. Global COIN’s attempted policy solutions made up little more than a transnational wish list.

The concept of a global counterinsurgency superficially improved on nebulous terms such as war on terrorism. Its adherents recognized the danger posed by the uncompromising and transnational character of jihadist movements such as al-Qaeda. Global COIN appeared to acknowledge the totalizing mission inherent in al-Qaeda’s Islamist ideology, and this acknowledgment represented a crucial difference from the neoclassical view.53 In his critical appraisal of The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Hoffman noted that it was “relatively mute on the subject” of religious motivation in jihadist activism. The document, he argued, “offers few indications that the classical approach to terrorist or insurgent activities are altered at all by religions based groups.”⁵⁴ The manual acknowledged, for example, that “ideas are a motivating factor in insurgent activities” but only as an artifice to gain recruits and garner local support and not as a motivational force to achieve radical strategic ends. “Stories are often the basis of strategies and actions,” it announced, and “insurgent organizations like Al Qaeda use narratives very effectively in developing legitimating ideologies.”⁵⁵

Relegating ideological motivation to the status of a narrative reflected the permeation of modernization throughout the manual. The manual privileged local, material factors rather than the credal appeal of a political religion, thus reinforcing the secular, liberal assumption that “religion is a secondary factor next to political grievances and nationalism—that [the] religious language of terrorists is instrumental and culturally idiomatic rather than causative.”⁵⁶ Such assumptions, as Hoffman noted, were ethnocentric, adducing that the target population in the host nation shared an American value system that desired to construct societies that “are consistent with representative democracy”. “But,” Hoffman contended, “if the population’s values system is not consistent with these basic elements of the U.S. approach, or if they reject [American values] in favor of something founded in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, we may need a drastically revised counter-insurgency strategy.”⁵⁷

Given this critique of neoclassical COIN’s ethnocentric bias, one might suppose the global counterinsurgency thesis to be more sensitive to the ideological forces at work in movements such as al-Qaeda. Surprisingly, though, when it came to exposing the drivers of jihadism, global counterinsurgency theorists also dismissed the politically religious motivation for Islamist activism. Curiously, instead of trying to understand al-Qaeda’s ideology, global COIN theorists focused on peripheral organizational characteristics, social networks, psychological profiling, and patterns of recruitment to understand the new global threat. In this context, the “global insurgency” thesis suffered from the definitional ambiguity that haunted the much criticized notion of a war on terrorism. Like the amorphous notion of a war on terrorism, a global counterinsurgency denoted an unspecific threat that obfuscated rather than clarified the object of the war—namely, a militant, political religion: Islamism.

Indeed, the key proponent of global COIN, David Kilcullen, specifically discounted Islamist ideology as the motivation to jihad. Instead, he considered the “sociological characteristics of immigrant populations” responsible for Islamist-inspired violence. These characteristics, he asserted, better explained “contemporary threats rather than Islamic theology.” Islamic thought, he declared, “has little functional relationship with violence.”58 For an article in the New Yorker, he even claimed that “after 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It’s about human social networks and the way they operate.” In justifying his analysis, Kilcullen argued that his postgraduate research into the Indonesian Darul Islam movement led him to conclude, “It’s not about theology.” He maintained, rather confusingly, that “there are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what is happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. It is not ‘Islamic behaviour.’ ” He added: “People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks,” remarking, somewhat tangentially, that fifteen of the 9/11 Saudi hijackers “had trouble with their fathers.”⁵⁹

What is one to make of this curious sense of denial about the role of political religion in both the neoclassical and the occasionally more perceptive global COIN position? Obviously, the process of radicalization is complex, and any individual’s willingness to transit from ideological conviction to violence in support of the cause cannot be attributed solely to religion or ideology. Nevertheless, it is somewhat perverse to dismiss it or relegate it to a second-order concern. Numerous violent al-Qaeda-linked assaults from 9/11 on were, whatever else, Islamist acts in a Western setting. The view that religion is at best a secondary motivation defies the evidence. All the jihadist groups that have undertaken high-profile attacks dating from 9/11 and stretching from Bali to Madrid, London, and Mumbai have acted in the name of a militant understanding of Islam. Such a pattern of worldwide attacks exhibiting a profound devotion to a politically religious cause intimates, if nothing else, a politically religious dimension to jihadism.60 To reduce jihadism to individual pathology, as Kilcullen and others do, merely explains away political religion as a social fact. Curiously, this reduction assumes that when a highly motivated jihadist claims to undertake an operation to advance a cause, he does not mean it, as if Kilcullen and the others know the jihadist mind better than the jihadist himself.

To deny the relevance of political religion to jihadist insurgency is ultimately akin to maintaining that the armed campaigns waged by Che Guevara, the Red Brigades, and the Baader-Meinhof gang had nothing to do with Marxist–Leninist and Maoist thought. Various factors may “push people into rebellion,” but it is ideology that justifies the violent act and gives it meaning. Paradoxically, Hoffman’s criticism of neoclassical COIN—namely, that it misunderstands a world-view that wishes to re-create an Islamic caliphate—applies with equal force to global counterinsurgency thinking. The lasting irony, then, is that global COIN supporters, although recognizing the transnational danger posed by jihadism, in their own turn discounted the ideology of Islamism that made the threat global.

Why, we might wonder, are counterinsurgency theorists of both global and neoclassical persuasions reluctant to confront the politically religious dimension of modern insurgency? COIN discourse and the counterinsurgent mind help answer this question. As we have observed elsewhere, counterinsurgency thinking in the West possesses a somewhat problematic relationship with strategy and politics, evident in the dismissal or downplaying of Carl von Clausewitz.⁶¹ This denial of Clausewitz facilitated the avoidance of politics and the recourse to technique in its place.

Chapter 2 noted the June 2007 meeting of a group of influential academics and soldiers to consider a draft of the British Army’s doctrine for the manual Countering Insurgency, which sought to marginalize Clausewitz’s thinking. The group evaluated modern counterinsurgency thought not in Clausewitzian terms but in light of the “characteristics which might distinguish what might be described as the post Maoist era.” The group recognized that “insurgency has become a globalized technique[;] the response is now international and multi-disciplined; the strategic centre of gravity lies beyond the territorial boundaries of the operational space; success is determined more in the virtual dimension than by events on the ground in the operational space; [and] in the 1950–60’s the vital ground comprised a single nation’s population[, but] now there are multiple populations involved.”⁶²

Such statements reveal a curious desire to dismiss a theorist whose writings remain seminal to any understanding of insurgency in the modern era. In the late 1950s, Raymond Aron, one of the more significant interpreters of Clausewitzian thought, with some perspicacity speculated that “revolutionary” or guerrilla war “would figure just as prominently as the theory of nuclear weapons in the treatise of a twentieth century Clausewitz.”⁶³ Clausewitz intimated this very point, contending that “wars will always vary with the nature of their motives and of the situations which gave rise to them.”⁶⁴ War is always determined by the “society and culture,” and it is strange indeed that COIN analysts such as McFate, who urged the United States to understand its adversary’s culture, should deny that al-Qaeda might possess a “rational” worldview, albeit one framed by an Islamist ideological prism and its distinctive understanding of global politics.

For Clausewitz, the interaction of tangible and intangible factors govern the course of war, influencing its direction and duration. War always “moves on its own goals with varying speed.”65 The Napoleonic era of warfare between nation-states shaped Clausewitz’s thinking, but his concern was not interstate war exclusively.⁶⁶ He presented an ontology of war, something more than an epiphenomenon of state activity. As Jan Honig observed some two decades ago, Clausewitzian ideas are thus “easily adaptable to forms of warring social organizations that do not form states.”⁶⁷ In this regard, McFate’s assumption that rational warfare occurs only among nation-states seriously misrepresents the Clausewitzian argument. David Kilcullen commits a similar categorical mistake when he argues that “Al Qaeda–linked insurgencies” do not necessarily “seek to do or achieve any practical objective, but rather to be a mujahid, earning God’s favour (and hope of ultimate victory through his intervention) through the act itself.”⁶⁸ It is curious that anthropologists of both a neoclassical and global COIN provenance ostensibly dedicated to understanding the customs and traditions of particular social groups reach the conclusion that nonstate actors, such as al-Qaeda, are incomprehensible and function without meaningful objectives because they are not states and are motivated by a religiously inspired value system.

The reluctance of both neoclassical and global COIN to find religious motives in jihadist action, global COIN’s emphasis on “post-Maoism,” and their shared disdain for Clausewitz reveal a profound discomfort on the part of all contemporary counterinsurgency analysts to address the political dimension of war. It is the politics of modern jihadist resistance that all the varieties of contemporary counterinsurgency theory avoids, for politics involves complexity, particularity, ambiguity, controversy, and the need to challenge or defend specific value systems. As Honig discerned, what many commentators find disconcerting about insurgent conflicts “is the seemingly irrational motivations of parties which originate in the murky depths of history.”⁶⁹ Accordingly, Clausewitz, who emphasized the politics of war above all else, returns us to the central problem identified in earlier chapters—namely, that modern COIN thinkers believe that any exploration of the underlying value systems shaping the societal and cultural complexity from which war arises somehow undermines their objective approach to the phenomenon.

This aversion to the politics of war is itself ironically an ideological position. COIN theorists can dismiss the significance of Clausewitz’s thinking on war only by assuming that insurgent movements act irrationally and function outside any form of political discourse because their motives are deemed unfathomable. Thus, a depoliticized and rationalized analytical framework is constructed that disengages from any attempt to address the “murky depths” of history, politics, and religion from which the global threat sprang. This process of exclusion and disengagement has enabled the modern counterinsurgency agenda to address the phenomenon in the rationalist terms with which it is most comfortable—namely, that of managerial technique.

Global COIN, like classical and neoclassical renderings of counterinsurgency, emphasizes technique over politics. Although professing to understand the cause and spread of deterritorialized jihadism, a global countertechnique ultimately temporizes with the claims of Islamist ideology. Ignoring the politics of Islamism, contemporary global COIN thinking avoids what might be politically necessary to defeat Islamism’s appeal within the modern West. Focusing on apolitical operational concepts, statements of aspiration, abstruse debates on the insurgent centers of gravity, the policy minutiae of countering radicalization, and what Lawrence Freedman has described as “vague talk of hearts and minds”70 amounts to a policy of evasion.

Global COIN was particularly guilty of such equivocation. Whereas the neoclassical school focused on the tactics necessary to counter armed challenges in “host nations” such as Iraq and Afghanistan, global counterinsurgency advanced global techniques that were either vaguely aspirational or strategically ambivalent. For all their criticism of neoclassical thought, when global COIN advocates defined their approach, it amounted to little more than the application of colonial, Malaya Emergency–style counterinsurgency methods practiced on an international stage. Accordingly, Kilcullen considered the global insurgency a “better model” than the more operationally well-defined “counterterrorism” paradigm because “the key to defeating global jihad” did not “lie in traditional counter terrorism (police work, intelligence, special operations or security measures) at all.” Instead, he contended somewhat nebulously, global insurgency must be “regarded as representative of deeper issues or grievances within society. We seek to defeat insurgents through ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of the population, a process that involves compromise and negotiation.”⁷¹

Similarly, Mackinlay considered that a “dangerous insurgency” “usually has legitimate grievances or cause,” which require a successful counterstrategy to be “politically strong enough to change direction in order to remove the pressure of the grievance, and at the same time hopefully remove a substantial element of popular support from the insurgent.”72 Kilcullen reinforced this view, asserting the need to “counter the grievances on which insurgencies feed, denying their energy to their recruiting and propaganda subsystems, and ultimately marginalizing them.” Drawing directly from the Malayan experience, he noted approvingly that the British “countered the Communist appeal to nationalism by setting a clear date for independence and commencing transition to self-government.”⁷³

Global COIN’s projection of the Malayan Emergency way of grievance settlement onto a global canvas has had, however, serious political consequences, which have been overlooked in the technical literature devoted to it. This is particularly the case when it applied itself to “the unbearable sense of grievance” that energizes support for the jihadist struggle.75 In fact, this depoliticized, technical approach to insurgency and the reluctance to confront Islamism’s ideological world-view led to policy prescriptions that were either dangerously naive or radically utopian. Grievance removal necessarily raised political questions such as, What level of conciliation would placate disaffected Muslim opinion? Are the ends of militant Islamism amenable to real-world solutions? Moreover, if they are, does the price paid for peace in the short term unduly compromise Western states’ national interests? These questions have been widely debated beyond the realm of counterinsurgency,⁷⁶ but rarely by global COIN thinkers themselves, whose answers, in those rare instances when they did offer them, were notable only for the lengths they were prepared to go to appease the global Islamist threat. Thus, for example, Mackinlay opined that the “global developments” that engendered al-Qaeda-inspired violence “cannot be arrested by a democratic, free market society; they are the consequences of that society,” which might have been true in one sense but not especially helpful in identifying practical measures to tackle the danger posed.⁷⁷ Kilcullen similarly chose to feel the Islamist pain, perceiving that “for Muslims in much of the world, there is no middle way: only a stark choice between jihad and acceptance of permanent second-class citizenship in a world order dominated by the West and apparently infused with anti-Islamic values. For many self-respecting Muslims, the choice of jihad rather than surrender is both logical and honorable.”⁷⁸

These and similar statements from global COIN advocates evince an interesting family resemblance to understandings expressed by the fashionable but radically pacifist and critical school of international relations theory. This fashionable branch of study denounces globalization as the problem, yet it asserts cosmopolitan Western liberal solutions of global justice and emancipatory norms as the solution. Hence, critical international theory perceives globalization as a synonym for a capitalist world order, hence a “late-modern sociological term for the ‘civilizing process’ ” and thus oppressive of the non-Western “other.” As a consequence, “terrorism—as a form of barbarism,” in the form of al-Qaeda, can be “seen as a challenge to international order and the civilizing process of globalization.”⁷⁹

In a similarly critical spirit, global COIN theorists such as Mackinlay and Kilcullen argued that the prevailing Western economic and political order represses Muslims everywhere. Such a diagnosis closely resembles the analysis of critical international relations scholars who considered al-Qaeda-style violence either a “construction” of or a reaction to Western “elite power.” From this perspective, the “westernised world system” imposes a global economic “apartheid” that reduces Muslims to second-class citizens via the markets that create a burgeoning economic divide between the rich “West” and the exploited poor of the “majority world.”80 This viewpoint sees insurgency and terrorism as weapons of the weak⁸¹ used against the hegemonic West and inexorably arising from the “global capitalist system.”⁸² In this context, “Al Qaeda is not a state nor [sic] a great power” but a “transnational network and more importantly an idea around which resistance is organised globally and locally.”⁸³ From this standpoint, the solution demands the radical transformation of the international order into “a system of sustainable security” “based … on justice and emancipation.”⁸⁴ The details of this radically transformed order, like the techniques of global COIN, remain opaque but at a minimum require the abandonment of market economics and the radical revision of Western foreign policy. Such transformationalism finds echoes in the global COIN perspective advanced by Mackinlay, who argued that “disarming the hatred of the disaffected Islamic communities means a new US policy on Israel and in the long term, for the US to … learn to talk to insurgents.”⁸⁵

Global COIN analysis ultimately, if somewhat equivocally, supports a radical transformation of the global order. Like critical theory and classical COIN, it rejects political religion as the driver of Islamist action while at the same time claiming to know the technical causes that inspire Muslim disaffection—namely, Western sociocultural and economic oppression. This of course is not to deny that governments should in some circumstances negotiate with those insurgents able to compromise. Such negotiation may be prudent in a specific theater, whether talking to Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq or elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But it is an entirely different case to extend “grievance settling” per se to the international arena because it invokes the logic of appeasement without examining whether global jihadism is capable of being appeased.

Lawrence Freedman’s skepticism about “vague talk of hearts and minds” reflected his belief that for Westerners, as potential victims of jihadist violence, it was important to understand the political causes of that violence. Moreover, he argued, “even when we do [understand those causes], we must also recognize the limited quality of the political response available to us.” For Freedman, this learning process does not mean “finding grievances” to placate. Rather, it requires comprehending the nature of the forces that wish to establish an illiberal, theocratic world order, considering why this problem has arisen, and appreciating the limited scope for agreement, conciliation, and amelioration.⁸⁶ It represents a far more credible understanding not only of jihadist adversaries but also of the values and interests that Western societies need to defend.

Although global COIN insists on the “post-Maoist” nature of insurgency, the reality of any counterstrategy, global or otherwise, is that it is always prosecuted within the spatial confines of the state. In fact, Kilcullen’s global COIN conception of “disaggregation,” with its emphasis on “de-linking local issues from the global insurgent system,” acknowledges this point.⁸⁸ Rather than transcending the Maoist of idea insurgency, addressing the threat at the local level returns us, by a somewhat circuitous route, to the Maoist paradigm of “sustaining the statist norm.” However, global COIN theory’s failure to countenance the ideological motivation to jihadist activism obscures what is happening at the domestic political level in Western cosmopolitan cities. Interestingly, its diagnosis of the threat invariably conflicts with the thinking and experience of intelligence and law enforcement officials, who often possess a greater insight into the specific factors that motivate local actors.

Thus, Jonathan Evans, the director general of the British Security Service, MI5, in a speech in Manchester in November 2007 diametrically opposed Kilcullen’s contention that political religion is a second-order concern, possessing little “functional relationship with violence.” Evans maintained that

Such statements reveal the constituting weakness in the global COIN thesis. The term global insurgency itself, rather than clarifying the nature of the current security condition, ignores it. In reality, the phrase “global” insurgency obscures something more prosaic—namely, a domestic insurgency arising from the political forces promoting Islamism both at home and abroad. It is, moreover, the ideology that the insurgency promulgates that renders its threat transnational and requires governments operating multinational coalitions to deal with jihadism both through external interventions (such as the removal of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in late 2001) and through domestic, police-level interventions.

In this way, the global threat presents a challenge to the modern democratic state as much as it does to “host nations” that Western interventionism attempts to stabilize. In the case of a number of European states such as the United Kingdom, which has possessed acute problems in integrating second-generation Muslims into its multicultural society, this challenge requires reasserting political sovereignty, securing state borders, and elaborating an inclusive national identity as part of a shared public morality and counterideology.

The notion of defeating the ideology that inspires jihadist militancy, then, does not detract from the Maoist concept of insurgency but actually supports it. Indeed, it accentuates the political and ideological struggle within a given territorial space. The sovereign state ought to provide security for its citizens and through its territorially limited authority contribute to the defeat of Islamism globally. Yet the global COIN school obfuscates this dimension of what Steven Pinker terms the “Leviathan state.”90 Its reluctance to confront the political dimension of the struggle means that it ignores the contest over values at home. The internal dimension of the conflict is problematic, controversial, and value laden, which is why global COIN theorists ignore it. Moreover, when they address this dimension, they focus not on the illiberal ideology of jihadism but on second-order issues such as social networks, prisons, urban deprivation, and family breakdown as sources of jihadist recruitment. Even here, global COIN’s casuistry is evident as its agenda deliberately overlooks the schools, mosques, colleges, and universities that provide the ideological energy for jihadist recruitment.⁹¹

The main puzzle identified in this chapter is that global counterinsurgency thinking, despite recognizing the complexity of the post–Cold War world, avoids the politics of the current conflict and its implications for an effective counterstrategy. Yet it is the contest about values at the state level that renders the conflict political in nature. The need to consider state security, however, poses difficult questions relating to civil liberty, surveillance, public morality, sovereignty, and the problem of multicultural identity for analysts and public agencies functioning within a secular and liberal democratic paradigm. Rather than confront this dilemma, global COIN evades it. This evasion contrasts with law enforcement agencies’ growing awareness of the threat jihadism poses to policing a liberal democracy. For instance, in 2007 Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, head of Counter-Terrorism Command at the London Metropolitan Police, admitted that counterterrorist policing (that is, internal counterinsurgency) has become more “political” because it has had to preempt plots and target resources against an identifiable section of the population.⁹² This is awkward terrain, but it requires traversing to construct coherent public policy.

In this context, a state-oriented “Maoist” paradigm for insurgency demonstrates the enduring relevance of classical COIN thinking to the dilemma of policing the modern cosmopolitan condition. It also raises difficult questions about the application of counterinsurgency principles in both the democratic state as well as any state of concern requiring external intervention. The central Maoist revolutionary warfare objective remains the control of the people: the battle for hearts and minds. We should finally ask, therefore, the question that global COIN theorists prefer to avoid: What are the implications for internal security of a Maoist strategy operating globally and locally? In fact, the notion of a transnational insurgency poses other questions: Who are the people? And whose hearts and whose minds need to be won? Global counterinsurgency thinking offers a recipe of grievance settling and assumes that Muslim communities in Western states and on the Arab street must be the focus of “hearts and minds” operations.

Certainly, a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy must attend to those communities to interdict plots and deter those who might be attracted to the path of violence. However, a properly conceived political strategy that effectively confronts the existential threat presented by a globalized insurgency requires more. In an age of polymorphous violence inspired by clashing ideological and religious visions, “hearts and minds” operations must also address the growing insecurity of majority populations in multicultural states. The silent majority also requires security and public order before it can consider second-order redistributive concerns.93 Sustaining popular support for protracted struggles abroad, such as the Western commitment to fighting the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, while countering the internal jihadist threat at home minimally requires this political assurance from a coherent counterstrategy.⁹⁴

The notion of a global insurgency recognizes that the contemporary security challenge is a complex transnational one, which manifests itself simultaneously at both the state and the international levels. Even if global COIN’s theorists negate the role of ideology, a realistic understanding that the threat is global would see that the totalizing political religion driving jihad conceives “over there” as “here.” As a consequence, countering this postmodern style of revolutionary warfare requires a political strategy that transcends conventional, classical counterinsurgency precepts. A properly conceived global counterinsurgency effort would entail a global “hearts and minds” campaign, but one very different from that offered in the global COIN theorists’ grievance-settling playbook. Maintaining security and facilitating development in places as diverse as Iraq and Afghanistan, as classical and neoclassical insurgency thought contends, would remain essential ingredients in a properly conceived “global” counterinsurgency program. At the same time, that program would also entail the quite separate task of neutralizing the ideology that inspires diasporic Islamic communities to violent jihadism in open Western democracies while ensuring the necessary social cohesion to sustain a protracted campaign.

This point returns us to a key Clausewitzian insight—namely, that in considering any kind of response in war, the first principle is to understand what the fundamental struggle is about, “neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into something alien to its nature.”95 This means recognizing that the contemporary conflict is ideological and permeates both the global system and the domestic politics of both Western and non-Western societies. Ultimately, it is a struggle between an illiberal and totalizing political religion, Islamism, and a secular, cosmopolitan, liberal democracy. Resolution of this struggle requires not only recalibrating Muslim hearts and minds but also crafting a coherent political response. The global insurgency, then, among other things, takes place within modern democracies and involves the whole population and its shared public morality, not just a particular minority and its cultural concerns. Democratic governments must persuade the majority of the validity of the struggle. This cannot be achieved by conceding important points of principle in foreign policy or compromising political values at home to appease vocal but intolerant minorities under the aegis of grievance settlement.

The evolution of neoclassical and global counterinsurgency evidently represents a remarkable rediscovery of both archetypal conflicts and the revolutionary style of warfare that define the contemporary polymorphous condition. Its precepts continue to affect conflicts such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Global counterinsurgency techniques that identify the transnational connections between local conflicts and the external factors that sustain them have enhanced the understanding of the modern international system. Nevertheless, we should not exaggerate global COIN’s influence, take its theories at face value, or accept that we have entered a new era of post-Maoist insurgency that marginalizes state responses.