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

The contemporary fascination for counterinsurgency in Western military thinking and its resultant attraction for scholars of social and political science have their origins in the aftermath of the events of 9/11, in particular the ensuing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan by Coalition forces. The costs, consequences, and controversies of this era have been immense and have preoccupied the thinking of policy makers and security analysts for the better part of a generation. In the years to come, though, the vast bulk of Western troops will have been withdrawn from major theaters of operation, with at most advisory missions remaining behind in low-profile training roles. The likelihood is that these areas of concern that once loomed so large in the popular mind will fade from view and be quickly displaced by the next set of crises on the world and domestic stages.

Although the impact of the post-9/11 era and the complex interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have inevitably informed a backdrop for this volume, such present-minded concerns have not been the focus of this study. This book is not a commentary on those conflicts or on the foreign-policy dilemmas from which they may have arisen. The analysis in this study is instead concentrated on the lasting problems, paradoxes, and puzzles that the decade-long fascination with COIN presents for a coherent understanding of war in the modern world. After the troops are dispersed, we will be left with a residue of an intense debate about the manner in which Western nations should conceive and deal with certain kinds of conflict phenomena, specifically those often described as insurgencies and small wars. The enduring question is, What are we to make of the remaining fragments of this debate?

The first of these durable themes concerns the elusive nature of the phenomenon that counterinsurgency is intended to counter. When placed under scrutiny, as chapter 1 revealed, notions of insurgency are extremely hard to pin down with analytical precision. The result has been a profusion of terms attempting to describe more or less the same thing: small war, irregular war, unconventional war, and so on. Yet that “thing” remains by degrees mysterious and intangible. These different terms have rarely succeeded in adding clarity and more often only stifle coherent meaning. Accordingly, the notion of counterinsurgency is rendered equally obscure.

Even so, when explored in detail, as chapter 2 disclosed, the resulting elasticity of the term counterinsurgency does suggest that the notion of COIN possesses properties not as a concrete, perceptible idea, but as a narrative. Its actual meaning may be open to question, but as an explanatory filter through which the past can be recited, it becomes a powerful tool indeed. The COIN narrative came to hold that that the awesome complexity of Iraq’s postinvasion civil strife could be compressed into a single understanding—that it constituted “an insurgency” to be dealt with by bold commanders willing to “surge” U.S. forces, who would, in the enhanced conditions of security, thus apply the tried and tested tactics of classic population-centric counterinsurgency, recently rediscovered and now distilled into The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. As a consequence, the gradual decline in violence in Iraq after 2007 was seen as a vindication of the counterinsurgency school. Irrespective of whether correlation was the cause, COIN became the doctrine du jour. It was a method to be extolled in military circles and became the basis of an intellectual movement that was to advance through the corridors of power as well as the halls of academe and the world of think tanks.¹

The power of COIN as a medium of explanation lay not simply in that it was, more by chance than design, able to narrate the decrease in violence and instability in Iraq after 2007, but that it was based on the discernment of recurrent patterns of conflict that yielded clear tactical lessons for operational conduct. The basis of this claim, as observed on numerous occasions in these pages, rested on the dissection of supposedly classic counterinsurgency encounters, most notably those of the British during the Malaya Emergency (1948–1960) and the French during the Algerian War (1954–1962). Other cases also made their appearance, either as supporting or admonishing exemplars, from the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya (1952–1960) to the Northern Ireland conflict (1968–1998) and Vietnam (1965–1975), among others. The problematical gathering of these conflicts under the rubric of COIN and the dubious basis for comparison have been increasingly discussed elsewhere,² but the historical narrative of COIN leads to the second key insight generated by this study, which is the obsession with technique.

The notion that the past yielded lessons for current and future practice was a compelling assertion for COIN theory’s enduring relevance. That there was a discernible form of war that could be characterized as insurgency led, not unnaturally, to the belief that a series of palliative methods and core operational principles could be enacted that would, if correctly applied by skilled soldiers and officials well versed in the ways of COIN, always promise success. These practices invariably revolved around ideas such as securing the loyalty of the population, grievance reduction, the integration of civic action plans, along with the minimum application of military force in “clear, hold, and build” programs. As a number of chapters in this volume evinced, most notably chapter 2, this emphasis on the technical grammar of conduct came at the expense of understanding the contingent factors of politics that always give rise to war and always continuously exert their influence upon military interventions. The methodology of COIN, therefore, at one level has played to a traditional conception of military conduct that has attempted to “scientize” warfare into a series of rules to be followed.³ However, an overriding concern for the “how” of operational conduct preempts necessary strategic questions about proportionality: What crucial political values are at stake, and what costs are worth incurring to defend them? In other words, it is not just how one fights but why one chooses to fight that is important. The “why” question is intensely political, and that is why COIN theory consequently has no answer to it.

Chapters 3 and 4 point to the third insight contained in this volume: that although COIN may eschew the making of overtly political statements, it is nonetheless highly ideological in orientation. On the surface, COIN theory purports to be apolitical and technocratic in its application. It aspires, in that sense, to become a comprehensive template for action across time and space. The timeless dynamics of insurgency are, so the thinking goes, perpetually capable of being answered by the timeless techniques of counterinsurgency.⁴ The universalizing claims inherent in COIN advocacies, in other words, are symptomatic of a profoundly normative project. Paradoxically, however, as chapters 2 and 3 discovered, this project comprises an associated ideology of modernization: the unarticulated agenda that the ultimate goal of the counterinsurgency method should be to advance those societies mired in backward customs and the slough of authoritarianism along the road of socioeconomic improvement and democratic development. Whether, of course, individual societies—notably tribal in the Middle East and South Asia—were in the first instance ever amenable to such nation-building blandishments and whether it was worth the long-term costs of Western forces to attempt to engage in modernizing missions in faraway places remain open-ended questions.⁵ Nevertheless, the ideology buried within the notion of Western counterinsurgency thinking, as it evolved in the 2000s, was that along the road of nation building lay the happy end of history.

This brings us to our fourth broad theme. If counterinsurgency strongly intimates an underlying end-of-history premise, its rendering in scholarly inquiry offers an entirely fictitious understanding of historical completion. Here COIN theory’s capacity to mythologize the past, distort historical understanding, ignore contingency, and obscure complexity has been overwhelming. This is succinctly illustrated by the myth of British counterinsurgency recounted in chapter 5. Through constant repetition, analysts credited the British armed forces with a reputation for counterinsurgency expertise based on their experience with colonial warfare, particularly in winning over the population through techniques of minimum force and hearts and minds. Rarely was this reputation scrutinized. Commentators simply assumed the principle they had to prove.

The most pernicious aspect of the presumption of historical completion was evidenced by the fact that by the early 2000s sections of the British armed forces themselves bought into this myth concocted by others. They came to believe that they did indeed possess a core competence in counterinsurgency, even though until that point the British Army rarely ever claimed such expertise, seeing its colonial encounters mainly in terms of orthodox demonstrations of hard power to curtail rebel activity. As a consequence of buying into this myth, when shortcomings in British military interventions became evident, most notably in southern Iraq in the mid-2000s, commentators expressed dismay at the demise of this nonexistent tradition. Such mythologizing then manifested its other deleterious effect: it obscured the more prosaic but important reality of how Britain usually had prevailed in its small wars—namely, by government commitment to see these campaigns through so that stipulated political objectives could be met. Moreover, such myth making degraded the tactical proficiency that the British did possess. As evidenced in the final chapter, far from a flair for minimum force and hearts and minds, it was a talent for escalation into the dark arts of intelligence-led Special Forces operations and the penetration of rebel networks—from Malaya to Northern Ireland to the back streets of Baghdad—where Britain’s capacities really lay and continues to reside.⁶

Ultimately, what do these four general findings mean for our understanding of the theory and practice of those wars grouped under the label counterinsurgency? Rory Stewart, the quixotic but solicitous British soldier-scholar-politician, traveler, and linguist, reflecting on his time as deputy governor of two southern Iraqi provinces under the Coalition Authority, made the following statement in early 2014:

Stewart’s statement illustrates a simple but profound message echoed throughout this volume: COIN is symptomatic of a fallacy at the heart of much contemporary Western social inquiry, which is the attempt to impose a structure on contingent conditions of the past that were never present at the time and never will be in the future. COIN is, as Stewart contends, a delusion. Counterinsurgency “theory” in this respect is little different from many other systems of thought that attempt to read the past through an understanding of a social or political “science” as if there are patterns to be discerned, lessons to be uncovered, and rules to be obeyed. It thus bears similarity, as Stewart perceives, with forms of quasi-mystical religious thought. In this regard, counterinsurgency is not so much a singular false analogy but a distorting lens that telescopes its focus, narrowing an appreciation of the past as well as overdetermining and oversimplifying the present and the future.