Clear-Hold-Build-Fail? Rethinking Local-Level Counterinsurgency by David Ucko, War on the Rocks.
Counterinsurgency theory underlines the uniqueness of each insurgency, yet also advances an approach that is to apply across time and space. Termed clear-hold-build, the approach involves clearing contested territory through security operations and then holding that territory so as to isolate and defend it from insurgent influence. The build phase, finally, involves economic, developmental or governance-related activity intended to increase the legitimacy of the counterinsurgents and the government they represent. Done successfully, clear-hold-build allows the government to increase the territory under its control. According to the most common simile, government control spreads like oil- or ink-spots across absorbent paper. The insurgents, meanwhile, lose both physical space and their link to the population, without which they are gradually rendered irrelevant or are simply defeated.
On a very abstract level, the sequencing and logic of clear-hold-build are sound. Yet, as any student or practitioner of counterinsurgency knows, implementing this approach is anything but easy…
Comments
Clear-Hold-Build is indeed a form of ink blot approach to insurgency. If one merely is looking to suppress some particular organization to a level where people can get on with their lives and governance until those suppressive effects wear off, it "works." It is a counterinsurgent, not a counterinsurgency approach.
To make it a counterinsurgency approach it must be coupled with a program of governance evolution. This does not mean government effectiveness and more services, it means a conscious effort to appreciate which population group is feeling so oppressed or ignored by the current system as to provoke them to illegally challenging government, and working to ensure that what governance is offered to the "friends and families" of the current regime are offered equally to all others. It probably means ensuring that barriers to legal challenges to governance are reduced as well.
The lessons of colonial and post-Colonial COIN all contain a bias that must be filtered if we are to apply them to the types of missions we tend to involve ourselves with today.
Clear-Hold-Build in Helmand while protecting the status quo of the Northern Alliance-based GIRoA in Kabul could only fail strategically. That was completely predictable from the beginning. But the military had no say over the causal mess of governance civilian authorities had set up to carry Afghanistan into the future, all the military could do was go out and shove our fingers into the dike of inevitable revolutionary insurgency that followed. Those military efforts in turn provoked a parallel resistance insurgency (little t Taliban).
No tactic, no matter how potentially good it is, can overcome a fatally flawed political framework. We lost this one by design at the beginning, just as we did in Vietnam. All of the hard "COIN" to follow was doomed to fail, and in both cases, it did just that. As Ron White the comedian always says, "You can't fix stupid."
When it comes to understanding what really causes insurgency, may not be stupid, but we are blinded to obvious truths because invariably those truths in just too damn inconvenient to what we hope to accomplish at the policy level, and how we hope to accomplish it.
Clear, hold, build, aka ink spot or oil spill, is simply one classic COIN strategy. David Ucko's critique is solid but incomplete because (1) the strategy can only work if the government has the capacity and will to execute it; and (2) it must be taken in conjunction with "kinetic" operations driven by intelligence and focused on the insurgents. Two different and successful Clear, Hold, Build strategies are the versions used in El Salvador and Colombia. In the former, the Build phase evolved through trial and error until President Jose Napoleon Duarte, with the assistance of US Ambassdor Ed Corr, settled on Municipios en Accion, which gave funding directly to local governments for development projects. In the words of the first large US MILGP commander, COL John Waghelstein, PhD, this was the last and successful "national plan." The other example is Colombia where President Uribe created the Centro Coordinadora de Accion Integral (CCAI - Coordinating Center for Integrated Action) which brought all national agencies under a single organization with military security elements to both hold and build territory that had been cleared of the insurgents. Note that both strategies were national but one was highly decentralized while the other was its opposite. Both worked and both were Clear, Hold, Build strategies.
As a civilian supporting governance and developments efforts in northeast Afghanistan, I think that Dr. Ucko is right on the mark. However, recognizing the complexity in one thing, being able to actually decipher it is another. The days of DSTs and ODAs deployed at the district-level are gone and we have much less insight as to what is going on below the provincial level.
Does the author have another option for tactical and operational units who find themselves in an operational environment like Iraq, where they must assume the role as primary counterinsurgent?
There is little doubt the record is mixed. However, if we find ourselves in another situation like Iraq, what else does the author suggest? If the United States has to act as the primary counterinsurgent, for at least some time, it is better to have something versus nothing. Moreover, that something will have to be culturally and legally acceptable to the US. With those conditions, clear hold build is about the best you can hope for, even if it is based on some very flawed assumptions. Something imperfect that is accepted and taught is a better than having nothing.