Victory Has A Thousand Fathers

My thoughts on the COIN study:

- 15 "good" COIN practices and 12 "bad" COIN practices seems to be too few to me to analyze why a COIN effort may have succeeded or not

- the authors seemed predisposed to what is "good" and what is "bad" COIN

- the way they define a counterinsurgent and an insurgent seems to be flawed. I'm sure the Taliban did not view themselves as insurgents when they fought the Soviets

- they seem to ignore examples wherein the same "insurgent" who "won" due to flawed COIN practices used similar or "worse" COIN practices to stay in power later (they seem to conveniently ignore cases that don't fit their theory). For example- the "insurgents" during the Taliban government seemed to lose even with the government's repressive actions (interestingly- the authors label this as a COIN loss for the Taliban government due to the U.S. overthrowing them in 2001...)

- many COIN examples seem to either be left out or the "bad practices" ignored.

- similarly- they don't seem to do an analysis on the "weight" of the practices- they just conclude that as long as the good outweighs the bad, the COIN fighter is good. That ignores the possibility that one or a few practices really made the difference.

- the study implies that the government and the COIN security forces are in lock-step and/or the people are too. I think the relationship
between the people, the security forces, and the government is much more complex and dynamic- and thus hard to quantify, but still VERY important.

The greatest difference between our efforts in Afghanistan and most, if not all, of the examples this study uses is that our efforts here are not supporting a legitimate government's efforts at COIN. We were the
insurgents, we came in and overthrew the de facto government, set up our own, and now are fighting the remnants of the old government- many times without the backing of the government we set up. Those nuances, in my opinion, complicate using any lessons learned from past COIN efforts to inform efforts here.

An email from Afghanistan went around joking that all we needed was to follow the Rand study's checklist here and we'll "win". I think the consensus here was that the study was meant to support 3-24's principles more than offer anything useful for those in Afghanistan now. Even if they are correct, the "how" is actually the hard part- not the "what".

I'll keep this simple. My biggest problem with this study is the same as my biggest problem with US Military COIN Doctrine:

1. It takes the position that the intervening party is conducting COIN, rather than supporting the COIN effort of the Host Nation; and

2. It defines "success" as sustaining the existing Host Nation government in power.

Until we can evolve to understandings of insurgency that are not based in blaming an insurgent populace for failing its government, or that presume some sort of mass mental disorder on the part of the populace due to the radicalizing efforts of some outside third party, we will never get in front of these types of operations.

Certainly men with self-serving and even evil intentions will emerge to take advantage of a government that is failing to serve the needs of its populace. Some will rise within the populace, some will come from states or non-states outside the populace to represent their own interests there. Some are noble and actually represent the populace with the goal of taking it to a better place. ALL however, only have the inroads to begin and further such movements when the existing governance is failing in it's mission.

This study defines the problem 180 out, so its findings are from that perspective. Flip the problem around and relook the same data, and one finds a very different result.

Populaces do not fail Governments; it is governments that fail populaces. Who steps up to exploit that failure is another matter, but it is the failure that comes first.

RAND studies have either become less impressive in recent years, or I have become more critical. They claim they only assessed (pulled data) from the decisive phase of COIN for this study and that it appears to validate our current COIN doctrine. Both statements present problems in my view.

First off it takes a lot of work and time to get to what I suspect they're calling the decisive phase (end of the conflict?), so all the things that were done to get to the decisive state are disregarded in this study. Maybe the real decisive phase was when the insurgents were defeated militarily and realized they could not achieve their objectives via armed conflict. Then during the final throes the government offered political solutions to bring the conflict to an end? The title of the study is correct, victory does have a thousand fathers, but they contribute to the defeat of the insurgency over time.

The study was clearly bias (perhaps intentionally), because they were only evaluating the elements identified in our COIN doctrine to see if there was a correlation with victory, without evaluating the underlying causes of each specific conflict and how that problem was resolved. It fails to identify that each conflict is unique, and is only looking at correlations versus cause and effect in an attempt to identify a silver bullet approach for every isurgency.

This study is what it claims to be, which is the problem. I don't think there is much we can really gleam from it that we didn't already suspect, and in many ways it may be misleading if COIN participants rely on this study versus what is really happening on the ground.

Who funded this study? What was the stated objective of the study?