Understanding Counterinsurgency Strategy

COIN vs. CT seems to be a question of a big vs. small footprint. Large numbers of ground troops securing the populace in COIN, vs. limited numbers of SOF and other units conducting raids, strikes, etc...

This debate is often couched as "what is more effective?" Certainly, COIN is. However, COIN is also long, bloody, and expensive (COIN requires a lot of coin, if you'll pardon the pun).

CT is certainly not as effective, but perhaps it is more efficient? Suppose you get 80% of the effects for 10% of the price?

Strategy cannot be solely based on ends. It must be a balance of ends, ways, and means. Perhaps we require a more "efficient" strategy?

Slapout, I'm not sure Bill Lind was right either, but I do agree that our clinginess to historical examples and associated theories are probably causing us to mis-diagnosis and apply the wrong treatment.

John, I think you're right, Dave Kilkullen did frame the debate as COIN versus CT and I think he would agree that is too simplistic and not really correct. Of course when he framed the argument that way there didn't seem to be a middle ground on the table for consideration.

Ken, as you implied we have always been more effective at FID (supporting a HN's COIN efforts) when we applied that assistance with a light hand (El Salvador, Greece, etc.). Of course Afghanistan is a unique beast, one that can't be won at the village level, and one that can't be won at the national level until factors external to Afghanistan are addressed in a firm manner.

Jason's point about government incompetence is sadly plain to see. Even if we had our Templar, I don't think our system allows the required level of cooperation. To further complicate issues how many nations are part of the coalition?

Jason's last paragraph is debatable and is being debated. Fortunately in my view most national leaders disagree with him.

"Perhaps we need to get our political leaders to properly explain that conflict in the 21st Century will be long protracted actions fought out on the soil of a host nation against a borderless enemy where gains are incremental with indefinate timelines rather than being won through cataclysmic endings that barely ressemble victory or defeat."

First off, what is new? Second, we actually have a choice in most cases (Afghanistan we didn't) on whether or not to willingly get involved in various quagmires in host nations. Of course if we do it with a light hand, we can do it with Special Forces and few enablers, anything more tends to lead to major problems for the HN and us. As for predicting the future of war and conflict in the 21st Century, good luck. Smarter men have tried, but all have blinded by the reality they were facing in their time.

Ken White

It's not only American impatience. Australia's own political leaders have failed to understand COIN, focused their public debate on conventional military assets and therefore fed the public's impatience.

Sure, the character of the Afghan people may be beyond our control, but we have complicated the atmospherics by things we have done that are in our control. It has been made harder by mostly international NGOs who lack the guts to engage with the population outside the wire. They are too Kabul centric. Endless green tea at the Governors compound is not counterinsurgency. We have also spent too long funding Warlords, elites and drug barons and tolerating corrupt Governors. At least one sub-Governor in Ghazni who raped a young girl was simply shifted to another District. He was only sacked when he did not steal enough wheat from the World Food Program for the former Governor of Ghazni. Most importantly, we continue to treat the Taliban as a homogenous group of insurgents. We have failed to turn the local Taliban against the foreign insurgents who have no interest in the future of Afghanistan.

Most local Talib could easily be picking up an AK-47 to shoot Coalition forces one day and a shovel to clean a karez the next. Yet, and this is the key, both actions are in direct support and protection of their local interests. Neither action is intended to be part of a global jihad or to install a new government in Kabul.

One of the most prescient lessons from T.E. Lawrence, in his famous 27 Articles published in 1917, is not to do too much with your own hands. There is always the temptation to impress upon the locals how we can do things better. Better the local people do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. What was so true in Afghanistan is our practical work was never as good as, perhaps, we thought.

We must also remember that a complete approach to COIN involving military, foreign affairs, governance, law and order, building the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) and development has only really been applied in Afghanistan with the full attention of the US administration since 2006-07. Even then with too few troops and even fewer civilian implementing partners who are prepared to get out from behind their fortresses in Kabul. The Rand Corporation in 2007 was accurate and frank in its assessment when it pointed that is wasn't until 2006 that the UK and the US began coordinating Departments within their own administrations; then came the realisation of the need to coordinate between the various governments and international agencies.

The ramification for the military is that an array of loosely connected national governments and their various departments are conducting a COIN campaign. The campaign embodies the same holistic concept as Thompson's approach in Malaya, but in this case each sector is now represented by one or more government departments at the national level, and this escalation of complexity and scale is further amplified by an international dimension. Rand Corporation's constructive analysis suggests that the better coordination on paper has actually led to further obfuscation in practice.
Even now as the surge of US troops reaches its peak the problem is that few of the other departments or countries for that matter are unified in their understanding and commitment to the implementation of a common version of COIN.

And almost before the surge can be on the ground long enough to take hold the draw down will begin in June / July 2011.

We are also trying to do something never acheived by any foreign force in Afghanistan. Perhaps we need to get our political leaders to properly explain that conflict in the 21st Century will be long protracted actions fought out on the soil of a host nation against a borderless enemy where gains are incremental with indefinate timelines rather than being won through cataclysmic endings that barely ressemble victory or defeat.

Anonymous, you should look at David Kilcullen's article here a year or so ago, "Two Schools of Counterinsurgency." This is the origin of the COIN/CT dichotomy written as enemy centric v. population centric strategies. See also my article in the Journal (with Max Manwaring), "The SWORD Model of Counterinsurgency" for a tabular comparison that makes the point that these are not polar opposites (as you and the author of this piece agree).
As to your point about occupation and COIN - they are not mutually exclusive. The French Maquis, Russian and Yugoslav Partisans, and American/Filipino guerrillas all conducted resistance/insurgencies against the occupiers in WWII who countered them with COIN - mostly enemy centric strategies. In the Ukraine, the NAZIs snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by inappropriately using a particularly brutal enemy centric strategy on the incipient (and at the time largely imaginary) resistance insurgency.