The New Counter-insurgency Era in Critical Perspective

The rise and fall of intellectual fashions is something that analysts sometimes ponder, attempting to discern the factors that inspired them and the manner in which they eventually fade into irrelevance. The past ten years witnessed the rise to ascendancy of counter-insurgency orthodoxy within military, political, and academic circles, notably in Washington and Westminster.¹ The origins of this orthodoxy are not hard to trace. They date from 11 September 2001 when the al-Qaeda jihadist network hijacked four airliners, two of which were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the other striking the Pentagon in Alexandria, Virginia, while the fourth crashed into a Pennsylvania field. The loss of nearly 3,000 lives on that fateful day was the defining factor that eventually saw counter-insurgency as its logical response.

Over the last half-decade, counter-insurgency (COIN) rose to prominence as the dominant paradigm in American and British thinking about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and indeed for the presumed wars of the future. ‘COIN’ achieved such currency in the strategic community that it became more than a military doctrine, which is its nominal status. Instead, it became a universal panacea. It offered a strategy, a theory of warfare, a movement in defence and military circles, and a ‘how to’ guide for implementing an interventionist American and allied foreign policy, informed by a seemingly humanitarian orientation.¹

As a result of coping with military contingencies in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, particularly the troubled occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the prominence of counter-insurgency (COIN) theory and practise has for the best part of a decade asserted itself as a priority in Western military thought.¹ Much effort and writing has been committed to understanding what should be done at the tactical and operational levels in order to contend with what the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual declares are ‘organized movement[s]’ that aim to overthrow ‘constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict’.² Commentators have, however, drawn attention to the fact that ‘academics and practitioners tend to concentrate their analyses on the government’s role in combating and defeating insurgencies’.³ Neglected in this concentration is an understanding of what it is exactly that counter-insurgency is meant to be countering. The solipsistic nature of much COIN thinking — focusing exclusively on what the authorities should be thinking and doing — overlooks the necessity of being clear about the nature of the intellectual phenomenon that is being engaged, namely, the idea of insurgency.

In 1968, William J. Lederer, a former career US Navy officer and writer, perhaps best known for his co-authored 1958 book The Ugly American, published a new book detailing numerous American failings in the Vietnam War.¹ Among the laundry list of these failings, Lederer highlighted the ways in which the US objective of building a strong and stable South Vietnamese state was actually being undermined simply by the very large-scale US military presence. Apart from his focus on the problems associated with the lack of cultural knowledge and sensitivities of the hundreds of thousands of US personnel based there, he also detailed the ways in which the massive basing and logistics system that allowed the US military to operate in the first place, was causing, or at least exacerbating on an exponential scale, corruption among South Vietnamese officialdom. Lederer concluded that rather than blaming the Soviet Union or China for supporting the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese with war material and food, helping them to maintain high morale, assisting them with recruitment, and stimulating their ‘determination to resist and defeat the United States’, that actually a greater portion of the blame should be laid at the feet of Saigon and Washington. In other words, ‘We are our own worst enemy’.²

In early February 2010, General McChrystal launched the first major offensive pacification operation of the Afghan surge in the town of Marjah in Helmand province. When observers expressed concerns about the coalition’s ability to hold the gains of offensive operations, McChrystal confidently answered, ‘We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in’.¹ The plan was to introduce robust Afghan civil governance, buttressed by US money and expertise, to recapture the loyalty of the population and cement the control of the central government.

In national security affairs, as in other policy spheres, boundaries between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ often become blurred and unstable. The ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT), with its intelligence gathering on US citizens and the relentless hunt for the ‘enemy within’, illustrates the erosion of any fixed distinction between external and indigenous threats and responses. Within US policy and academic circles, the American conduct of counter-insurgency typically is framed in ‘expeditionary’ terms. Under this conception, counter-insurgency is a tool of US international security policy — it is something the US armed forces and civilian agencies do abroad, ideally in cooperation with international partners and ‘by, with, and through’ the embattled ‘host nation’ facing insurgent threats. And at its most baroque, counter-insurgency demands nothing less than political, social, and economic revolution, with the United States serving as the midwife that will bring the besieged polity into the modern world.

This chapter begins to explore two concepts which form the increasingly unspoken core of counter-insurgency (COIN) in the West: the control of the population and its link with the control of territory. Both of these key functions of counter-insurgency present fundamental problems for liberal democratic states engaging in the kind of expeditionary counter-insurgency campaigns which have occupied the previous decade. The problems stem from the need to please the audience at home, from frequently misunderstanding the needs, desires, ambitions, and politics of the population of the state undergoing the COIN campaign, and the series of constraints, both visible and invisible, imposed on the intervention force by liberal thinking itself.

Debates about counter-insurgency (COIN) have been a recurring feature of American security policy, most dramatically during the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars. These battles over whether and how to do COIN have resolved little, leading to enduring disagreements over historical memory, policy prescription, and academic theory. This chapter argues that a fundamental flaw of the discourse on COIN is how technocratic and apolitical it is. A consequence has been a profusion of tactical and operational advice that only provides lowest-common-denominator platitudes at the level of strategy. A deep frustration with COIN has emerged among many because its analytical tools are so limited.

The aim of this chapter is to provide a corrective to the post-dated script writing which has characterised contemporary understanding of the British Army’s campaign in Northern Ireland. The campaign is now often viewed through the prism of more recent operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, this means that the historical record has become partially obscured and the ‘lessons’ lifted from Northern Ireland are sometimes based on a limited understanding of the nature of that campaign. What follows is not a reflection on counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine or practise, but an attempt to caution against COIN-centric interpretations of how a complex civil conflict was brought to an end after around thirty years of comparatively low-level violence. Nothing in the chapter is intended to be prescriptive for current or future campaigns; the aim is to provide a clearer historical record of a campaign which remains central to British conceptions of irregular warfare; and to move from generic points about ‘what to do’ and ‘what not to do’ in comparable situations to a better understanding of the mosaic of failures and successes which make up British security policy in Northern Ireland.

The doctrine of counter-insurgency or COIN, rediscovered around 2006 by the brains of the American military and certain defence intellectuals as a tool to rescue the failing Iraq occupation and to redefine American grand strategy and military organisation, was guided by two hitherto obscure texts written in the early 1960s by a French veteran of the War for Algerian Independence, David Galula. This later-day prophet died in 1967 after an honourable but comparatively pedestrian military career. Forty years later, French strategists and soldiers, whose stable of legendary small warriors is extensive, wonder why General David Petraeus found inspiration for his 2007 Anbar ‘surge’ in the writings of an innocuous major with limited combat experience. Pacification in Algeria 1956–1958 and Counterinsurgency Warfare written in the early 1960s to inform the doctrine of a US military on the threshold an equally ill-fated crusade in Southeast Asia ironically made Galula the conduit to transfer France’s Algerian experience into FM 3–24 Counterinsurgency published in December 2006 which provided the doctrinal underpinning of the COIN revival in the US Army and Marines: ‘Of the many books that were influential in the writing of Field Manual 3–24’, say its co-authors, ‘perhaps none was more important as David Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare’, writes Galula biographer Ann Marlowe. Marlowe believes that Galula’s ‘rigor, analytical sophistication, and capacity for self-criticism’ as well as stylistic clarity explains why two tracts written in the early 1960s by an obscure French major with limited operational experience caught the eye of the authors of FM 3–24.

From 2004 to mid-2007, Iraq was extremely violent. Iraqi civilian fatalities averaged more than 1,500 a month by August 2006; by late fall the US military was suffering a monthly toll of almost 100 dead and 700 wounded.

The US Army and Marine Corps risk degrading their national security worth if they do not reassess the principles of counter-insurgency (COIN) and reject the strategy of nation-building as a core US military mission. Based on a decade of war, the doctrine for COIN has failed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Understanding the core errors that caused those failures should be the starting point for revising COIN doctrine. If this is not done, the conventional infantry forces will lose utility for the next decade.

The title of Paula Broadwell’s 2012 biography of General David Petraeus, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus, defines America’s broken strategy in Afghanistan and its deadly embrace with counter-insurgency (COIN). Broadwell portrays Petraeus as a committed general who has embraced with a near fanatical zeal the idea that counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan can be made to work as long as he, the American military, and the political elite go ‘all in’ to win it. But what if the United States in Afghanistan, and potentially other areas in the future, did not need to go all in with a large military force doing counter-insurgency operations? The image of Petraeus, created by people like his biographer Paula Broadwell and Petraeus himself, as a great general who can make any war work anywhere in the world, has done severe damage to American national security strategy. The damage is done by the belief that counter-insurgency operations can be made to work as long as a saviour general like Petraeus is brought on board to go all in. Unfortunately, this belief commits the United States to perpetual wars of armed state building, even if those kinds of wars are not remotely in American national interests. What Broadwell, Petraeus, and many others have done is to create a new American militarism based on the idea that any problem in the world — Syria’s civil war, violence in Kenya, al-Qaeda’s presence in Pakistan — can be solved by the American military at the barrel of a gun.

American counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine places a war zone’s population in an analytically salient position and is therefore premised on assumptions based in social theory. This military doctrine, institutionalised in the US Army Field Manual FM 3–24, makes explicit arguments about the social roots of substate armed conflict and posits tactical and operational methods to resolve them in favour of stability. It argues that political reforms and service provision can resolve or at least sufficiently suppress those roots. FM 3–24 draws on the anecdotal best practises of various practitioner-theorists with involvement in wars of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century and derives a model often referred to as ‘population-centric’ counter-insurgency,¹ rather than providing an empirical basis for these assumptions and arguments. The most prominent of these practitioner-theorists, the French military officer David Galula, even referred to counter-insurgency as ‘the conduct of sociological warfare’.² Despite the input of a small number of social scientists in the doctrine’s formulation, the academic community has not rigorously engaged with the assumptions of counter-insurgency doctrine from a social theory perspective. Rather, most engagement from the scholarly community has focused on the ethics of social scientists’ involvement in advising and informing military organisations, doctrine, and operations. While ethical debates are important, the social assumptions underlying counter-insurgency doctrine demand substantive engagement from social scientists and sociologists in particular.

Britain’s participation in the Iraq war was beset by controversy before the invasion even began. Many observers expected disaster, and seemed vindicated as the country fell into a sprawling insurgency.¹ Mistakes made early in the occupation appeared to have sparked an unstoppable descent into vast destruction. Then a radical decision by President Bush, in January 2007, altered this trajectory.² By August 2006, civilian fatalities in Iraq averaged over 1,500 per month, alongside almost 100 American military dead. Yet by June 2008, civilian fatalities per month were down to around 200, and American military killed under a dozen.³ The surge of 30,000 soldiers, matched by changed tactics, doctrine, and Sunni politics, showed defeat was not inevitable. One of Britain’s main objectives in entering the war had been to cement Anglo-American relations. Poor military performance in Iraq is widely perceived to have damaged these relations.⁴ This chapter asks why the British army failed to emulate its American allies in conducting a successful counter-insurgency (COIN) in Iraq.

The intense debate over counter-insurgency (COIN) in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan revolved around three related questions. First, should COIN forces focus on attacking insurgents or protecting the civilian population? Second, was victory defined by destroying the enemy or by building a legitimate and self-sustaining government? Third, would heavy investment in COIN doctrine and training erode the Army’s conventional capabilities? These questions played out in fractious public debates pitting so-called ‘COINdinistas’, who emphasised the importance of population security and government legitimacy, against traditionalists who argued that the main role of the armed forces was to destroy armed enemies.

Whereas the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers seemed to demonstrate the ineffective nature of deterrence theory, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan appear to have undermined the efficacy of counter-insurgency (COIN). The result is a military instrument that in many respects not only looks to be hampered by a relative decline in funding among a number of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) powers but, more fundamentally, now also lacks a clarity of purpose that suggests other forms of state power have more utility. To be sure, a number of scholars have pointed out that brute force may well have the virtue of focusing our adversaries’ minds on whether they wish to continue along a particular course of action.¹ However, the application of state violence also has the potential to undermine the human security values Western powers typically use to frame their objectives.²

The book in which this chapter appears comes at a special historical moment: the last months of the Western combat commitment against the Afghan insurgency and the first months of the Malian and wider North West African commitment. French, Canadian, and Dutch combat units have left Afghanistan. The US and UK combat roles are to end in 2014 by the latest, but the pace of departure is accelerating. Planning for extraction of heavy equipment is an increasing preoccupation, complicated by Afghanistan’s distance from the sea, and the complexities of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO’s) relationship with Pakistan and the Russian Federation.¹ A good enough endgame, leaving behind Western trainers for the Afghan Security Forces and perhaps US drone bases, with associated force protection, is now the limit of NATO’s admitted aspiration in South Central Asia. But in mid-January 2013, amid considerable public anxiety, France committed troops and aircraft in Operation Serval, at the request of the Government of Mali, to repel Islamist advances, supported by American transport and command assets, and small specialist detachments from European Union (EU) states.