others saw Iraq as a catastrophe demonstrating the limits of U.S. military power. If the U.S. military had learned lessons from classic imperialist counterinsurgencies such as the French campaign in Algeria, did that make the COIN doctrine any less imperialist? Of course, the most important questions were, Should the United States be involved in any of this? Should it act as an imperial power? Should the U.S. Army be doing stability operations in the first place? But these were questions for the politicians, not the military.
In some ways COIN was a rejection of the neoconservative use of military power as the main tool of U.S. foreign policy, since COIN recognized that military force cannot solve conflicts alone. It was tempting to welcome the new doctrine, because tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians had been killed as a result of the U.S. military not knowing how to operate in complex environments where “the terrain is the people.” Just as the neoconservatives had taken over the Pentagon during the Bush administration, so it seemed that the proponents of counterinsurgency, former dissidents within the military, now held key positions and enjoyed a preponderance of influence over the Obama administration. Many were veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. The lessons they learned from Iraq and Afghanistan were less about questions over strategy (such as whether to invade a country) and more about the practice. They criticized as counterproductive the overwhelming blunt force of the U.S. military, and maintained that repeated assassinations of senior insurgent leaders were not effective. They urged all the other civilian agencies of the U.S. government to contribute to the effort to win the support of the population and separate them from the insurgents. The best way to do this was to learn what people’s grievances were and respond to them. Chief among these needs was the provision of security. Another key element in winning a counterinsurgency war was the creation of an effective local security force. The COIN proponents urged a huge expansion of the Afghan security forces and the creation of many more military advisers to train the Afghan security forces.
COIN advocates fought such a determined and near fanatical battle to gain influence over a calcified military establishment that they started believing in themselves a bit too much. Even if you implement a perfect COIN campaign, you can still fail to achieve your goals. President Obama’s new approach to Afghanistan was drafted by these counterinsurgency theorists. The idea was to get troops to where the population was, to deny the insurgents access to the population while increasing the number of aid workers and diplomats in the country who could improve governance. The focus would be on local leaders instead of the corrupt and incompetent central government in Kabul.
For liberals these COINdinistas, as they call themselves, might seem like kindred spirits. They emphasize nonlethal means, humanitarian aid, development work, making peace with enemies instead of just killing them, and protecting the civilian population. But the end result was still a foreign military occupation. Sometimes the very locals the Americans were promoting were the ones oppressing the population. Other times the Americans harmed the population even while trying to help. The neoconservatives also co-opted COIN. Neocons didn’t care what it took; they just wanted an American combat presence on the ground. Though they preferred an enemy-centered presence, population-centric COIN was the best way to repackage and sell their goals. For liberal interventionists who think they can re-engineer societies—those who supported the U.S. interventions in the Balkans and elsewhere in the 1990s, some of whom supported the invasion of Iraq—COIN provides the perfect template, clearing and holding thousands of villages in the middle of nowhere, one at a time, on the road to civilization.
In 2005 the respected COIN theorist and practitioner Kalev Sepp—a former Special Forces officer and deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations capabilities—wrote a seminal article, “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency,” in
In addition, he noted, “Intelligence operations that help detect terrorist insurgents for arrest and prosecution are the single most important practice to protect a population from threats to its security. Honest, trained, robust police forces responsible for security can gather intelligence at the community level. Historically, robustness in wartime requires a ratio of 20 police and auxiliaries for each 1,000 civilians. In turn, an incorrupt, functioning judiciary must support the police.”
On each of Sepp’s criteria Afghanistan has been a study in abject failure. The civilian Afghan government is insignificant; it is the American military that is leading the war effort. The Afghan government does not provide any services or protect rights. Moreover, the U.S. military regularly kills civilians with impunity, arresting many more and holding them without trial. The Taliban have not been penetrated. There is no honest or well-trained police force, and the American-led coalition will never come near to the ratio that Sepp calls for.
In the article Sepp also called for population control measures, but there are too few troops to control the majority of the Afghan population, who live in remote rural areas. He called on counterinsurgents to “convince insurgents they can best meet their personal interests and avoid the risk of imprisonment or death by reintegrating themselves into the population through amnesty, rehabilitation, or by simply not fighting.” This has been a total failure in Afghanistan. And why would the Taliban, who have all the momentum and are winning, contemplate an amnesty or rehabilitation program?
Ironically, what Sepp describes as the American experience in Vietnam and the Soviet one in Afghanistan, in which military staff rather than civil governments guided operations, resembles Afghanistan under American occupation today. “Indigenous regular armies, although fighting in their own country and more numerous than foreign forces, were subordinate to them. Conventional forces trained indigenous units in their image—with historically poor results. Special operations forces committed most of their units to raids and reconnaissance missions, with successful but narrow results. The Americans further marginalized their Special Forces by economy- of-force assignments to sparsely populated hinterlands. Later, Spetznaziki [Russian Special Forces] roamed the Afghan mountains at will but with little effect. . . . The Soviet command in Afghanistan was unified but wholly militarized, and the Afghan government they established was perfunctory.”
COIN was a massive endeavor, I was told by retired Col. Pat Lang, who had conducted COIN operations in Vietnam, Latin America, and elsewhere. There were insufficient resources committed to doing it in Afghanistan, but if the Americans didn’t plan on owning Afghanistan, he argued, why waste time on it? It was worth the expenditure of resources only if you were the local government seeking to establish authority, or an imperialist power that wanted to hang around for a while. There were thirty million people in Afghanistan, and they were widely dispersed in small towns. “You have to provide security for the whole country,” he said, “because if you move around they just move in behind you and undo what you did. So you need to have effective security and a massive multifaceted development organization that covers the whole place. COIN advisers have to stay in place all the time; they can’t commute to work. If you’re going to do COIN, it really amounts to nation building, and troops are there to provide protection for the nation builders. Afghanistan doesn’t matter. The Taliban is not part of the worldwide jihadi community at war with U.S. We need to disaggregate Taliban from Al Qaeda. The idea that Al Qaeda is an existential threat to the U.S., it’s so absurd that you don’t know how to deal with it.”
Ariel David Adesnik, a defense analyst who works as a consultant for the U.S. government, has been critical of attempts to turn COIN into a science. “One of the hardest parts of COIN operations is measuring progress,” he says. “There is a strong temptation to measure progress with statistics, since numerical data imply a measure of objectivity. The counterinsurgency manual says you need twenty pairs of boots on the ground for every thousand inhabitants in the area of operations. This ratio has become an article of faith across the political spectrum. Yet the twenty-per-thousand rule is little more than a plausible guess based on a handful of historical examples, such as the British operations in Malaya and Northern Ireland. No one is exactly sure how to count either soldiers or inhabitants. Does a logistics officer at headquarters count the same as an infantryman on patrol? Does a rookie Afghan cop count the same as a battle-hardened Marine? What about contractors?
“The population isn’t much easier to count. The population of an Iraqi or Afghan district is often a matter of guesswork. Should peaceful districts be included in the area of operations, or only those with a certain amount of violence? If you change the rules for counting, the ratio of troops to inhabitants can go up or down by a factor of two, three, or more. Using historical data, my research team tried to figure out the actual ratios employed in around forty COIN operations over the past sixty-five years. We found a rough correlation between higher ratios and better outcomes, especially at ratios of thirty to fifty troops per thousand inhabitants. Other researchers found no correlation at all.”
