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US: Counterinsurgency Back In Vogue?
Analysis by Daniel Luban*
WASHINGTON, Apr 10 (IPS) - As the U.S. prepares to reduce its military presence in Iraq while intensifying its
war effort in Afghanistan, hawks within both the Republican and Democratic
parties have come increasingly to believe that counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine
offers a solution to the central security challenges Washington will face in the
21st century.
Drawing on the perceived, if still uncertain, success of the U.S. "surge" in
Iraq, many prominent opinion-makers - notably neoconservatives and
"liberal hawks" - have joined COIN advocates within the military itself to
argue that "small wars" theory should be the cornerstone of U.S. military
strategy going forward, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
But COIN’s current ascendancy masks several lingering points of contention.
For critics, the current enthusiasm reflects a fundamental overestimation of
the efficacy of military force, and a desire for technocratic solutions to
strategic problems that presume a neo-imperial nation-building role for the
U.S.
Even among hawks, COIN has drawn fire from those who dispute the
supposed "lessons" drawn from the surge in Iraq, and from those who argue
that conventional warfare against potential rivals like China and Russia should
remain a much higher priority than irregular warfare against non-state
actors.
COIN is a fundamentally broad-ranging concept, encompassing all "military,
paramilitary, political, economic, psychological and civic actions" used to
defeat insurgency, according to the 2006 Army Counter-Insurgency Field
Manual.
It emphasises protecting and winning the "hearts and minds" of civilian
populations - summed up in the mantra "clear, hold, and build" - meaning in
practice COIN can often shade into "nation-building."
A team led by Gen. David Petraeus, the most prominent COIN advocate within
the military, authored the Army field manual. Now head of U.S. Central
Command (CENTCOM) overseeing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Petraeus
has become an icon among hawks due to his perceived success in pacifying
Iraq.
In the wake of Iraq, many commentators across the political spectrum have
called for the principles of the COIN doctrine used in the Iraq surge to be
institutionalised as the guide for future campaigns in Afghanistan and
elsewhere.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the hawkish independent Democrat, for example,
called in January for an enhanced effort in Afghanistan built around six linked
"surges" - in troop strength, strategic coherence, civilian resources, "native"
support, regional integration, and political commitment.
While conventional warfare remains the centrepiece of military spending -
Defence Secretary Robert Gates estimated this week that "irregular warfare"
accounts for only ten percent of the new defence budget - COIN has come to
dominate conversation in Washington foreign-policy circles, and many argue
that "small wars" will characterise the 21st century.
"In a multipolar world where small wars proliferate, there is reason to believe
that [COIN] doctrine will shape not only the next phase of the fights in
Afghanistan and Iraq, but the future of the U.S. military," according to John
Nagl, a former Army officer who contributed to the COIN manual and now
heads the influential think-tank, Centre for a New American Security (CNAS).
CNAS, which was founded in 2007 and has served as something of a pipeline
to senior ranks in the Obama administration, appears to embody the new
bipartisan conventional wisdom in Washington. Its ‘mediagenic’ Rhodes
Scholar president has become a poster boy for COIN enthusiasts, including
influential neo-conservatives who two weeks ago featured Nagl at the kick-
off of their newest think-tank, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI).
COIN is especially attractive to many liberal hawks, however, because it
emphasises civilian protection and knowledge of local cultures, in contrast to
the "shoot-first" style that often characterised U.S. military policy in the early
Bush years.
But although advocates portray COIN as a purely pragmatic and non-
ideological response to the security challenges of the twenty-first century,
critics charge that its focus on "small wars" and nation-building simply
assumes that the main goal of the U.S. military should be subduing local
populations of far-flung but strategically important countries. In that respect,
they argue, COIN can serve as a smokescreen for maintaining U.S. imperial
posture.
"Great powers wage ‘small wars’ not to defend themselves but to assert
control over foreign populations," wrote Andrew Bacevich, a former Army
colonel and Boston University professor, in his 2008 book "The Limits of
Power". "Historically, that is, ‘small wars’ are imperial wars."
"[T]o assume that wars like Iraq define the military’s future evades a larger
question. Given what the pursuit of American imperial ambitions in the
Greater Middle East has actually produced…why would the United States
persist in such a strategy? Instead of changing the military, why not change
the policy?" asked Bacevich.
The history of COIN in the U.S. is in fact intimately tied to the history of
imperialism, dating back to the "Indian wars" and the suppression of
insurgencies in Cuba and the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century.
Many of the classics of COIN literature, such as David Galula’s
"Counterinsurgency Warfare", came out of the French colonial experience in
Algeria. The heyday of COIN in the U.S. came in the 1960s, when the U.S.
supplemented its military forces in Vietnam with tens of thousands of civilian
advisers applying the latest social-science findings to everything from police
training to land reform.
The U.S. defeat in Indochina made COIN anathema to a generation of military
officers who demanded an end to murky and open-ended nation-building
engagements. The "Powell doctrine", which demanded overwhelming force in
the pursuit of clearly defined goals, was emblematic of U.S. military thinking
post-Vietnam.
While the immediate post-Cold War period saw the U.S. intervene in ‘small
wars’ in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans, the George W. Bush administration
came to office promising an end to such commitments. Former Defence
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sought to transform the military into a
technology-heavy force designed to defeat rival states quickly and with as
few "boots on the ground" as possible.
It was Rumsfeld’s failure to anticipate the challenges of post-invasion Iraq
that sent the U.S. officer corps scrambling back to the archives in search of
their predecessors’ wisdom about how to conduct counter-insurgency.
Ironically, many of the same neo-conservatives and liberal hawks who now
tout the virtues of COIN were previously firm believers in the high-tech
Rumsfeld military. This has led critics to charge that these new COIN
enthusiasts simply aim to foster a belief in the efficacy of military force and
interventionist foreign policy.
Bacevich and other critics caution against falling back into the same illusions
about military efficacy that drew the U.S. into Iraq in the first place.
"U.S. leaders should… be wary of the potential moral hazard represented by
the COIN [field manual]: thinking they have figured out the journey, they may
be tempted to go down the road more often," Colin Kahl, a CNAS fellow who
will head Middle East affairs in the Pentagon under Obama, warned in Foreign
Affairs in 2007.
Others dispute the notion that the drop in violence in Iraq was due to the
surge and the use of COIN doctrine. Lt. Col. Gian Gentile, now a professor at
West Point, has been foremost among these critics, arguing that success was
due primarily to other factors - notably the decision to begin paying former
Sunni insurgents to stop attacking U.S. forces.
Even among neo-conservatives and other hawks, it remains to be seen
whether the current enthusiasm for COIN will outlast the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Some, such as influential columnist Robert Kagan, have already begun to
argue that state powers such as China and Russia pose a greater long-term
threat than terrorism and other non-state actors, which would once again
push conventional capabilities to the forefront of Washington’s military
priorities.
This focus on conventional warfare would dovetail with the inclinations of
many within the military itself, where the newly influential COIN advocates
appear to remain in the minority.
*Jim Lobe contributed to this article.
(END/2009)
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