[Peace-discuss] How to lose a criminal war

[C. G. Estabrook]

	The Great Myth: Counterinsurgency
	by Conn Hallinan, July 24, 2010

There are moments that define a war. Just such a one occurred on June 21, when 
Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke and U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl 
Eikenberry helicoptered into Marjah for a photo op with the locals. It was to be 
a capstone event, the fruit of a four-month counterinsurgency offensive by 
Marines, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies, and the newly minted 
Afghan National Army (ANA) to drive the Taliban out of the area and bring in 
good government.

As the chopper swung around to land, the Taliban opened fire, sending 
journalists scrambling for cover and Marines into full combat mode. According to 
Matthew Green of the Financial Times, "The crackle of gunfire lasted about 20 
minutes and continued in the background as a state department official gave a 
presentation to Mr. Holbrooke about U.S. and U.K. [United Kingdom] efforts to 
boost local government and promote agriculture in the town."

The U.S. officials were then bundled into armored cars and whisked back to the 
helicopter. As the chopper took off, an enormous explosion shook the town’s bazaar.

When it was launched in March, the Marjah operation was billed as a "turning 
point" in the Afghan War, an acid test for the doctrine of counterinsurgency, or 
"COIN," a carefully designed strategy to wrest a strategic area from insurgent 
forces, in this case the Taliban, and win the "hearts and minds" of the local 
people. In a sense Marjah has indeed defined COIN, just not quite in the way its 
advocates had hoped for.
The Missing Cornerstone

In his bible for counterinsurgency, Field Manual 3-24, General David Petraeus 
argues, "The cornerstone of any COIN effort is establishing security for the 
civilian populace." As one village elder who attended the Holbrooke meeting — 
incognito for fear of being recognized by the Taliban —  told Green, "There is 
no security in Marjah."

Nor in much of the rest of the country. The latest United States assessment 
found only five out of 116 areas "secure," and in 89 areas the government was 
"non-existent, dysfunctional or unproductive."

That the war in Afghanistan is a failure will hardly come as news to most 
people. Our NATO allies are preparing to abandon the endeavor — the Dutch, 
Canadians, and Poles have announced they are bailing — and the British, who have 
the second largest contingent in Afghanistan, are clamoring for peace talks. 
Opposition to the war in Britain is at 72 percent.

But there is a tendency to blame the growing debacle on conditions peculiar to 
Afghanistan. There are certainly things about that country that have stymied 
foreign invaders: It is landlocked, filled with daunting terrain, and populated 
by people who don’t cotton to outsiders. But it would be a serious error to 
attribute the current crisis to Afghanistan’s well-earned reputation as the 
"graveyard of empires."
A Failing Doctrine

The problem is not Afghanistan, but the entire concept of COIN, and the debate 
around it is hardly academic. Counterinsurgency has seized the high ground in 
the Pentagon and the halls of Washington, and there are other places in the 
world where it is being deployed, from the jungles of Colombia to the dry lands 
that border the Sahara. If the COIN doctrine is not challenged, people in the 
United States may well find themselves debating its merits in places like 
Somalia, Yemen, or Mauritania.

"Counterinsurgency aims at reshaping a nation and its society over the long 
haul," says military historian Frank Chadwick, and emphasizes "infrastructure 
improvements, ground-level security, and building a bond between the local 
population and the security forces."

In theory, COIN sounds reasonable; in practice, it almost always fails. Where it 
has succeeded — the Philippines, Malaya, Bolivia, Sri Lanka, and the Boer War — 
the conditions were very special: island nations cut off from outside support 
(the Philippines and Sri Lanka), insurgencies that failed to develop a following 
(Bolivia) or were based in a minority ethnic community (Malaya, the Boer War).

COIN is always presented as politically neutral, a series of tactics aimed at 
winning hearts and minds. But in fact, COIN has always been part of a strategy 
of domination by a nation(s) and/or socioeconomic class.

The supposed threat of communism and its companion, domino theory, sent soldiers 
to countries from Grenada to Lebanon, and turned the Vietnamese civil war into a 
Cold War battleground. If we didn’t stop the communists in Vietnam, went the 
argument, eventually the Reds would storm the beaches at San Diego.

Replace communism with terrorism, and today’s rationales sound much the same. 
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates described Afghanistan as "the 
fountainhead of terrorism." And when asked to explain why Germany was sending 
troops to Afghanistan, then-German Defense Minister Peter Strock argued that 
Berlin’s security would be "defended in the Hindu Kush." British Prime Ministers 
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown routinely said that confronting "terrorism" in 
Afghanistan would protect the home-front.

But, as counterterrorism expert Richard Barrett points out, the Afghan Taliban 
have never been a threat to the West, and the idea that fighting the Taliban 
would reduce the threat of terrorism is "complete rubbish." In any case, the 
al-Qaeda operatives who pulled off the attack on the World Trade Center and the 
Pentagon got their training in Hamburg and South Florida, not Tora Bora.
Hearts, Minds, and Strategic Interests

The United States has strategic interests in Central Asia and the Middle East, 
and "terrorism" is a handy excuse to inject military power into these two 
energy-rich regions of the world. Whoever holds the energy high ground in the 
coming decades will exert enormous influence on world politics.

No, it is not all about oil and gas, but a lot of it is.

Winning "hearts and minds" is just a tactic aimed at insuring our paramount 
interests and the interests of the "friendly" governments that we fight for. Be 
nice to the locals unless the locals decide that they don’t much like long-term 
occupation, don’t trust their government, and might have some ideas about how 
they should run their own affairs.

Then "hearts and minds" turns nasty. U.S. Special Operations Forces carry out as 
many as five "kill and capture" raids a day in Afghanistan, and have 
assassinated or jailed more than 500 Afghans who are alleged insurgents in the 
past few months. Thousands of others languish in prisons.

The core of COIN is coercion, whether it is carried out with a gun or truckloads 
of money. If the majority of people accept coercion — and the COIN supported 
government doesn’t hijack the trucks — then it may work.

Then again, maybe not. Tufts University recently researched the impact of COIN 
aid and found little evidence that such projects win locals over. According to 
Tufts professor Andrew Wilder, "Many of the Afghans interviewed for our study 
identified their corrupt and predatory government as the most important cause of 
insecurity, and perceived international aid security contracts as enriching a 
kleptocratic elite."

This should hardly come as a surprise. Most regimes the United States ends up 
supporting against insurgents are composed of a narrow class of elites, who rule 
through military power and political monopoly. Our backing of the El Salvador 
and Guatemalan governments during the 1980s comes to mind. Both were essentially 
death squads with national anthems.

The United States doesn’t care if a government is authoritarian and corrupt, or 
democratic — if it did, would countries like Egypt and Honduras be recipients of 
U.S. aid, and would we be cuddling up with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait? The priority 
for the United States is whether the local elites will serve Washington’s 
interests by giving it bases, resources, or commercial access.

Afghanistan is no different. The government of Hamid Karzai is a kleptocracy 
with little support or presence outside Kabul.

In many ways, COIN is the most destructive and self-defeating strategy a country 
can employ, and its toxicity is long-term. Take what didn’t get reported in the 
recent firing of former Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal.
COIN’s Long History

McChrystal cut his COIN teeth running Special Operations death squads in Iraq, 
similar to the Vietnam War’s Operation Phoenix, which killed upwards of 60,000 
Viet Cong cadre and eventually led to the My Lai massacre. The success of 
Phoenix is best summed up by photos of desperate South Vietnamese soldiers 
clinging to U.S. helicopter skids as the Americans scrambled to get out before 
Saigon fell.

But COIN advocates read history selectively, and the loss in Vietnam was soon 
blamed on backstabbing journalists and pot-smoking hippies. The lessons were 
rewritten, the memories expunged, and the disasters reinterpreted.

So COIN is back. And it is working no better than it did in the 1960s. Take the 
counterterrorism portion of the doctrine.

Over the past several years, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has been 
carrying out a sort of long-distance Phoenix program, using armed drones to 
assassinate insurgent leaders in Pakistan. The program has purportedly snuffed 
out about 150 such "leaders." But it has also killed more than 1,000 civilians 
and inflamed not only the relatives of those killed or wounded in the attacks, 
but Pakistanis in general. According to an International Republican Institute 
poll, 80 percent of Pakistanis are now anti-American, and the killer drones are 
a major reason.

"Hearts and minds" soldiers like Petraeus don’t much like the drone attacks, 
because they alienate Pakistan and dry up intelligence sources in that country.

But McChrystal’s Phoenix program of killing Taliban "leaders" in Afghanistan is 
no better. As author and reporter Anne Jones notes, "Assassinating the 
ideological leaders, the true believers and organizers — those we call the ‘bad 
Taliban’ — actually leaves behind leaderless, undisciplined gangs of armed 
rent-a-guns who are more interested in living off the population we’re supposed 
to protect than being peeled off into abject Afghan poverty."

The "hearts and minds" crew have their own problems. McChrystal and Petraeus 
have long stressed the counterproductive effect of using airpower and artillery 
against insurgents, because it inevitably produces civilian casualties. But this 
means that the war is now between two groups of infantry, one of which knows the 
terrain, speaks the local language, and can turn from a fighter to a farmer in a 
few minutes.

As the recent Rolling Stone article found, McChrystal was unpopular because his 
troops felt he put them in harm’s way. Firefights that used to be ended quickly 
by airstrikes go on for hours, and the Taliban are demonstrating that, given a 
level playing field, they are skilled fighters.

In his recent testimony before Congress, Petraeus said he would "bring all 
assets to bear" to ensure the safety of the troops and "re-examine" his ban on 
air power. But if he does, civilian casualties will rise, increasing local anger 
and recruits for the Taliban.
The Choice

The war in Afghanistan is first about U.S. interests in Central Asia. It is also 
about honing a military for future irregular wars and projecting NATO as a 
worldwide alliance. Once the United States endorsed Karzai’s fraudulent election 
late last year, the Afghans knew it wasn’t about democracy.

One of the key COIN ingredients is a reliable local army, but U.S. soldiers no 
longer trust the ANA because they correctly suspect it is a conduit to the 
Taliban. "American soldiers in Kandahar report that, for their own security, 
they don’t tell their ANA colleagues when and where they are going on patrol," 
writes Jones. Somebody told those insurgents that Holbrooke and Eikenberry were 
coming to Marjah.

Afghanistan is ethnically divided, desperately poor, and finishing its fourth 
decade of war. Morale among U.S. troops is plummeting. A U.S. military 
intelligence officer told The Washington Times, "We are a battle-hardened force 
but eight years in Afghanistan has worn us down." As one staff sergeant told 
Rolling Stone, "We’re losing this f—ing thing!"

The sergeant is right, though the Afghans are the big losers. But as bad as 
Afghanistan is, things will be considerably worse if the U.S. draws the 
conclusion that "special circumstances" in Afghanistan are to blame for failure, 
not the nature of COIN itself.

There was a time when the old imperial powers and the United States could wage 
war without having to bank their home-fires. No longer. The United States has 
spent over $300 billion on the Afghan War, and is currently shelling out about 
$7 billion a month. In the meantime, 31 states are sliding toward insolvency, 
and 15 million people have lost their jobs. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told 
the Huffington Post, "It just can’t be that we have a domestic agenda that is 
half the size of the defense budget."

Empires can choose to step back with a certain grace, as the Dutch did in 
Southeast Asia. Or they can stubbornly hang on, casting about for the right 
military formula that will keep them on top. That fall is considerably harder.

The choice is ours.

Reprinted with permission courtesy of Foreign Policy in Focus.