There was a very interesting article in the Times over the weekend about India’s decision to step up efforts to combat a growing Maoist insurgency centered in the state of Chattisgarh, but now spreading to surrounding areas as well:

Or one piece of it. India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period.

If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.

I don’t know much of anything about the subject other than what’s in the article. It did, however, serve as a reminder that there’s a difference between this kind of situation and the kind of thing that tends to go under the term “counterinsurgency” in the American context. What India has is an insurgency. So the insurgency is being fought by India, which is trying to counter the insurgency.

A lot of what makes the Afghanistan situation problematic is that we’re not there providing assistance to an Afghan government’s counterinsurgency strategy. Instead, we seem to be trying to coerce/cajole the Afghan government into adopting what we think of as a sound approach. That’s a tricky needle to thread.

Steve Metz has an excellent TNR piece making the case that pious talk aside, we’ve done nothing to actually build the civilian capabilities that all our defense policy planners and political leaders say we need in order to conduct the sort of counterinsurgency operations it’s claimed that we need to do. What to do about it. I’m going, however, to quote the very end of the article where I think he doesn’t lay the conclusions out just right:

There are only two solutions. We could belly up and provide the resources for a serious expeditionary civilian corps. But a few hundred or even a couple of thousand people is not enough. We would need many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of advisers with linguistic skills and cultural knowledge willing to leave home and live under risky conditions for years at a time. And we are not talking about 20-somethings paid a pittance and fueled by idealism, but skilled professionals demanding serious pay for their expertise and sacrifice. (The difficulty that the State department had convincing even its hardened professionals to volunteer for duty in Iraq showed what a challenge this is.) Of course, if the pay is high enough, the experts will come. But, at a time of massive government budget deficits and a persisting national economic crisis, this is simply not in the cards.

What, then, is Plan B? If we are unwilling to pay the price for a serious civilian capability–and admit that foisting the job of development and political assistance on the military is a bad idea–the only option is to alter our basic strategy. We could find a way to thwart Al Qaeda and other terrorists without trying to re-engineer weak states. We could, in other words, get out of the counterinsurgency and stabilization business. This is not an attractive option and entails many risks. But it does reflect reality. Ultimately, it may be better than a strategy based on a capability that exists only in our minds.

I think the situation is actually much less bleak than Metz makes it out to be. For one thing, the massive government budget deficits and a persisting national economic crisis really shouldn’t be a barrier to doing this. If the things that leading Pentagon officials claim to believe about American national security are true, what we ought to do is draw up a bill of what it would cost to properly finance the civilian side of things and cut that much money from the Defense Department budget in order to pay for it. But of course the Pentagon won’t actually agree to that, which sets up the more realistic option of the Pentagon paying lip service to the need for civilian capabilities while in practice building those capabilities in-house.

That’s not a great idea, but it’ll probably work out okay anyway because there’s really very little reason to believe that “thwart[ing] Al Qaeda and other terrorists without trying to re-engineer weak states” is really all that hard. Al-Qaeda is a very small number of people with what appears to be an extremely limited capacity to damage western interests. What’s more, even on the rare occasions when al-Qaeda achieves tactical success at murdering westerners, there’s no sign these murders do any real damage on a strategic level. It’s not as if the July 2005 bombings in London have displaced the U.K. from its ranks as wealthy, medium-sized country with highly competent armed forces.

Representative David Obey, the top appropriator in the House, has a hot new letter out expressing deep skepticism about the wisdom of an ambitious COIN mission in Afghanistan. I think some of the points about military strategy are wrongheaded, and I especially think Obey overplays the argument that COIN would be futile. But what he says here is true, profound, and weirdly radical in the context of our present-day bizarre politics:

As an Appropriator I must ask, what will that policy cost and how will we pay for it? We are now in the middle of a fundamental debate over reforming our healthcare system. The President has indicated that it must cost less than $900 billion over ten years and be fully paid for. The Congressional Budget Office has had four committees twisting themselves into knots in order to fit healthcare reform into that limit. CBO is earnestly measuring the cost of each competing healthcare plan. Shouldn’t it be asked to do the same thing with respect to Afghanistan?

And again:

Lastly, after the healthcare reform effort is completed, this country still has four huge long-term challenges that will require a sustained national effort:

1. The need for further action to repair the fragility of our own economy and rebuild the capacity of our economy to provide desperately needed job growth;

2. The need for a long-term commitment to strengthen our national security by dramatically reshaping our energy policy – an effort that will require sustained and meaningful sacrifice by all elements of our society;

3. The need for long-term action to restore fiscal soundness by reining in the federal deficit; and

4. The need for long-term action to extend the fiscal soundness of Social Security and Medicare.

To me, these points about costs and tradeoffs get especially pointed when we start talking about ambitious full-spectrum counterinsurgency. It would do Afghanistan a lot of good to provide better economic opportunities for its population and high-quality effective public services. But they could also use better economic opportunities and effective public services in Baltimore. The citizens of Detroit are lacking in physical security, viable infrastructure, and corruption-free governance.

I’d been wondering all week what I should ask the German foreign policy and defense officials I was scheduled to talk to today, so at the suggestion of Spencer Ackerman I asked what they thought about General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency concepts and the general doctrinal shift toward COIN in the United States.

Bundeswehr photo by Martin Stollberg

Unfortunately, nobody in the German government seems to have any interest whatsoever in talking to a room full of American journalists on anything other than off-the-record terms. Nevertheless, a few points emerged:

One is that there’s disagreement about terminology. It was explained to me that one challenge NATO has is that sometimes different national militaries will agree on an idea but have different names for it, or else will be agreeing on some words but actually mean quite different things. German public opinion is very pacifistic and the German military doesn’t like the term “counterinsurgency” which I think it regards as too alarming. They prefer to say that you need a comprehensive approach, rather than just killing the bad guys.

They also seem to sort of resent the idea circulating in the American press and apparently to some extent in the U.S. government that (to exaggerate a bit for effect) COIN doctine was something invented in the U.S. military in 2004-2005 then perfected in 2007-2008 and now General Petraeus has come down from the mountaintop to enlighten the allies. As the Germans see it, these had been familiar ideas in Europe for a while.

There’s also some really evident bitterness about the way the US government handled the Kunduz aistrike situation. I deliberately tried to not ask about this since I figured I’d just get a defensive response, but Germans wanted to drag the conversation about COIN doctrine back to this point. Few people really dispute the basic point about the need to avoid civilian casualties, but I think there’s a feeling that the Bundeswehr was being made into an example by American commanders and publicly humiliated in a way that would never have been done to an American military unit operating in a hostile situation.

Josh Marshall did a very thoughtful and interesting post this morning following up on some of my earlier doubts about the focus on the idea that preventing an al-Qaeda “safe haven” in Afghanistan should be the ne plus ultra of American national security policy.

Since Josh’s post will probably kick attention to this issue up a few notches, I thought I might add that I think there are other perfectly good issues for the United States to remain in Afghanistan. For one thing, I’m enough of a squish that I think “not abandoning the population of Afghanistan to civil war and Taliban rules” makes perfect sense. And it’s also very reasonable to see the situation in Afghanistan as tied in with the situation in Pakistan and to see preventing the collapse of the Pakistani state as an important American policy goal.

But if these are our real objectives, then certain things follow from that. Consider air strikes. If you define the goal as “eliminate safe havens” then maybe airstrikes that accidentally kill Afghan civilians aren’t that big a deal. By contrast, if we’re there to help Afghan civilians, then killing Afghan civilians is a very big deal.

Kevin Drum makes a key point about the apparent defeat of the Tamil Tigers:

And now the hardest part: can the Sinhalese majority bring itself to treat the defeated Tamil minority charitably after a quarter century of brutal war and nearly 100,000 deaths? Stay tuned.

Insurgencies, even when defeated, oftentimes have a way of coming back. Anti-Russian insurgents in Chechnya, for example, have been active on-and-off for about 200 years. Lasting resolution of the situation will require a measure of real reconciliation and wise magnanimity. “With malice toward none, with charity toward all,” and that sort of thing.

Via Robert Farley, a good concise explanation from David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum about the problem with these drone strikes against targets in Pakistan:

Governments typically make several mistakes when attempting to separate violent extremists from populations in which they hide. First, they often overestimate the degree to which a population harboring an armed actor can influence that actor’s behavior. People don’t tolerate extremists in their midst because they like them, but rather because the extremists intimidate them. Breaking the power of extremists means removing their power to intimidate — something that strikes cannot do.

Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people’s houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn’t it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that, exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war.

In my mind, this is one of the big problems with using the phrase “war on terror.” It gets people in a frame of mind where they’re thinking of analogies like “what would I do to a Nazi tank column?” rather than “what would I do to a crime-plagued neighborhood?” And when trying to figure out the right approach here, the right thing to do isn’t to ask yourself whether international terrorism is “really” a kind of warfare or “really” a kind of crime. The right thing to do is to ask yourself what kind of strategic goals you have and what kind of tactics are likely to achieve them. What we want is for Muslim communities around the world to cooperate with various governments around the world to smoke out and apprehend would-be violent extremists. That’s more like a crime-fighting mission.