Phony Counterinsurgency Is Dead, Long Live Real Counterinsurgency?

A source in Afghanistan sent Spencer Ackerman a paper about the operation in Kandahar province titled “A Counterproductive Counterinsurgency”. Its argument, essentially, is that the principles of counterinsurgency are correct and that by those standards the actual approach being undertaken in their name is failing and doomed to fail. He writes that “[l]ike communism, however, counterinsurgency methods are not proving to be effective in practice.”

The answer, according to the author, seems to be more and better counterinsurgency:

An effective counterinsurgency can only be waged by an organization that is capable of committing to support only those it empowers, remains quiet until it strikes, and effectively owns the world of information. Once it is capable of identifying the vulnerabilities in core infrastructure before the enemy is able to exploit them—and strikes with precision to seal them up, the enemy will dissolve and we will find the war is won.

This sort of reminded me of how after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party (USA), Bob Avakian, wrote a book called Phony Communism is Dead, Long Live Real Communism!, an analogy I see Steve Hind has also hit upon.

This is an objection you can mount at two levels. One is linguistic. On some level, “counterinsurgency” has to refer to the things that happen when people who describe themselves as practitioners of “counterinsurgency” say they’re engaging in “counterinsurgency.” Generals McChrystal and Petraeus are basically all-in on the COIN concept and they’re being supported by the White House so whatever’s happening in Afghanistan is a counterinsurgency (also note that JFK thought he was doing counterinsurgency in Vietnam). The other is practical. Ever since FM 3-24 was released people have been questioning whether it’s at all realistic to imagine the US military successful executing the sort of strategies outlined therein. On some level, what the author of “A Counterproductive Counterinsurgency” seems to be telling us is “no, it’s not.” But America as a society, and the US military as a society-within-a-society has a lot of can-do spirit and lacks a tragic worldview so it’s difficult to get people to accept the idea of limits.