COIN: Dead Or Alive?

Members of the class of 2013 at the United States Military Academy practice for coming military maneuvers in the field.
Photo credit: Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times


West Point Is Divided On A War Doctrine’s Fate

By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: May 27, 2012
Courtesy Of "The New York Times"

Now at another critical moment in American military history, the faculty here on the commanding bend in the Hudson River is deep in its own existential debate. Narrowly, the argument is whether the counterinsurgency strategy used in Iraq and Afghanistan — the troop-heavy, time-intensive, expensive doctrine of trying to win over the locals by building roads, schools and government — is dead.

Broadly, the question is what the United States gained after a decade in two wars.

“Not much,” Col. Gian P. Gentile, the director of West Point’s military history program and the commander of a combat battalion in Baghdad in 2006, said flatly in an interview last week. “Certainly not worth the effort. In my view.”

The debate at West Point mirrors one under way in the armed forces as a whole as the United States withdraws without clear victory from Afghanistan and as the results in Iraq remain ambiguous at best. (On the ABC News program “This Week” on Sunday, the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, called the Taliban “resilient” after 10 and a half years of war.)

But at West Point the debate is personal, and a decade of statistics — more than 6,000 American service members dead in Iraq and Afghanistan and more than $1 trillion spent — hit home. 

Many of them are apprehensive about what they will find in Afghanistan — the news coming back from friends is often not good.

At West Point the arguments are more public than those in the upper reaches of the Pentagon, in large part because the military officers on the West Point faculty pride themselves on academic freedom and challenging orthodoxy. Colonel Gentile, who is working on a book titled “Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace With Counterinsurgency,” is chief among them.

Colonel Gentile’s argument is that the United States pursued a narrow policy goal in Afghanistan — defeating Al Qaeda there and keeping it from using the country as a base — with what he called “a maximalist operational” approach. “Strategy should employ resources of a state to achieve policy aims with the least amount of blood and treasure spent,” he said.

Counterinsurgency could ultimately work in Afghanistan, he said, if the United States were willing to stay there for generations. “I’m talking 70, 80, 90 years,” he said.

Colonel Meese’s opposing argument is that warfare cannot be divorced from its political, economic and psychological dimensions — the view advanced in the bible of counterinsurgents, the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual that was revised under General Petraeus in 2006. Hailed as a new way of warfare (although drawing on counterinsurgencies fought by the United States in Vietnam in the 1960s and the Philippines from 1899 to 1902, among others), the manual promoted the protection of civilian populations, reconstruction and development aid.

“Warfare in a dangerous environment is ultimately a human endeavor, and engaging with the population is something that has to be done in order to try to influence their trajectory,” Colonel Meese said.

Counter-Insurgency: From Latin America To Afghanistan

The US COIN program has its origins in the decades long US interventions - secretive and not so - in its own southern hemisphere. And the war in Afghanistan (and in Iraq) takes on the same state terror versus insurgent terror attributes of that long era of violence

By Pablo Behrens.
First Published 2010-08-19
Courtesy Of "Middle-East-Online"

In recent decades there have been only one or two precedents in which the United States and the United Kingdom could analyze directly the use of guerilla warfare by insurgents, and the response by government authorities. In the US' case it was the urban guerilla movement and the ‘threat’ of progressive political parties in South and Central America and the State terror it unleashed during the 1970s. In the case of the UK, it was the IRA mainland attacks of the 1980s.

Their experience in those two conflicts cannot be underestimated and in one form or another lessons learnt by both re-surfaced in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is unthinkable that US government agencies such as the Pentagon, the CIA and the NSA has not applied the lessons learned in Latin America, when less than twenty years later the White House would be directly involved in a war against insurgency.

In the case of the UK, it was a source of pride for their military cadres to freely admit that British commanders were applying "lessons learnt in Belfast" in their war against the urban insurgency in Basra.

At some point, the Global War on Terror of 2001 turned into a War on Insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the nations that signed up for those wars did not imagine is that one day they would be using the same tactics as the enemy they were trying to destroy.

Terror attack takes various forms. A bomb from nowhere, kidnap or arrest without trial, renditions, assassinations, secret prisons, improvised explosive devices, drone attacks, summary executions and torture. Anything goes. Terror is a State tactic as well as an insurgency tactic. It is borne from a need to produce results quicker than more conventional warfare or legal means. The difference is that one side is condemned by the law of the land while the other acts with impunity and is above the law.

The methods of recruitment, command, control and attack used by the urban guerillas in the big cities of South America in the past are very similar to the methods insurgents use today in Baghdad, Basra, Kandahar or Kabul -- with the exception of suicide attacks and that Latin American guerillas generally targeted government forces as per the Cuban model. But for any insurgent anywhere in the world it's still the same old Che Guevara tactic of “bite and flee” (muerde y huye). In its simplest form it’s a small arms attack by a group of guerillas and then back to the shadows. By the time government forces are able to respond they find only the dust settling and a few dead bodies.

The authority in Iraq and more so now in Afghanistan is none other than the US occupation army. As such it responds the only way it knows: an iron fist that smashes anything that moves -- it’s the ‘kill today, ask human rights questions tomorrow’ method. The reasoning is simple: If Che Guevara and his urban cohorts had been dealt with that way, why not Osama bin Laden's irregulars?

There is no other recent learning curve in either the United States or the UK than their respective experiences in Latin America and Northern Ireland. Except Vietnam, but that was a war the United States lost.

Thanks to the passage of time we now know how military juntas in Latin America dealt with guerillas or political threats. Torture was widespread as well as mass arrests; paramilitary elements organized political assassinations via death squads; illegal flights across frontiers were used to transport kidnapped dissidents or insurgency suspects for torture. During this period, a permanent, widespread presence of US intelligence operatives maintained contact with local military agencies, advising and protecting.

All the above was 'stock in trade' in Latin America between the early 60s and the mid 80s. A kind of 'operations manual' for counter-insurgency success was being drawn up for future conflicts by research elements in the US state security establishment. The preferred chapter was the use of violent attack against anybody deemed a suspect on the flimsiest of evidences. Insurgency was stamped out in Latin America by the sheer force of the bloodbath committed by State terror. Only human rights organizations bothered then as they still bother today and only one or two Western countries batted an eye as the horror was unleashed.

All Latin American military juntas of the period were supported by successive US administrations through generous loans, arms and training of military, police and intelligence cadres. That campaign is still today considered an unmitigated military success by US security.

That’s why we should not be surprised if in the last few years a similar counter-insurgency strategy was apparently applied by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hallmark was the same: rendition flights of suspects, arrests without trial and rumors of torture in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and Abu Ghraib in Iraq. There were also secret assassination squads, trigger happy soldiers and CIA-run secret prisons.

In the War on Insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq what was happening was just the recycling of a tried and tested formula first applied “successfully” years earlier in Latin America.

The main difference between a war on insurgency in Latin America and counter-insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan is that in the former case, the human rights violations were carried out by the military juntas of each country concerned and US involvement was kept out of the limelight. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the equivalent military power is nonexistent or unreliable, so the United States has to carry out the repression by itself. Their heavy handed modus operandi -- the only one they know -- is confirmed in a number of leaks over the years and published by newspapers like the Washington Post, by the WikiLeaks web site, or by denunciations from organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

So now the counter-insurgency manual is found faulty, as the power exercising the repression, the United States, has been caught red-handed and there is no one else to blame. It was easy to claim "plausible deniability" when violations were carried out by well known South American military butchers like Garrastazu Medici in Brazil, Videla in Argentina, or Pinochet in Chile. It is more difficult to apply it when the only military game in town is the United States.

State terror has its limits. It can kill some of the people all the time. It can even kill all the people some of the time. But it cannot kill all the people all the time. Some wars are better lost.

Pablo Behrens is a Uruguayan freelance journalist based in London, England. Between 2005-2008 Pablo was London correspondent for La Republica covering the terrorist attacks in the London Underground, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and general national and international policy of the British government within the War on Terror framework.

Copyright © 2010 Pablo Behrens – distributed by Agence Global

Counterinsurgency: The Great Myth

By Conn Hallinan,
July 22, 2010
Courtesy Of "Foreign Policy In Focus"

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 Columbia 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 highjack 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 Mai 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.

Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist. He also writes the blog, Distpatches from the Edge.

Recommended Citation:

Conn Hallinan, "The Great Myth: Counterinsurgency" (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, July 22, 2010)

Counter-Insurgency Down For The Count

By Ann Jones

June 3, 2010

Courtesy Of "Asia Times Online"

United States President Barack Obama's Afghanistan strategy isn't working. So said a parade of Afghanistan watchers during the flap over war commander General Stanley McChrystal's firing. But what does that phrase, so often in the media these days, really mean? And if the strategy really isn't working, just how can you tell?

The answers to these questions raise even more important ones, including: Why, when Obama fires an insubordinate and failing general, does he cling to his failing war policy? And if our strategy isn't working, what about the enemy's? And if nothing much is working, why does it still go on non-stop this way? Let's take these one at a time.

1. What do you mean by "it's not working"?

"It" is counter-insurgency or COIN, which, in fact, is really less of a strategy than a set of tactics in pursuit of a strategy. Counter-insurgency doctrine, originally designed by empires intending to squat on their colonies forever, calls for elevating the principle of "protecting the population" above pursuing the bad guys at all cost. Implementing such a strategy quickly becomes a tricky, even schizophrenic, balancing act, as I recently was reminded.

I just spent some time embedded with the US Army at a forward operating base near the Pakistan border where, despite daily "sig acts" - significant activity of a hostile nature - virtually every "lethal" American soldier is matched by a "non-lethal" counterpart whose job it is, in one way or another, to soften up those civilians for "protection”.

McChrystal himself played both roles. As the US commander, he was responsible for killing what he termed, at one point, "an amazing number of people" who were not threats, but he also regularly showed up at Afghan President Hamid Karzai's palace to say "sorry”. Karzai praised him publicly for his frequent apologies (each reflecting an American act or acts that killed civilians), though angry Afghans were less impressed.

The part of the lethal activity that often goes awry is supposed to be counter-balanced by the "sorry" part, which may be as simple as dispatching US officers to drink humble tea with local "key leaders". Often enough, though, it comes in the form of large, unsustainable gifts. The formula, which is basic COIN, goes something like this: kill some civilians in the hunt for the bad guys and you have to make up for it by building a road. This trade-off explains why, as you travel parts of the country, interminable (and often empty) strips of black asphalt now traverse Afghanistan's vast expanses of sand and rock, but it doesn't explain why Afghans, thus compensated, are angrier than ever.

Many Afghans are angry because they haven't been compensated at all, not even with a road to nowhere. Worse yet, more often than not, they've been promised things that never materialize. (If you were to summarize the history of the country as a whole in these past years, it might go like this: big men - both Afghan and American - make out like the Beltway Bandits many of them are, while ordinary Afghans in the countryside still wish their kids had shoes.)

And don't forget the majority of Afghans in the countryside who have scarcely been consulted at all: women. To protect Afghan women from foreign fighters, Afghan men lock them up - the women, that is. American military leaders slip easily into the all-male comfort zone, probably relieved perhaps to try to win the "hearts and minds" of something less than half "the population”.

It's only in the past year or two that the US Marines Corps and the army started pulling a few American women off their full-time non-combat jobs and sending them out as Female Engagement Teams (FETs) to meet and greet village women. As with so many innovative new plans in our counter-insurgency war, this one was cobbled together in a thoughtless way that risked lives and almost guaranteed failure.

Commanders have casually sent non-combatant American women soldiers - supply clerks and radio operators - outside the wire, usually with little training, no clear mission and no follow up. Predictably, like their male counterparts, they have left a trail of good intentions and broken promises behind. So when I went out to meet village women near the Pakistan border last week with a brand-new army FET-in-training, we faced the fury of Pashto women still waiting for a promised delivery of vegetable seeds.

Imagine. This is hardly a big item like the "government in a box" that McChrystal promised and failed to deliver in Marjah. They're just seeds. How hard could that be?

Our visit did, however, open a window into a world military and political policymakers have ignored for all too long. It turns out that the women of Afghanistan, whom former president George W Bush claimed to have liberated so many years ago, are still mostly oppressed, impoverished, malnourished, uneducated, short of seeds and mad as hell.

Count them among a plentiful crew of angry Afghans who are living proof that "it's not working" at all. Afghans, it seems, know the difference between genuine apologies and bribes, true commitment and false promises, generosity and self-interest. And since the whole point of COIN is to gain the hearts and minds of "the population”, those angry Afghans are a bad omen for the US military and Obama.

Moreover, it's not working for a significant sub-group of Americans in Afghanistan either: combat soldiers. I've heard infantrymen place the blame for a buddy's combat injury or death on the strict rules of engagement ("courageous restraint”, as it's called) imposed by McChrystal's version of COIN strategy. Taking a page from Vietnam, they claim their hands are tied, while the enemy plays by its own rules. Rightly or wrongly, this opinion is spreading fast among grieving soldiers as casualties mount.

It's also clear that even the lethal part of counter-insurgency isn't working. Consider all those civilian deaths and injuries, so often the result of false information fed to Americans to entice them to settle local scores.

To give just one example: American troops recently pitched hand grenades into a house in Logar province that they'd been told was used by terrorists. Another case of false information. It held a young Afghan, a relative of an Afghan agricultural expert who happens to be an acquaintance of mine. The young man had just completed his religious education and returned to the village to become its sole maulawi, or religious teacher. The villagers, very upset, turned out to vouch for him and the army hospitalized him with profuse apologies. Luckily, he survived, but such routine mistakes regularly leave dead or wounded civilians and a thickening residue of rage behind.

Reports coming in from observers and colleagues in areas of the Pashtun south, once scheduled to be demonstration sites for McChrystal's cleared, held, built and better-governed Afghanistan, are generally grim. Before his resignation, the general himself was already referring to Marjah - the farming area (initially trumpeted as a "city of 80,000 people") where he launched his first offensive - as "a bleeding ulcer".

He also delayed the highly publicized advance into Kandahar, the country's second-largest city, supposedly to gain more time to bring around the opposing populace, which includes Karzai. Meanwhile, humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) based in Kandahar complain that they can't do their routine work assisting the city's inhabitants while the area lies under threat of combat. Without assistance, Kandaharis grow - you guessed it - angrier.

From Kandahar province, where American soldiers mass for the well-advertised securing of Kandahar, come reports that the Afghan National Army (ANA) is stealing equipment - right down to bottled drinking water - from the US military and selling it to the Taliban. US commanders can't do much about it because the official American script calls for the ANA to take over responsibility for national defense.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) soldiers have complained all along about the ill-trained, uninterested troops of the ANA, but the animosity between them seems to have grown deadly in some quarters. American soldiers in Kandahar report that, for their own security, they don't tell their ANA colleagues when and where they're going on patrol. In the 1980s, in the anti-Soviet jihad the US supported, the US trained Afghan jihadis who have today become the US's worst enemies and now it is happening again.

Factor in accounts of what McChrystal did best: taking out bad guys. Reportedly, he was vigorously directing special forces' assassinations of high- and mid-level Taliban leaders in preparation for "peeling off" the "good" Taliban - that is, those impoverished fighters only in it for the money. According to his thinking, they would later be won over to the government through internationally subsidized jobs.

But assassinating the ideological leaders, the true believers and organizers - or those we call the bad Taliban - actually leaves behind leaderless, undisciplined gangs of armed rent-a-guns more interested in living off the population we're supposed to protect than being peeled off into abject Afghan poverty. From the point of view of ordinary Afghans in the countryside, our "good Taliban" are the worst of all.

I could go on. If you spend time in Afghanistan, evidence of failure is all around you, including those millions of American taxpayer dollars that are paid to Afghan security contractors (and Karzai relatives) and then handed over to insurgents to buy protection for US supply convoys traveling on US built, but Taliban-controlled, roads. Strategy doesn't get much worse than that: financing both sides and every brigand in between, in hopes of a happier ending someday.

2. So why does Obama stick to this failed policy?

Go figure. Maybe he's been persuaded by Pentagon hype. Replacing McChrystal with Central command chief General David Petraeus brought a media golden-oldies replay of Petraeus' greatest hits: his authorship of the army's counter-insurgency manual, updated (some say plagiarized) from a Vietnam-era edition and of Bush's 2007 "surge" in Iraq, an exercise in sectarian cleansing now routinely called a "success". If you can apply the word "success" to any operation in Iraq, you're surely capable of clinging to the hope that Petraeus can find it again in Afghanistan.

But like David McKiernan, the general he ousted, McChrystal has already misapplied the "lessons" of Iraq to the decidedly different circumstances of Afghanistan and so produced a striking set of failures. A deal to buy off the Shinwari Pashtuns, for instance, a tribe mistakenly thought to be the equivalent of the Anbar Sunnis in Iraq, ended in an uproar when they pocketed the money without firing a shot at a single Talib. Not so surprising, considering that the people they were paid to fight are not foreign invaders - that would be us - but their Pashtun cousins.

Moreover, the surge into the Afghan south seems only to have further alienated the folks who live there, while increasing violence against local residents. It has also come at the expense of American troops in the east, the ones I was recently embedded with, who face an onslaught of hostile fighters moving across the border from Pakistan.

3. What about the enemy strategy? How's that working?

It seems the Taliban, al-Qaeda and various hostile fighters in Afghanistan drew their own lessons from Petraeus' surge in Iraq: they learned to deal with a surge not by fading away before it, but by meeting it with a surge of their own.

An American commander defending the eastern front told me that hostile forces recently wiped out five border posts. "They opened the gate," he said, but with the American high command focused on a future surge into Kandahar, who's paying attention? In fact, as the battle heats up in the east, another official told me, they are running short of helicopters to medevac out American casualties. In this way, so-called strategy easily morphs into a shell game played largely for an American audience at the expense of American soldiers.

And all the while America's "partner" in this strategy, the dubious Karzai, consolidates his power, which is thoroughly grounded in the Pashtun south, the domain of his even more suspect half-brother, Ahmed Wali.

In the process, he studiously ignores parliament, which lately has been staging a silent stop-work protest, occasionally banging on the desks for emphasis. He now evidently bets his money (which used to be ours) on the failure of American forces and extends feelers of reconciliation to Pakistan and the Taliban, the folks he now fondly calls his "angry brothers".

As for the Afghan people, even the most resilient citizens of Kabul who, like Obama, remain hopeful, say: "This is our big problem." They're talking, of course, about Karzai and his government that the Americans put in place, pay for, prop up and pretend to be "partners" with.

In fact, America's silent acceptance of Karzai's flagrantly fraudulent election last summer - all those stuffed ballot boxes - seems to have exploded whatever illusions many Afghans still had about an American commitment to democracy.

They know now that matters will not be resolved at polling places or in jirga council tents. They probably won't be resolved in Afghanistan at all, but in secret locations in Washington, Riyadh, Islamabad and elsewhere. The American people, by the way, will have little more to say about the resolution of the war - though it consumes our wealth and our soldiers, too - than the Afghans.

Think of what's happening in Afghanistan more generally as a creeping Talibanization, which Afghans say is working all too well. In Marjah, in Kandahar, in the east, everywhere, the Taliban do what we can't and roll out their own (shadow) governments-in-a-box, ready to solve disputes, administer rough justice, collect taxes and enforce "virtue”. In Herat, the ulema issue a fatwa restricting the freedom of women to work and move about without a mahram, or male relative as escort.

In Kabul, the police raid restaurants that serve alcohol and the government shuts down reputable, secular international NGOs, charging them with proselytizing. Taliban influence creeps into parliament, into legislation restricting constitutional freedoms, into ministries and governmental contracts where corruption flourishes and into the provisional peace jirga tent where delegates called for freedom for all imprisoned Taliban. Out of the jails, into the government, to sit side-by-side with warlords and war criminals, mujahideen brothers under the skin. Embraced by Karzai. Perhaps even welcomed one day by American strategists and Obama as a way out.

4. If it's so bad, why can't it be stopped?

The threatening gloom of American policy is never the whole story. There are young progressive men and women running for parliament in the coming September elections. There are women organizing to keep hold of the modest gains they've made, though how they will do that when the men seem so intent on negotiating them away remains a mystery.

There are the valiant efforts of thoroughly devout Muslims who wish to live in the 21st century. When they look outward to more developed Islamic countries, however, they see that their homeland is a Muslim country like no other - and if the Taliban return, it will only be worse.

American development was supposed to have made it all so much better. But tales abound of small, successful projects in education or health care, funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and then dropped without a single visit from USAID monitors afraid to leave their embassy fortress in Kabul. Regularly, USAID now hands over huge hunks of "aid" money to big, impossibly ambitious, quick-fix projects run by the usual no-bid Beltway Bandit contractors whose incompetence, wastefulness, unconscionable profits and outright fraud should be a national scandal.

This, too, is a process everyone knows but can't speak about because it's not part of the official script in which the US must be seen as developing backward Afghanistan, instead of sending it reeling into the darkest of ages. Despairing humanitarians recall that Hillary Clinton promised as secretary of state to clean house at USAID, which, she said, had become nothing but "a contracting shop". Well, here's a flash from Afghanistan: it's still a contracting shop and the contracts are going to the same set of contractors who have been exposed again and again as venal, fraudulent and criminal.

Just as Obama sends more troops and a new commander to fight a fraudulent war for a purpose that makes no sense to anyone - except perhaps the so-called defense intellectuals who live in an alternative Washington-based Afghanaland of their own creation - Clinton presides over an aid program that functions chiefly to transfer American tax dollars from the national treasury to the pockets of already rich contractors and their congressional cronies.

If you still believe, as I would like to, that Obama and Clinton actually meant to make change, then you have to ask: How does this state of affairs continue and why do the members of the international community - the United Nations, all those international NGOs and our fast-fading coalition allies - sign off on it?

You have only to look around in Kabul and elsewhere, as I did this month, to see that the more American military there is, the more insurgents there are; the more insurgent attacks, the more private security contractors; the more barriers and razor wire, the more restrictions on freedom of movement in the capital for Afghans and internationals alike; and the more security, the higher the danger pay for members of the international community who choose to stay and spend their time complaining about the way security prevents them from doing their useful work.

And so it goes round and round, this ill-oiled war machine, generating ever-more incentives for almost everyone involved - except ordinary Afghans - to keep on keeping on. There's a little something for quite a few: government officials in the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan, for-profit contractors, defense intellectuals, generals, spies, soldiers behind the lines, international aid workers and their Afghan employees, diplomats, members of the Afghan National Army and the police and the Taliban and their various pals and the whole array of camp followers that service warfare everywhere.

It goes round and round, this inexorable machine, this elaborate construction of corporate capitalism at war, generating immense sums of money for relatively small numbers of people, immense debt for our nation, immense sacrifice from our combat soldiers and for ordinary Afghans and those who have befriended them or been befriended by them, moments of promise and hope, moments of clarity and rage and moments of dark laughter that sometimes cannot forestall the onset of despair.

Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Kabul in Winter. Her new book, War Is Not Over When It's Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War, about her work with women in post-conflict countries, is to be published by Metropolitan Books in September. She is at work on her next book about what happens when America's wars come home. To visit her website, click here.

(Copyright 2010 Ann Jones.)

(Used by permission Tomdispatch)

The Burden Of Hypocrisy

By Mark LeVine

UPDATED ON: Saturday, June 26, 2010

16:11 Mecca time, 13:11 GMT

Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

Of the many questions surrounding the sudden career implosion of General Stanley McChrystal, the one to which no one has yet been able to offer a satisfactory answer is, why?

Could it really be that one of the gurus of 21st century counterinsurgency - the man responsible for finding and killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and helping turn Iraq back from the brink - somehow did not understand that you cannot toss profanity-laden insults at the civilian chain of command and continue to run their war?

Many commentators have suggested that his ill-chosen words in the now infamous Rolling Stone interview, and the even more damaging statements by several of his close aides, reflect an increasingly politicised, right-wing military - a growing majority of whose officers are Evangelical Christian Republicans who seem willing to put their faith above their oath to uphold and protect the constitution and the pluralistic, civilian-governed society founded upon it.

Others argue that unlike his successor, David Petraeus, who is famous for encouraging divergent points of view, McChrystal's special ops background and close knit circle of aides made him dismissive of views that did not fully support his own.

in depth

McChrystal's fatal error   Reactions to dismissal   In video: Relieved of command   In video: Petraeus takes charge   In video: Writer explains article   In video: Taliban getting US funds   Riz Khan: Interview with General McChrystal   Riz Khan: Is Afghanistan a failing state?

And even though Obama approved the now nine-month-old troop surge, the president's unwillingness to commit to an open-ended engagement in Afghanistan left McChrystal and his team afraid that the timetable given was insufficient to succeed in the core mission of their counterinsurgency strategy: to win over the local population by defending important population centres and limiting civilian casualties and to bolster support for the Afghan government and to create the infrastructure necessary for a state to function.

And some, like Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter whose story ended McChrystal's career, believe that he simply became a "runaway general" who "seized control of the war" by focusing more on his supposed enemies in the White House than on crafting a politically viable strategy for ending the US occupation.
All these hypotheses certainly have their merits, but there is likely an even deeper reason for the ill-considered remarks by the general and his "Team America" (as his crew liked to refer to itself): They were operating in an environment of significant and increasing hypocrisy at the political level and intellectual dishonesty at the level of policy.


This situation produced a level of cognitive dissonance which became so corrosive that those at the centre of the Afghanistan mission could not stop themselves from revealing this reality to the outside world when presented with the opportunity; however ill-advised doing so might have been for their careers and the mission more broadly.

Long Tradition Of Hypocrisy

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, came out in support of McChrystal [EPA]

Chapter seven of the counterinsurgency manual, Leadership and Ethics for Counterinsurgency, that McChrystal supposedly adopted as his blueprint for turning around the war, begins by declaring the need for senior commanders to "establish and maintain the proper ethical climate of their organisations" - one based on the "inextricable link" between honour and morality.

Because "insurgency is more than combat between armed groups; it is a political struggle with a high level of violence," the successful commander will "feel the pulse of the local populace, understand their motivations, and care about what they want and need. Genuine compassion and empathy for the populace provide an effective weapon against insurgents".

And yet, after one year in country, McChrystal's war was not going well.

Indeed, one of the few figures who came out in support of him in the last few days was Hamid Karzai, the embattled Afghan president, whose government is so racked by corruption and has so little legitimacy among the majority of Afghans that his support demonstrates precisely how out of touch with ordinary Afghans McChrystal and his team remain.

More important than the negative endorsement of Karzai, however, is the reality that it is practically impossible to maintain a correspondence, never mind an "inextricable link," between ethics, honour and morality, and the messy - and in Afghanistan often bloody - business of politics.

In fact, politics has been described as little more than "organised hypocrisy," with good reason. However much governments are supposed to represent "the people," the interests of rulers and states to maintain and even increase their power rarely coincide with those of people to be free of state coercion, control and even violence.

An Ancient Problem

Hypocrisy is a very old concept; it is discussed in numerous places in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles as well as the Quran, in the Buddhist and Taoist scriptures and, with strikingly similar language, in the works of philosophers from ancient Greeks to the founders of modern political theory.

The root of the English word comes from the Greek and then Latin, and means, originally, playing or acting out a part on a stage and at the same time suggests an inability honestly to decide on what one believes or feels.

It is clearly the provenance of politicians, for whom "acting the part," and especially, espousing beliefs and/or policies that they know will not be pursued in office, is one of the requirements of the job.
The idea of hypocrisy (although not the Hebrew word) is among the most important concepts in the Hebrew Bible. The theme is picked up in the New Testament and is one of the behaviours that most angered Jesus, particularly as portrayed in the Gospel of Matthew, where he condemns people who "do not practice what they preach" (Matthew, 23:3).

In the centuries between the Hebrew prophets and the time of Jesus, Plato and Aristotle would grapple with the implications of hypocrisy.

Not surprisingly, hypocrisy (roughly translated as "nifaq" in Arabic) is also a major theme in the Quran, where it is mentioned well over two dozen times in various forms, as well as in the hadith, or sayings of the prophet, and Islamic theology more broadly. As in the Old and New Testaments, the main criticism of the prophet is of people who are "double-faced".

Almost a millennium later, the founders of modern political philosophy like Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes discussed the importance of hypocrisy in politics. While Hobbes was less supportive of the practice than Machiavelli, he too understood that politics is necessarily a "parade of masks", precisely because the ruler must find ways of convincing people to accept actions that are not in their interests.

Hypocrisy and Cleverness

The whole idea of counterinsurgency is hypocritical [AFP]

Perhaps the Tao Te Ching describes the problem of hypocrisy best with a simple aphorism: "When cleverness emerges/There is great hypocrisy."

The meaning of this couplet is quite relevant to the present situation. When someone moves or departs from the Tao, or "way," we can talk about it but it is really not there. In the current context, the moment you start speaking regularly about honour, ethics and morality is probably the moment when they are largely absent.

The celebrated 17th century French writer François de La Rochefoucauld similarly wrote that "hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue" precisely because it must pretend to follow its ethos while practicing the opposite.

More broadly, the whole idea of counterinsurgency - or "COIN," as the clever people in the Pentagon have acronymed it - is utterly hypocritical. It is based, in theory, on "winning hearts and minds" and "separating" civilians from insurgents in a situation where the military practicing it is a belligerent occupier of a territory where the majority of the population most likely view it as such. After all, if they supported or were at least willing to tolerate the presence, COIN would not be necessary.

It is clear that a belligerently occupying foreign army cannot win the hearts and minds of a population that still has the means and will to fight back. The whole strategy is, therefore, doomed from the start. Obama knows this and this no doubt partly explains why he was unwilling to commit to the open-ended engagement preferred by McChrystal.

And yet there is no politically practicable way for any government to withdraw from an occupation until the costs of remaining become so high that the people demand it. Some justification has to be found for slogging it out, with all the human and financial costs that entails, until the people call for a quick exit regardless of the political costs.

Plague Of Contemporary Politics

Petraeus is perceived as being more politically adept than his predecessor [AFP]

And so when our leaders start sounding too clever, when doctrines and strategies seem too well conceived, they likely mask a great deal of hypocrisy by those wielding them, precisely because they are aware of the disconnect between rhetoric and reality.

Today, it seems that every politician wears a mask. The more successful ones have many and can change between them without most people noticing.

Hypocrisy has indeed become the coin of the realm of international politics; it unites seeming enemies in an intricate discourse that allows each to maintain an appearance of integrity by pointing out the hypocrisy of those who attack them. And as long as everyone is guilty, no one has to change their behaviour.

And this is the most troubling aspect of the McChrystal affair and its ostensible resolution. Obama's decision to replace the politically maladroit McChrystal with Petraeus is being applauded in Washington and other Western capitals in good measure because Petraeus is supposedly a more politically adept manager. But Petraeus' political skills should be a cause for more rather than less concern. His greater political acumen will, if history is any guide, likely lead to an even greater level of hypocrisy across the board in the prosecution and spinning of the war.

We may never know why McChrystal and his aides felt compelled to speak openly and honestly to Rolling Stone. It might just be that the pressure of so much hypocrisy was too much to bear, or at least to cover up.

Whatever the reason, their words serve as a warning about the realities of the war, and while McChrystal's replacement might be able to manage the conflict publicly more deftly than did he, in the end the realities of war have a way of smashing through even the most carefully crafted distortion, leaving an even bigger disaster in its wake.

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Against CounterInsurgency In Afghanistan

By Hugh Gusterson

1 July 2010

Courtesy Of "Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists"

It says something about American politics that Gen. Stanley McChrystal was not fired because U.S. casualties in Afghanistan are running at record levels, because the much vaunted Marja initiative has failed, or because the Kandahar offensive is already in trouble during its preliminary rollout. No, he was fired because he and his team embarrassed the White House with carelessly frank talk to a journalist. "This is a change in personnel, but not a change in policy," said President Barack Obama in announcing General McChrystal's dismissal. Or, in the words of Rep. James McGovern, we have the "same menu, different waiter."

But you could put Mother Teresa in charge of Afghanistan and, with flows of resources of that magnitude, she would be unable to prevent the kind of corruption we see in Afghanistan today.

However, the real story should not be the change in personnel but the continuation of a failed policy, and there is abundant evidence that the policy is failing--both in the Rolling Stone article that got General McChrystal fired and in other recent media reports. Coalition casualties are steadily rising, and this month is the deadliest yet with over 46 U.S. and 95 coalition troops killed already. Over the past year, IED attacks have doubled.

The Marja campaign, intended to model the power of the new counterinsurgency strategy, is failing: The Taliban are more popular in Marja than the corrupt official government with which the U.S. is allied and, having melted away during the front-page U.S. military offensive, Taliban fighters are now back in force.

General McChrystal himself referred to Marja as "a bleeding ulcer" (a much more significant quote than what his aides might have called Vice President Joe Biden). The Kandahar campaign, for which Marja was supposed to be a glorious dress rehearsal, is months behind schedule in the face of opposition from local elders and second thoughts from an ill-prepared Afghan government. So tenuous is U.S. control of the countryside that coalition forces cannot move essential supplies along major transport routes without paying warlords hundreds of dollars per truck in protection money, some of which gets passed on to the Taliban fighters sworn to kill U.S. soldiers. Most devastating of all (and the least reported in secondary media accounts), the Rolling Stone article quotes American grunts on the frontlines saying they have lost faith in the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. And the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, has become like Robert McNamara in Vietnam, telling his government in private that counterinsurgency is not working, only to fall in line behind the policy in public. Finally, the U.S. is losing the war on the home front too, with the Christian Science Monitor reporting that only 41 percent of Americans now believe that the war in Afghanistan can be won, while 53 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Obama is managing it.

Yet the U.S. national security state has doubled down on counterinsurgency, not just in Afghanistan but more generally. The U.S. Army has heavily promoted its new Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and advocates of counterinsurgency (such as Gen. David Petraeus, one of the authors of the Manual) have been promoted to key positions in the military. Military training of new Army recruits and Marines now emphasizes counterinsurgency techniques. Africom, the U.S. military's new Africa command, has largely organized itself around counterinsurgency doctrine. Meanwhile, think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the Center for a New American Security, both well networked to the current White House, litter their websites and the nation's op-ed pages with homilies in favor of counterinsurgency doctrine. The U.S. military is, in other words, reorienting itself around counterinsurgency.

And yet, historically, counterinsurgency campaigns have almost always failed. This is especially so when the counterinsurgents are foreign troops fighting on the insurgents' territory. The U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Vietnam failed. The Soviet counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan failed (as did the British one about a century earlier). The British counterinsurgency campaigns in Northern Ireland and Kenya failed. The white Rhodesians' counterinsurgency campaign against black guerillas failed. And the French counterinsurgency campaign in Algeria failed--although that has not stopped the U.S. military from building their current doctrine around the theories of David Galula, one of the leaders of that failed campaign. A rare example of success is the recent Sri Lankan campaign against the Tamil Tigers, but success was achieved by a government on its own territory following a military strategy of exterminist ferocity. Surely the U.S. does not want to go down that path, does it?

Rolling Stone quotes Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, General McChrystal's chief of operations, as saying of the endgame in Afghanistan, "It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win." In the inevitable postmortem in future years that will follow the defeat or stalemating of the U.S. in Afghanistan, the loudest voices will belong to the apostles of counterinsurgency who, rather than admit that counterinsurgency is an inherently flawed project, will start to point the finger of blame elsewhere. Notwithstanding the dismal track record of counterinsurgency campaigns in general, they will tell us the war in Afghanistan could have been won if Obama had agreed to more troops. Or if he had put General Petraeus in charge earlier. Or if he had not declared the July 2011 date for beginning withdrawal. Or if the U.S. had found a more popular ally than President Hamid Karzai.

This will matter greatly because Afghanistan is at the beginning, not the end, of the counterinsurgency road on the U.S. military horizon. In what was until recently called the "Global War on Terror," counterinsurgency plays the sort of framing and orienting role that containment and deterrence played in the Cold War. The U.S. military is already thinking about future counterinsurgency campaigns in Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines.

Given the Pentagon's fantasies of future counterinsurgencies, it is vital to make the argument that counterinsurgency has failed in Afghanistan not because of flaws in its execution but because, as I have argued before, counterinsurgency campaigns almost inevitably contain within themselves the seeds of their own failure. Counterinsurgency forces stand little chance of defeating the insurgents without large numbers of troops, but the presence of foreign troops inevitably excites nationalist hostility from the local population; the more foreign troops there are, the more hostility there will be. Also, the more troops there are, the more military casualties there will be, and this undermines support for counterinsurgency at home--as we are now seeing in the UK and the U.S. Counterinsurgency campaigns also benefit from being allied to a strong and popular local government. We hear a lot these days about Karzai's inadequacy in this regard, but it may not be all his fault: Almost by definition, a leader who relies on external occupying troops for his power will be seen as a foreign puppet and will be compromised in the eyes of his people.

Finally, there is the issue of development, about which the U.S. media and military leaders have shown an extraordinary inability to think clearly in Afghanistan. U.S. military leaders are surely right to think that they are more likely to win the hearts and minds of local populations if they bring them not just roadblocks, nighttime raids, and detentions, but also power plants, irrigation projects, schools, and so on. But the problem is that, when you pour huge amounts of money into a poor country, you inevitably produce corruption and all sorts of other social distortions. Leaving aside the military contracting money pouring into Afghanistan, the U.S. is allocating almost $4 billion a year for development projects in Afghanistan, the fifth poorest country in the world (with a GDP estimated at $13-23 billion and a per capita GDP of $1,000). And it is complaining that Karzai's inability to control corruption in Afghanistan is alienating the population. But you could put Mother Teresa in charge of Afghanistan and, with flows of resources of that magnitude, she would be unable to prevent the kind of corruption we see in Afghanistan today. It is not Karzai, but the U.S. strategy of counterinsurgency itself, that is ultimately responsible for the corruption.

It seemed that the U.S. learned these lessons after the failure of counterinsurgency in Vietnam. For 20 years after Vietnam, the U.S. eschewed the occupation of other countries and learned to intervene either with short, sharp land invasions that led to the installation of a new client regime and rapid removal of U.S. forces (Grenada, Panama), or by deploying U.S. airpower in support of other people's ground forces (Bosnia, Kosovo). But, after the end of the Cold War, boasting that it was the world's sole remaining superpower, the U.S. became drunk on fantasies of its own power and, after 9/11, enraged enough to lash out. It believed that it would succeed where others had failed, simply because it was the United States of America.

The Obama administration will be defined by three disasters. The first, the economic meltdown, it inherited. The second, the BP oil spill, it did nothing to avert. The third, the failed war in Afghanistan, it made worse. All three disasters were caused by a carefree lack of precaution. In the financial world, the U.S. dismantled regulatory structures and trusted the banks to police themselves. Something similar happened with regard to offshore drilling, with the U.S. government outsourcing its responsibilities to oil companies and placing blind faith in technology to keep the environment safe. In Afghanistan, civilian leaders have failed to exercise their responsibility to restrain the military and have fallen prey to lone superpower hubris. Do we have to make the same mistakes in still more countries, wrecking them as we go, to learn our lesson?

Copyright © 2010 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. All Rights Reserved.

The COIN Myth

Economy Of Farce

Part III

By Jeff Huber,
January 19, 2010
Courtesy of Anti-War

Parts I and II discussed how our counterinsurgency doctrine’s requirements for a reliable host-nation government, a reliable host-nation security force, and reliable intelligence are impossible to achieve in our present wars. The third and final part of the series focuses on the futility of counterinsurgency itself as a tool of U.S. foreign policy.

Our counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan were doomed by incompetent and corrupt host-nation governments and security forces and an inability to produce reliable intelligence about cultures we have little or no understanding of. Of even greater concern, though, is that our COIN efforts have little or nothing to do with our national security objective of protecting the homeland from terrorism.

A Case of the Creeps

"Mission creep" is the incremental expansion of a project or mission beyond its original goals until the mission concludes in catastrophic failure.

The flimsy excuses we were given by the Bush/Cheney administration for the invasion of Iraq were the threat from Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program (he didn’t have one) and the not so subtle implication that he was involved in the 9/11 attacks. (He wasn’t. Among the Americans who still fall hook, line, and sinker for the 9/11 ploy is Fox News commentator and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.)

We successfully achieved the military objective of booting Hussein from power, but we failed to plan for the unintended consequences of an insurgency-style civil war that still rages almost seven years after the staged toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad. There’s every reason to expect that the Pentagon and/or Iraq’s President Nouri al-Maliki will trump up a security-related excuse to keep American troops in Iraq beyond the December 2011 deadline prescribed in the status of forces agreement. Gen. Ray "Desert Ox" Odierno, commander in Iraq, is on record – thanks to the Long War camp’s official stenographer, Thomas E. Ricks – as wanting to see a "force probably around 30,000 or so, 35,000" American troops in Iraq through 2014 or 2015.

Bush and the rest of the pro-war jackdaws justified our prolonged involvement in the Mesopotamia Mistake by proclaiming Iraq to be the "central front in the war on terror," but it was never anything of the kind. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was a bastard franchise of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda that may comprise as few as 850 full-time fighters whose importance in Iraq’s insurgency was deliberately exaggerated by the Pentagon’s propaganda directorate during the Bush administration. AQI would never have existed if we hadn’t invaded Iraq and beheaded a regime that managed to keep Iraq’s herd-of-cats society under control, and if we ever do leave Iraq, they have no interest in following us here.

One may be tempted to view our expedition to Afghanistan as being more relevant to our counterterrorism and national security aims, but one would be mistaken. The Afghanistan project has been a cluster bomb since it began in October 2001. The stated aim of Operation Enduring Freedom was to capture Osama bin Laden and other high-ranking al-Qaeda officials and destroy the entire al-Qaeda organization.

We came nowhere near achieving that end. We instead let bin Laden and his top henchmen slip away at Tora Bora (out of kindness, I suppose) and then claimed to have defeated the ruling Taliban. We seated a warlord with ties to the Afghan opium trade, Hamid Karzai, on the Afghan throne, making him, in essence, the "mayor of Kabul." His government has little to zero influence outside of Afghanistan’s capital city; the respected International Council on Security and Development in London says the Taliban have a "permanent presence" in 80 percent of the country.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, "King David" Petraeus’ anointed fellow COINdinista who commands U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, managed to manipulate President Obama into further escalating his war in order to conduct a "well-resourced" and "classic" counterinsurgency operation as described in the field manual FM 3-24, which as we have discussed is a self-defeating doctrine infested with internal fallacies.

Economy of Farce

Our counterinsurgency doctrine, especially the way that we’ve been conducting it, bends virtually every accepted principle of warfare and tenet of operational art over the kitchen table. It especially violates the vital principles of objective and economy of force.

Our two full-bore COIN operations have not eliminated al-Qaeda as a threat to the American homeland, as the recent panty-bomber affair plainly illustrates. Our terror wars aren’t even taking place on the right chunks of real estate. Saddam Hussein had no involvement with 9/11, and the rifle-toting garage band that calls itself al-Qaeda in Iraq mainly consists of disgruntled Iraqis who have no interest in or potential for harming Americans other than the ones presently occupying their country. The 9/11 attackers were not Afghans. Fifteen of them came from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt, and one from Lebanon.

Yet we’re executing nation-birthing operations in support of two of the most corrupt regimes in the world. At the rate we’re going, we’ll be changing Third World despots’ diapers for decades.

The panty bomber was supposedly trained in Yemen by al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, but he isn’t from Yemen, he’s from Nigeria. But lipstick neocon Joe Lieberman says Yemen is now "one of the centers of the fight" on terrorism and that "If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war," and his fellow warmongers say, "Amen, Sister Joe."

Actually, as Joe is aware, Yemen is today’s war. We’ve already deployed "trainers" (Special Ops) and intelligence gatherers (CIA) to the country, and we’ve bombed it with carrier and cruise-missile strikes. Joe and his hawk cronies apparently want a boots-on-the-ground Yemen surge to match the ones we’ve already so foolishly foisted on ourselves in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If we send a significant number of troops into Yemen, we’ll get our mitts caught in the same old ringer. Yemen is nowhere as corrupt as Iraq or Afghanistan; Transparency International ranks it as the 25th most corrupt nation of 180 rated, as opposed to Afghanistan and Iraq, which are second and fifth, respectively. But Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh has the same kind of insurgency problems that Hamid Karzai and Nouri al-Maliki have. He has Shi’ite and Sunni militants in the north and separatist rebels in the south.

We’ll once again be bogged down in someone else’s insurgency for the sake of denying sanctuary to a handful of Islamo-hooligans. Referring to the total strength of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Yemeni Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi says there are "maybe" two or three hundred of them.

President Obama’s National Security Adviser James Jones admits there are fewer than 100 al-Qaeda skulking around in Afghanistan, and a senior intelligence official in Kabul estimates there are only 300 al-Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The 850 al-Qaeda copycats in Iraq don’t present a terror threat to America, so they don’t count if we’re really conducting a war on terror with the purpose of protecting the homeland.

The cost of our wars in Iraq in Afghanistan just topped $1 trillion. We still have in the neighborhood of 115,000 troops in Iraq, who are contributing little to the war on terrorism other than acting as recruiters for the terrorists.

Stan the Man with the plan for Afghanistan envisions an eventual escalation of forces that will include a half million U.S., NATO, and Afghan troops for the purpose of conducting a counterinsurgency campaign that may go on for decades to deny a safe haven to fewer than 400 terrorists.

Military scholars and experts disagree on what exactly the various terms used in military art mean, but nobody would suggest that what we’re doing overseas reflects economy of force.

That’s especially true when one considers that a historical analysis conducted by the RAND Corporation offers inarguable proof that military action is an impotent means of countering terrorism: policing and political solutions account for 83 percent of "victories" over terrorist groups. Military action has only been effective in 7 percent of terrorist case studies dating back to 1968.

The only way our counterinsurgency doctrine relates to economics is as a way to justify conducting endless small conflicts in support of the Pentagon’s Long War doctrine as a fuzzy excuse for maintaining a large Army in the face of economic challenges.

And the economic value of the Long War is the perfect excuse to kill health reform and education reform and Social Security and Medicare and every other "social program" in the federal budget except for the biggest social program of all: the military-industrial complex.

Read more by Jeff Huber

• The COIN Myth, Part II – January 12th, 2010
• The COIN Myth – January 10th, 2010
• Old Blackwater Keeps on Rollin’ – January 6th, 2010
• The Next Quagmire – January 3rd, 2010
• I See London, I See France, I See Bombs in Underpants – December 30th, 2009