Contextualizing Counterinsurgency

Stephen Sloan &

Sebastian L. V. Gorka

few days before Christmas in 2007, on the day the Pentagon bade farewell to Donald Rumsfeld, the Department of Defense launched its new field manual on counterinsurgency (COIN). Incredibly, the field manual had been written in just thirteen months, often with the input of officers who were actually in theater fighting at the time. In the first month after its release, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, was downloaded more than 1.5 million times from Army and Marine Corps websites, reviewed on extremist Salafi websites and later even found in Taliban camps in Pakistan. This unclassified document has since then become one of the key tools in what, since the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, was rechristened “The Long War.”

In the months before and since, there has been an upsurge in specialist articles by strategists and historians, as well as commentary on weblogs from those actually fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, all debating the merits of FM 3-24 and the various extant counterinsurgency theories and case studies. The U.S. government even established a dedicated website (http://www.usgcoin.org/index.cfm) to document and discuss the question of counterinsurgency.

The rediscovery and widespread acceptance of what had for decades been the doctrinal “black sheep” led several strategists and authors to not only embrace counterinsurgency’s rebirth in the Central Asian and Middle Eastern contexts, but to see in it the answer to our challenge of defeating al-Qaeda globally. Today, despite a healthy debate over how well the new, revised doctrine will serve U.S. national security interests in the post-9/11 strategic environment and how it should inform a global doctrine, certain fundamental questions remain—questions which go beyond the merits of any individual doctrinal document.

How does insurgency and counterinsurgency relate to the higher strategic activity of waging global war? Is the “Long War” truly just another iteration of counterinsurgency, but in this case applied globally? Just how applicable is “classical” COIN theory to the struggle with globally dispersed terrorism that is religiously informed? Can other, less examined/forgotten conflicts illuminate the nature of the current confrontation?

The nature of the threat

The first problem is one of definition. Although some seven-and-a-half years have elapsed since the events of September 11th, there still exists considerable disagreement over who, or what, we are fighting. Writing the day after the attacks on Washington and New York, the influential columnist Charles Krauthammer defined the threat as an “existential” one:

We no longer have to search for a name for the post-Cold War era. It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism. Organized terror has shown what it can do: execute the single greatest massacre in American history, shut down the greatest power on the globe and send its leaders into underground shelters. All this, without even resorting to chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass destruction.1

Yet, in its official response, the White House did not declare war just on al-Qaeda but on terrorism itself. President Bush was unequivocal. “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there,” he told a joint session of Congress just nine days after the attacks. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”2 This is how we arrived at the term Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).

However, during its tenure, even the Bush administration was not consistent in its use of this term. All too often, President Bush also referred to the enemy as being militant jihadism and Islamofascism, not just al-Qaeda or terrorism itself.3 And, with the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the consequent eruption of sectarian violence there, administration thinking undertook another evolution: toward the idea of al-Qaeda as an insurgency.

America’s military response to this development, in the form of counterinsurgency, has lagged far behind. As one study of the subject by the prestigious RAND Corporation noted in 2007:

The U.S. response to this pattern of insurgency has stressed (1) new bureaucratic layers, e.g., the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, that seem to have improved neither analysis nor decisionmaking; (2) increased investment in military platforms, which are of marginal utility against a diffuse and elusive insurgency; and (3) the use of force, which may validate the jihadist argument, producing more jihadis and inspiring new martyrs. What has been missing is a systematic attempt to identify and meet critical analytical, planning, and operational decisionmaking needs for global COIN, exploiting revolutionary progress in information networking. Consequently, U.S. COIN has been as clumsy as the new insurgency has been cunning.4 (emphasis added)

Intellectual blinders

The rediscovery of counterinsurgency theory5 following the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq led scholars and officials to revisit case studies and doctrinal texts on the subject long overlooked by politics and fashion. Speaking on the day of FM 3-24’s official release, one of its contributing editors, Col. John Nagl, made it clear that it was the negative political backlash to Vietnam that made the U.S. Army willingly forget and distance itself from all that it had learned in Indo-China about unconventional warfare during the 1960s and 1970s.6 Since then, however, we have seen the wholesale return of serving officers and strategists to the study of classic texts on previous insurgencies, foremost among them Callwell on ‘small wars,’ Frank E. Kitson on Northern Ireland, Roger Trinquier and David Galula on the French experience in Algeria, as well as Robert Taber’s original War of the Flea and of course the works of T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), in an effort to relearn that which we once knew.

Drawing on these classic texts and today’s fresh interpretations of them, it is relatively easy to compile a set of classic COIN do’s and don’ts. (see Table 1). Nevertheless, two surprising facts remain. Firstly, for some opaque reason, the list of conflicts the military and academic worlds examine under the category of “insurgencies” is incredibly restrictive and ignores many cases of irregular warfare that could be included without undue justification. In most cases, those conflicts have for some reason been labeled “civil wars” or “revolutions” and not insurgencies. Secondly, despite all the canonical texts and individual and comparative case studies, no one has attempted a categorization of previous COIN cases that differentiates between the original conditions at the start of a conflict, the given government’s aims and the eventual strategic end-state that it wished to achieve.

Together, these two factors—the restriction of COIN analysis to just a handful of famous 20th-century cases and the mistake of examining each without first separating them based upon the strategic government aims and the political, economic and military point of departure—have greatly distorted what can be learned from existing examples of irregular warfare and what in fact the lessons for today may be.

If the data set of COIN analysis is enlarged, the results are striking. Modern COIN theory is built on just a handful of books written by practitioners, based upon their experiences in just a handful of 20th-century conflicts. The most famous of these authors have been mentioned above: Lawrence, Callwell, Kitson, Trinquier, Galula, and so forth. Country studies by less famous writers are similarly restricted in scope to a small number of countries or regions, including: Vietnam (and French Indochina), Algeria, Northern Ireland, the Philippines and Malaya. A few of the more adventurous writers will go on to discuss Mozambique, Rhodesia, Angola, El Salvador, Aden, Oman or Afghanistan under the Soviets. Only the most adventurous brave traveling as far at Kashmir or Cyprus to look at what can be learned there. Subsequently, the modern study of counterinsurgency is limited to just over a dozen conflicts in a century that witnessed scores of wars and lesser conflicts, domestic and inter-state (see Table 2).

Just as detrimental to the formation of a comprehensive modern COIN doctrine is the fact that almost all of the better-known examples of counterinsurgency are limited to cases where a colonial or post-imperial government was fighting on the territory of its dependent (ex-)colonies. In the vast majority of these cases, the insurgent was interested in self-determination or similar politically—as opposed to religiously—motivated goals. Limiting our understanding of insurgency to such historically particular anti-colonial and areligious cases seems very hard to justify in today’s decidedly post-colonial and post-Cold War era. Most importantly, none of the insurgents discussed within the canon of classic COIN studies was religiously motivated with the aim of initiating a global revolution, as is al-Qaeda. As a result, any translation of classic COIN doctrine to the threat posed by a religiously informed and globally ambitious al-Qaeda would seem forced, to say the least—and misguided at best.

Broadening the scope

But what if we were to truly broaden the scope of COIN analysis to include all examples of irregular warfare that occurred in the 20th century? Such a list, if it is to be intellectually rigorous, must include those instances—internal or international—where unconventional warfare was used by one or both sides, to include civil wars and revolutions. Such a list would include conflicts that the COIN strategists, both pre- and post-9/11, rarely discuss, such as the Boer War, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, partisan and resistance efforts in Europe during World War II and even the Chechen-Russian conflict of the 1990s. The tally adds up to almost fifty conflicts and enormously expands the field of data that can be examined by the counterinsurgency strategist and theoretician.

This expanded set of case-studies lends itself to at least a preliminary classification (see Table 3). Those that are italicized denote conflicts that are rarely, if ever, examined as instances of insurgency or counterinsurgency. Conflicts marked with an asterisk constitute an additional category or sub-set: COIN events substantially informed or influenced by religion, (as well as politics) and which therefore have greater relevance to today’s threat environment.

There is no scientific reason why the study of these other conflicts has been all but ignored by those wishing to find doctrinal answers as to how to defeat today’s irregular foe. This is especially true once we realize that by enlarging the pool of conflicts to be studied we automatically include cases that are far closer to the current challenges we face. First, we include more cases where the enemy was religiously as well as politically motivated, as are bin Laden and his Salafi allies. Second, we now include examples of conflicts which are similar to Iraq and Afghanistan insofar as the goal of the counterinsurgent was not a return to the status quo ante, a return to normalcy, but instead a drastic alteration of the political reality, the forcible engineering of a nation, turning a dictatorship into democracy.

It would therefore seem obvious that there is no unitary counterinsurgency doctrine, and that there can be no universal set of best practices that has evolved over time. After all, how can the same guidelines be used to reestablish order by a strong central government that has been challenged by a minority (such as was the case in Northern Ireland or even Malaya) and also to guide the use of force in creating a completely new economic, political and military system in a country that was formerly a fundamentalist religious regime (Afghanistan) or a secular dictatorship (Iraq)? By comparison, would we ever have insisted on using a doctrine based on lessons learned in mass-maneuver warfare in a conventional campaign in Europe (e.g., WWII) for a campaign consisting of unconventional raiding missions in Central Asia (e.g., America’s support to the anti-Soviet mujahideen in the 1980s)? At the very least, we need to have a doctrine in each case shaped by two fundamental variables: the starting point for the intervention, and the ultimate (political) goal.7

When one discusses the former, it is useful to ask whether the initial situation is one of unrest and low-level violence amongst people that are tied to us historically, culturally and linguistically (the colonial scenario), or the use of force in a nation-state which suffered under a dictatorship for decades (Iraq), or that has a failed central government of its own (Afghanistan). In the latter two instances, we need to think about whether our objective is simply the suppression of relatively low levels of violence, or to radically alter the political and economic reality of another country.

On top of the need to recognize the differences in the strategy one would adopt based on these under-examined factors, there is also the question of religion. If counterinsurgency is, in the final analysis, about which side has the greatest legitimacy, then we cannot simply measure that legitimacy as a function of political recognition by the majority of the population (representation, as opposed to “democracy”). It should be obvious that if our forces are not only from a different ethnic, linguistic and cultural group from those communities in which they are operating, but also not of the same faith, then this will drastically affect the legitimacy of our intervention and the chances for success. At the very least, it will affect our credibility in the eyes of a different faith-community. Put another way, if after World War II, U.S. troops had had to occupy Saudi Arabia or Turkey for a number of decades, would they have used the same rules and doctrines and been as successful as they were in their occupation of (West) Germany?8

Toward 21st-century COIN

What are the doctrinal consequences of recognizing that a great variety of irregular conflicts should be examined under the heading of counterinsurgency and that these can be categorized into very different types of campaigns based upon starting points and end-states desired? One significant conclusion is that we must stop thinking in terms of “Vietnamization,” or as we now say: “Af-ghanization” and “Iraqization.” The idea that externally effected regime-change must follow the pattern of COIN activities in Vietnam, a Cold War conflict uninformed by religion, seems wrong-headed. Similarly, the idea that the foreign force comes in, effects massive change and then measures its success by how many of its units’ responsibilities are gradually handed over to indigenously created and controlled forces seems at the very least to be outdated, if not wholly irrelevant to current (and especially future) scenarios.

If today the yardstick of success is how soon native forces and the new representative government can take responsibility for the security of their own citizens, we may be better served by emphasizing them to begin with. And since it is clear that the final end-state envisions zero (or nominal) troop presence by U.S. forces, we should immediately dismiss all COIN cases where this was not the end-state envisaged, and where—whatever happened—it was always going to be “our” national forces patrolling national territory (such as in Northern Ireland or Colombia).

Consequently we may need to radically redefine counterinsurgency, or instead re-label what we are doing as “international regime change.” As we look to the expanded list of COIN-relevant conflicts of the 20th century, our guiding principles for interventions where we wish to encourage radical change in another state would better be derived from those case studies where the outside actor assisted and facilitated a change-of-regime or at least armed resistance to a regime that was illegitimate (for example, the cases from WWII of external assistance to indigenous resistance groups, or the covert assistance provided by the U.S. to the mujahideen in Communist Afghanistan). Our forces may be best served therefore by the formulation of a new doctrine specifically for international regime-change based upon previous cases where the need to catalyze change and resistance was very much in our national interest but where we could not or did not want deploy our own forces enmasse.9

Marginalization doctrine

In formulating a strategic policy or doctrine that can have application from Mosul to Manchester and from Herat to Heidelberg, we should focus less on universal concepts of our own legitimacy and instead build a strategy to delegitimize and thus marginalize the enemy.10 Al-Qaeda, and all the associated movements and organizations which espouse a fundamentalist and totalitarian vision of the future to be achieved through the use of violence against the unarmed in the name of God, must be attacked with ideological tools which focus upon how these people represent no-one except themselves and how through their actions they do more to harm their nominal co-religionists than anyone else. Military force, law enforcement tools, intelligence and public diplomacy must all be employed in such a way as to lay bare the message and the methods of al-Qaeda for what they are: the views of an unanointed bloody minority.