Food For COIN Thought

By Cernig

William Lind, the man who coined the phrase "Fourth Generation Warfare" is pessimistic about the U.S. military's chances of fighting a successful counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq. He writes that the U.S. military is still primarily focussed on fighting big-ticket wars with big-ticket equipment he believes will go straight from production line or slipyard into military museums. He continues:

DOD's latest fad, counter-insurgency, is something of a fraud...whereas states have often been successful in defeating insurgencies on their own soil, invaders and occupiers have almost never won against a guerilla-style war of national liberation. Not even the best counter-insurgency techniques make much difference, because neither a foreign occupier nor any puppet government he installs can gain legitimacy. Despite the current "we're winning in Iraq" propaganda, both Iraq and Afghanistan are almost certain to add themselves to the long list of failures.

So here's the topic for discussion - "is a successful long-term counter-insurgency campaign possible in Iraq?"

Some background reading material:

- Spencer Ackerman: 

Sadr is an insurgent figure who adopts key principles of counterinsurgency. His military strategy is complemented by an appealing political and economic strategy for securing the loyalties of the population. That would help explain why the counterinsurgents battling Sadr in Baghdad have consistently lost.

    "While other individuals and parties sought U.S. support and bickered over the high-profile government ministries," A.J. Rossmiller, who spent 2005 in Baghdad as an analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, wrote an e-mail, "Sadrists quietly sought the three things most valuable in a political system: popular legitimacy, a patronage network and the ability to provide for the basic needs of citizens."

    Some counterinsurgents believe that Sadr's own dexterity with counterinsurgency principles, combined with his deep political support in Iraq, make accommodation the only sensible strategy. "The best solution now," said longtime counterinsurgency advocate and former Army officer Terrence Daly, "is to try to coopt Sadr's forces." Defeating him, in other words, is beyond the U.S.'s capabilities.

- Nir Rosen:

There is no proxy war in Iraq, because the US and Iran share the same proxy and the US installed that proxy and empowered it. Today, to the extent that we can talk about an Iraqi "state," it is dominated by the Supreme Council and its Badr militia. The Sadrist movement of which the Mahdi Army is a loose militia is also the largest humanitarian organization in Iraq, providing homes, security, rations, clothes and other services to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It is a complex movement and certainly is as guilty of crimes as all the other groups that took part in the Iraqi civil war, including the Americans. But it is also the most popular and legitimate movement in Iraq, and the one sure to outlast the others.

TIME Magazine's Abigail Hauslohner in Baghdad:

Although the U.S. military has been training and fighting alongside the Iraqis for five years, many American officers and soldiers say they don't trust their Iraqi counterparts. In the main, this is because Iraqi forces are rife with sectarian loyalties. Many soldiers and policemen were recruited from the very militias they are now being asked to kill or capture. "While in general they are prepared to fight, if you put them into a sectarian battle, you still have to wonder if their commitment to the country is greater than their commitment to their own sectarian group," says Michael O'Hanlon, a military scholar at the Brookings Institution.

The International Crisis Group (via Abu Aardvark):

on their own, without an overarching strategy for Iraq and the region, these tactical victories cannot turn into lasting success. The mood among Sunnis could alter. The turn against al-Qaeda in Iraq is not necessarily the end of the story. While some tribal chiefs, left in the cold after Saddam’s fall, found in the U.S. a new patron ready and able to provide resources, this hardly equates with a genuine, durable trend toward Sunni Arab acceptance of the political process. For these chiefs, as for the former insurgents, it mainly is a tactical alliance, forged to confront an immediate enemy (al-Qaeda in Iraq) or the central one (Iran). Any accommodation has been with the U.S., not between them and their government. It risks unravelling if the ruling parties do not agree to greater power sharing and if Sunni Arabs become convinced the U.S. is not prepared to side with them against Iran or its perceived proxies; at that point, confronting the greater foe (Shiite militias or the Shiite-dominated government) once again will take precedence.

Brandon Friedman of Vet Voice, in an email, says:

I think an invader should be able to implement an effective COIN strategy in theory, but we're nowhere close right now.  For instance, in order for us to be able to compete with Sadr on the ground for societal influence, we would have to have units in which a majority of the soldiers spoke Iraqi Arabic and understood Arab and Islamic culture intimately.  That ain't happening anytime soon. 

As it stands now, here's an excerpt of what I said about this in my book:

You have to put yourself in their shoes.  If a foreign country invaded the United States, it wouldn't matter if they came handing out hundred dollar bills and a cure for AIDS.  If they fucked over one family in an American neighborhood, a resistance would form.  It doesn't make it right--it just makes it reality.

And with these types of insurgencies, the longer you stay there the worse it gets.  On a long-enough timeline, an occupying force will eventually piss off everyone.  That's just what happens, even when you come with the best of intentions.

So I think the pessimism is justified.  Now, that's not to say we shouldn't strive to be the best at COIN that we can be.  Certainly a unit trained in COIN will fare better than one that isn't.  It's just that we should try to avoid getting in these situations in the first place.  And when we can't avoid it (Afghanistan), we should at least try to avoid getting entangled in more than one or two or three at a time.

Brandon also thinks that the best way to fight the counter-insurgency battle in Iraq is to defuse it by leaving.

In a place where violence is cyclical and driven by shifting intramural alliances while the bulk of the populace sees the occupation as the problem and the indigenous government as a proxy for foreign masters, I personally think you have two choices - either admit to Imperialism and flood the place with enough troops (your own and indigenous auxilliaries) as to stifle all bar a small amount of violence - which in a few decades leads to insurgents taking the Ghandi Option of peaceful resistance - or get the hell out.

The floor is open for comments, thoughts, links and flames...

Update If you want to think of this more as an exercise in presidential decision-making than as COIN theorising, then MSNBC's Ronald Brownstein notes that John McCain, for all his talk of 100 years in Iraq, has not said how long he'd be willing to keep U.S. forces in an active combat role if any form of insurgency persisted. If your conclusion is that such persistence is inevitable, than that's a gaping flaw.

Comments

[Clive A.]

So here's the topic for discussion - "is a successful long-term counter-insurgency campaign possible in Iraq?"

The answer is really quite simple if you can see the forest through the trees -- i.e., not find yourself bogged down in all the theoretical COIN flotsam and jetsam.

A "successful" long-term counter-insurgency campaign is dependent upon what the U.S. decides to be their end-state goal in Iraq.

If they can define down their goals far enough to accept a strategically disadvantageous outcome, then sure, a "successful" long-term COIN can be had.

But if the U.S. expects to create a client state or even an Iraq that is willing (when the mood strikes them) to support U.S. national interests in the region, then no amount of TRADOC bullshittery will be able to salvage the mission.

[Charles]

Honestly, I don't think they expect a client state. I think they expect to be able to sustain (both physically and politically) a casualty rate of 50 or so US soldiers a month indefinitely. I think they are fine with Iran and Iraq cooperating, because that keeps major violence down in the region, and allows the oil to keep flowing.

The definition of success is whether the oil keeps flowing, and whether most of that oil goes through the hands of the western oil companies. All else is stagecraft and b.s. to keep the rubes interested and hopeful.

Success = Oil. Period. Nothing else is relevant or important.

[1MaNLan]

The American economy is not looking pretty. The burn rate on money needed to keep the Iraqi machine going is just phenomenal. Sort of an unfortunate vector for the occupying power, no?

Any COIN strategy must do what it intends to do (by any measure of success) pretty quickly as this beast cannot be sustained forever. This is really no surprise since time is usually on the side of the guerillas. With patience and time, the guerilla, gounded in his own people and land, ususally wears down the stone.

I suppose that Sadr can be defeated militarily, or at least certain levels of his organization can be eliminated, but JAM would not be destroyed as a movement and its forces, supported by a large numbers of civilians, operating as small independent units, could confidently deny a lot of oil revenue to either the Iraqi government (or rather, the factions that comprise it), or to the oil majors.

In terms of a successful COIN strategy, I don't see one short of killing most of the population (Even Cheney is not that crazy...I think...hmmm). Going after Iran (which I think is increasingly likely) will only create more conflict, while buring off lots more money. Sending enough troops to pacify the country means still more tons of money and probably a draft (unless we can conscript our prison population or do something equally vile). Partitioning will not resolve anything and will open the way for the Shiite south to gravitate towards Iran while intensifying Turkish/Kurdish conflict.

But, the issue of staying in or leaving Iraq cannot be looked at in a vacuum. I don't think we can sustain Afghanistan without Iraq. Once we leave those countries, the whole ME equation is up for grabs and our place in that theatre is in some doubt. Imagine the impact on US clients in the region. Then there is the Israeli government with all those nukes and the attitude to use 'em...From the perspective of US interests, it is hard to just walk away from the key strategic region on earth, even if that is inevitable.

[Ron Beasley]

The stupidity of this administration and the neocons is simply amazing. We are threatening Iran on one hand and fighting to support their puppet government in Iraq on the other hand. If and when we attack Iran we will quickly discover where the loyalties of the Iraqi government(ISCI) and the Iraqi "Security" forces(Badr Orignization) lie and it won't be on the side of the US. The plus side to an attack on Iran is that it will get us out of Iraq a lot faster. Unless of course we decide to join Sadr to drive the Iranians out.

[CSI]

Counterinsurgency skills are useful and need to be maintained and developed. However I doubt if there's going to be another large-scale COIN campaign after Iraq.