COIN: Colonialism By Another Name?

By Cernig

Toronto Globe and Mail correspondent Doug Saunders has a thought-provoking blog post I want to drop on the heads of all those liberal authors so enamoured recently with COIN expertise that they can't see the wood for the trees or the military spinning them like tops through their joy at rubbing shoulders with the "serious people" at CNAS:

Doug begins in Naray, one of Afghanistan's most lawless places:

I was greeted in a swirl of dust by Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Kolenda, a clean-cut, steel-eyed officer in the 173rd Airborne, who dragged me into a large tent filled with other officers. They promptly began one of the key battlefield tactics of the new American military — the two-hour PowerPoint presentation.

"The heart of the matter here, as we see it, is a socio-economic dislocation," Col. Kolenda told me, before quoting at length from Kaffirs of the Hindu Kush (Sir George Scott Robertson, 1900) and explaining in detail the anthropology and tribal politics of this region, including some new research he had commissioned from the U.S. government's elite squad of battlefield anthropologists, better known as Human Terrain Specialists.

"There's been an atomization of society here — the elders lost control over their people, and a new elite of fighters came in to fill the vacuum, so what we need to do out here is to re-empower the traditional leadership structures," he continued.

"As you can see here," he said at one point, "as you approach the possibility of self-sufficient development, then you reach what I'll call the developmental asymptote, which is the point we're striving to reach."

... Within the U.S. military, this is known as population-centric counterinsurgency, an approach that has a cultish following among some officers. It was attempted and then dropped in the Vietnam War (the infamous "strategic hamlets" were at its centre) and there are still officers who believe that Vietnam would have been won if counterinsurgency had been practised to the end.

One of its strongest advocates happens to be General David Petraeus, who has just become the head of the U.S. Central Command, making him responsible for both the Iraq and the Afghanistan wars.

In practice, I found, it looks and sounds a lot more like old-fashioned colonialism. In the tents of Naray, I had the distinct feeling that I had strolled into Uttar Pradesh at some point after 1858, in the early days of the British Raj.

... There are good reasons to be suspicious of this approach.

"We do not believe in counterinsurgency," a senior French commander tells me. "If you find yourself needing to use counterinsurgency, it means the entire population has become the subject of your war, and you either will have to stay there forever or you have lost."

It's nice to see the French learned something useful from their own adventures in Indochina and Northern Africa. But the French officer's words explain why it's been so difficult to state the mission in Iraq and Afghanistan in a way that the US public might find palatable and why Thom Ricks was so gleeful about the way in which General Petraeus managed to slip one over on the public, making those occupations acceptable again without ever explaining that the end game is way off in the never-never. Ricks recently wrote:

what neither he nor Bush had articulated -- and what lawmakers, the public and even some high up the military chain of command did not recognize -- was that the new strategy was in fact a road map for what military planners called "the long war."

The military, all the way up and down, certainly know that's where a COIN-based occupation has to lead. Doug recounts a State Dept official telling him:

"We want to get to the point where there's long-term sustainable employment that leads to economic growth. … If the insurgents do decide to come back, they will face a great wall of resistance from a population that has experienced economic development."

It sounds good. But I should mention that eastern Afghanistan is facing the highest military casualty rate in the war's history at the moment, and a British report has just concluded that their heavy-handed poppy-eradication strategy is creating hundreds more Taliban fighters.

I ask one officer how long it is going to take to make this new strategy bear fruit. "Look," he says, "we're still in Germany and Japan 60 years after that war ended. That's how long it can take. I fully expect to have grandchildren who will be fighting out here."

Are those liberal pundits who are so gung-ho about a counter-insurgency fighting military and their passe partout into "Petraeus Central" at the Center for a new American Century Security sure they want to stand up and tell their readers they're advocating generations-long occupations? Because they certainly haven't done so to date. Instead, they're so happy with their new military friends that they haven't noticed they're being spun into turning a blind eye to Petraeus, Keane and Co's deliberate undermining of President Obama's withdrawal timetable in Iraq - a withdrawal timetable that is (even after it has been tweaked) too much at odds with the perpetual, blood and treasure draining, colonialist COIN strategy the military and liberal hawks are advocating nowadays.

I wonder what Robert Mackey, an honest-to-goodness liberal expert who seems genuinely sceptical about a military-led "COIN Forevah!" foreign policy, would make of it all?

Update: Well, now we know. Retired Lt. Col., Pentagon planner, Assistant Professor of Military History at West Point and Iraq war veteran Bob Mackey writes in the comments that: "COIN is just another name for Imperial Warfare, ala Queen-and-Country. You only fight COIN, unless you are unlucky enough to have an internal one (aka, Civil War), when you deploy troops to other countries....we should quit thinking in a Cold War mentality...and start understanding that intervention is not the answer."

Thanks for responding, Bob!

Comments

[Please Fix HyperLinks In First Sentence]

the two hyperlinks in the first sentence point to same thing ( biography ) - neither points to the blog post that you cite.

[Steve Hynd]

Fixed. Thank you for the edit job :-)

Regards, C

[Robert Mackey]

I dunno C--what do I think?

I think that COIN is just another name for Imperial Warfare, ala Queen-and-Country. You only fight COIN, unless you are unlucky enough to have an internal one (aka, Civil War), when you deploy troops to other countries.

Maybe, just maybe, we should quit thinking in a Cold War mentality--what the COIN experts accuse the rest of the military of doing, but in reality they themselves are the true Cold Warriors ("If we don't stop them in Afghanistan, we'll be fighting them in San Francisco!"--and start understanding that intervention is not the answer. If a government is so corrupt or unrepresentative of the people that it is racked with internal strife, why should the US taxpayer fund the bill with money and blood?

As I told C in an email: the whole thing smacks too much of "the 24th Regiment of Foot, fighting off the Fuzzy-Wuzzys for Her Majesty the Queen" for my liking.

[Siun]

How refreshing to read both Cernig's great post and Bob Mackey's comment.

Superb!

[anna missed]

Just ask yourself, if the cultures of Afghanistan or Iraq were to impose their historically grounded hierarchal networks of power upon the U.S. That would be ideological(tribal/religious) - political - military - and economic networks in descending order of importance. Superimposed on (our) network of economic - military - political - ideological networks in descending order. Which are of course, reversed in importance. It would take exactly the same time frame (many generations, if ever) for the people of the U.S. to assimilate Afghan cultural hierarchies as it will for Afghan culture to assimilate American hierarchies.

The State Dept. official mentioned, confident as they are trying to trump the tribal with the economic is typical of the myopia these people suffer from. They'd probably do better with pith helmets and riding crops.

[zenpundit]

If COIN is "colonialism by another name" then is anti-COIN just "anti-Americanism by another name" ? ;)

The logic is the same and about as sophisticated. But it is catchy, pre-formatted for people who get their history from Howard Zinn and Oliver Stone.

BTW large parts of the US military and the Pentagon hate COIN doctrine because they would prefer to be gearing up for a war with China or the nonexistent Soviet Union with joint strike fighters and future combat systems.

The hard Left though, with it's Cold War intellectual Marxist roots, dislikes COIN because it assumes that all Western intervention is bad ("imperialism!") and unjustified ( put terrorism in "" scare quotes) but mostly because COIN has been an effective tool against anti-Western irregular fighters and terrorists in the third world. That's the part that really worries them.

So now, we will see a sustained memetic campaign by leftist blogs and orgs to demonize COIN the new "Joe Lieberman" and CNAS the new "PNAC". But everyone outside of this Left political strand should feel free to reject both the premises and aggressively challenge their re-framing of history, COIN and our Islamist adversries state and non-state, in some bizarre sympathetic light. In my view, it is politically motivated crap driven by legacy opinions carried over from the Cold War.

[Steve Hynd]

Being worried about the moral and empirical basis of generations-long committments to telling entire nations what to do, backed by military force, because we know best, is "politically motivated crap driven by legacy opinions carried over from the Cold War"?

Zen, your common sense has left the building. I'm against that kind of colonialism whether it's the Brits, Russians, Chinese or Martians doing it. COIN is indeed effective "against anti-Western irregular fighters and terrorists in the third world". Cutting both hands off for a first offense is an effective tool against pickpockets. There are, however, good reasons for not doing either - reasons to do with larger scale issues of justice, morality and security.

Regards, C

[Steve Hynd]

BTW, did you forget I was a Brit? I've never, to my knowledge, read Zinn or watched Stone's political works. But I grew up in a nation that was no longer an Empire but understood through hindsight the lies of exceptionalism told to justify it.

Regards, C

[zenpundit]

Hi C.

"COIN is Colonialism" is political sloganeering, not sober analysis.

You're a bright guy. All states throughout history - not just Western ones - intervene in the affairs of other states for a host of reasons and in a variety of ways, not just with military force. Each case has to be judged on it's merits, context and outcome.

COIN isn't "cutting off the hands of thieves" - an analogy better suited for free-fire zones and artillery bombardment. Sometimes irregulars are the "good guys" in the sense of being morally better than the regime they seek to replace but reality is they are hard men with guns - and often they are no better or much worse than the government forces.

In such cases where we perceive it in our interest to intervene, COIN is preferable for doing minimal harm and some good compared to conventional military tactics which are primarily destructive.

[Steve Hynd]

Hi Zen,

"In such cases where we perceive it in our interest to intervene".

The trouble there is two-fold. Firstly, COIN is by its nature a very long-term endevour. That means decades of meddling after the interest that required intervening has passed. That's colonialism. Secondly, because COIN is better at the task of occupation - and I agree it is - then "every problem looks like a nail for the military hammer" becomes even more attractive. COIN success and a large COIN-capable standing force will inevitably encourage interventions that shouldn't be undertaken.

Regards, C