Moving Beyond Population-Centric vs. Enemy-Centric Counterinsurgency

Abstract

Historically, insurgency is one of the most prevalent forms of armed conflict and it is likely to remain common in the foreseeable future. Recent experiences with counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan offer many lessons for future counterinsurgents, but the discourse on the subject continues to be mired in a traditional dichotomy pitting population-centric approaches to counterinsurgency against enemy-centric approaches. Historical analysis suggests that this traditional dichotomy is not a sufficiently nuanced way to understand or plan for such operations. Instead, discussions of counterinsurgency should focus on two dimensions: actions (use of physical force vs. political or moral actions) and targets (active insurgents vs. insurgent support). This perspective divides the space of possible counterinsurgency efforts into four quadrants, suggesting that effective counterinsurgency campaigns find a balance of effort across the four quadrants that is well matched to the specific context.

Keywords:

• Military strategy
• insurgency
• counterinsurgency
• intrastate conflict
• theory of counterinsurgency
• modern insurgency

Notes

1. Jones and Johnston, “The Future of Insurgency”, 1–25.

2. See Byman, “Friends Like These”; also see Joint Chiefs of Staff, JP 3-22, I-1–I-18.

3. Kilcullen, “Two Schools of Classical Counterinsurgency”.

4. Headquarters, US Department of the Army, FM 3-24, I-2.

5. See, for example, the works criticized in Ucko, “Critics Gone Wild”.

6. Svet, “COIN’s Failure in Afghanistan”; For more on some of the root causes of the conflict, see Jones, “The Rise of Afghanistan’s Insurgency”. see also, Johnson and Mason, “No Sign until the Burst of Fire,” 59.

7. Record, The American Way of War, 2–4; Cohen, “Just Another Depressing Day at the Office”; Marshall, “Imperial Nostalgia, the Liberal Lie, and the Perils of Postmodern Counterinsurgency”; Porch, “The Dangerous Myths and Dubious Promise of COIN”.

8. Marston and Malkasian, Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare, 13.

9. A detailed history of many of America’s first experiences with insurgency and counterinsurgency are captured brilliantly in Boot’s The Savage Wars of Peace; Also, although T.E. Lawrence is often credited for his contributions to COIN theory, Lawrence worked with insurgents to instigate and foment rebellion in the Middle East, not to counter it.

10. Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1956–1958.

11. Marlowe, David Galula, 2–4.

12. Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, 63.

13. For example, one of FM 3–24’s core assumptions is that the main challenge facing the COIN force is not killing their adversaries, but rather locating them in the first place. In turn, establishing the security of the populace should take precedence over nearly all else. See Friedman, “Manpower and Counterinsurgency,” 561.

14. Rid, “The Nineteenth Century Origins of Counterinsurgency Doctrine”.

15. See Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency; Trinquier, Modern Warfare; Kitson, Low Intensity Operations.

16. Griffin, “Major Combat Operations and Counterinsurgency Warfare,” 557.

17. Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine,1942–1976, 162–3.

18. ‘The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.’ Tse-tung, On Guerrilla Warfare.

19. Wilson III and Lyall, “Rage against the Machines”.

20. Aylwin-Foster, “Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations”.

21. Just as some scholars see COIN only through the lens of population-centric COIN, so too do some scholars view enemy-centric COIN as the sine qua non of irregular warfare. For example, Gian Gentile has written repeatedly on the topic of COIN doctrine. Most of his work on the subject follows the same basic themes: the enshrinement of population-centric COIN in FM 3–24 borders on heresy and the doctrine promoted in the field manual is not only wrong but also actually dangerous. His main argument is that more firepower, not less, is the real solution to an insurgency. For examples of these arguments, see Gentile, “A (Slightly) Better War: A Narrative and its Defects”; “Our COIN Doctrine Removes the Enemy from the Essence of War”; “The Surge Threatens U.S. Army’s Conventional Capabilities”; “Not So Big of a Tent”; “The Death of the Armor Corps”; “Gaining the Initiative in Afghanistan”; “A Strategy of Tactics: Population-Centric COIN and the Army”.

22. See for instance Boot, “The Lessons of a Quagmire”; Boot, “An Iraq To-Do List”; Valentino et al., “Draining the Sea”; Downes, “Desperate Times, Desperate Measures”.

23. Kilcullen, “Two Schools of Classical Counterinsurgency”.

24. Finel, “A Substitute for Victory,” 2. On the importance of leadership in conflict, see Byman and Pollack, “Let Us Now Praise Great Men”.

25. Some scholars have argued that proponents of the population-centric theory of COIN have come to dominate any discussion of counterinsurgency by utilizing ‘select historical interpretations’ to bolster their argument. See Michaels and Ford, “Bandwagonistas”.

26. Another critique of population-centric COIN is the ‘untenable premise’ that populations are static, when, in fact, people tend to move around, especially in times of conflict. Jardine, “Population-Centric Counterinsurgency and the Movement of Peoples,” 31.

27. Springer, “Many Paths up the Mountain,” 1–4.

28. Libicki, “Eighty-Nine Insurgencies: Outcomes and Endings”. The initial case list was drawn from Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War”.

29. See Lawrence, “The Analysis of the Historical Effectiveness of Different Counterinsurgency Tactics and Strategies”.

30. Paul, et al., Paths to Victory Detailed Insurgency Case Studies; Paul, et al., Victory Has a Thousand Fathers.

31. Paul, et al., Paths to Victory Detailed Insurgency Case Studies; Paul, et al., Victory Has a Thousand Fathers: Detailed Counterinsurgency Case Studies.

32. Paul, et al., Victory Has a Thousand Fathers: Sources of Success in Counterinsurgency.

33. Paul, et al., Paths to Victory Detailed Insurgency Case Studies.

34. The particularly observant and well-informed reader will notice that Kenya (1952–1956) is included on the list in Table 1 and will also know that COIN forces defeated the Mao Mao Rebellion (so, that the case was a win for COIN forces). This might lead one to question the premise of excluding these cases, namely that good COIN practices did not lead to success in cases where the outcome was all but predetermined by the deteriorating legitimacy of colonialism. Be reassured that, while British COIN forces did manage to suppress the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, they also granted Kenya its independence just a very few years later. This exception offer further support for our exclusion principle, not less. The astute reader may also note that Malaya (1948–1955) is not listed as an excluded, though it clearly began as an anti-colonial insurgency. Though the first phase of the Malaya case was anti-colonial, the later phases (and, critically, the decisive phase) were not by virtue of the steps the British had taken to transition power and authority to an indigenous government. Although they continued to help fight the insurgency in support of that new government, by the end of the conflict, the British no longer fought to retain colonial control.

35. n = 59 is a somewhat challenging space methodologically. Fifty nine is too many cases to be considered small-n, and is many more cases than can be comfortably compared in a strictly holistic manner. Similarly, 59 is too few to qualify as large-n and unleash the full power of inferential statistics, especially when the number of covariates is high (and thus degrees of freedom are low). Instead, this body of research falls squarely within the medium-n methodological space. For a discussion of medium-n methods, see Paul, et al., “Between Large-N And Small-N Analyses”.

36. Paul, et al., Paths to Victory: Lessons from Modern Insurgencies, 18–20.

37. As indicated by the binary variable COIN efforts balanced between eliminating immediate threat and diminishing motive for insurgency.

38. Not only have primarily enemy-focused COIN efforts failed more often than they have succeed, but they have almost always involved atrocities or other COIN force behaviors that are ‘beyond the pale’ by contemporary Western ethical standards, such as forced resettlement and coerced labor in Indonesia, Kampuchea, and other cases to the ‘disappearances’ or civilian massacres in Algeria, Afghanistan in the 1990s, Tajikistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and others.

39. Such efforts can either be enforced by an external actor or maintained by and with the population. Rid, “The Nineteenth Century Origins of Counterinsurgency Doctrine”.

40. Political efforts to diminish the motives of insurgents can include negotiating with insurgents, although these negotiations do not have to be negotiated settlements to the conflict, but rather incremental building block-type confidence building measures. For more on the latter, see Clarke and Paul, From Stalemate to Settlement, and Stedman, “Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes”. For more on the former, see Downes, “The Problem with Negotiated Settlements to Ethnic Civil Wars”; Hartzell, “Explaining the Stability of Negotiated Settlements to Intrastate Wars”; Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945–1993”; Toft, “Ending Civil Wars: A Case for Rebel Victory?”; and Cronin, “How Terrorism Ends,” 35–72.

41. Jahan, Genocide in Bangladesh. Some might argue due to the separatist nature of the conflict’s inception that COIN doctrine played no role in the Pakistani Army’s approach to this conflict. On the separatist nature of the conflict, see Fair, Fighting to the End, 143–149. Whether or not it was guided by formal COIN doctrine, however, the Pakistani Army did end up waging a counterinsurgency effort in this conflict, creating several paramilitary groups to combat the Bengali guerrilla Mukti Bahini (‘freedom fighters’). See Paul, et al., Paths to Victory Detailed Insurgency Case Studies, 340-345; Liberation War of Bangladesh, Bangladesh News.

42. Liberation War of Bangladesh, Bangladesh News; Payne, Massacre, 48.

43. GlobalSecurity.org, Indo-Pakistani War of 1971.

44. Akmam, “Atrocities Against Humanity During the Liberation War in Bangladesh,” 549.

45. The depiction of such a straw-man caricature of population-centric COIN is seen in arguments such as those put forth by Gentile, “Our COIN Doctrine Removes the Enemy from the Essence of War”.

46. Montague, “The Business of War and the Prospects for Peace in Sierra Leone”.

47. Olonisakin, Peacekeeping in Sierra Leone, 63.

48. Gberie, A Dirty War in West Africa, 162–174.

49. Shared Western values and the domestic polity would not support such a heavy-handed approach. For more on the importance of liberal values in shaping foreign policy, see Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics”; For more on the significance of domestic politics in shaping foreign policy, see de Mesquita, Principles of International Politics.

50. Joes, Guerilla Warfare, 127–132.

51. Smith Jr., Tibetan Nation, 421.

52. Conboy and Morrison, The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet, 99.

53. Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War, 272; Tom, The Making of Modern Tibet, 150.