COIN: A study of strategic illusion

Abstract

Has the US military become a learning institution, one able to transition from relying on a conventional war model to fighting against irregular adversaries such as insurgents and terrorists? This article examines the United States' interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan in an effort to respond to this question. It shows that there are two major ways for a military to fail to be a ‘learning’ institution: It may stick to its old dogma or – adopt a flawed new one. Those who saw counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine as the best way to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan made the US military into a learning organization – but taught it the wrong lesson. They failed to take into account the absence of the sociological conditions that make a post-conflict environment amenable to nation-building, which is an integral part of the main variants of counterinsurgency. The article closes by outlining the foremost reasons the US military continues to be a poorly adaptive organization.

Keywords::

• nation-building
• counterterrorism
• Marshall Plan
• Afghanistan
• Iraq
• Malaya

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Jesse Spafford, Ashley McKinless, and Erin Syring for their extensive research assistance on this article.

Notes

^1.Kaplan, The Insurgents, 3–4.

^2.Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, 101–3.

^3.Mortenson and Relin. Three Cups of Tea.

^4.Bumiller, ‘Unlikely Tutor Giving Military Advice’.

^5.Jaffe, ‘How the US Military Fell in Love with “Three Cups of Tea”’.

^6.Krakauer, Three Cups of Deceit.

^7.Joes, ‘Leave It to the Marines?’.

^8.Nagl. Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife.

^9.US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (hereafter cited as FM 3–24).

^10.Kaplan, The Insurgents, 3–4.

^11.Ladwig, ‘Managing Counterinsurgency’, 64.

^12.Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency.

^13.Jaffe. ‘How the US Military Fell in Love with “Three Cups of Tea”’.

^14.Etzioni, ‘The Active Society’.

^15.Kleinfeld, ‘Petraeus the Progressive’.

^16.Crowley, ‘Exit Petraeus’.

^17.McKelvey, ‘The Cult of Counterinsurgency’.

^18.Fukuyama, The End of History.

^19.Packer, The Assassins Gate, 136.

^20.United States Senate Democrats, ‘Paul Wolfowitz's Happy Talk Five Years On’.

^21. ‘Our record of learning from previous experience is poor; one reason is that we apply history simplistically, or ignore it altogether, as a result of wishful thinking that makes the future appear easier and fundamentally different from the past’ (McMaster, ‘The Pipe Dream of Easy War’).

^22.Andaya and Andaya, History of Malaysia, 155–61; Milner. ‘Colonial Records History: British Malaya’.

^23.Hack. ‘The Malayan Emergency’, 386.

^24. Ibid., 385–6; Ladwig, ‘Managing Counterinsurgency’, 58; Miller, ‘Malaya’.

^25.Ucko, ‘The Malayan Emergency’; Strachan, ‘British Counter-Insurgency from Malaya to Iraq’; Jones, SAS; Karl Hack. ‘The Malayan Emergency’, 3.

^26.Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, 68.

^27.Ucko. ‘The Malayan Emergency’, 20.

^28.Hack, ‘The Malayan Emergency’, 387–9.

^29. Ibid.

^30. Ibid., 386–7.

^31.Miller. ‘Malaya’; Clutterbuck, The Long, Long War, 57; Sendut, ‘The Resettlement Villages’, 41.

^32.Merkel. ‘Draining the Swamp’, 36.

^33.Hack. ‘The Malayan Emergency’; Miller, ‘Malaya’.

^34.Merkel. ‘Draining the Swamp’, 38.

^35.Nye, The Future of Power.

^36.Strachan, ‘British Counter-Insurgency from Malaya to Iraq’.

^37.Purcell, Malaya; Ucko, ‘Countering Insurgents’, 52; Freedman and Swift, ‘Rural Sociology in Malaya’, 6–7.

^38.Hack. ‘“Iron Claws on Malaya”’, 118.

^39.Fleming. ‘Experiment in Democracy’, 103.

^40.Tilman. ‘The Non-Lessons of the Malayan Emergency’, 407.

^41.Kaplan. The Insurgents.

^42. FM 3-24, 5–20.

^43.Isaac, ‘The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual’.

^44.Fukuyama. Nation-Building.

^45.Galvin, ‘Uncomfortable Wars’.

^46.Petraeus, ‘Learning Counterinsurgency’.

^47. Of the United States' nation-building endeavors in 16 countries since 1900, 2 were unambiguous successes (Germany and Japan), 2 can be considered overall success (Panama and Grenada), and in 11 cases the United States ‘failed to establish and sustain democracies’ (Pei and Kasper, ‘Lessons from the Past’).

^48.Bremer. My Year in Iraq, 203.

^49.United States Department of State Archive, About S/CRS.

^50.Human Rights Watch, Afghanistan.

^51.Long, ‘Small is Beautiful’, 199.

^52.Dobbins et al., ‘America's Role in Nation-Building’, xiii.

^53. Other preconditions could certainly be added to this list. Scholars have enumerated an array of factors that play into the success of counterinsurgency operations including geography and force density (Fearon and Laitin, ‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’; Friedman, ‘Manpower and Counterinsurgency’; Quinlivan, ‘Force Requirements in Stability Operations’).

^54. Stephen Biddle argues that in the context of a sectarian (as opposed to ideological) civil conflict, like that in Iraq, nation-building measures, COIN endeavors such as democratization and the building up of indigenous security forces, will likely exacerbate violence. In Iraq, Biddle writes, ‘the insurgents are not competing for Shiite hearts and minds; they are fighting for Sunni self-interest, and hardly need a manifesto to rally supporters’ (Biddle, ‘Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon’).

^55.Diefendorf et al.,American Policy and the Reconstruction of West Germany; Turner, Reconstruction in post-war Germany; Allinson, Japan's Postwar History; Tabb, The Postwar Japanese System.

^56.Kaplan, The Insurgents.

^57. Ibid., 74.

^58.Martins, ‘The Commander's Emergency Response Program’.

^59.Kent, ‘Commander's Emergency Response Program’, 30–1.

^60.Mohiuddin, ‘General David Petraeus’, 955–6.

^61.Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Iraq.

^62.Kaplan, The Insurgents, 76.

^63.House Committee on Government Reform, Winning the Peace.

^64.Smith and McFarland, ‘Anbar Awakening’.

^65.Kaplan, The Insurgents, 77.

^66.Dodge, Iraq.

^67. For a comprehensive list of documents associated with the Department of State's plans for Iraq reconstruction, see the National Security Archive at George Washington University's excellent digitization of the so-called ‘Future of Iraq Project’ at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB198/.

^68.Wollack, ‘Assisting Democracy Abroad’, 28–9.

^69.Halchin, The Coalition Provisional Authority, 11.

^70.Bremer, My Year in Iraq, 203.

^71.Dobbins, ‘Occupying Iraq’.

^72.Natsios, ‘Democratic Opportunity in the Arab and Muslim World’, 267–70; USAID, Foreign Aid in the National Interest.

^73.Rogers, ‘Managers Strengthen Iraq's Representative Government’; Louis Berger Group, ‘USAID-Tijara 2012’.

^74.Clinton, ‘Testimony’.

^75.Docena, ‘Iraq's Neoliberal Constitution’; Deeks and Burton, ‘Iraq's Constitution’, 54.

^76. George Weigel, a board member at the National Endowment for Democracy – which supports more than 40 programs for democracy and social reform in Iraq – writes of the concept of Augustinian moral order and the United States' responsibility to establish global peace and freedom in the wake of the Cold War (Weigel, ‘Toward a Just Order’).

^77. The Bush administration was further driven to promote democracy in Iraq by the perception that Iraq represented a critical turning point in the larger project of Middle Eastern democracy; successful nation-building in Iraq, therefore, was a potential ‘multiplier’ that could reap advancements throughout the region (Patterson and Amaral, ‘Presidential Leadership’; Kalu, ‘Global Governance and National Governance’).

^78.Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, ‘Learning from Iraq’; Khurshid, ‘Tracing Shia-Sunni Conflict Divide in Iraq’.

^79.Parker, ‘The Iraq We Left Behind’, 94.

^80.Dodge, Iraq, 205; Nasr, The Dispensable Nation, 153.

^81.Taneja, ‘Iraq's Minorities’.

^82.Kane et al., ‘Iraq's Federalism Quandary’.

^83.Viviano, ‘The Kurds in Control’.

^84. For more information about Arab–Kurd relations and the limited success of confidence building mechanisms in reducing tensions, see Hanauer et al.,Managing Arab–Kurd Tensions; Katzman, ‘Iraq’.

^85.Senate Committee on Armed Services, Security Issues Relating to Iraq.

^86.Baker et al.,The Iraq Study Group Report, 3.

^87.Katzman, ‘Iran-Iraq Relations’; Kerry, ‘Remarks’.

^88. For example, in the final Quarterly Report ‘Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq’ submitted to Congress by the Department of Defense, the writers were careful to emphasize that conditions were ‘improving’ – but details were less emphasized. (Department of Defense, Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq; Blinken, ‘Morning in Mesopotamia’).

^89.Parker, ‘The Iraq We Left Behind’; Cordesman and Khazai, ‘Patterns of Violence in Iraq’. The Department of State Overseas Security Advisory Council's (OSAC) Iraq 2012 Crime and Safety Report rated the country a ‘critical threat for terrorism and political violence’ and found that terrorists and insurgent groups remained a significant threat – regardless of prior improvements. https://www.osac.gov/Pages/ContentReportDetails.aspx?cid = 12114. (Cockburn, ‘Iraq's Permanent Crisis’).

^90.Parker, ‘The Iraq We Left Behind’, 95; Ottoway and Kaysi, The State of Iraq, 1; Dodge, ‘Iraq's Road Back to Dictatorship’. For example, in the wake of US troop withdrawal from Iraq, Maliki has attempted to dissolve the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), a semi-autonomous structure that has coexisted with the central government peacefully since 2003 (Ozpek, ‘Democracy or Partition’; Parker ‘The Iraq We Left Behind’, 206; Goldstone, ‘Population and Security’, 10–11).

^91.Al-Asadi, ‘Report: Iraq Reconstruction’.

^92.Parker, ‘The Iraq We Left Behind’; Department of Defense, Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq.

^93.Ratcliffe and Merza, ‘Iraq's Competing Gas Demands’, 20.

^94.Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, ‘Learning from Iraq’, 119.

^95.Toone, ‘Foreign Direct Investment in Iraq’.

^96.Al-Tamimi, ‘Assessing Iraq's Oil Industry’.

^97.Dodge, Iraq, 136.

^98.Gordon, ‘Report Details Mistakes’.

^99.Pirnie and O'Connell, Counterinsurgency in Iraq.

^100.Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Iraq Report.

^101.Dodge, Iraq.

^102. Adnan al-Asadi as quoted in Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, ‘Learning from Iraq’.

^103. “For more on the concept of malleability, see: Etzioni, The Active Society”.

^104.Pirnie and O'Connell, Counterinsurgency in Iraq, 61.

^105.PBS Frontline, ‘The Evolution of the Bush Doctrine’.

^106.Ladwig, ‘Managing Counterinsurgency’, 64.

^107.Kaplan, The Insurgents, 74–5.

^108.Rao, ‘Iraq Cabinet Unveils Sweeping Reform’.

^109.Chandrasekaran, Interview for ‘The Lost Year in Iraq’.

^110.Pirnie and O'Connell, Counterinsurgency in Iraq.

^111.Strauss. ‘U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan’. In a Congressional hearing, General Tommy Franks indicated that US objectives during the first months of Operation Enduring Freedom were ‘the destruction of the al Qaeda terrorist network and the government of the Taliban’, and specifically cautioned against assuming that the United States would remain in Afghanistan as a stabilizing force following the achievement of these goals.

^112. Early airstrikes focused mainly on al Qaeda targets, but by October 2001, President Bush rejected Secretary of State Colin Powell's recommendations in favor of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's suggestions to target both al Qaeda and the Taliban, and the United States began conducting airstrikes against Taliban targets as well (Kagan and Kristol, ‘A Winning Strategy’). In a November 2001 news briefing, Secretary Rumsfeld implicitly rejected nation-building by stating that simply eliminating al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan represented ‘the greatest humanitarian aid that could be rendered to the Afghan people’ (Department of Defense, ‘News Transcript November 8, 2001’).

^113.Woodward. Bush at War, 237.

^114. Ibid. In response to reporters' questions about whether the United States should take responsibility to ‘liberate’ Afghanistan, President Bush remarked ‘We're not into nation-building; we're focused on justice’ (Bush, ‘Remarks Following Discussions’).

^115.Malvesti, ‘Bombing Bin Laden’, 17.

^116.Steele, ‘Afghanistan SITREP’.

^117.Pirnie and O'Connell, Counterinsurgency in Iraq.

^118.Jakobsen, PRTs in Afghanistan, 12.

^119.USAID Afghanistan, ‘PRT Quick Impact Projects’.

^120.Malkasian and Meyerle, Provincial Reconstruction Teams.

^121.Abbaszadeh et al.,Provincial Reconstruction Teams, 42.

^122.Vesely, ‘Afghanistan’.

^123.McKelvey, ‘Hillary Clinton’.

^124.Kaplan, The Insurgents, 307.

^125. Ibid.

^126.Shanker and Landler, ‘NATO Ministers Endorse Wider Afghan Effort’.

^127.Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Quarterly Report.

^128.Caldwell, ‘Transition in Action’.

^129.Whitlock, ‘Defense Secretary Gates’; Cowper-Coles, Cables from Kabul.

^130.Department of Defense, ‘Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability’.

^131. Ibid.

^132.Rogio and Lundquist, ‘Green-on-Blue Attacks in Afghanistan.

^133.Department of Defense. ‘Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability’.

^134.Rohde. ‘An Afghan Symbol for Change, Then Failure’.

^135.Oppel, ‘Corruption Undercuts Hopes for Afghan Police’.

^136. Ibid.

^137.Hosenball et al., ‘The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight’.

^138.Felbab-Brown, ‘Afghan National Security Forces’.

^139.Department of Defense, US Army Human Terrain Team Report.

^140.Gannon, ‘Afghan Police School Tries to Fix Struggling Force’.

^141. Historically, attempts to centralize Afghanistan's government have failed. Until 1964, although the country was an absolute monarchy, the governmental system was sustained through deals with local leaders who then insured order. In the 1970s, the system fell apart entirely due to heightened pressures to centralize (Biddle et al., ‘Defining Success in Afghanistan’).

^142.Barker, ‘Pervasive Corruption Fuels Deep Anger in Afghanistan’; Rasanayagam, Afghanistan, 192; Wissing, Funding the Enemy, 86–7.

^143. In 2005, it was reportedly the 42nd most corrupt nation in the world (Wissing, Funding the Enemy, 86–7).

^144.Transparency International, ‘Corruption Perceptions Index 2012’.

^145. Wissing reports that endemic payoffs began to pervade every aspect of Afghan life, including schools, police, courts, and government agencies. “Band-bazi – corruption networks within the Karzai government – managed a bazaar economy that bought and sold every favor, service, and administration position from cabinet members and provincial governors down to district police chiefs’ (Wissing, Funding the Enemy, 88).

^146.The Asia Foundation, ‘Afghanistan in 2012’, 7.

^147.Reynolds, ‘The Curious Case of Afghanistan’.

^148.Worden, ‘Afghanistan’; Kraemer, ‘Towards State Legitimacy in Afghanistan’.

^149.Fernholz, ‘The Ultimate Test Case’.

^150.Hogg et al.,Afghanistan in Transition, 47.

^151.Katzman, ‘Afghanistan’, 63.

^152.United States Government Accountability Office, ‘Afghanistan’, 25.

^153.Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Quarterly Report, 144.

^154.United States Department of Agriculture, ‘Agriculture in Afghanistan’.

^155.Peters, ‘How Opium Profits the Taliban’; Kerry, Afghanistan's Narco War.

^156.Ziad, ‘A Strategy for U.S. Policy Toward Afghanistan’, 91; Department of Defense, ‘Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability’, 105; Dempsey, ‘The Folly of Nation-Building in Afghanistan’; Dobbins et al.,After the War, 102.

^157.Hyman, ‘Nationalism in Afghanistan’.

^158.Harrison, ‘Afghanistan's Tyranny of the Majority’.

^159.Fukuyama, Nation-Building, 6.

^160.Emadi, ‘Nation-building in Afghanistan’.

^161.Barfield, ‘The Roots of Failure in Afghanistan’, 412.

^162.Hogg et al.,Afghanistan in Transition, 50–1.

^163.Farrell and Gordon, ‘COIN Machine’, 665–83.

^164.Walt, ‘The Real Reason the U.S. Failed in Afghanistan’.

^165.Fisher, ‘Is the Afghan War About Women's Rights?’.

^166.Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, 10.

^167.Chandrasekaran, Interview for ‘The Lost Year in Iraq’, 57.

^168.Cordesman, ‘Afghanistan’.

^169.Upshur et al., ‘Recognizing Systems in Afghanistan’. For an additional comprehensive study on the problems with metrics, see Connable, Embracing the Fog of War.

^170.Upshur et al., ‘Recognizing Systems in Afghanistan’.

^171.Clemons, ‘McChrystal's Afghanistan “Confidence Tour”’; Sopko, ‘Challenges Affecting US Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan’.

^172.Chandrasekaran, Little America, 95–6.

^173.Ucko, ‘Innovation or Inertia’.

^174.Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era.

^175.Broadwell, ‘The “Major” Challenge’.

^176.Chandrasekaran, Little America, 199.