Goodbye to all that: On small wars and big choices

Abstract

This article reflects on a decade of British counterinsurgency operations. Questioning the idea that lessons have been learnt, the paper challenges the assumptions that are being used to frame future strategic choice. Suggesting that defence engagement is primarily focused on optimising overseas interventions while avoiding a deeper strategic reassessment about whether the UK should be undertaking these sorts of activities, the article calls for a proper debate on Britain's national security interests.

Keywords::

• defence engagement
• state-building
• stabilisation
• defence diplomacy
• intervention

Notes

^1.Petraeus, ‘We Must Be Coldly Realistic’; Petraeus, ‘Reflections on the Counter-insurgency Era’.

^2.Alderson, ‘Learn from Experience’.

^3. As Hew Strachan suggests, ‘Defence Review’.

^4.Gentile, Wrong Turn.

^5. For the extreme case of Germany during and after World War I, and its organised mobilisation of the past to shape contemporary politics, see Herwig, ‘Clio Deceived’.

^6.White-Spunner, ‘Great Expectations’, 90; similar arguments in the same volume are made by Riley, ‘NATO Operations’, 246–7.

^7.Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index 2013, 2.

^8.Graham-Harrison, ‘UK Leaves its Helmand Project’.

^9.Biddle, Friedman, and Shapiro, ‘Testing the Surge’.

^10.Kaplan, ‘The End of the Age of Petraeus’, 90.

^11. For a participant's critique of the attempt to cut and paste COIN doctrine in Afghanistan, see Eikenberry, ‘The Limits of COIN Doctrine in Afghanistan’.

^12.Stewart, ‘What can Afghanistan and Bosnia teach us about Libya?’. To add to that list, the commander of ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ Major General Eric Olsen described the Taliban as a ‘force in decline’ in an article by a journalist who concluded that they were a ‘busted flush’ and that ‘nation-building’ had turned the tide (McGurk, ‘The Taliban on the Run’); Marine General Richard Mills declared in January 2010 that in Helmand province, US forces ‘have taken on the Taliban, the insurgency, right in the heartland and they've defeated them’ (‘US General: Taliban beaten in Helmand Province’, USA Today, 11 January 2010); Ahmed Wali Karzai declared in October 2010 that the Taliban were ‘defeated and broken’ after being killed in ‘industrial numbers’ (Express, 9 October 2010). For a longer discussion of over-optimistic assessments of the war, see Bird and Marshall, Afghanistan, 147–8.

^13. See Tootal, Danger Close.

^14. For two notably hagiographic texts, see Robinson, Tell Me How This Ends and Broadwell, All In.

^15.Nagl, ‘A Better War in Iraq’; Nagl, ‘Unprepared’.

^16.Jackson, ‘British Counter-insurgency in History’; Bennett, ‘The Other Side of the COIN’; Strachan, ‘British Counter-Insurgency’, 10.

^17.Donnelly, ‘the Cousins' Counter-Insurgency Wars’, 4.

^18.Regan, ‘Third-party Interventions’; Wood, Kathman, and Gent, ‘Armed Intervention’.

^19.Monten and Downes, ‘Forced to Be Free?’.

^20.Etzioni, ‘The Folly of Nation Building’, 63; Mazarr, ‘The Rise and Fall of the State Failure Paradigm’.

^21.Stewart Patrick makes this argument in one of the few sustained critical studies of the issue, Weak Links; see also Simons and Tucker, ‘The Misleading Problem of Failed States’; Mazarr, ‘The Rise and Fall of the State Failure Paradigm’.

^22. As he described it on the PBS programme, ‘Kill/Capture’, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/afghanistan-pakistan/kill-capture/transcript/.

^23. According to those experts who briefed them, Prime Minister Blair and President Bush did not take seriously expert warnings about the difficulties of reconstructing and politically reforming a post-Saddam Iraq. For the UK case, see the account of Steele, Defeat, 18–19, 172; for the USA, see Packer, The Assassin's Gate, 113–14; Woodward, State of Denial, 256.