[R-G] US: Counterinsurgency Back In Vogue?

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46463

US:  Counterinsurgency Back In Vogue?
Analysis by Daniel Luban*

WASHINGTON, Apr 10 (IPS) - As the U.S. prepares to reduce its military  
presence in Iraq while intensifying its war effort in Afghanistan,  
hawks within both the Republican and Democratic parties have come  
increasingly to believe that counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine offers  
a solution to the central security challenges Washington will face in  
the 21st century.

Drawing on the perceived, if still uncertain, success of the U.S.  
"surge" in Iraq, many prominent opinion-makers - notably  
neoconservatives and "liberal hawks" - have joined COIN advocates  
within the military itself to argue that "small wars" theory should be  
the cornerstone of U.S. military strategy going forward, in  
Afghanistan and elsewhere.

But COIN’s current ascendancy masks several lingering points of  
contention.

For critics, the current enthusiasm reflects a fundamental  
overestimation of the efficacy of military force, and a desire for  
technocratic solutions to strategic problems that presume a neo- 
imperial nation-building role for the U.S.

Even among hawks, COIN has drawn fire from those who dispute the  
supposed "lessons" drawn from the surge in Iraq, and from those who  
argue that conventional warfare against potential rivals like China  
and Russia should remain a much higher priority than irregular warfare  
against non-state actors.

COIN is a fundamentally broad-ranging concept, encompassing all  
"military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological and civic  
actions" used to defeat insurgency, according to the 2006 Army Counter- 
Insurgency Field Manual.

It emphasises protecting and winning the "hearts and minds" of  
civilian populations - summed up in the mantra "clear, hold, and  
build" - meaning in practice COIN can often shade into "nation- 
building."

A team led by Gen. David Petraeus, the most prominent COIN advocate  
within the military, authored the Army field manual. Now head of U.S.  
Central Command (CENTCOM) overseeing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,  
Petraeus has become an icon among hawks due to his perceived success  
in pacifying Iraq.

In the wake of Iraq, many commentators across the political spectrum  
have called for the principles of the COIN doctrine used in the Iraq  
surge to be institutionalised as the guide for future campaigns in  
Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the hawkish independent Democrat, for example,  
called in January for an enhanced effort in Afghanistan built around  
six linked "surges" - in troop strength, strategic coherence, civilian  
resources, "native" support, regional integration, and political  
commitment.

While conventional warfare remains the centrepiece of military  
spending - Defence Secretary Robert Gates estimated this week that  
"irregular warfare" accounts for only ten percent of the new defence  
budget - COIN has come to dominate conversation in Washington foreign- 
policy circles, and many argue that "small wars" will characterise the  
21st century.

"In a multipolar world where small wars proliferate, there is reason  
to believe that [COIN] doctrine will shape not only the next phase of  
the fights in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the future of the U.S.  
military," according to John Nagl, a former Army officer who  
contributed to the COIN manual and now heads the influential think- 
tank, Centre for a New American Security (CNAS).

CNAS, which was founded in 2007 and has served as something of a  
pipeline to senior ranks in the Obama administration, appears to  
embody the new bipartisan conventional wisdom in Washington. Its  
‘mediagenic’ Rhodes Scholar president has become a poster boy for COIN  
enthusiasts, including influential neo-conservatives who two weeks ago  
featured Nagl at the kick- off of their newest think-tank, the Foreign  
Policy Initiative (FPI).

COIN is especially attractive to many liberal hawks, however, because  
it emphasises civilian protection and knowledge of local cultures, in  
contrast to the "shoot-first" style that often characterised U.S.  
military policy in the early Bush years.

But although advocates portray COIN as a purely pragmatic and non-  
ideological response to the security challenges of the twenty-first  
century, critics charge that its focus on "small wars" and nation- 
building simply assumes that the main goal of the U.S. military should  
be subduing local populations of far-flung but strategically important  
countries. In that respect, they argue, COIN can serve as a  
smokescreen for maintaining U.S. imperial posture.

"Great powers wage ‘small wars’ not to defend themselves but to assert  
control over foreign populations," wrote Andrew Bacevich, a former  
Army colonel and Boston University professor, in his 2008 book "The  
Limits of Power". "Historically, that is, ‘small wars’ are imperial  
wars."

"[T]o assume that wars like Iraq define the military’s future evades a  
larger question. Given what the pursuit of American imperial ambitions  
in the Greater Middle East has actually produced…why would the United  
States persist in such a strategy? Instead of changing the military,  
why not change the policy?" asked Bacevich.

The history of COIN in the U.S. is in fact intimately tied to the  
history of imperialism, dating back to the "Indian wars" and the  
suppression of insurgencies in Cuba and the Philippines at the turn of  
the twentieth century.

Many of the classics of COIN literature, such as David Galula’s  
"Counterinsurgency Warfare", came out of the French colonial  
experience in Algeria. The heyday of COIN in the U.S. came in the  
1960s, when the U.S. supplemented its military forces in Vietnam with  
tens of thousands of civilian advisers applying the latest social- 
science findings to everything from police training to land reform.

The U.S. defeat in Indochina made COIN anathema to a generation of  
military officers who demanded an end to murky and open-ended nation- 
building engagements. The "Powell doctrine", which demanded  
overwhelming force in the pursuit of clearly defined goals, was  
emblematic of U.S. military thinking post-Vietnam.

While the immediate post-Cold War period saw the U.S. intervene in  
‘small wars’ in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans, the George W. Bush  
administration came to office promising an end to such commitments.  
Former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sought to transform the  
military into a technology-heavy force designed to defeat rival states  
quickly and with as few "boots on the ground" as possible.

It was Rumsfeld’s failure to anticipate the challenges of post- 
invasion Iraq that sent the U.S. officer corps scrambling back to the  
archives in search of their predecessors’ wisdom about how to conduct  
counter-insurgency.

Ironically, many of the same neo-conservatives and liberal hawks who  
now tout the virtues of COIN were previously firm believers in the  
high-tech Rumsfeld military. This has led critics to charge that these  
new COIN enthusiasts simply aim to foster a belief in the efficacy of  
military force and interventionist foreign policy.

Bacevich and other critics caution against falling back into the same  
illusions about military efficacy that drew the U.S. into Iraq in the  
first place.

"U.S. leaders should… be wary of the potential moral hazard  
represented by the COIN [field manual]: thinking they have figured out  
the journey, they may be tempted to go down the road more often,"  
Colin Kahl, a CNAS fellow who will head Middle East affairs in the  
Pentagon under Obama, warned in Foreign Affairs in 2007.

Others dispute the notion that the drop in violence in Iraq was due to  
the surge and the use of COIN doctrine. Lt. Col. Gian Gentile, now a  
professor at West Point, has been foremost among these critics,  
arguing that success was due primarily to other factors - notably the  
decision to begin paying former Sunni insurgents to stop attacking  
U.S. forces.

Even among neo-conservatives and other hawks, it remains to be seen  
whether the current enthusiasm for COIN will outlast the wars in Iraq  
and Afghanistan.

Some, such as influential columnist Robert Kagan, have already begun  
to argue that state powers such as China and Russia pose a greater  
long-term threat than terrorism and other non-state actors, which  
would once again push conventional capabilities to the forefront of  
Washington’s military priorities.

This focus on conventional warfare would dovetail with the  
inclinations of many within the military itself, where the newly  
influential COIN advocates appear to remain in the minority.

*Jim Lobe contributed to this article.

(END/2009)