[R-G] Exposing Counterfeit COIN

[Anthony Fenton]

http://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2009/05/06/gian-gentile-exposing-counterfeit-coin/

Gian Gentile: Exposing Counterfeit COIN
by Kelley B. Vlahos, May 07, 2009

I found myself talking with a rather prominent journalist in  
Washington the other night. The subject was the war in Iraq and in  
Afghanistan. And COIN — counterinsurgency imagined and inculcated as  
the new (Petraeus) Doctrine, the new field manual, the new heroic  
battlefield narrative, made entirely so because of the 2007-2008 Surge  
operations in Iraq.

It’s population-centric counterinsurgency that clears, holds and  
builds, while winning hearts and minds, turning local populations  
against the bad guys and building up civic institutions and the  
legitimacy of the central government. Certainly not new theory, but  
dusted off and tweaked by Gen. David Petraeus & Co. for the Army’s new  
field manual released in December 2006, dovetailing conveniently with  
the Surge plan crafted by the neoconservatives at the American  
Enterprise Institute (and ultimately appropriated by the Bush  
Administration) in the same month.
gentile2
So I won’t just shut-up and accept the Surge Narrative as it is given  
to us now, because I think that there are huge flaws to it that must  
be corrected so that we can get to a more balanced understanding of  
it, and the years that came before it ~ Gian Gentile, Small Wars  
Journal blog, Jan. 2009

Today, it is the blueprint du jour for President Barack Obama’s  
inherited Long War, in fact, supporting it is a litmus test for one’s  
position and status in his national security apparatus.

So what? — the journalist seemed to suggest, looking incredulous that  
there was even a hint of drama here. The Surge was a success, how  
could there be anyone or anything to legitimately take on the bright  
lights of the COIN constellation now orbiting the President? Players  
like Michele Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy at the  
Pentagon and Kurt Campbell, the co-founder of their think tank, Center  
for a New American Security (now a greased-up policy feeder for the  
administration). He’s been nominated by Obama to become the Assistant  
Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs.

As a reporter myself, I was a bit nonplussed. A quick Google search  
would find that there is indeed an energetic debate — not only about  
the aforementioned "COINdinistas," now shaping policy for "Af-Pak,"  
but more importantly, about the validity of COIN and of the vaunted  
Surge itself.

Hadn’t you heard of Gian Gentile?

He shook his head.

He’s active duty. He’s West Point, I pressed on. He’s at the forefront  
of this pushback against COIN.

The journalist shook his head. He let me write down Gentile’s name.  
Looking skeptical, he moved on.

It really shouldn’t be a surprise, that members of the elite news  
media — particularly the ones who don’t necessarily focus on a  
national security beat — fasten easily onto the conventional narrative  
and "move on" condescendingly, satisfied their knowledge is au courant  
and complete.

Army Colonel Gian Gentile just doesn’t fit into their equation, though  
his name is known well enough, if only at the U.S Military Academy,  
military journals, critical foreign policy webzines like Antiwar.com,  
and as a foil and vexation for the COIN-centric blogs, the doctrine’s  
biggest promoters, like Small Wars Journal and Abu Muqawama (a moniker  
for Andrew Exum, Iraq war veteran and senior fellow at Flournoy’s CNAS).

To the rest of the world, the mainstream media included, Col. Gentile  
is kind of a ghost. Persistent and clever, sometimes noisome and  
everywhere. That he might remain invisible to people inside-the- 
beltway is only a problem in that information gatekeepers like the  
aforementioned journo, craft narratives about the war — about future  
wars — without the consistent insight of the contrary view. As  
consumers of the news — as Americans — we should demand the whole scoop.

The scoop is that Gentile, a 51-year-old former cavalry squadron  
commander in Iraq, now director of the military history division at  
West Point, has been putting his job in the Army on the line everyday,  
doing interviews with people like me, questioning the emerging  
historical record on the War in Iraq, the Surge and COIN. He  
challenges the historical pretexts used to merchandise and sell COIN,  
particularly by chief operators like retired Lt. Col. John Nagl  
(formerly with Sec. Def. Donald Rumsfeld, now president of CNAS). He  
throws cold water on the inescapable panegyrics to Petraeus and Gen.  
Ray Odierno (see Tom Ricks, a senior fellow at CNAS and a Washington  
Post military correspondent).

He warns that under the current influence of these "crusaders" (as  
tagged by Professor Andrew Bacevich back in October 2008), the  
military is shifting headlong and too far into COIN, bleeding the  
conventional force in favor of what he fears is a institutionalized  
role of global security change agents, nation-builders and cops.

He says the emperor has no clothes.

"I try to apply an historian’s sensibility to problems and in my  
writing, to make arguments based on the evidence available," he tells  
Antiwar.com. "When I got back from Iraq, there wasn’t much ‘otherwise  
thinking’ going on. There wasn’t much questioning of the direction we  
were heading. One can end up with this group think approach."

Gentile has written extensively about why the Petraeus Surge narrative  
has become both a symbol and byproduct of group think, and is now  
seemingly impenetrable thanks to a growing canon of after-action  
literature that place the "success" of the operation squarely on  
clear, hold and build — including of course, more boots on the ground.

"First of all, that didn’t happen in Iraq. But you pick up any number  
of books," he said, "they basically accept the standard Iraq War  
narrative." Which is, in short: before 2007, the Army didn’t prepare  
or focus on counterinsurgency. The Army finally sees the light, and  
wielding the updated counterinsurgency manual (FM 3-24) (co-written by  
Petraeus, with the aid of officers like Nagl), leads five additional  
brigades "surging" into Baghdad and pursuing new COIN principles in Al  
Qaeda strongholds. Violence is reduced to acceptable levels, providing  
"space" for political reconciliation.

First of all, Gentile says, "it places too much emphasis on the role  
of the additional brigades, armed — the narrative goes — with the new  
COIN doctrine," said Gentile.

Aside from the sectarian cleansing in Baghdad — where the few  
remaining Sunnis now live walled off, and in tiny urban enclaves —  
Gentile zeros in on what he believes were the two critical events that  
made the real reduction in violence happen. First, Muqtada al Sadr’s  
decision to stand down his rebel forces in the summer of 2007. Second,  
the U.S Army’s decision to start paying off some 90,000 Sunni  
militiamen and former insurgents to turn against al Qaeda.

"In my opinion, the two necessary and controlling reasons for lowering  
the violence in Baghdad in the second half of 2007 had little to do  
with the increased number of U.S. combat brigades practicing so-called  
new counterinsurgency tactics," Gentile said in an interview a year ago.

He hasn’t changed his mind. Instead, he’s spent the last 12 months  
arguing his points, and taking quite a few personal hits along the  
way. Most publicly, in Thomas Ricks’ much-celebrated, The Gamble:  
General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq,  
2006-2008, the author takes aim at Gentile by throwing into question  
his command in West Baghdad in 2006 (indeed, Gentile has argued that  
the Army was already adapting and practicing counterinsurgency methods  
on a general basis long before the Petraeus Brain Trust moved in.  
Ricks’ book clearly disputes this).

"Certainly, I have received pushback from other forums, and other  
media," Gentile says. "The Gamble, the way (Ricks) wrote about me and  
my squadron in 2006, I think it was a direct pushback against me for  
being critical of the counterinsurgency doctrine and the sort of  
triumphal narrative that has emerged over the last year or so."

Gentile’s own attacks against COIN standard-bearers have been both  
withering and precise. In his counterpoint to Nagl’s "Let’s Win the  
Wars We’re In" for the current Joint Force Quarterly:

"Retired Army lieutenant colonel John Nagl, author of Learning to Eat  
Soup with a Knife, is so cocksure of the efficacy of Army combat power  
that he believes it will have the ability not only to dominate land  
warfare in general but also to ‘change entire societies’… We are  
organizing ourselves around the principle of nationbuilding rather  
than fighting. For defense thinkers such as Nagl, that principle has  
turned into a synthetic consensus. To repeat, how else can one explain  
his most profound and deeply troubling statement that the Army, in the  
future, will have the capability to ‘change entire societies’? In this  
sense, the caricature of Nagl as a ‘crusader’ seems correct."

For his part, Nagl has not backed down. "We need the ability to kill  
people and break things with our Army, absolutely. But we also need,  
in this modern era, we need an Army that can protect people and build  
things. And what we’re doing is looking for the right balance between  
those two," he told PRI’s The World radio program earlier this month.

Velvety smooth, and hardly unpalatable to an American public with no  
more appetite for blood and bombs, say critics, but it cannot perfume  
the stinky reality that this is Bush Doctrine, with a few new liberal  
bells and whistles, all over again.

"Gentile is one of the few officers with the guts and brains to tell  
the truth at a time when the truth is very unpopular," says Ret. Army  
Col. Douglas MacGregor, another dissident voice in the beltway  
wilderness. Like Gentile, he struggled to be heard during the Bush  
years against the preponderant neoconservative din. Today, it is the  
liberal interventionists, mostly Clinton-era throwbacks with a taste  
for nation building from the Balkan Wars. "Sadly, men like Gentile are  
currently in short supply."

Gentile became a commissioned officer through the ROTC program at UC  
Berkeley in 1986, and received his masters and PhD from Stamford  
University after three years in the field in Germany and Korea. While  
teaching at West Point, where he says "academic freedom really does  
mean something," he frequently dusts it up on the milblogs, where he  
is alternately excoriated and saluted, if not a bit patronized, even  
by his friends.

"Now here’s a question: Isn’t there anyone other than Gian Gentile  
willing to take up the anti-COIN crusade? Where is everyone else? I  
want to ask him that when he visits the 202 area code in the next few  
weeks," wrote Abu Muqawama, aka Exum, back in January.

But public sentiment may be shifting closer to Gentile and MacGregor,  
as current events — foreign and domestic — threaten the durability of  
the Surge success story and the open-ended military and civilian  
commitment Obama’s policymakers are setting up for Pakistan and  
Afghanistan.

"I don’t think the fundamental issues that have divided (Iraq) have  
been resolved. I think what we have done over the last year is frozen  
those issues in place, but we haven’t resolved them," Gentile charges.  
"I think, what you are seeing with the increasing attacks today, are  
the emergence of those differences again," he said. Pointing to recent  
reports that the Sunni Awakening, now abandoned by the Americans to  
the hostile Shia authority, are becoming restive, he said, "I think  
there may be some cooperation there — some cooperation between Sunni  
and al Qaeda elements there."

Deny it they may, says Gentile, but today’s policymakers are promoting  
a similar Surge strategy for Afghanistan (See congressional  
testimonies by Flournoy and Chief Af-Pak envoy Holbrooke this week:  
clear, hold and build, with more boots on the ground, more civilian  
experts, more COIN). As an active duty officer, Gentile won’t question  
current plans outright, but he left me with this:

"As soldiers, our role is to do whatever we are told to do by our  
civilian masters. However, my experience is, that the idea of using  
military force to change entire societies — to use John Nagl’s words —  
at the barrel of a gun, is highly problematic and it is not as clean  
and as clear and as sensible as I think our own COIN doctrine makes it  
seem to be," he said. "I saw what it is like changing the entire  
society at the barrel of a gun in Baghdad in 2006, it wasn’t as simple."

Gentile laughed when he thought of the ribbing he might get among the  
COIN-set, being interviewed by a site with the name "Antiwar."  
Ultimately, he doesn’t care. He is driven by a sincerity his  
detractors cannot touch, and a personal mission not to let current war  
doctrine go unchallenged. He might just have a ghost of a chance.