Options for Avoiding Counterinsurgencies

How can the West continue to shape international order without over-committing itself to ruinous and ambiguous operations on the scale of Iraq and Afghanistan? This article addresses this question by examining the failures of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, and by outlining three alternatives for future engagements: the Libya model, the indirect approach, and contingency operations in support of multilateral organizations. Each presents unique possibilities, but the imperative for strategic clarity and commitment is consistent. B December 2014, the large-scale Western military effort in Afghanistan will be over, ending more than a decade of direct intervention in that country and Iraq. A page is being turned in the history of warfare and, as most recognize, there is a need to take stock of the diverse but often painful experiences of the past, and to translate these into appropriate lessons for future interventions. That the recent campaigns, despite substantial investment, have yielded such limited results is difficult to accept. Yet denial will not prepare us for the future. Indeed, if the West is to remain in the business of shaping global affairs, sometimes by force of arms, it must resolve the contradictions raised by its recent campaigns.1 Most pressingly, it seems, the West wants the rights that go along with global leadership, but not the responsibilities and costs. How can we bridge this gap? How can the West sustain its contribution to a very particular international order, without falling into the pitfalls that characterized the last decade? Creative solutions are urgently needed. This article examines three such solutions in light of the failures of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. These alternate approaches provide more limited applications of force and more modest roles. Recent history suggests that—within key contexts and preconditions—such approaches can be successful. The Challenges in Afghanistan An important first step to understanding the challenges faced in Afghanistan is to broaden the scope of analysis beyond the mere conduct of operations. Many of the mistakes in Afghanistan were strategic and, therefore, had little to do with counterinsurgency. These include the creation of a highly centralized form of governance, the wasted opportunities provided by the fall of the Taliban, the massive diversion caused by the war in Iraq, and the decision to expand the International Security Assistance Force’s (ISAF’s) area of operations beyond Kabul without committing a fraction of the resources necessary for security 1 For a cogent list of areas of enquiry, see Francis G. Hoffman, “Learning Large Lessons from Small Wars,” War on the Rocks, February 5, 2014, http://warontherocks.com/2014/02/ learning-large-lessons-from-small-wars/. On MilitAry interventiOns Options for Avoiding Counterinsurgencies David H. Ucko and Robert C. Egnell © 2014 David H. Ucko and Robert C. Egnell 12 Parameters 44(1) Spring 2014 and stability. Underlying these missteps was the inability of international allies to establish common political and strategic aims. The campaign was defined by three separate and poorly coordinated efforts: the US-led counterterrorism effort of Operation Enduring Freedom-Afghanistan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) -led ISAF effort to provide security and to enable the third mission, United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), a UN effort devoted to political and economic development. On one side of the spectrum, Afghanistan was a narrow exercise in counterterrorism; on the other, it was statebuilding aimed at establishing democracy, gender equality, and human rights. Rather than a propitious division of labor, the broad spectrum of aims provided the West with the false comfort of “doing it all,” all at once, and with little need for prioritization. Tensions between competing interests were glossed over, but became strikingly apparent with NATO’s expansion beyond Kabul and the steady deterioration of security thereafter. The bloodshed deepened strategic divisions, both between and within individual governments. In a context where victory was not really a relevant concept, the lack of political and strategic direction had serious consequences. Most importantly, it thwarted the essential process of balancing ends, ways, and means, and the mismatches therein which became increasingly obvious. Security worsened and the United States, having “discovered counterinsurgency” in Iraq, was called upon to rescue the effort. Counterinsurgency was seen as the solution to a strategic problem.2 However, as an operational approach, it could not possibly provide the answer. The fact that the launch of the “Surge” and the switch to population-centric counterinsurgency coincided with the first talk of withdrawal from Afghanistan clearly did not help. Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan Theories and concepts should be used to make sense of a complex reality and to support the dynamic process of analysis, decisionmaking, and implementation. This is not just an intellectual exercise; the concepts we use have an impact on how we interpret the conflict, prioritize our resources, and conduct operations. Selecting a concept, or a term (like counterinsurgency), requires great care: ideally, it should help us understand the true nature of the problem, and how best to deal with it. How does counterinsurgency measure up? The concept has been useful in moving many armed forces from an exclusive focus on conventional warfare, yet in itself, the idea of counterinsurgency has served better as an antithesis to past pathologies than as a prescriptive guide for ongoing campaigns. In Afghanistan, for several reasons, the introduction of a counterinsurgency framework did not help us understand the true nature of the problem or how to reach our aims. The first reason stems from the misinterpretation and overgeneralization of lessons from past counterinsurgency campaigns. Historians and military thinkers often stress the limited generalizability of operational approaches from one context to the next. One would, therefore, assume that when a colonial policing approach was revived to support 2 Hew Strachan, “Strategy or Alibi? Obama, McChrystal and the Operational Level of War,” Survival 52, no. 5 (2010): 168. On Military interventiOns Ucko and Egnell 13 the state-building campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, care would be taken to appreciate the differences separating these two worlds. Yet such analysis was all too rare. One result of this rather problematic reading of history was the exaggeration of the “hearts and minds” aspect of operations, and the neglect of often equally important coercive components.3 Much of the emerging wisdom was based on polished historical accounts of past campaigns that were never critically examined. Instead, a liberal 21st century filter was applied that simply reinforced preexisting biases. In fact, collective punishment, executions, and forced population movements are but a few examples of past tactics, employed even in the most revered yet academically abused campaign—Malaya. Much of this scholarship and pop history was benignly intended to reverse the prior over-reliance on military force. Since then, the pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other and it will continue to do so lest greater historical rigor is applied.4 There are also key contextual differences to grapple with. Past counterinsurgency operations took place as “internal” challenges within empires. 5 Today, the West engages these challenges as part of a coalition and in support of weak yet legally sovereign and fully independent states. Despite some room for divergence, contemporary counterinsurgency doctrine still presumes a sufficient harmony of interests between intervening and host-nation governments, or at least an ability to push the latter toward the “correct” course of action. Actual practice provides a more sobering perspective. In Iraq, institutions either collapsed through war or were dismantled through coalition decree, leading to the infiltration of sectarian elements into positions of central power and a government whose interests often ran counter to those of the intervening coalition. In Afghanistan, the counterinsurgency campaign confronted a deeply dysfunctional state bureaucracy and a NATO headquarters that lacked the capacity and resources to run anything but the security aspects of operations. In both campaigns, difficulties with hostnation governments were compounded by differences among coalition partners regarding approach, commitment, and contributions. A further change has already been hinted at: the availability and competence of civilian means. The strategic intent in Iraq and Afghanistan required substantial civilian participation, large and capable enough to compensate for in-state weaknesses. This resource was at the disposal of past empires in the form of colonial administrations with local experience and understanding, and local police forces that could maintain order.6 Today, the political and civilian components of counterinsurgency are tremendously under-developed, despite efforts like the Stabilization Unit in the United Kingdom and the ill-fated Office of the 3 Paul Dixon, “‘Hearts and Minds?’ British Counter-Insurgency from Malaya to Iraq,” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 3 (June 2009) . 4 For an elaboration of this point, see David H. Ucko and Robert Egnell, Counterinsurgency in Crisis: Britain and the Challenges of Modern Warfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 19-44. 5 John Mackinlay made this point already in 1997. See John Mackinlay, “War lords,” RUSI Journal 143, no. 2 (1998): 25. It does not follow that historical counterinsurgency campaigns are entirely irrelevant, as David French notes, the discontinuity can also be exaggerated. See David French, The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945-1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 252–253. 6 See for example I.A. Rigden, The British Approach to CounterInsurgency: Myths, Realities and Strategic Challenges, Strategy Research Project (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College, 2008), 13; Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peace-keeping (London: Frank Cass, 1971). 14 Parameters 44(1) Spring 2014 Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS) within the United States. This deficiency has caused a distinct mismatch between ambitions and resources. Attempting to transplant past counterinsurgency approaches onto contemporary state-building efforts also risks neglecting the essentially conservative nature of counterinsurgency. The concept of counterinsurgency presumes that the problem at hand is an insurgency that challenges the status quo. While successful counterinsurgency campaigns have often involved certain political concessions, counterinsurgency operations are predicated on the survival of the state or preemption of violent change through peaceful liberalization. However, this description hardly fits the role played by the Kabul regime. Nor is it clear that the defeat of the Taliban and other groups would really meet Western strategic aims or even lead to stability. The question is whether “the insurgency” was the issue? Or, was it a symptom of more profound problems in the establishment of the Afghan state, its evolution, and the shortcomings of Western intervention in the regional context in which all this has played out? Given the fact that external coalitions toppled the existing regimes and instigated revolutionary societal changes in both Iraq and Afghanistan, it is a stretch to argue we were merely protecting or even reforming the status quo. Instead, the international community was the true revolutionary agent of change, and branding its efforts as counterinsurgency led us to misunderstand the actual roles of different actors within those respective societies, not least our own. Most critically, it reveals an all-too militaristic and optimistic view of what it takes to transform societies.7