Crispin Burke on a decade of COIN:
"Some are calling the latest developments a failure of counterinsurgency doctrine, though these criticisms are off-mark. Counterinsurgency arose as a tactical and operational response to deteriorating conditions in Iraq; conditions which many planners chose to ignore. It’s a useful tool, but only in the context of well-designed strategic objectives. In Iraq, the strategic objectives were, despite the rhetoric, to salvage the situation which existed in 2003-2006. In Afghanistan, the original strategic objectives—to destroy al Qaeda and capture key leaders of that organization—became obsolete following the 2001 Battle of Tora Bora, where Osama bin Laden narrowly escaped across the border into Pakistan. Over time, Afghanistan fell victim to “mission creep”, with the original counter-terrorism mission ballooning into a massive nation-building campaign, currently involving some 100,000 US troops. ... Indeed, one of the most frustrating aspects of a counterinsurgency campaign is that a perfect counterinsurgency campaign at the tactical and operational level is still subject to greater influences at the strategic level, often well beyond the control of the counterinsurgent."
In military history, one of the toughest things is establishing causation. A common myth is that World War I's Western front slaughter was caused entirely by the "ideology of the offensive." In fact, historians are still debating the social, geopolitical, and military causes of the war. Blaming it purely on doctrine is short-sighted. The actual record of combat on the Western front also was influenced more by the density of troops to space and the command and control problems of managing, for the first time, million-man armies.
I think a task for future historians will be looking in a clear way at the record of the Iraq and Afghan wars that incorporates the doctrinal, political, and social dimensions. This task will also be grossly incomplete without access to diplomatic archives in the United States (records unlikely to be declassified soon) as well as local sources in the Middle East and South Asia. This will take even longer, as the ISI is not likely to be very happy about enterprising PhD students rummaging around in Islamabad looking for archival documents for their dissertations.
One thing we can do now is lose our fixation on whether or not "COIN" led to our present difficulties. Rather, I think we have to look at something else--third party state-building. A lot of literature after the Cold War looked at ungoverned spaces or weak states as a threat because they could house terrorists or insurgents. This literature has been challenged but not disproven--weak states and ungoverned spaces have housed insurgent groups. However, it does not necessarily follow that the best way to mitigate these threats is to rebuild those states in the style of postwar Japan or Germany.
If we look at the literature on global security since 1991, as well as the record of interventions in places such as Bosnia, Kosovo, or Somalia, we can see in both policy and academia a much more fertile ground for security policy in the 2000s than a focus purely on the operational art of COIN.
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