FID or COIN? does it matter

[Dayuhan]

As to last US COIN; as I have stated on other threads I have come to believe that it is most helpful to look at COIN as Governance. COIN is a condition between a governance and its own populace. When you travel to another country to intervene in the relationship between that governance and populace you are either conducting UW or FID (in US doctrinal terms), depending on which side you are there to assist.

What if you travel to another country to destroy and remove a government you don't like? Isn't that just plain war? Then if you "win" - successfully remove the government you dont like - what do you call what you do next? It used to be called occupation, but that's not a word we like to use now. That may, however, be the word that the locals use for it, and they don't like it either. Just because we choose to call it something else doesn't necessarily make it something else.

If COIN is "a condition between a governance and its own populace", we have to ask ourselves a simple question: what, in reality, is the "governance" of Afghanistan? Is it really the Karzai government, or is it us? How would Afghans in various areas answer that same question? If we say it's the Karzai government and the Afghans say it's us, whose opinion matters?

If we go to a foreign country, knock down a government, install another, and call our support of that government "FID" we may be able to fool ourselves - for a little while at least - but we're not likely to fool anyone else. As long as that government is perceived by those who matter - the people it governs - as our tool and not their government, we are not "doing FID".

Arguably, viewed in this manner, all governance and every populace in every country is at some level of COIN/Insurgency at all times. Most are bumping along in what I would call "Phase 0". It is only when the government loses the bubble on the populace, that some segment of discontent will rise up from the masses to compete with the government for the support of the populace through illegal and typically violent means. This is when one enters Phase I Insurgency and typically needs to bring in military assistance to help move the conditions back down into Phase 0, or within the Civil government's span of control.

The last time the US really was at risk of losing the bubble, was Civil Rights Movement in the 60s. Of note, the US opted not to employ the military to merely suppress the insurgent segment of the populace, but instead opted to enact bold and sweeping changes to the law and to enforce those changes so as to move that segment of the populace back down into Phase O by working to address their concerns and include them more fully in good governance. THAT is good COIN. At the same time we were busy in Vietnam, conducting FID with a much less savvy approach. Ironically, I am sure no one considered what we were doing at home COIN, and many considered what were were doing in Nam COIN.

An interesting construct, but I suspect that there has to be some line of distinction between domestic dissent (an ever-present condition) and insurgency, both on a quantitative and a qualitative basis. Expand a definition far enough and it tends to lose its usefulness.