Porch shines a torch on COIN

[Bill Moore]

I haven't read the paper yet but will. In the meantime, people always talk about strategy, but I don't know what they mean in the sense of doing. What, in your view, is a strategy that should be applied to South Asia? What should we do or have done and how? That is a big question but I am not looking for a big answer. But I am sincerely at a loss about actual actions when people talk about strategy.

Carl,

Getting to this kind of late, so initial response will be short, but I think Colin Gray captured why our efforts are floundering and it because our senior leadership is too focused on an array of tactical activities that we collectively call COIN focused on winning over the population, but that approach is not moving us towards our strategic ends. In fact our current approach IMO is undermining our effort to achieve our ends. This is what happens when we confuse the tactics of countering an insurgency with our strategy aims. What were/are our strategic aims in Afghanistan and the region (since you pointed out S. Asia)? Those would be the ends. How did/do we intend to accomplish them? The ways. What were/are the resources we will employ to achieve the ends? The means. If we agree that strategy consists of the ends, ways, and means we can start here.

The principal and driving issues for the United States with respect to counterinsurgency are when to do it and when not, and how to attempt to do it strategically. Policy and strategy choices are literally critical and determinative.

The above quote is critical to my overall argument. If we pursue unrealistic ends, and/or pursue our ends via a strategy that either won't work, or achieve our ends at an acceptable cost (many factors to consider such as time, money, casualties, and other less tangibles), then we already reached strategic failure (despite our tactical successes), but unfortunately it may take us many years to realize it, and by that time there is a lot of blood and money under the bridge. I'm not making this claim from a position I told you so, like many others I didn't see the mess in Afghanistan coming, but I am critical of two aspects. One we didn't change course when we realized (or should have realized) we got it wrong, and perhaps worse the lessons that the Army is drawing from the past 10 years of fighting is we need more Cow Bell (I think you get my point). This gets at Dayuhan's comment,

Not that the US military is perfect, but I actually have considerable confidence in their ability to get a job done, provided that the goal is clearly defined and suitable for accomplishment by a military force. If those conditions are absent, we don't need to change the military, we need a better set of goals and we need to choose the right tool for accomplishing the goals.

In most cases the military is doing superbly at the tactical level, especially SOF. One thing we learned way to slowly that hurt us was not to act like a jerk. It is true that turning the population against us through brutality or rudeness will hurt us at both the strategic and tactical levels (I'm surprised it took us a few years to really learn that, even in some elements of SOF), but it also true in my opinion that simply winning over the population will not achieve our goals which I expand upon below a little. So despite my sometimes excessive criticism of our COIN doctrine, at the tactical level there are many things in it that are valuable that I hope we don't lose, but of course tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat (hopefully that comes across as balanced, I criticize harshly because the COINdista mentality that pervades our force needs some provocative comments to actually get them to think independently and not recite doctrine line by line and confuse it with strategy).

Denying safe haven in Afghanistan was one of the stated ends (I believe our primary end after the initial combat operations to kill the core of AQ), and our proposed strategic approach for achieving that was installing a centralized and democratic government, and getting the population to support it. That approach may reform a country, but in itself wouldn't deny safe haven, but we ignored that fact. We also ignored the fact we can't transform a country like Afghanistan at an acceptable cost. I don't know we decided to do this based on neocon hubris (the end of history outlook), perception that it was an inherent responsibility (you break it you fix it), but we clearly didn't understand the culture and history which would have indicated this approach wouldn't work without a significant investment in resources and implementing severe population control measures that we can't do by law and custom. This policy end (transforming the nation) and our strategic approach to do so was probably fatal to our ability to achieve our policy end of denying safe haven. It required building a nation from a state composed of tribes with a long history of intertribal warfare. In recent decades the Taliban was the only force that was able to impose some limited degree of stability through tactics we would never employ.

I'm not prepared to argue in detail alternative approaches to achieving our policy end, but will quickly summarize some potential courses of action (that surely are not less realistic than the ones we're pursuing now). In all courses of action I think we started off right with SOF and air power to conduct aggressive combat operations against AQ and their friends (but leaving the door open for their friends to become our friends). Continue pressure on the Taliban/ruling party, and negotiate a settlement with them from a position of power under the table so they can save face and all sides can declare victory except AQ. They agree to deny AQ safe haven in turn for the U.S. not interfering with them. It may be unpleasant to allow these thugs back in power (assuming they regained control, we could have continued covert support to the Northern Alliance), but we live in a tough world.

Another option is no deal, we hit AQ and their friends hard, to include pursuing AQ into Pakistan while we had the global political support to do so shortly after 9/11. That would be a punitive raiding expedition for a couple of months, and then we leave with the promise of returning (based on our recent action we demonstrated we have the means to execute our will, so it wouldn't be hollow threat) if AQ returns. We turn it over to whoever and let them work it out (yes it will be bloody, but not unlike our 10 plus years in country, or the 10 years prior to our raiding expedition). We have every right to conduct a punitive expedition, it didn't need to turn into a humanitarian one. I suspect there are multiple other options that could have been explored related to options with Pakistan, India, Iran and even China at the beginning based on realpolitik opportunities for all concerned that would have got to denying safe haven much more effectively than we have done.

Instead we decided we wanted to install a democratic and central government (which is actually undemocratic in Afghanistan). Not surprisingly the government is opposed by different insurgent groups and our presence is opposed by resistance groups. Our misdiagnosis of the situation led us to naively assume that if we win over the population with economic incentives that insurgents will be defeated and peace will fall upon us and AQ will be denied a safe haven because people have jobs and the kiddies are going to school. Of course the Afghans aren't fighting for our vision of Pleasantville, but for wide range of deep seated hatreds between groups we just can't seem to apprehend. We spent billions trying this approach, and after it failed we assumed we still had the right strategic approach to achieve our end, and decided we needed more cowbell so we surged and spent billions more. Now it seems our leadership realized our current approach failed, but unfortunately the answer isn't adjusting our strategy, but simply leaving. Apparently we never seriously considered actually changing our strategy because we confused our COIN doctrine with the strategy and failed to realize it was the wrong doctrine for this conflict to achieve our end, but we were blinded by the hype that many authors made a good living promoting. This is where the danger of confusing tactics with strategy becomes readily apparent.

The issue is not whether Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else either needs to be, or should be “improved.” Instead, the issue is whether or not the job is feasible. Even if it would be well worth doing, if it is mission impossible or highly improbable at sustainable cost to us, then it ought not to be attempted. This is Strategy 101.

Population-centric COIN will not succeed if the politics are weak, but neither is it likely to succeed if the insurgents can retreat to repair, rally, and recover in a cross-border sanctuary.