COIN Counterinsurgency (merged thread)

[Dayuhan]

They did what they could when they could as they have since, but it always involved killing people in a theatrical way. They have never gone after the economy as such even though it is an easy target as demonstrated by the attack by parties unknown on our grid last year. They like blood. They like to kill.

I don't honestly see how you can study the history of AQ and not conclude that 9/11 was intended to provoke American incursions into Muslim lands, restoring to the movement the raison d'etre that it lost with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

[TheCurmudgeon]

Does the United States acheive its policy goal? Thats how I would define victory, not operational success.

Agreed, but the language makes it sound like the military Commander is the one making that determination. I would think that the military Commander could determine whether the military operational objectives could be met. State, the Intelligence community, and others, would determine whether their components were achievable, and with all that data the political leader makes the final call.

Could just be the way the verbiage is laid out, but it sounds like the military is the final word. I would think that is backwards.

Still, until the rest is published I may be assuming too much based on a single sentence or two.

[carl]

I don't honestly see how you can study the history of AQ and not conclude that 9/11 was intended to provoke American incursions into Muslim lands, restoring to the movement the raison d'etre that it lost with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

You mean like the US military presence in Saudi Arabia from 1991 to 2003 and current bases in Kuwait and Quatar?

[Bill Moore]

You mean like the US military presence in Saudi Arabia from 1991 to 2003 and current bases in Kuwait and Quatar?

Carl, your arguments are overly simplistic and while I understand not wanting to give credit to our adversaries, to pretend or deny they don't have a strategy and seek to understand it puts us at a disadvantage. I'll see what references I can find, but in the meantime recommend reading the Looming Tower for some background.

Those that attacked us on 9/11 were well educated and obviously highly dedicated to their cause. Like us they don't mindlessly spend resources on operation that isn't tied to a strategic end, and that attack obviously wouldn't defeat us, so it was part of larger construct. They didn't do it just to kill innocent people (though they obviously did kill many innocent people), but for a larger aim which was to provoke into a fight they think they can win in the long run.

You bring up a fair point about why aren't they attacking economic targets directly? I can only speculate, but so far our response has been measured, they may assume correctly if they start targeting economic targets we'll take the gloves off. Just a thought.

[JMA]

I don't honestly see how you can study the history of AQ and not conclude that 9/11 was intended to provoke American incursions into Muslim lands, restoring to the movement the raison d'etre that it lost with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Please explain how you arrive at that conclusion.

[Bill Moore]

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art...shallow-waters

Blood in Shallow Waters

“All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written Al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.” (O. Bin Laden, 2004)

This paper focuses on the facet of Al Qaeda’s stratagem very plainly laid out by Osama bin Laden above, further explicating Al-Qaeda’s plan to cripple the U.S. through a series of proxy wars: an integral – and currently the most pertinent – component of its aggregate strategy.

Carl, the author of this paper may agree with you, since according to his research there is little evidence AQ initially conducted the attacks to sucker us into invading Afghanistan, but afterwards this became a primary element of their strategy. The next article written by a former CIA member seems to claim it was their strategy all along.

Like most of Al-Qaeda’s public communications, this account of their strategy came after the operation and its effects. This ex-ante account of grand strategy may indeed have been a creative effort of Al-Qaeda leadership and media personnel designed to give the organization an appearance of having a more robust and impressive strategic design than they had. Given the history of Al-Qaeda affiliated organizations and operations by both Al-Qaeda affiliates and U.S. and other western military and security services throughout the last 12 years it would be foolish to believe that Al-Qaeda doesn’t consider, if not aim for, a response by the U.S. and other western forces through military means.

Al-Qaeda’s plan of bait and snare via franchising disparate guerrilla forces accomplishes seven objectives. First, Al-Qaeda is able to gain reaction by U.S. leadership resulting in a military response and a new guerrilla conflict. Second, the military response puts U.S. boots on the ground in even more Muslim lands lending even greater credit to the argument that the U.S. is engaged in a crusade to occupy and exploit Muslims and Muslim lands throughout the world. Third, Al-Qaeda’s image of the vanguard of Muslim resistance to the imperialist U.S., a Robin Hood of the Muslim world, is reinforced by the primacy the U.S. assigns to it. Fourth, Al-Qaeda is able to frame the conflict as being fard ‘ayn (individual duty) to defend Muslim lands from an invading force, thus flooding their ranks with new recruits. Fifth, increasing international opposition to U.S. military action often proves detrimental to U.S. political efforts. Sixth, domestic support for the U.S. government will be further diminished as troops and money are allocated to conflicts that are largely perceived to be ‘none of our business’, divisions which are exacerbated by Al-Qaeda’s media prowess. Seventh, the U.S. military is further strained and weakened by these new battlefronts. Each of these objectives is further developed below.

http://www.brookings.edu/research/ar...rrorism-riedel

Al Qaeda Strikes Back

By: Bruce Riedel

Bin Laden's goals remain the same, as does his basic strategy. He seeks to, as he puts it, "provoke and bait" the United States into "bleeding wars" throughout the Islamic world; he wants to bankrupt the country much as he helped bankrupt, he claims, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The demoralized "far enemy" would then go home, allowing al Qaeda to focus on destroying its "near enemies," Israel and the "corrupt" regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. The U.S. occupation of Iraq helped move his plan along, and bin Laden has worked hard to turn it into a trap for Washington. Now he may be scheming to extend his strategy by exploiting or even triggering a war between the United States and Iran.

Decisively defeating al Qaeda will be more difficult now than it would have been a few years ago. But it can still be done, if Washington and its partners implement a comprehensive strategy over several years, one focused on both attacking al Qaeda's leaders and ideas and altering the local conditions that allow them to thrive. Otherwise, it will only be a matter of time before al Qaeda strikes the U.S. homeland again.

[Bob's World]

Which "FID" and why don't you simply call it "occupation"?

Fuchs and Bill Moore both raise factually accurate points, but I believe that sometimes we focus on the wrong facts and allow them to lead us logically into intractable situations.

Fuchs, certainly yes Iraq and Afghanistan are/were both occupations - but that is not a mission with task and purpose, it is simply a fact of our physical status.

And Bill, yes absolutely we blew out the existing sovereign and created power vacuums in both cases. There was no "host" government - but equally we had no intent to stay and submit those lands and the people who lived upon them to our sovereign control. I believe that second fact trumps the first. "Begin as you intend to finish.". It is about mind-set, perspective and priorities. This in turn shapes perceptions of the legitimacy of our own actions and the legitimacy of whatever host system of governance might ultimately emerge.

Based on our intent and purpose from the very start, from the moment President Bush declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq we were no longer fighting a short brutal war, but were beginning the long, even more brutal peace. That is FID, even if there is little to no host governance left to support. Perhaps we shouldn't have tossed out Gen Zinni's plan that left much of the Iraqi military intact to serve that role. Regardless, the nature of the game does not change because we chose to deal ourselves bad cards.

[TheCurmudgeon]

Decisively defeating al Qaeda will be more difficult now than it would have been a few years ago. But it can still be done, if Washington and its partners implement a comprehensive strategy over several years, one focused on both attacking al Qaeda's leaders and ideas and altering the local conditions that allow them to thrive. Otherwise, it will only be a matter of time before al Qaeda strikes the U.S. homeland again.

Bill, isn't this what we are doing in Afghanistan?

1. Killing leadership ... which only accomplishes the next rank moving up.

2. Changing conditions by trying to create responsible, representative government.

3. Attacking their ideas ... by offering an alternative via changing conditions.

It would seem that we are working an old fashion exhaustion campaign.

Perhaps we need to work more on number 3 by not responding with large military actions and treating the group as criminals instead of granting them the status of combatant via our responses to their actions.

Lastly, I really hate comments like "if you don't do this it is only a matter of time till AQ strikes again." AQ may strike again and it will have absolutely nothing to do with not implementing this plan, but it serves as a logical (though not causal) connection "proving" the author right. .... Hmmmmm .... If you don't listen to my ideas about doctrine there will be hurricanes in the Atlantic and Typhoons in the Pacific, mark my words!


But this is off topic.

[carl]

Carl,

You don't need to kill hundreds of people to commit genocide.

http://efchr.mcgill.ca/WhatIsGenocide_en.php?menu=2

It is the intent to destroy, in whole or part, any group that you can separate out from the whole based on an identifying characteristic. It does not even require death. When we "assimilated" the American Indians into our society effectively destroying theirs, arguably, that was genocide.

Of course, when we took the children away and taught them how to be American's there was no crime of genocide, so it was all good.

Your response illustrates my point exactly. The word as it is used popularly, or had been anyway, was associated with truly monstrous crimes that had few equals in history, the Holocaust being the prime example. It has expanded to include just about anything that somebody disapproves of. People use it now mainly show how very much they disapprove of something, the intent of which is to really put their moral superiority on display. "I don't just disapprove of it, I judge it genocide which makes me a really sensitive and fine person." That kind of thing.

That's fine I guess. Words and meanings change in language but in this case it tends to minimize the events that the word should be confined to. Instead of a description of something so big and bad as to almost defy comprehension, the word is being used to establish the moral superiority of people who use when describing something they disapprove of.

It's a shame I think but language goes where it goes.

[TheCurmudgeon]

Your response illustrates my point exactly. The word as it is used popularly, or had been anyway, was associated with truly monstrous crimes that had few equals in history, the Holocaust being the prime example. It has expanded to include just about anything that somebody disapproves of. People use it now mainly show how very much they disapprove of something, the intent of which is to really put their moral superiority on display. "I don't just disapprove of it, I judge it genocide which makes me a really sensitive and fine person." That kind of thing.

That's fine I guess. Words and meanings change in language but in this case it tends to minimize the events that the word should be confined to. Instead of a description of something so big and bad as to almost defy comprehension, the word is being used to establish the moral superiority of people who use when describing something they disapprove of.

It's a shame I think but language goes where it goes.

You are correct, meanings change over time. But in this case I was referring to the crime that can be committed by people or states acting in their sovereign capacity. The US will bend the rules, but I don't see them overtly breaking them. That will limit the range of options and remove ideas like mass relocation (without a good justification) or mass re-education of children.

How far we would go to turn a blind eye to the actions of our host nation is hard to say.

[carl]

Carl, your arguments are overly simplistic and while I understand not wanting to give credit to our adversaries, to pretend or deny they don't have a strategy and seek to understand it puts us at a disadvantage. I'll see what references I can find, but in the meantime recommend reading the Looming Tower for some background.

Those that attacked us on 9/11 were well educated and obviously highly dedicated to their cause. Like us they don't mindlessly spend resources on operation that isn't tied to a strategic end, and that attack obviously wouldn't defeat us, so it was part of larger construct. They didn't do it just to kill innocent people (though they obviously did kill many innocent people), but for a larger aim which was to provoke into a fight they think they can win in the long run.

You bring up a fair point about why aren't they attacking economic targets directly? I can only speculate, but so far our response has been measured, they may assume correctly if they start targeting economic targets we'll take the gloves off. Just a thought.

They do indeed have a strategy, it just isn't a sophisticated and complex. It's rudimentary. Kill people in a theatrical fashion and hope for the best. I said that I think twice above.

They didn't spend resources on something with no end. It was in accordance with their strategy, kill a lot of people in a theatrical way and hope for the best.

The 'kill' part is integral to all this. If OBL had issued a fatwa saying 'Boycott Pepsi and monkey wrench oil refineries' it wouldn't have had the same effect. That doesn't motivate young men, the key target audience. You want to motivate them, you say 'Kill'. They like that.

I think you are missing the obvious when you wonder why they don't hit economic targets. They aren't green beanies. They are takfiri killers. They want to kill because it makes them feel good to smack it to the kufars.

[carl]

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art...shallow-waters

Blood in Shallow Waters


Carl, the author of this paper may agree with you, since according to his research there is little evidence AQ initially conducted the attacks to sucker us into invading Afghanistan, but afterwards this became a primary element of their strategy. The next article written by a former CIA member seems to claim it was their strategy all along.

http://www.brookings.edu/research/ar...rrorism-riedel

Al Qaeda Strikes Back

By: Bruce Riedel

AQ talks and talks and writes and writes but as far as doing against the the West in the West, it is blow some people up in a spectacular way and hope for the best.

Because that is simple doesn't mean it won't work. But it is simple.

[carl]

You are correct, meanings change over time. But in this case I was referring to the crime that can be committed by people or states acting in their sovereign capacity. The US will bend the rules, but I don't see them overtly breaking them. That will limit the range of options and remove ideas like mass relocation (without a good justification) or mass re-education of children.

How far we would go to turn a blind eye to the actions of our host nation is hard to say.

The children had better be reeducated if you want an occupation of pacification or whatever to work. If the Israelis were to tomorrow occupy all of Gaza and turn it into Israel they would have to tinker with the curriculums of all the schools a bit.

[TheCurmudgeon]

The children had better be reeducated if you want an occupation of pacification or whatever to work. If the Israelis were to tomorrow occupy all of Gaza and turn it into Israel they would have to tinker with the curriculums of all the schools a bit.

An accurate observation, but possibly an illegal act

[slapout9]

If COIN isn't Strategy then what is it? Link to a PDF download of noted military commentator Edward Luttwak who believes that COIN is nothing but Military Malpractice. Article appeared in Harper's Magazine in 2007.

http://www.ifri.org/files/politique_...re/luttwak.pdf

[TheCurmudgeon]

I suppose this is a good time to clarify. COIN – counterinsurgency – is a type of operation. Population-Centric COIN is a strategy. I believe it is because the political end-state (stable, legitimate government) is identical to the operational end-state (stable, legitimate government). The key is legitimacy. It is, by definition, the recognized right to govern. Take that out of COIN and all that is left is tactics and operational concepts.

Here is a question/admonition I received by e-mail followed by my response.

I am surprised by this thread at SWJ. It's as if the past several years are erased away. The critique is that the insurgency should be put down first, then nation building or democratization may take place.


I already posted--years ago--Col Gentile's suggestion for the manual, that there be various options besides pop-COIN in the manual: "In general terms I would deconstruct the manual as it is now and break the singular link that it has with a certain theory of state building (known as population centric COIN). Once broken up I would then rewrite the doctrine from the ground up with three general parts: 1) would be a counterinsurgency approach centered on post-conflict reconstruction; 2) would be a counterinsurgency approach centered around military action to attack insurgent sources of military power (sometimes referred to as counter-terror or CT), but not linked to an endstate of a rebuilt or newly built nation state; 3) would be a counterinsurgency approach -- perhaps call it COIN light -- that would focus largely on Special Forces with some limited conventional army support conducting Foreign Internal Defense (FID)."

I don't get that thread. We have been over this a thousand times.

My response:

First I totally (ok partially) disagree. I would even go so far as to say that there is only one effective strategy in an intra-state conflict. That is to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the population.



Gentile is wrong when he claims that nation building equals population centric COIN. That is his primary error … it always has been and always will be. An external party cannot "create" a nation. We can "create" a government. We have done this effectively in the past. We can even “create” a democracy, we did it in Japan after WWII.



A Nation is largely a matter of identity. Theoretically nation building is possible. I could argue that Stalin did it in parts of the Soviet Union, including parts of the Ukraine. A fact that is now creating instability.



An insurgency is always a fight for the right to govern. The right to govern is granted by the population via legitimacy. You can govern through coercion, either naked threat or via bribery. But this will always require constant pressure on the population until you gain legitimacy.



If we don’t recognize this basic fact then we will be drawn into counterinsurgencies we cannot hope to win. Our history demonstrates this.

Disregarding for a moment that our intent in fighting the insurgency may have less to do with supporting the government and more to do with killing the insurgents (think, Pakistan), the ultimate objective should be to have the population accept the government as legitimate. That legitimacy will drain the pool in which the insurgent swims, to use the old Maoist metaphor.

All this could just be an academic exercise, but I believe that if we lose focus on legitimacy we lose.

[carl]

An accurate observation, but possibly an illegal act

Thompson said you must always do things in accordance with the law, but the law can be changed. In my little hypothetical, the Israelis would change the law.

[Bill Moore]

They do indeed have a strategy, it just isn't a sophisticated and complex. It's rudimentary. Kill people in a theatrical fashion and hope for the best. I said that I think twice above.

They didn't spend resources on something with no end. It was in accordance with their strategy, kill a lot of people in a theatrical way and hope for the best.

The 'kill' part is integral to all this. If OBL had issued a fatwa saying 'Boycott Pepsi and monkey wrench oil refineries' it wouldn't have had the same effect. That doesn't motivate young men, the key target audience. You want to motivate them, you say 'Kill'. They like that.

I think you are missing the obvious when you wonder why they don't hit economic targets. They aren't green beanies. They are takfiri killers. They want to kill because it makes them feel good to smack it to the kufars.

Terrorism is theater and you don't create theater by throwing wooden shoes in into a factory's machinery. When you say hope for the best, I guess we all do that to varying degrees. We build a school, we conduct a raid, we stand up a local government and we hope for the best. If it doesn't work then we should adjust our approach. I'm not confident we do this.

I think Al-Qaeda was hoping we invade in Afghanistan, and when the USS Cole and East Africa Embassy attacks didn't work they went back to the drawing board. That's my hypothesis. They are absolutely killers and they do so with a passion that only hate can generate. They still don't come close to being as radicalized and violent as the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese Army who killed tens of thousands. President Bush was right that evil exists in this world that must be dealt with. I don't debate that, I debate our approach/strategy for dealing with it.

[Bill Moore]

Bill, isn't this what we are doing in Afghanistan?

1. Killing leadership ... which only accomplishes the next rank moving up.

2. Changing conditions by trying to create responsible, representative government.

3. Attacking their ideas ... by offering an alternative via changing conditions.

It would seem that we are working an old fashion exhaustion campaign.

Perhaps we need to work more on number 3 by not responding with large military actions and treating the group as criminals instead of granting them the status of combatant via our responses to their actions.

Lastly, I really hate comments like "if you don't do this it is only a matter of time till AQ strikes again." AQ may strike again and it will have absolutely nothing to do with not implementing this plan, but it serves as a logical (though not causal) connection "proving" the author right. .... Hmmmmm .... If you don't listen to my ideas about doctrine there will be hurricanes in the Atlantic and Typhoons in the Pacific, mark my words!


But this is off topic.

I don't agree with his recommendations, it is the same ole standard line of we have to change conditions, and by definition we can't change conditions. I also agree with your off topic point.

[Bill Moore]

Fuchs and Bill Moore both raise factually accurate points, but I believe that sometimes we focus on the wrong facts and allow them to lead us logically into intractable situations.

Fuchs, certainly yes Iraq and Afghanistan are/were both occupations - but that is not a mission with task and purpose, it is simply a fact of our physical status.

And Bill, yes absolutely we blew out the existing sovereign and created power vacuums in both cases. There was no "host" government - but equally we had no intent to stay and submit those lands and the people who lived upon them to our sovereign control. I believe that second fact trumps the first. "Begin as you intend to finish.". It is about mind-set, perspective and priorities. This in turn shapes perceptions of the legitimacy of our own actions and the legitimacy of whatever host system of governance might ultimately emerge.

Based on our intent and purpose from the very start, from the moment President Bush declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq we were no longer fighting a short brutal war, but were beginning the long, even more brutal peace. That is FID, even if there is little to no host governance left to support. Perhaps we shouldn't have tossed out Gen Zinni's plan that left much of the Iraqi military intact to serve that role. Regardless, the nature of the game does not change because we chose to deal ourselves bad cards.

I can't agree that we weren't an occupying force just because our long term intent was to hand both Iraq and Afghanistan back over to their citizens. I also don't imply anything negative by being an occupying force, it is often a necessity in war, and it comes with legal responsibilities we largely ignored by pretending we weren't an occupying power. It is FID when the supported nation invites us to assist them, in reality we stood up a government and their security forces to assist us. If we go into Iraq it will be FID this time. A mind set doesn't change physical reality.