Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
The real problem is that Afghanistan is not COIN, it's a war. Our efforts to treat it as COIN effort and our US Government wide institutional failure to be prepared for or to reject participation in such conflicts are partly why it is now a war.
I read this comment echoed several times on this thread and others. Afghanistan is counter-insurgency fighting. An insurgency attempts to overthrow the government; a counter-insurgency attempts to defeat those attempts. By defining insurgency and counter-insurgency like this, we can see that politics is the key driving force on either side (whether your politics are religiously motivated or not, they are still politics).

I have to define Afghanistan as a counter-insurgency because it will require political solutions. When commenters say it is not COIN it is war, what they mean is it is not Iraq. That is true, it is a rural insurgency fought mainly with guerilla tactics. It is also extremely intense and kinetic, but it is still COIN.