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.
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