Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
Again, though, where is the host nation government in this process? Is it just US Military, USAID, US Agencies involved?

If the key problem is, say, the lack of a road or a bridge or an irrigation system, it might be possible to address this with a project funded by AID and protected by the military, driven purely by US involvement. Rarely is it so simple. What if your driver of conflict is, for example, conflict over land between a migrant and an indigenous population? Or central government support for a regional governor that a segment of the population considers to be irretrievably hostile to their interests? Or a government's desire to extract resources that a portion of the population regards as theirs? Or a perception that government is taking sides in a longstanding clan or tribal dispute? Or... obviously this could go on and on, but the point is simple: more often than not the problems driving insurgency are not things that one set of Americans can draw up a list of and whistle in a group of American agencies to neatly solve. More often than not elements of host country government will be neck deep in the problem; they may not be at all sympathetic with the solutions we may propose. There may be a number of actors on the ground with conflicting agendas. Some of them may have agendas quite conrary to ours. The idea that "we" - by definition outsiders and not direct parties to the insurgency - can simply walk into a situation, identify "the problem", and develop a program among our agencies to solve it seems to leave out some realities that are almost always present in these situations.
HN must be out front. Sorry not to state something so obvious. In fact, best if the HN is doing this all by itself, all the time, and never requiring any outside assistance what so ever.

Which goes to my points that COIN is no more and no less than the continuous process of governance by the HN for its own populace. And only when it loses touch with its duties to its populace does it find itself facing an insurgency. Outside parties come to such troubled states either to protect their interests there (FID) or to create interests there (UW). It is a continuous process in every country, everywhere, everyday. We only notice when it goes kinetic and somehow involves us.

This is why I caution severely any (and this is most) who think they are doing COIN when they go to another's country. To take such a perspective on your role is to set yourself on a course of inappropriate actions and mission creep. And I don't see the fact that one invaded and removed the existing government as an excuse unless you also annexed the country and claimed it as your own and intend to keep it as such. Otherwise, you are back in the FID role again and need to work diligently to not take on too much of the role of the sovereign, nor to create too much of a perception that the new government draws its legitmacy more from you the invader than from the populace of that land. Tricky business all around.