COIN in a non-state environment

[TheCurmudgeon]

COIN seems to be predicated on the idea that there is a functioning (albeit not necessarily legitimate) government in place. That the insurgency is fighting to replace that government. What happens when there is not a government?

The obvious example is Afghanistan, where Karzai is often referred to as nothing more than the "mayor of Kabul". If there is no real state, do the doctrines underlying COIN really apply?

[Global Scout]

Where does it state that COIN requires a functioning government? If you buy into Bob's World's arguments then the conditions were set for insurgency because the State wasn't functioning well to begin with.

I think Karzai is more than a Mayor and he extends control beyond Kabul, but as you state he doesn't control a lot beyond Kabul. If it isn't an insurgency what is it? A civil war? If that was the case then the doctrinal approach (I'm not saying this is right) would be peace enforcement.

[M-A Lagrange]

Per definition, you need a government to have insurgents. The fact that the government is or not legitimate does not really matter.
In failed states, governing by abandonning part of the State supremacy to local war lords can and has been a form of government in failed states. In such cases, it is difficult to really establish if government is representing the whole State or just the formal form of administration that a modern state can discuss with.
But even in non state environment, such as Somalia, you do have a form of government. The main issue is that it is not unified, does not correspond to our form of governance... Therefore each and every little agreement has to be negociated with each and every war lord. I like to picture it as an archepelago of small state like organisations in a sea of sand...
If you want to impose a webberian modern state on them, I am not that sure that you need COIN in the first place. At least not pop centric COIN.
You need to establish the military suprematy of the government you do support first. That needs to be violent and unflexible.
Then, in the area where you have control on you can think about pop centric COIN as a magnet to rally populations to your side. But they will rally just because your the strongest, mightest and they fear you, not for any other reasons. The social services and formal state administration will just a cherry on the top of the cake.

[TheCurmudgeon]

If you want to impose a webberian modern state on them, I am not that sure that you need COIN in the first place. At least not pop centric COIN.
You need to establish the military suprematy of the government you do support first. That needs to be violent and unflexible.
Then, in the area where you have control on you can think about pop centric COIN as a magnet to rally populations to your side. But they will rally just because your the strongest, mightest and they fear you, not for any other reasons. The social services and formal state administration will just a cherry on the top of the cake.

I was thinking the same thing, but this was tried by the Soviets. Maybe their failure was their attempt to use a Marxist version of COIN, trying to convince the locals that they were the abused proletariat.

I would have to agree that the average rural Afghan will side with whomever can provide long term security as long as they do not try to change the social structure. Not sure how violent and inflexible you can be, not because they will not accept your rule but because we don't have the support for those type of tactics. However, in principle I think that is a strategy that would work.

[slapout9]

If it isn't an insurgency what is it? A civil war? If that was the case then the doctrinal approach (I'm not saying this is right) would be peace enforcement.

A Covert Invasion from Pakistan using a Guerrilla Army(Guerrilla=Armed Civilians).

[Bob's World]

You need to establish the military suprematy of the government you do support first. That needs to be violent and unflexible.
Then, in the area where you have control on you can think about pop centric COIN as a magnet to rally populations to your side. But they will rally just because your the strongest, mightest and they fear you, not for any other reasons. The social services and formal state administration will just a cherry on the top of the cake.

Oh boy. I had a squad leader like that who worked for me back in my PL days in the mech infantry in West Germany. He would treat his guys like crap all week long, then on Friday afternoon he'd buy a case of sodas to share. He came to me one day asking me why none of his guys liked him, what with him buying them sodas and all.

I told him "Its because your an a*@hole, SGT M." "Your men have no respect for you because you have no respect for them, and then try to bribe away your sins at the end of the week. It won't work. You need to treat them the same way you'd want to be treated."

As to Afghanistan, of course there is a government; we took out their competition, picked them a leader, allowed them to build an overly centrally controlled Ponzi scheme free from any legal popular challenge, and then dedicated ourselves to protecting it.

What is surprising to me is that anyone is surprised that there is an insurgency to challenge what we've enabled to exist.

[Stan]

That's Africa whether you install a government or not (we've done it more times that I care to even remember and with a lot more money than we currently have invested in Afghanistan). I dare not call the resistance an insurgency (as was once pointed out to me earlier this year) while millions die.

Anyone who has at least a tour on the dark continent would appreciate where M-A is coming from. Yes, his appraisal has little to do with Muslims and their culture, or does it ?

Respect ? Has nothing to do with Africa as you end up in the river with the crocks.

[Bob's World]

That's Africa whether you install a government or not (we've done it more times that I care to even remember and with a lot more money than we currently have invested in Afghanistan). I dare not call the resistance an insurgency (as was once pointed out to me earlier this year) while millions die.

Anyone who has at least a tour on the dark continent would appreciate where M-A is coming from. Yes, his appraisal has little to do with Muslims and their culture, or does it ?

Respect ? Has nothing to do with Africa as you end up in the river with the crocks.

Perhaps an initial assessment would have came back with: "These guys really don't do "states", and simply because the US only has a State Department for running our foreign policy is no reason to force half the world's populace into that structure to accommodate them. Perhaps DOS could make a minor adjustment or two, and learn to interact with other structures more acceptable to the people who will have to live with them."

No, M-A is running off of a mindset that, while never acceptable, did at least work fairly well up to about the mid-1800s. As info/transportation technology with the harnessing of steam and electricity, such models have been in an accelerating downward spiral ever since.

[davidbfpo]

We started with Curmudgeon's opening statement:

COIN seems to be predicated on the idea that there is a functioning (albeit not necessarily legitimate) government in place. That the insurgency is fighting to replace that government. What happens when there is not a government?

Perhaps we in the West, where we currently have relatively stable societies and borders, need to adjust to those parts of the Third World which governance and / or governments that are very, very different? Alongside an appreciation that such places can change, for the better and the worse (as reflected in another thread on Africa).

I have yet to see an appreciation of this in the British political realm, except some "think tanks", where short-term dominates. It is difficult to see a Western politician explain that the burden and cost of intervention / help will not produce an effect we can understand. A point that appeared on the Haiti thread, with an unexpected political twist in Canada and another on "kith & kin" IIRC.

With the current situation in the Ivory Coast, a successful nation until a few years ago, with both a French and UN intervention force trying to resolve two competing governments this is a current issue. A few years ago there was the collapse, if not civil war in Congo-Brazzaville that made it a "basket" case.

Surely the first rule for the West is to help conflict prevention and keep out of COIN?

[Stan]

In fact, most Africans have never done “States”. We’ve been in the business of installing them, financing them, and politically coaxing them for the last 60 years.

State runs our foreign policy ?
Sorry, have way too many years with those folks. Perhaps they are legislatively responsible for running foreign policy ? That must be it

Accommodate them ? We’re back to respecting our troops I recon.

You’re not accommodating nor respecting them. What you have done is evened the playing field. Do we actually think we will change what 200 years has bred into them ?

M-A’s mindset is just what we’ve been successfully accomplishing for the last 25 years there. Sadly, a few never get it and conclude in their witless minds they endured a hardship tour

Info and Transportation… in Africa ? Ever served there for three years ?
Steam electricity… Naw, we built their electric dams too on the taxpayer’s dime !

[selil]

I would directly counter that "states" as in "nation states" have a relatively short history. Empires rise and fall through history, but other than centralized power there are a lot of different models that have existed. Principalities, city-states, fiefdoms, however you cut them up there are a lot of different styles. The nomadic types don't do or recognize states but we have a fairly long history of them being involved in insurgency and other forms of conflict.

I don't have the historical grounding in the forms of conflict and their finest details. I can discuss in detail how this might be expressed in cyber space and why thinking nation-states in a realm that techno-states take precedence might be an issue.

[Steve the Planner]

I think there is a very big disconnect between what America really is and what the nickel tour perception is.

Try to build a regional mall or a muslin cultural center anywhere in the US,or, as a school staff, propose redistricting school boundaries in an affluent area, and you will rapidly learn how much active local governments, communities and neighborhoods actually exist, along with their diffuse powers and interests.

The US, in itself, is a highly-fragmented and locally-distributed form of governance, gridded by a relatively recent Great Society "carrots-and-sticks" structure that, in certain fields, serves to harmonize specific ranges of activity by minimum standards, enabling compliances, or mandated bodies and procedures.

Wheel back to just the 1950s, and you could not easily drive from Washington to Norfolk without scratching your way past one speed trap town after another. It was safer, cheaper, easier to take the Night Boat down the Potomac. All this village-by-village, tribe-by-tribe value capture stuff only left the stage after the Interstate Highway system came into play, with many federal "harmonizing" rules and structures taking the steam out of localism for Interstate commerce.

Oh, how we Americans forget/ignore basic lessons of our own recent past!

I suspect that the future international landscape will be a uniquely crafted balance of diffuse local controls and federal/international "harmonizing" norms---some places accept some or all of them, and some accept none.

The challenge is how we come to terms with them to assure minimum standards like security, trade and travel in a global landscape.

Our current efforts do not seem to represent a cost-effective, sustainable format for the future, nor a stable path forward for Afghanistan and its many peoples and communities.

To the core of this thread---if what we want is minimum security, trade and travel options in around and through Afghanistan, what difference should it make to us what structure they choose to associate through?

Why is Karzai essential/relevant to our interests? Or theirs?

[Global Scout]

Posted by Slapout,

A Covert Invasion from Pakistan using a Guerrilla Army(Guerrilla=Armed Civilians).

that is definitely part of it, and a reason the population centric approach alone won't work. You won't defeat the ISI in the villages of Afghanistan. There is also the resistance piece to our occupation. There is also the traditional identity squables.

If this was simply an "internal" insurgency to change the government I think we actually would have wrapped it by now, but it is much more than that and I'm not convinced the answers are in FM 3-24.

[Dayuhan]

I tend to agree with M-A that insurgency by definition requires a government, unless we're stretching the definition of insurgency beyond the breaking point. Somalia, for example, is not really an insurgency, more of a disorganized civil war.

I understand that there's a level of confusion between "ungoverned" and "self-governed", but in many places neither really applies. In many of these areas traditional tribal governance structures have been severely degraded and face competition from independent armed groups (what media invariably and melodramatically call "warlords") and groups funded by external government and non-government sources. In many cases "contested" might be a more accurate description than "ungoverned" or "self-governed".

Where we do have conflict between government and insurgent, we're seeing a significant difference between what might be called "traditional COIN", in which an acknowledged government (maybe bad or illegitimate, but acknowledged as a government) is threatened by insurgents, and what might be called "regime change COIN", in which the acknowledged government has been removed and an external power has decided that one group is "the government" and all others are "insurgents". These distinctions may carry little weight with the populace or with the groups involved. What makes a "government" a government? Is it enough to sit in the chair, wear the t-shirt, and have US approval? Or must they actually govern? If we put Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck, and Olive Oyl in the palace and call them "government" (not all that far-fetched, considering some of the people we've put in power over the years), do they become "the government" because that's what we call them? One might argue that opposition to regime change doesn't really become insurgency until the "government" put in power by outside intervention actually becomes a functioning, acknowledged, government.

I suspect that the differences between "traditional COIN" and "regime change COIN", and the questionable extent to which the lessons of the former are applicable to the latter, are insufficiently appreciated.

M-A and Stan also have a valid, if often unwelcome, point when he mentions that we are not intervening in Massachusetts, and that when we go to places where different rules apply we have to deal with those different rules, especially if an extended intervention is contemplated and still more if we are considering "nation-building". It seems to me that a lot of our problems come from designing and presenting our interventions to appeal to our own domestic audience, rather than to the populace and the contending parties in the place where we're intervening.

If we're not willing to deal with the political and cultural realities of these places, we should consider not going to them, or at least not staying there for any more time than is required to deliver a simple message.

STP says:

if what we want is minimum security, trade and travel options in around and through Afghanistan, what difference should it make to us what structure they choose to associate through?

I don't even think we need that. Their security is not our concern, trade potential is insignificant, and it ain't exactly Bora Bora. All we need is to deny refuge to those who would attack us and our allies. I don't see how that requires us to govern Afghanistan or to shape Afghan governance.

[M-A Lagrange]

Ok, I might come somewhere here to clarify my point.

Oh boy. I had a squad leader like that who worked for me back in my PL days in the mech infantry in West Germany. He would treat his guys like crap all week long, then on Friday afternoon he'd buy a case of sodas to share. He came to me one day asking me why none of his guys liked him, what with him buying them sodas and all.

Bob, I do think that respect is something important. If you treat your team as #### them you are a bad leader. I do agree with that. Being strong, violent and inflexible does not mean being unjust. But, as in Bible or in Koran you have to be the God that punish, not the one who loves. Well at least where I am.

Anyone who has at least a tour on the dark continent would appreciate where M-A is coming from. Yes, his appraisal has little to do with Muslims and their culture, or does it ?

As Stan does state, the problematic is how you get respect, not how people appreciate you. If I take a Muslim example, North Sudan, the services are delivered on a discriminative approach and used to undermine local powers or even a whole group of people because of the opinion of their leaders. While Sharia was a law made to protect women (At the begining of Islam), now it’s a tool use to justify any crazy abuse on women… (40 lashes because you wear a trouser when you are a women inNorth Sudan. )
In neighbouring Somalia, what makes you a power is not the money you distribute but the level of violence you can distribute. Somali fear Ethiopians. Not because Ethiopians are nicer but because they crush them without remorse anytime they put a foot in Somalia. And so do the Kenyans with the South Sudanese and Ugandans too.

M-A and Stan also have a valid, if often unwelcome, point when he mentions that we are not intervening in Massachusetts, and that when we go to places where different rules apply we have to deal with those different rules, especially if an extended intervention is contemplated and still more if we are considering "nation-building". It seems to me that a lot of our problems come from designing and presenting our interventions to appeal to our own domestic audience, rather than to the populace and the contending parties in the place where we're intervening.

As Dayuhan says, it’s not politically correct and may be not bankable on domestic audience but that’s how it works there.
And please, do not mistake me; I do believe that State and Nation State in particular have a role and a responsibility in protecting their citizens. I do believe that the scheme you developed Bob is very much applicable in a place like Irak.
But if you want to impose a webberian/modern state/administration on a population who lives without it, you have to look at what they do take as a mark of respect. Unfortunately, in such case Might is right.
But in more sophisticated environment as Kenya or Ivory Cost, Right is might. But we are starting in a complete different setting: nations with a functioning state apparatus.
The point here is what to do in a non state context. All states, even Europ started first by being unified under a strong, violent and unflexible military power which with time became a modern state. That may be the first step? To go further.

[Stan]

I tend to agree with M-A that insurgency by definition requires a government, unless we're stretching the definition of insurgency beyond the breaking point. Somalia, for example, is not really an insurgency, more of a disorganized civil war.

... In many cases "contested" might be a more accurate description than "ungoverned" or "self-governed".

Hey Dayuhan,
Thanks for a breath of fresh air !

I think this is exactly where we once again misuse the USA cookie cutter by not understanding just who it is we're dealing with. Your statement holds true for 11 of the African countries I served in over a decade or more. The only remote similarity to Afghanistan would be governance in the capital and perhaps where the president resides. That's pretty much the extent of governing in Africa. Hence the term "jungle rules".

Is it enough to sit in the chair, wear the t-shirt, and have US approval? Or must they actually govern? If we put Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck, and Olive Oyl in the palace and call them "government" (not all that far-fetched, considering some of the people we've put in power over the years), do they become "the government" because that's what we call them? One might argue that opposition to regime change doesn't really become insurgency until the "government" put in power by outside intervention actually becomes a functioning, acknowledged, government.

This holds true to this day. The stamp of approval (we never gave out T-shirts, but that's not a bad idea ), works well until the cash is gone and the population and local military go haywire, then it's every man for himself. Many of the governments never reached maturity but there were obvious reasons for that. Then we once again indignantly step in and cut off the remaining support The rest is pretty easy to figure out and every Western power has equally failed at it.

M-A and Stan also have a valid, if often unwelcome, point when he mentions that we are not intervening in Massachusetts, and that when we go to places where different rules apply we have to deal with those different rules, especially if an extended intervention is contemplated and still more if we are considering "nation-building". It seems to me that a lot of our problems come from designing and presenting our interventions to appeal to our own domestic audience, rather than to the populace and the contending parties in the place where we're intervening.

If we're not willing to deal with the political and cultural realities of these places, we should consider not going to them, or at least not staying there for any more time than is required to deliver a simple message.

It's not only a set of confusing rules (ROE) from the onset, but the stark realities when the program doesn't bear fruit during the time the hierarchy is in charge. Case in point with many of our State folks who think an injection of cash and 30 soldiers will have an immediate effect on a civil war (five civil wars in three separate countries in less than two years to be precise).

Regards, Stan

[Bob's World]

Establishing legitimate governance is a very different mission than countering insurgency; yet we tend to blur these things. So the title of "COIN in a non-state environment" leads us into a rabbit hole of debate where there is no right answer.

Drop the COIN mission from the title, and simply ask: How does one establish legitimate government where none currently exists?

To throw the obligatory "COIN" word in only serves to create even more confusion about insurgency and COIN; and does not help get to the real problem at hand.

I will agree with M-A that if one is coming into an area with the intent to stay and govern, one must first defeat the resistance to one's presence, followed by a persistent demonstration that that initial defeat was no fluke or overly enabled by some third party (like the US with the Northern Alliance over the Taliban; or even the US and the West with Israel over the Arab populaces and states). One must earn the initial respect that comes from the knowledge that resistance is futile. Next one must earn the subsequent respect that comes from good governance. It is only at that point, well after one has formed the state, that COIN comes into play. This is also the point that what was guerrilla warfare to challenge some party seeking to establish governance over a region transforms to an insurgency to resist/overthrow that new government. If one does not earn that initial "right of might" legitimacy over the populace and land they seek to govern, then insurgent (and neighboring state) challenges to their governance will be rapid, strong, and persistent. But it has to be done on one's own merits, and the US relies far too much on the effectiveness of us employing our merits to back some party who otherwise had little chance to prevail (at least in the eyes of the populace, or those forced out); resulting in long drawnout dramas after the fact.

So, following that logic, applying sound COIN principles to governance in Europe is far more important and logical than attempting to apply sound COIN principles to HOA. Much of Africa would be better served by an Attila, to similarly defeat/bind together the tribes of a weak, disjointed region into a larger, stronger, more cohesive whole. But that isn't very PC, and certainly is not in the COIN manual (and by definition, cannot be enabled by the backing of some third party, such as the U.S.).

[Stan]

I can’t comment with any experience on COIN (I think I retired before it was invented ), but whole heartedly agree that our current objectives in Sub-Sahara seem misguided only by terms and interagency meddling. I’m of the opinion that our current missions at establishing peace and a legit government are misguided by each and every administration. Regardless of what was presented (professional military advice from those on the ground), it was dismissed as it didn’t fit the current popular administration’s theme (let alone be PC).

An extreme example would be in 94, when a SFSO declared that the Rwandan refugee crisis and subsequent civil wars in two countries would last “two weeks tops” ! At that point, there were three of us trying to fix a “one-million/plus people problem” in a country with no infrastructure what so ever. The Colonel and I nearly drank ourselves silly at the thought of such idiocy. Imagine that same idiot’s spouse is now the 2OIC for a major command !

I really enjoyed a short note from M-A where he states “I would also tend to believe that many do not understand "war" between non modern countries as it is: violent, dirty and violent again.“

I doubt seriously that this operating method is PC, but most of the third parties don’t actually perform these unpopular missions… We hire beltway bandits and contract former soldiers to do it. We still are for that matter (shadowed by the current conflicts elsewhere).

There is nothing traditional about a civil war where over 4,000 die every day and are stacked on the road like cord wood for the West to clean up with bulldozers. The US and French infantry were showing real signs of depression, yet, not a single shot (then) was fired. I doubt there’s much one could do to adequately prepare a soldier for that experience and still remain PC, IAW the COIN manual.

[Entropy]

This is an interesting discussion!

I would like people to consider an alternative view, however, that Afghanistan is not so different from these African "states." In particular, there is this comment from Bob:

I will agree with M-A that if one is coming into an area with the intent to stay and govern, one must first defeat the resistance to one's presence, followed by a persistent demonstration that that initial defeat was no fluke or overly enabled by some third party (like the US with the Northern Alliance over the Taliban; or even the US and the West with Israel over the Arab populaces and states). One must earn the initial respect that comes from the knowledge that resistance is futile. Next one must earn the subsequent respect that comes from good governance. It is only at that point, well after one has formed the state, that COIN comes into play. This is also the point that what was guerrilla warfare to challenge some party seeking to establish governance over a region transforms to an insurgency to resist/overthrow that new government. If one does not earn that initial "right of might" legitimacy over the populace and land they seek to govern, then insurgent (and neighboring state) challenges to their governance will be rapid, strong, and persistent

My essential argument would be that a state has not formed in Afghanistan in this context and that Afghanistan was still in the midst of a civil war when we invaded - a civil war which our invasion has not settled. I would argue that Afghanistan more resembles Somalia than, say, Pakistan.

Afghanistan was once a state, but no more. The traditions and institutions that allowed Afghanistan to be a governable entity through much of the 20th century are gone and have been gone for a generation. Our effort there, then, really isn't COIN, in my opinion, but nation-building in the midst of still on-going civil war.

In my opinion our money, our combat power and our large footprint masks this reality and provides the illusion that we have created governance - a state - in Afghanistan and that protecting that government requires COIN since, by definition, insurgency is opposition to a government. In reality we have, to put it simply, taken sides in a civil war and our failures there are rooted in our inability to consider and acknowledge this reality. This is something the Pakistani's understand which is partly why support for their "side" continues despite a decade of complaints by us.

I'm about as far from being an expert on Africa as one can be, but I see a lot of parallels between Afghanistan and Africa, the main one being how borders were drawn and how unnatural those borders are to the people who actually live there.

[Stan]

Thanks for a very interesting observation and some of the parallels that are not too often evident.

This is an interesting discussion!

I would like people to consider an alternative view, however, that Afghanistan is not so different from these African "states." In particular, there is this comment from Bob:

As my experiences in Afghanistan were rather limited to a direct support mission and out in the boonies, nation building and COIN were not part of our goals or worries.

I will say however, that much of what I learned in Africa applied relatively well in Afghanistan when dealing with the general population. What was also evident then (2001 - 2005), was the extent of any governance. Once out of the capital, there was none other than what the local populace considered and manipulated.

In my opinion our money, our combat power and our large footprint masks this reality and provides the illusion that we have created governance - a state - in Afghanistan and that protecting that government requires COIN since, by definition, insurgency is opposition to a government. In reality we have, to put it simply, taken sides in a civil war and our failures there are rooted in our inability to consider and acknowledge this reality. This is something the Pakistani's understand which is partly why support for their "side" continues despite a decade of complaints by us.

This may be where there is only a slight semblance of comparison as the USA has yet to literally invade and occupy Africa. Although much of the lessons from the French and Belg are clear (which is what M-A was pointing out). If we have no intent on staying for the long haul, better to perhaps rethink our options. Our missions there were very short-term. expensive and painful - one would have thought we were tired of liking our wounds, or, get real with the cultural realities - when in Rome !

I'm about as far from being an expert on Africa as one can be, but I see a lot of parallels between Afghanistan and Africa, the main one being how borders were drawn and how unnatural those borders are to the people who actually live there.

Couldn't have put it better myself
But, I think you touch on an area that most of us "Africa Hands" often complain about when sent reinforcements or replacements.

There are obviously some very proven and unpopular methods at work, and I won't pretend to know what to do with COIN or nation building in such an inhospitable place like Sub-Sahara.