This is a brief post to encourage comments on a perspective I’m continuing to develop.
Counterinsurgency seems to me to be a euphemism for our role in fighting guerrilla fighters. It’s a peculiar term that seems to charge those who attack an invading force with fault for starting aggression. Guerrilla warfare is not winnable because it requires the support of local populations over a large geographic area. Consider our losses in the Cuban Revolution and in Vietnam as examples. We can contrast this with waging war against a state, when the troops wear uniforms, the weapons have state seals, and there is a hierarchy that can accept defeat. This kind of war is winnable, though the cost in lives and resources remain intolerable.
For this reason, we will never achieve peace in Iraq through armed intervention. At best, continued “counterinsurgency” might eventually cause so much damage that the people cannot continue fighting (Orwellian “pacification”). Instead, the policy for dealing with a guerrilla culture must be rewritten in its entirety if we wish to bring peace.
Thoughts?
Counterinsurgency (many Europeans prefer the phrase “comprehensive approach”) is warfare between an out of power group (insurgents) against those in power (counterinsurgents). COIN, as we now call it, is becoming a way to approach these kinds of wars. This quote from Abu Muqawama is good.
“They therefore utilize the term “Comprehensive Approach” to denote the set of practices across the political, military, economic, social, and information spheres required to defeat an entrenched insurgent enemy.”
Conventional war usually involves controlling land, and defeating another army by killing enough of its soldiers that it surrenders. In COIN, killing the enemy is not enough. If not done well it often just breeds more bad guys. Rather than fighting for land you are really fighting for the people as your objective, hearts and minds if you will. If you can win over the people, the insurgents cannot hide and they cannot recruit. Winning the people, COIN refers to the people as the center of gravity, means employing all the assets mentioned in the quote above. Above all, it probably means having a legitimate government for the counterinsurgents to support.
Counterinsurgencies are winnable. Greece, Malaysia, the Phillipines (kinda) are a few examples. In Viet Nam and Cuba COIN techniques were not used, or used adequately. Indiscriminate bombing, napalm and Agent Orange do not win over the people (duh!). We trained the South Viet Nam Army to rpepare for a war against the Chinese. They were not prepared for a COIN war. The South Viet Namese government was far from legitimate. There were isolated areas where we emplyed good COIN tactics, but not on a sustained basis (some might dispute this). We had over 500,000 troops in country, but the people were never won over. For those who wanted to invade North Viet Nam, we forget that China may have become involved then. Additionally, it is not clear they would have cared. It would have just exposed more troops to attack and more area for us to hold. Remember that when they were fighting the French, they had planned on giving up al the major cities. Holding land was not their way to win. As long as they had support from the people, or at least not opposition, they could move freely and eventually wear down the French.
We dont have access to all their documents, but there is no reason to think they would have done differently against us.
I think we might have really had a chance to win (defining win is part of the problem), if we had done things correctly from the beginning. Disbanding the Army and the local political apparatus was a key mistake. I think it is possible than we can leave the country in a relatively stable condition. Creating a legitimate government is something only the Iraqis can do. I am not sure that can be done in our presence. We run the risk of being the Super SWAT team for whomever is currently in power.
Steve