The Incoherence of COIN Advocates: Andrew Exum Edition
In a recent post on his blog (Losing Patience with GIRoA), Exum makes a startling argument that raises fundamental questions about whether mainstream counter-insurgency theorists — of which Exum is one of the most prominent examples — actually understand the connection between military forces and political goals.
He writes:
There is a growing realization that we can run the greatest counterinsurgency campaign in the world’s history in Afghanistan and that it will all be for naught as long as the government of Afghanistan remains weak, catastrophically corrupt, or both.
This actually continues a theme he has been developing recently. In another post (The Limits of Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan), he writes:
Many of those who have studied Afghanistan closely over the past several years have come to the conclusion that a corrupt Afghan government represents as big a threat to U.S. and allied mission success as the Quetta Shura Taliban or the Haqqani Network.
He has also stated (Back from Afghanistan):
….I set about examining ISAF operations and strategy, which will largely succeed or fail based on the degree to which the institutions of the Afghan state are capable of defeating this insurgency. To say we are facing an uphill struggle in Afghanistan is an understatement. But as a famous commander once said, hard is not hopeless.
See, in Exum’s mind, the problem with in Afghanistan is not our reliance on ahistorical theorizing, but rather just that those darn Afghans won’t get with the program. You can’t blame Exum or Nagl or Biddle or Petraeus, if only those pesky Afghans would properly absorb the population-security COIN framework, we could still “win.”
There are few things more distasteful than this sort of pre-emptive blame shifting. Yes, it is a staple of inside-the-beltway gamesmanship. But that does not make it intellectually honest. Let’s review the situation.
The COIN theorists would like the Afghan government to field a force of somewhere in the neighborhood of 400,000-600,000 disciplined troops, capable of using discriminant force and avoiding civilian casualties. They’d like the Aghan government to eliminate corruption. They’d like the central government to find a way to build loyalty from provincial governors and other local elites, to ensure an Afghan “whole of government” response.
Actually, it isn’t that the COIN theorists would “like” this. They require it as a precondition for the viability of their strategy. This is like writing a business plan for a new start-up that assumes you have the killer app to sell and then focuses all its details on the design for the corporate suite.
But unfortunately, the prerequisites are actually virtually impossible to achieve. The Afghan government does not have the tax base, infrastructure, expertise, or — significantly — the inclination to build the kind of military and institutional capacity that our strategy requires from the local partner. Furthermore, the desire to curtail corruption runs counter to the desire to secure the cooperation of provincial leaders. We are setting the Afghans up to fail. And unfortunately, setting the Afghans up to fail is a win-win scenario for the COIN theorists. If, by some miracle, the Afghan government is able to meet our needs, we will claim credit for having given the Afghans a model to achieve. If the Afghans fail, then any negative consequences will be the fault of the Afghans.
That is not the way to develop a sound military strategy. In the standard model, military strategy is conceived as a cycle where the theorist explores ends, ways, means, and RISKS. What we have in Afghanistan is a super-risky approach because some of the key assumptions are profoundly unlikely. The proper response to this situation is to develop a branches and sequels framework. What if the Afghans can’t deliver? Exum — et al — essentially say, “well, in that case, that is their fault.” But the problem is that if you genuinely believe that Afghanistan is so significant that it warrants the expenditure of American blood and treasure for a decade or more, you need to provide a solution, not just a response that sustains your position in the American punditocracy.
We’ve gone down this road before. In South Vietnam, Ngo Dihn Diem was an effective leader in many ways. He suppressed criminal gangs and religious cults, and managed to establish control over most of the key levers of power. He was also corrupt, gave preferences to the Catholic minority in the country, and surrounded himself with various mediocrities and some fanatics. Because he was not our ideal counter-insurgency leader, we threw him overboard. For a decade after his assassination in 1963, we chased after a chimera of our ideal leader, rarely stopping to consider the realm of the possible.
A sane strategy for Afghanistan begins with an assessment of Afghan government capacity as it exists today, not as we wish it existed. From there, you have to assume that its capacity will increase slowly — at best — or suffer dramatic reverses — at worst. Can we win in that kind of scenario?
Actually, the answer is probably yes — (though I have argued that Afghanistan is not worth the effort regardless). After all, the Taliban controlled 90% of Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001 with security forces less than one-tenth the size of the force we think we need to control Afghanistan. We have adopted a “strategy” that will accomplish the same goal, but with massively larger requirements.
There are two main reasons why we are doing so:
(1) Lack of imagination.
(2) Political convenience.
The latter is really unconscionable, but reading Exum it is hard to avoid the sense that part of the reason he is so attached to his proposed operational concept is that it contains within it a ready made excuse if it happens to fail. “Don’t blame me. Blame the Afghans!”
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I’m no expert on the Afghanistan war and certainly not much interested in it.
Nevertheless, I have a strong feeling that the COIN mafia overestimates its own relevance.
The Iraq war ran out of steam when the ethnic cleansing was complete and the Sunnis realized that victory is unlikely. COIN was only one of several and possibly not even a decisive factor there.
In Afghanistan, Karzai is said to have focused on eliminating Northern Alliance (non-Pashtu) political opposition for years. He may turn to combat the Pashtu opposition (Taliban) after the elections, and whatever he achieves; the COIN crowd will surely sell it as their achievement.
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By the way; there’s another impossible requirement in the Afghan War; to clear and hold. The “hold” part is impossible; not enough troops.
A German quote from Frederick the Great goes like “The one who wants to defend everything defends nothing.”
The ongoing operations suffer badly from lacking the indigenous troops to do the “hold” job. That was predictable, of course.
The French have a new counter-rebellion manual that divides the country in three parts: One of these parts is made up of areas that cannot be held and won’t be cleared.
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