Is COIN dead?
Trefor Moss agrees with a growing number of analysts that counter-insurgency is on the way out:
These are probably very good reasons for reorienting NATO and the U.S. military away from COIN â?? but not, it seems to me, the best or most obvious one. COIN should be abandoned because itâ??s time to accept that it simply hasnâ??t worked.Counterinsurgency was always a paradoxical idea that involved the simultaneous waging of war and peace on the same country: you shoot the bad guys and build schools for the good guys. Afghanistan, though, was always resistant to these neat distinctions. The bad guys didnâ??t always seem so bad, and we were never quite sure if the good guys were really on our side.
Even so, politicians, military commanders and think tankers often maintained that the problem in Afghanistan wasnâ??t COIN itself, but rather the inadequacy of the doctrineâ??s implementation. In theory, yes, counterinsurgency could have delivered in Afghanistan â?? if thereâ??d been a million more troops and a trillion more dollars. Or if the terrain hadnâ??t been so impenetrable, or the tribal politics so inscrutable. Or if Karzai hadnâ??t been Karzai, and Pakistan hadnâ??t been Pakistan...
COIN was wreathed in so much hype that for a long time there was a general, uncritical acceptance that it was the right and only way. But in the end, Afghanistan left counterinsurgency looking like intellectual naivete: a smart idea on paper that was utterly unworkable in real world conditions.
Another important aspect of the counter-insurgency debate is not whether or not it worked or "could work" if adequately-resourced, but whether the U.S. should really put itself into a position where it needs to suppress an insurgency in the first place.
Put another way, if the U.S. had to do Afghanistan over again, would it have been better to apply the approach used at the early outset of the war (special forces and air power) without any commitment to reconstruction, nation building or political reform?
Libya is a bit instructive in this regard. Post war Libya is quite unstable - with armed militia groups holding out against what is nominally the governing authority in the country. It may yet collapse into a full-blown civil or tribal war. But the U.S. accomplished the goal of killing Gaddafi and running his family out of power and won't be stuck with large numbers of troops in the country and billions of dollars on the line should things get ugly.
The entire recourse to counter-insurgency, then, was indicative of a larger and more important failure in American strategy - the imposition of goals for Afghanistan that were far too broad and ambitious given the nature of the conflict the U.S. found itself in after 9/11. COIN is very much like asking whether we can clean up a mess after we've made one - a good question, but better to figure out how not to make the mess in the first place.
