Stubbing David's Toe Posted by Michael Cohen

David Shorr has offered an interesting critique below of my argument regarding the Powell Doctrine and its efficacy versus counter-insurgency doctrine. He makes the point that:

Interveners aren't the only ones who overplay their hand. Insurgencies can be brittle too -- operating as criminal gangs rather than genuine political movements or sowing the seeds of their own destruction with brutality against the local population.

Sure, this is absolutely true, insurgencies fail all the time. In fact, they probably fail more often then they succeed. But that isn't the issue. The question at hand is whether the US should fight them in the first place and whether we have the political will to see them through. I'm hard pressed to think of any that the US has fought over the past century that would be considered a strategic victory for the United States. One could argue that the US was successful in defeating an insurgency in the Philippines. It also took many, many years, involved the deaths of as many as a million people (estimates vary) and was defined by terrible acts of torture by the United States. In short, it's not exactly a model we can or should replicate.

As for other counter-insurgencies fought by the US they are a trail of woe - in Somalia and Lebanon, we packed up after getting our nose bloodied and left both places in even worse condition than we found them. In Vietnam, we had some limited success at turning the tide against the insurgency but of course we lost the war and at a terrible cost. In Iraq, we had some limited success, although it's still an open question as to whether we are actually fighting a counter-insurgent campaign or a pacification campaign. But that hardly matters; I can't imagine David or anyone else would argue it was a good idea for us to get involved in a guerrilla fighting campaign in Iraq. It was a point brought home to me last night when I saw the excellent and harrowing "The Hurt Locker."

Ironically, I would make the argument that the only successful counter-insurgency the United States ever fought or at least the one that brought the most obvious strategic victory was the Civil War - and we weren't exactly using modern COIN tactics then.

David argues, "[T]he political will to see such conflicts to the end was in short supply on the U.S. side -- and in great supply among its enemies . . . except when it isn't."  And David is right that factors vary from one situation to the next in general, but not really when the US intervenes in counter-insurgency conflicts. They almost always end badly or they force the US to pay far too great a price that is not commensurate with our national interests.

Now maybe our experience in Iraq has taught us the lessons of how to fight counter-insurgencies effectively. Maybe FM 3-24 is the holy grail that will ensure we are more successful at COIN in the future.

Color me skeptical.

Comments

[Zathras]

Successful insurgencies, whether opposed or not by the United States, almost always end badly as well.

The discipline, single-mindedness and ruthlessness necessary to overthrow an established government by force of arms does not ordinarily translate to successor regimes that respect the rights of their people and operate through orderly procedures. Having risked their lives to seize power, successful insurgents are generally willing to do almost anything to keep power. Some succesful insurgencies form governments that the United States can eventually deal with to the mutual benefit of all concerned, the obvious model being our relationship to the Franco regime in Spain after World War II.

It does not follow from that, I'm afraid, that a "hands-off" attitude toward all insurgencies advances American interests -- making all allowances for the argument that the time to intervene with the least risk is before an insurgency develops and organizes, by supporting legitimate governments. It is perfectly true that the descent of some countries into chaos is not something America can reverse at will; Lebanon in the 1980s -- which incidentally is a little removed from most people's ideas of an insurgency -- was too far gone for foreign peacekeepers to fix what had gone wrong, something obvious in retrospect that probably should have been obvious at the time as well.

I'm afraid it's also true, though, that a hands-off American attitude toward insurgencies would help produce more insurgencies, and more inward-looking, intolerant governments determined to suppress them. In somewhat the same way, the very public American (and UN) withdrawal from the famine relief effort in Somalia may have helped create the conditions that made Srbenica and the Rwandan genocide possible. An internationalist foreign policy by the United States doesn't guarantee anything, but a policy that lets those determined to upset the established order know they have nothing to fear from the United States promises marginally less trouble now and much greater problems later.

[Don Bacon]

For the 3,557th time, natives of a foreign land who resist US military invasions and occupations are not insurgents -- overthrowing an existing government -- the US military is. The resistors are counter-insurgents, and they therefore have the legal and nationalistic rights to defend their country against foreigners. What rights do the invaders have?

From those considerations comes the motivation of people resisting the US military, and David Shorr might understand that if he got out more. On the other hand, Michael Cohen is more than skeptical, he has become my favorite DA diarist since Heather Hurlburt and Lorelei Kelly dropped from sight.

Michael did slip on the Philippines, though. The US defeated the Spanish and then fought against the Filipinos who ought to have taken control of their own country -- certainly it was not an "insurgency" on their part. It was a US colonial war, and we currently have modern examples of that.

[el-belle]

A point that sounds like nitpicking but i think is actually quiet relevant in both your examples of American "wins" in Insurgencies, the Philippines and the American Civil War. In both cases, I would argue that its debatable whether what was being fought was a insurgency at all, because of the fact that following victory, the US proceeded to set up very permanent and direct control of the losing side's territory for the next 50 odd years, either in the form of traditional colonialism, or in the reconstruction policies.

Given that in the past Mr. Cohen has not seemed to be an advocate of such a presence in either Iraq or Afghanistan(and frankly I cant think of anyone who is), a consideration of the tactics used in either war seems to form a very weak analogy to the current conflicts.

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