Matt Yglesias

First-Order Counterinsurgency in India

There was a very interesting article in the Times over the weekend about India’s decision to step up efforts to combat a growing Maoist insurgency centered in the state of Chattisgarh, but now spreading to surrounding areas as well:

Or one piece of it. India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period.

If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.

I don’t know much of anything about the subject other than what’s in the article. It did, however, serve as a reminder that there’s a difference between this kind of situation and the kind of thing that tends to go under the term “counterinsurgency” in the American context. What India has is an insurgency. So the insurgency is being fought by India, which is trying to counter the insurgency.

A lot of what makes the Afghanistan situation problematic is that we’re not there providing assistance to an Afghan government’s counterinsurgency strategy. Instead, we seem to be trying to coerce/cajole the Afghan government into adopting what we think of as a sound approach. That’s a tricky needle to thread.

Counterinsurgency Needs Civilian Cabilities

Steve Metz has an excellent TNR piece making the case that pious talk aside, we’ve done nothing to actually build the civilian capabilities that all our defense policy planners and political leaders say we need in order to conduct the sort of counterinsurgency operations it’s claimed that we need to do. What to do about it. I’m going, however, to quote the very end of the article where I think he doesn’t lay the conclusions out just right:

There are only two solutions. We could belly up and provide the resources for a serious expeditionary civilian corps. But a few hundred or even a couple of thousand people is not enough. We would need many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of advisers with linguistic skills and cultural knowledge willing to leave home and live under risky conditions for years at a time. And we are not talking about 20-somethings paid a pittance and fueled by idealism, but skilled professionals demanding serious pay for their expertise and sacrifice. (The difficulty that the State department had convincing even its hardened professionals to volunteer for duty in Iraq showed what a challenge this is.) Of course, if the pay is high enough, the experts will come. But, at a time of massive government budget deficits and a persisting national economic crisis, this is simply not in the cards.

What, then, is Plan B? If we are unwilling to pay the price for a serious civilian capability–and admit that foisting the job of development and political assistance on the military is a bad idea–the only option is to alter our basic strategy. We could find a way to thwart Al Qaeda and other terrorists without trying to re-engineer weak states. We could, in other words, get out of the counterinsurgency and stabilization business. This is not an attractive option and entails many risks. But it does reflect reality. Ultimately, it may be better than a strategy based on a capability that exists only in our minds.

I think the situation is actually much less bleak than Metz makes it out to be. For one thing, the massive government budget deficits and a persisting national economic crisis really shouldn’t be a barrier to doing this. If the things that leading Pentagon officials claim to believe about American national security are true, what we ought to do is draw up a bill of what it would cost to properly finance the civilian side of things and cut that much money from the Defense Department budget in order to pay for it. But of course the Pentagon won’t actually agree to that, which sets up the more realistic option of the Pentagon paying lip service to the need for civilian capabilities while in practice building those capabilities in-house.

That’s not a great idea, but it’ll probably work out okay anyway because there’s really very little reason to believe that “thwart[ing] Al Qaeda and other terrorists without trying to re-engineer weak states” is really all that hard. Al-Qaeda is a very small number of people with what appears to be an extremely limited capacity to damage western interests. What’s more, even on the rare occasions when al-Qaeda achieves tactical success at murdering westerners, there’s no sign these murders do any real damage on a strategic level. It’s not as if the July 2005 bombings in London have displaced the U.K. from its ranks as wealthy, medium-sized country with highly competent armed forces.

David Obey’s Radical Idea

Representative David Obey, the top appropriator in the House, has a hot new letter out expressing deep skepticism about the wisdom of an ambitious COIN mission in Afghanistan. I think some of the points about military strategy are wrongheaded, and I especially think Obey overplays the argument that COIN would be futile. But what he says here is true, profound, and weirdly radical in the context of our present-day bizarre politics:

As an Appropriator I must ask, what will that policy cost and how will we pay for it? We are now in the middle of a fundamental debate over reforming our healthcare system. The President has indicated that it must cost less than $900 billion over ten years and be fully paid for. The Congressional Budget Office has had four committees twisting themselves into knots in order to fit healthcare reform into that limit. CBO is earnestly measuring the cost of each competing healthcare plan. Shouldn’t it be asked to do the same thing with respect to Afghanistan?

And again:

Lastly, after the healthcare reform effort is completed, this country still has four huge long-term challenges that will require a sustained national effort:

1. The need for further action to repair the fragility of our own economy and rebuild the capacity of our economy to provide desperately needed job growth;

2. The need for a long-term commitment to strengthen our national security by dramatically reshaping our energy policy – an effort that will require sustained and meaningful sacrifice by all elements of our society;

3. The need for long-term action to restore fiscal soundness by reining in the federal deficit; and

4. The need for long-term action to extend the fiscal soundness of Social Security and Medicare.

To me, these points about costs and tradeoffs get especially pointed when we start talking about ambitious full-spectrum counterinsurgency. It would do Afghanistan a lot of good to provide better economic opportunities for its population and high-quality effective public services. But they could also use better economic opportunities and effective public services in Baltimore. The citizens of Detroit are lacking in physical security, viable infrastructure, and corruption-free governance.

Germans and Counterinsurgency

I’d been wondering all week what I should ask the German foreign policy and defense officials I was scheduled to talk to today, so at the suggestion of Spencer Ackerman I asked what they thought about General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency concepts and the general doctrinal shift toward COIN in the United States.

Bundeswehr photo by Martin Stollberg

Unfortunately, nobody in the German government seems to have any interest whatsoever in talking to a room full of American journalists on anything other than off-the-record terms. Nevertheless, a few points emerged:

One is that there’s disagreement about terminology. It was explained to me that one challenge NATO has is that sometimes different national militaries will agree on an idea but have different names for it, or else will be agreeing on some words but actually mean quite different things. German public opinion is very pacifistic and the German military doesn’t like the term “counterinsurgency” which I think it regards as too alarming. They prefer to say that you need a comprehensive approach, rather than just killing the bad guys.

They also seem to sort of resent the idea circulating in the American press and apparently to some extent in the U.S. government that (to exaggerate a bit for effect) COIN doctine was something invented in the U.S. military in 2004-2005 then perfected in 2007-2008 and now General Petraeus has come down from the mountaintop to enlighten the allies. As the Germans see it, these had been familiar ideas in Europe for a while.

There’s also some really evident bitterness about the way the US government handled the Kunduz aistrike situation. I deliberately tried to not ask about this since I figured I’d just get a defensive response, but Germans wanted to drag the conversation about COIN doctrine back to this point. Few people really dispute the basic point about the need to avoid civilian casualties, but I think there’s a feeling that the Bundeswehr was being made into an example by American commanders and publicly humiliated in a way that would never have been done to an American military unit operating in a hostile situation.

Things Worth Fighting For in Afghanistan

Josh Marshall did a very thoughtful and interesting post this morning following up on some of my earlier doubts about the focus on the idea that preventing an al-Qaeda “safe haven” in Afghanistan should be the ne plus ultra of American national security policy.

Since Josh’s post will probably kick attention to this issue up a few notches, I thought I might add that I think there are other perfectly good issues for the United States to remain in Afghanistan. For one thing, I’m enough of a squish that I think “not abandoning the population of Afghanistan to civil war and Taliban rules” makes perfect sense. And it’s also very reasonable to see the situation in Afghanistan as tied in with the situation in Pakistan and to see preventing the collapse of the Pakistani state as an important American policy goal.

But if these are our real objectives, then certain things follow from that. Consider air strikes. If you define the goal as “eliminate safe havens” then maybe airstrikes that accidentally kill Afghan civilians aren’t that big a deal. By contrast, if we’re there to help Afghan civilians, then killing Afghan civilians is a very big deal.

After the Tamil Tigers

Kevin Drum makes a key point about the apparent defeat of the Tamil Tigers:

And now the hardest part: can the Sinhalese majority bring itself to treat the defeated Tamil minority charitably after a quarter century of brutal war and nearly 100,000 deaths? Stay tuned.

Insurgencies, even when defeated, oftentimes have a way of coming back. Anti-Russian insurgents in Chechnya, for example, have been active on-and-off for about 200 years. Lasting resolution of the situation will require a measure of real reconciliation and wise magnanimity. “With malice toward none, with charity toward all,” and that sort of thing.

The Trouble With Air Strikes in Pakistan

Via Robert Farley, a good concise explanation from David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum about the problem with these drone strikes against targets in Pakistan:

Governments typically make several mistakes when attempting to separate violent extremists from populations in which they hide. First, they often overestimate the degree to which a population harboring an armed actor can influence that actor’s behavior. People don’t tolerate extremists in their midst because they like them, but rather because the extremists intimidate them. Breaking the power of extremists means removing their power to intimidate — something that strikes cannot do.

Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people’s houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn’t it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that, exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war.

In my mind, this is one of the big problems with using the phrase “war on terror.” It gets people in a frame of mind where they’re thinking of analogies like “what would I do to a Nazi tank column?” rather than “what would I do to a crime-plagued neighborhood?” And when trying to figure out the right approach here, the right thing to do isn’t to ask yourself whether international terrorism is “really” a kind of warfare or “really” a kind of crime. The right thing to do is to ask yourself what kind of strategic goals you have and what kind of tactics are likely to achieve them. What we want is for Muslim communities around the world to cooperate with various governments around the world to smoke out and apprehend would-be violent extremists. That’s more like a crime-fighting mission.

Stanley McChrystal and “Black” Special Forces

Benjamin Friedman notes new Afghanistan commanding general Stanley McChrystal’s background in the “sharp” or “kinetic” end of special forces work and raises some concerns:

In the (recently released!) book on the post Cold War evolution of the US military that I co-edited, Colin Jackson and Austin Long have a chapter discussing the politics of special operations command. They argue that the direct action theory of victory in counterinsurgency is a close relative to the air force’s theory of decapitation, which says you can defeat a nation by attacking its leaders from the air. They explain that direct action has long been the favored tactic of secret or “black” SOF organizations like Delta Force, but that the wars made it the dominant mission in SOCOM as a whole, crowding traditional “white” counterinsurgency missions like population protection, force training, and civil affairs. To them, that is a problem, because the direct action theory of victory is badly flawed. You can’t kill your way to victory in these sorts of wars, they argue. That’s particularly true in Afghanistan, I’d add, where distance and poor roads make the exploitation of intelligence far more time-consuming.

I don’t know to what extent McChrystal shares the black SOF worldview. He would probably say that direct action is just part of the toolkit. It is possible, however, that his appointment reflects a decision to downplay nation-building in Afghanistan and focus more on killing raids and training Afghan soldiers.

I think the use of the term “nation building” probably obscures more than it reveals in this context. The real crux of the matter is that in a geographical sub-portion of Afghanistan where there’s insurgent activity happening, US forces face a choice at the margin between trying to identify and kill insurgents, and trying to identify and protect civilian population centers.

OMB Un-Disavows “War on Terror”

One interesting sub-plot thus far in the Obama administration has been the not-quite-official disavowal of the term “war on terror.” This saw another flair-up recently when a civil servant named Dave Riedel emailed Pentagon officials to tell them “OMB says: ‘This Administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ [GWOT]. Please use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation.’” But according to Brian Beutler, when Peter Orszag was asked about this he distanced himself from the distancing saying “I’m not aware of any communication I’ve had on that issue. It was a communication by a mid-level career civil service.” Brian observes:

So GWOT it is. That doesn’t mean the Riedel email didn’t go out, though, and some (me, for instance) wonder if some at the Pentagon might stick with the supposedly new moniker (Overseas Contingency Operation) leading to some amusing confusion on the Hill.

This has been a problem for the government for some time, and to such an extent that even George Bush was willing to admit error. “We actually misnamed the war on terror,” Bush said in August 2004. “It ought to be the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world.” Touche.

I think this is a more important issue than people realize. Names of programs matter. The fact that the Future Combat Systems project is named “Future Combat Systems” allowed John McCain during the campaign to try to get people to believe that Barack Obama had some kind of blanket opposition to funding future combat systems, rather than opposition to a specific boondogglish program. Similarly, it sounds and feels a lot more reasonable to say that Pentagon requests for money to use in overseas contingency operations need to be weighed against other priorities than it does to question funding requests aimed at winning a “Long War” or a “War on Terror.” Completely non-military endeavors have often tried to leverage the term “war” into increased funding (War on Poverty, War on Drugs) but obviously this works a lot better for the military which is in the business of fighting wars.

But reducing the world’s exposure to terrorists is neither an enterprise with a defined beginning and end, nor is it mainly a military undertaking. “War on Terror” and “Long War” thinking distort our policy approaches, distort our budgetary priorities, and encourage the problematic idea that we need to fight a hazily defined “global counterinsurgency” and can’t afford to think about the costs of doing so.

Exum: “No One Who Understands COIN Really Wants to Do It”

I’ve been looking at the rise of “counterinsurgency” theory first to prominence, then to some influence in the Bush administration, and then via CNAS to influence within the Democratic Party and now the Obama Pentagon with a mix of hope and anxiety. Hope because I think the COIN mindset is a smarter way to think about 21st century security challenges than what you get from F–22 salesmen masquerading as strategists, but anxiety because it also sometimes seems to open the door to a vast new array of misbegotten imperialist adventures. So when Justin Logan recommended Andrew Bacevich’s skeptical take on the new memoir from COIN guru David Kilcullen I paid attention. But even more interesting than Bacevich’s take on Kilcullen was CNAS fellow and counterinsurgent Andrew Exum’s take on Bacevich’s take on Kilcullen:

One of the things I have always maintained is that realists of the Andrew Bacevich school and counter-insurgents of the David Kilcullen school have more in common than they realize at first glance. No one who really understands COIN wants to do it. Liberal interventionalists and neo-conservatives are likely to be much more enthusiastic than the practitioners themselves. Counter-insurgents, often knowing something of what they speak through practical and hard-won experience, realize all too well just how difficult and costly big schemes drawn up in Washington become when they have to be operationalized. Counter-insurgency is hard. Best to avoid it, actually.

I’m torn between wanting to write “I think this is true” and wanting to write “I hope this is true.” But the fact that Exum, who’s on the inside of the COIN clique looking out, is writing it makes me more hopeful that it actually is true. It’s always seemed to me that the clear implication of giving due consideration to the issue of how to eat soup with a knife is that you should do your damn best to avoid putting yourself in that kind of situation. In other words, if at all possible find something else to eat.

But at the same time that this has seemed to me to be the clear implication, I’ve also worried that actual practitioners may be disinclined to draw the implication in practice. After all, active engagement in counterinsurgency operations tends to boost demand for counterinsurgency experts while a foreign policy that aimed to avoid such scenarios might reach the conclusion that it can afford to simply ignore the subject. Thus you could see a certain structural bias in COIN circles toward wanting to see COIN-needed situations lurking under every rock.

The ongoing Afghanistan strategic review process will, I think, be a practical test of whether or not Exum’s ideas about a realist/counterinsurgent synthesis can be made to work. It seems to me that it’s a scenario in which we need to simultaneously apply COINish insights about the tactics employed by our troops (relying on manpower rather than firepower, seeing public opinion as a key center of gravity, etc.) with realist insights about the need to set priorities, define interests, and establish realistic goals. There’s a big risk of tumbling too far into one side or another—either pulling back and just lobbing occasional bombs at bad guys in a manner that radicalizes the entire population, or else committing ourselves to an unnecessary and probably impossible decades-long effort to build a modern state structure in Afghanistan.

I think we’ll see soon enough how well the administration does on this score, but the blogging lifestyle has turned me into an impatient person.

Eating Soup With a Knife: A Neat Trick, But Fundamentally Something To Be Avoided

This subject really deserves a treatment longer than a blog post, but let me recommend my colleague Matt Duss’s post on Bob Woodward and the perversity of that burgeoning establishment consensus that the main lesson of Iraq is that, whether or not we should have gone to war in the first place, we’ve now learned a bunch of awesome counterinsurgency techniques that will allow us to subdue future adversaries near and far.

I know he disagrees with this interpretation, but I’ve always thought it made a lot of sense to dwell on the fact that the title of COIN guru John Nagl’s excellent book on the subject is Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife. One thing you might ask yourself, of course, is why would you do that? And it’s hard to say. I mean, even a starving man with a bowl of soup and no spoon is just going to drink directly from a bowl. Of course you can devise some kind of scenario in which it might be necessary to eat soup with a knife, but your basic gameplan in life is going to be to avoid being in those kind of situations. And much the same, it seems to me, with the lessons of counterinsurgency. This is very difficult stuff. Like eating soup with a knife. Your top policy priority should be to avoid the situations in which it arises.