Whatever you may think of the Biden administration’s $753 billion defense budget request, one thing is certain: After two decades of headaches and sunk costs associated with small wars and insurgencies in the Middle East, the U.S. military is moving away from the counterinsurgency business.
China, rather than failing states in Iraq and Afghanistan, is now the Defense Department’s top concern.
There are some, however, who are worried that an emphasis on great power competition will throw counterinsurgency doctrine into the wastebasket. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a columnist for the Washington Post, is one of them. Writing for Foreign Affairs magazine, Boot offers a case on behalf of counterinsurgency, arguing that the U.S. would be ill-advised to ditch the doctrine altogether. In Boot’s words, “There is no strategy better suited to confronting terrorists and guerillas.” It worked in Iraq and Afghanistan for a time, he claims. And If the strategy failed to accomplish U.S. policy objectives over the long-term, he writes, it’s because the U.S. wasn’t willing to put in the time and resources to see it through.
I disagree. Boot grossly underestimates just how taxing counterinsurgency warfare is for those who must carry it out. He also misrepresents how successful these tactics have actually been for the U.S. in places such as Iraq, the poster-child for pro-COIN advocates.
For one, Boot undermines his own glowing reviews about what COIN could have achieved in Afghanistan. He faults the Obama administration for pulling the plug on the doctrine early and only giving the U.S. troop surge 18 months to succeed. At the same time, he admits Taliban safe-havens in Pakistan made a U.S.-led population-centric counterinsurgency operation in Afghanistan unworkable. Therein lies one of the flaws associated with COIN: If the insurgency is able to reconstitute, rearm, and rest in a neighboring state virtually unmolested, no amount of U.S. troops or reconstruction will ultimately make much of a difference. In these circumstances, giving the strategy more time to achieve concrete results would be as shortsighted as putting a Band-Aid over a leaky pipe. The water just keeps on flowing.
COIN advocates like to point to Iraq, between 2007 and 2008, to demonstrate that the strategy can be effective if resourced properly. The roughly 90% decrease in Iraqi civilian casualties during this period is cited as evidence that a clear, hold, and build approach can be replicated against other insurgencies.
Unfortunately, COIN is only as good as the host government’s willingness to cooperate and pull its fair share of the weight. While there is no question that Iraq’s sectarian violence plummeted during 2007-2008 and that the Sunni-dominated insurgency lost a significant share of its mobility and freedom of movement, all of these gains proved to be relatively short-lived. Nouri al-Maliki’s Shia-led Iraqi government continued to pursue highly sectarian policies that disenfranchised Iraq’s roughly one-third Sunni demographic. The U.S. troop surge in Iraq was designed to lessen the violence and provide Iraqi political leaders with the space to reach an amicable multi-sectarian political agreement. Maliki and others made sure that it never happened.
Ultimately, counterinsurgency is about far more than throwing tens of thousands of troops into a city, killing the bad guys, and holding the terrain, and constructing schools and hospitals. If the civilian side of the COIN strategy is lacking or if the host government is unwilling to do the political work required, U.S. troops essentially turn into permanent security guards and police officers. As John Spencer of the Modern War Institute tweeted, “It’s impossible to fight a counterinsurgency for a corrupt, illegitimate, and unaccepted government and hubris to try to build a western idealized form of government in places where it has never been.”
Finally, we should be crystal clear about how resource-intensive counterinsurgency really is.
Many insurgencies last for decades. Despite Boot’s contention that COIN worked in Colombia, there are still offshoots and remnants of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia that operate in the country’s villages and rural areas. An exception is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, but the group’s defeat required such brute force that the U.N. is now investigating the Sri Lankan government for war crimes.
Unless U.S. officials want to travel down the dangerous road of using U.S. troops to resolve the intractable internal problems of relatively unimportant countries, they would be best served by leaving COIN in the rearview mirror.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
