By Steve Hynd
Yesterday, I posted "Progressives and the COIN Debate", in which I called for a third option beyond counter-insurgency colonialist occupation and violent ethnic cleansing in Afghanistan. An option that says "We don't want an Empire and we don't want to be mass murdering f**kheads - time to bring the troops home."
Since then I've had a fruitful email discussion with Michael Cohen of the New America Foundation and Democracy Arsenal blog and the first thing I have to do today is apologise to Michael for misunderstanding his intent.
I had taken a post of his, "Civilian Casualties V Body Counts", as an admonition to practise CT without worrying about collateral damage, something that would lead to humanitarian disasters on the scale of Sri Lanka's brutality in putting down the Tamils...and all the civilians that happened to be in the area. Michael says he can see how I arrived at that conclusion but that he needs to clarify his position: that counter insurgency is a dirty business � to win it you often have to resort to brutal means. That�s why we shouldn�t do it in the first place.
In his emails, Michael explains:
My argument is that our focus in Af/Pak needs to be on taking out AQ safe havens and degrading the Taliban's capabilities as best we can all the while building up the Afghan security services so that we can ensure the Taliban will not be able to take over the country again...Our focus in Af/Pak should be full-on CT.
To some extent, the argument that I think needs to be made here is that counter insurgency is a dirty, nasty business (as we saw in Swat and Sri Lanka). I'm not defending the human rights abuses that occurred there but simply acknowledging that this is a basic reality of COIN. If we really wanted to wipe out the Taliban these are the steps we'd have to take and we're not prepared to do it (and rightfully so).
So yeah, I would appreciate it if you corrected the record on this one - I'm not an interventionist think tanker and I'm not advocating ethnic cleansing. Quite the opposite.
Consider it corrected, and happily so.
But while I'm correcting things, it occurs to me that I should clarify my own position a bit too. Michael wrote that he disagrees with me that COIN strategy is motivated by colonialism and imperialism, but that's not my position at all. I'm not saying that the COINdinistas are motivated by colonialism and imperialism. It just happens that those are the inevitable fallout of decades long occupations and the COINdinistas hide their heads in the sand about it. It's accidental colonialism, informed by an implicit sense of exceptionalism and a humanitarian gloss on the White Man's Burden, which gets there by increments of wishful thinking. The hardcore COIN gurus write that the best way to do COIN is to not do it - i.e. not invade and occupy in the first place. But then, being given the task of salvaging quagmires after the fact, they come up with ways of putting lipstick on a pig. Then along come the think-tankers who point out that the lipstick looks terrible on the current pigs but might look better on future ones. Then the politicians and interventionist Very Serious Persons use the white papers the COINdinistas and think tankers wrote to justify some more interventionism in their own minds, because they believe they've just been told that "next time we can do it right". The result of this incremental process from "Don't do it" to "Can we invade it? Yes we can!" will inevitably be more heavily made up pigs wallowing in mire. Thus accidental colonialism - which is still seen as just colonialism by the rest of the world. As one French commander put it to reporter Douglas Saunders: "If you find yourself needing to use counterinsurgency, it means the entire population has become the subject of your war, and you either will have to stay there forever or you have lost."
Update: more from Michael Cohen on this subject here.
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