Progressives And The COIN Debate

By Steve Hynd

Spencer Ackerman had a remarkable 'graph yesterday in a post on McChrystal's confirmation hearings.

Over at Democracy Arsenal, Michael Cohen reads some of my McChrystal coverage and is dismayed to learn the general is a dyed in the wool counterinsurgent. I tend to agree with Michael's overall fear that counterinsurgency is uncomfortably commensurate with imperialism. But unless you're willing to make that the end of the conversation on McChrystal, or counterinsurgency -- and I think that's a mistake; it should be an entrance into a discussion -- his specific concerns are rather overstated.

At least Spencer now accepts that "counterinsurgency is uncomfortably commensurate with imperialism." But that fact should be "an entrance into a discussion" for American foreign policy, not a glaring red light? What kind of discussion should that be then? Cohen, specifically cited by Ackerman, wants it to be about full-on Sri Lankan style slaughter, regardless of civilian deaths. In a post the day before the one Spencer links, he wrote:

forgive me for asking the obvious question - and at risk of being derided as an old fashioned, lost in the weeds, conventional warrior - but isn't the point of war-fighting to kill the enemy? I'm sure if you would ask the Sri Lankan government why they succeeded in defeating the Tamil counter-insurgency or the Pakistani military why they were able to turn back the Taliban forces in Swat, I'm pretty sure the answer will not be - we protected civilians. If anything quite the opposite: their success came from killing the enemy and in a brutal manner.

...In the end, not only is a full-fledged COIN campaign in Afghanistan not going to succeed, but it's very hard to argue how it is in our national interest to continue down that road. America has an enemy in Af/Pak; it is Al Qaeda and to a lesser extent Taliban. Our military's job is to wipe out that enemy, not to ensure that Afghans can life peaceful, prosperous and safe lives (a wonderful goal, but one that we are highly unlikely to achieve). When we talk about what to do in Afghanistan it might be worth remembering that basic fact . . . and what America's interests actually are.

Seems to me we're having a very uncomfortable debate for non-interventionist Dems or progressives there.  As Ian Welsh wrote in an email:

Does the US have the manpower to do what Pakistan and the Sri Lankans did? And will Pakistan hold SWAT in two years? Remember, the Tamil Tigers made a big mistake. They were intent on being a government, so they herded the Tamils into a tiny area of land, thus destroying their own support network and concentrating themselves in a fashion where conventional military force could be used to wipe them up.

That said, there are, and always have been, two ways to do counter-insurgency. And the nasty way tends to be more effective. The US used it very effectively in the Phillipines. Be really ruthless, kill in huge amounts, cause refugees, round them up and put them in camps you control completely. Drain the sea that insurgents rely on by putting the civilian population completely under your control, and by making it clear that you are happy to kill or make into refugees however many civilians it takes.

Will that work in Afghanistan? I have my doubts. Unless the US is willing to shift ALL military forces there, and probably even enlarge the army. It isn't a small country. And then, what happens when you leave? Bear in mind the Sri Lankans and the Pakistanis are in for the long run. They're staying, because they regard it as their country. Same with the Russians in Chechnya, or the Turks in their Kurdish areas (which were brutally put down in the late nineties). Is the US going to stay? Real colonialism works, in part, because of the credible commitment to be the government. "We're the British Empire, and we intend to be here 50 or a 100 years from now. The sun never sets on Britannia." If you want to be a colonial empire, you've got to be a colonial empire. But who the hell wants to run Afghanistan? It's a hole, with nothing worth fighting over.

The Coindinistas and the Interventionist think-tankers are presenting us with a false binary here - full-on colonialism or ethnic cleansing. But the debate is being framed in such a way as to exclude anyone who says both are ridiculous options for America to consider and to deliberately ignore that this is indeed the debate. Alexi Koltowitz emails:

If the goal is to secure a peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan/Pakistan/Iraq/whichever brown people land then we're going about it in all the wrong ways. So either that's not our intention or we're criminally stupid. (IMO, it's a lot of both.) There are no other possibilities.

If the goal is empire (yes, it is) then Cohen's right. The happy talk about our good intentions doesn't fool anyone who isn't intent on being fooled. And if the goal is empire, we're doing a piss-poor job of it, because we refuse to go all in. So long as we refuse to call things by their names and deal with reality as it really is we will neither change course nor competently execute the course we're on.

Remember, what Americans decide to do about Afghanistan will set precedent for what will get done about other parts of this troubled world. It's time the Obama administration, the Village's Very Serious Persons and the wannabe-VSP's were pressured to introduce a third option to the discussion. It should be a very short debate.

We don't want an Empire and we don't want to be mass murdering f**kheads - time to bring the troops home.