COIN and the Continental Disconnect

By Dave Anderson:

The Christian Science Monitor is covering German political reaction to the recent bombing of the two gasoline tankers that most likely killed scores of civilians. The airstrike was carried out by a US aircraft, but under German ground command. [h/t to MyDD]

Germany and other European nations are unlikely to abruptly change their Afghan missions in the short term, despite high levels of public dissatisfaction. But German, French, and British leaders this week began to signal that their commitment is not indefinite.

 

Neither Mrs. Merkel�s Christian Democrats nor her main opponents, the Social Democrats led by Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, have engaged a deeply pacifist electorate on the subject.

 

Horst Bacia, defense columnist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, offered a typical reaction: The bombing �is having a sobering effect on the home front, where people have long viewed the [Afghan] mission through rose-tinted spectacles. Why is it so hard for politicians to give convincing reasons for it?�

 

In recent polls, 66 percent of the British and 64 percent of the French electorate said they wanted the Afghan mission ended. Some 22 percent of Italians want an immediate withdrawal, and 34 percent favor gradual withdrawal.  

�But there�s a questioning on both sides of the Atlantic � what should we do next? Karzai is looking like a South Vietnamese dictator � vote fraud, corruption. It�s getting tricky.�

This isthe problem with COIN when implemented by democracies on tertiary objectives; the public does not buy into the mission or the benefits that are dwarfed by the probable bundle of costs:

the political costs of the COIN strategy were very high; promises of ten to twenty year wars, consumption of the society's productive surplus, the consistent threat of de-pacification, severe social and domestic political instability and legitimacy threats.  These costs could be borne if the theatre of war was critical to the existence and maitenance of a desired social order as these costs were borne in World War Two.  However in both examples, especially in Vietnam, the objective loss function was fairly small as Vietnam was a tertiary interest for the United States.

 

COIN today promises the same type of inputs --- ten to twenty year wars, operational costs of one to two points of annual GDP at a time of structural deficits and domestic fiscal crisis --- with the same type of outcomes --- weak, client states in need of continual support in secondary or tertiary areas of interest.

And shockingly the public of democracies don't like COIN nor do they want to spend those resources for minimal real gains in security that operational and tactical successes may or may not generate.

So as the public turns against the Afghanistan war as there has been at best a muddled and poorly reasoned argument for expansion of the war to prop up �our guy� in Karzai, the elites and governing institutions can either continue at the cost of significant mistrust and legitimacy losses or they can ramp down their engagement of unpopular policies.  Some European nations will respond to democratic incentives and pressures first because their institutions are not half-way through the crazy window, but sooner or later the United States will either have an insulated, Beltway-centric elite pursuing vastly unpopular policies or vaguely competent opportunistic politicians who are not scared of being called �weak on defense� and �terrorist lovers� will smell an opportunity and run with it.