By Steve Hynd
Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Washington Post revelations about the many communications breakdowns inside the Obama administration as it green-lighted a COIN-based strategy for Afghanistan has really put the cat among the pigeons, as evidenced by Spencer Ackerman, Michael Cohen, Bernard Finel and a whole bunch of rightwing crowing about the White House being clueless over military matters.
But when Bernard writes that "The policy process was not captured by a cabal of COINdinistas shutting out all skeptics�. the policy process was instead mismanaged and the participants failed to do sufficient due diligence," he's taking the WaPo piece at face value and missing a crucial step in the deliberations. That's perhaps not too surprising, because that step was taken during the crossover period between the last days of the Bush administration and the first of the Obama one.
Before Obama had even made his March 27th speech or the administration released it's accompanying white paper - the one Spencer argues all military planning was based around - there was a prior January 2009 white paper entitled the "United States Interagency Counterinsurgency Initiative". This official COIN guide was a multi-department affair but led by the Bureau of Political/Military Affairs at the State Dept. Gates, Condi Rice and USAID's Henrietta Fore signed off on the document, which was described as a COIN guide for civilian lawmakers.
The COINdinistas who were recruited from various neoliberal think-tanks, but especially the Center for New American Security, into the new Obama administration promptly set about pushing the COIN guide. At the time, I argued that although those who had written and backed the COIN guide were careful to say that such operations were always difficult, expensive and time-consuming, the overall tone of the document was "Can we invade it? Yes we can!" It gave an over-rosy impression of the ability of the U.S. government and U.S. military to turn COIN-on-paper into COIN-in-reality, an impression that was bound to lead to overreach.
In the months since, COIN advocates have been careful to keep saying "difficult, expensive and time-consuming" without ever letting themselves be tied down to specifics. The impression was given that COIN was only a little more difficult, would only take a little longer, than a more restricted CT-based mission. Although even a back-of-the-envelope guess based upon their own precepts would reveal that a COIN-based strategy in Afghanistan would take at least fifteen years and cost at least $1.3 trillion, none of the COIN pushers in the administration, the military or pundit-land would be drawn into saying so out loud. Like the question of troop increases, such matters were treated as occult, above the hoi-polloi's understanding and only to be revealed in stages like some ancient mystery religion. Heck, they weren't even being honest with themselves. Too many had a vested interest, career advancement, in not looking too closely at the panacea-de-jour they were advancing.
It's unfair to pick on my friend Spencer Ackerman as he's a small fish in the COINdinista pond but something he wrote today entirely encapsulates the COINdinista's willfull ignoring of the realities of their own doctrine.
To Michael, counterinsurgency clearly required more resources than the nation was prepared to devote; a civilian component unlikely to materialize; Afghan governance that was extremely unlikely to materialize; and in any event, the whole thing was orthogonal to the actually-existing issue of counterterrorism that was the Obama administration's stated purpose.
To me, I (in all honesty) breezed by the first point because I wasn't convinced; share the second and third concern; and disagreed with the fourth. Well, I disagreed in two ways -- both substantively and descriptively.
...Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Washington Post piece demonstrates that Michael has the better of our descriptive argument. If the Obama administration doesn't have faith in its white paper, and then is saying to Rajiv that McChrystal "extrapolated" from the white paper to population-centric counterinsurgency, then it really does make sense to discuss mission creep, and Michael is right.
Leaving aside whether Cohen was correct, the ability to "breeze past" matters of resourcing is symptomatic of the COIN community whether in uniform or not. Likewise, not seeing the blindingly obvious about the "civilian surge" or Afghanistan's governance has taken a massive amount of deliberate, blinkered, not seeing the wood for the trees for some time now. The data was there, it was just ignored because of blind faith in the occult mysteries of COIN and their ability to somehow, magically, do the impossible.
And finally, the cult of COIN's priesthood is generally silent about the most basic unpleasant truth about its doctrine - that "when the US takes the lead and pushes the host nation to a secondary role in its own country then the US takes on the role of occupier. They are conducting �pacification operations�. COIN is popular because it seemed to be the "fix" for two stalled occupations. But that popularity willfully ignores the unpleasant truth that such a fix is impossible when the U.S. is an occupying power bereft of a legitimate and sovereign host government. COIN as currently understood by the powers-that-be in America is inevitably a colonial adventure. Only occasionally is this let slip, and even then the COINdinistas seem not to realise what they're saying:
Col. Andrew Bacevich (ret.), a professor of international relations at Boston University, is among those who believe that America's emerging view of war is potentially dangerous to US interests. Bacevich notes that he was the "only Afghanistan skeptic" to speak at a CNAS conference held in June. He was particularly struck by the extent to which the belief that American power should be used to change foreign societies had taken root.
"It was at that CNAS meeting that I heard Nagl ... describe that we are in a global counterinsurgency campaign. My head snapped back," says Bacevich. "If counterinsurgency implies that we have to secure the people, that implies not only protecting them but providing them economic development, creating the institutions of good governance and the elimination of corruption, and that seems to imply that we have to do this everywhere. The phrase 'protecting the people' contains enormous ambitions."
"Global" COIN is a euphemism for imperialism via the "White Man's Burden".
The mystery cult of counter-insurgency has largely concealed its unpleasant truths and drawbacks from lawmakers and the public, and done so mostly through its advocates own overly rosy thinking. That it's unvarnished acceptance has led to overreach and mission creep isn't at all surprising given that concealment. Thankfully, that appears to be changing somewhat although Obama's statement that there will be no partial drawdown of forces in Afghanistan shows that de-programming the cult's infuence still has a long way to go.
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