Incapable of Doing COIN

By Steve Hynd

Nir Rosen lays the truth out there:

"The troubles with COIN are institutional. The American military and policy establishments are incapable of doing COIN."

It's something I've argued in the past and that Sean Naylor adds more evidence for today. Rosen says it for pretty much the same reasons.

The fact is that once you get down to the rifle squad, COIN does not make any sense. Soldiers, whose greatest concern is living through their deployments, are being asked to mix Wyatt Earp and Mother Theresa. In public they pay lip service to COIN because that is the way to advance. Less publicly, officers speak of going in to villages and �doing that COIN shit.�

But COIN is not going in for a few hours, calling a shura�a sit-down�with some elders, and heading back to base before the chow hall closes. COIN is dangerous, and the military is risk-averse. American casualties peaked in Iraq when the military got serious about protecting the people. COIN advocates have changed the language used by the top brass, but the bureaucracy is still dominated by old-school army thinking. All they can do is try to take COIN and graft it onto conventional doctrine.

The military has been talking for a long time about being good at complex operations, simultaneously fighting and providing aid. But they still make it up as they go. Each unit takes its knowledge back home with it, leaving its successor to relearn everything. Relationships formed with Afghans�still viewed derisively in the military as �Hajis��are lost.

The troubles with COIN are institutional. The American military and policy establishments are incapable of doing COIN. They lack the curiosity to understand other cultures and the empathy to understand what motivates people. The new counterinsurgency manual gets it right: political factors have primacy in COIN. But the military is not a political party, and the Surge is the exception to the rule: Afghanistan 2009 is not Iraq, certainly not Iraq 2007, and confusing the two cases�rural/urban; ungoverned/governed; history of expelling occupiers/no comparable history; largely organized insurgency/multiple, competing insurgencies�promises disaster.

Rosen's criticism of the current course in Afghanistan is informed by detail from his recent trip to that country, offering invaluable insight into the lives of US soldiers there and, especially, the futility of the notion that "they'll stand up so we can stand down". Read the whole thing.

He ends:

President Obama�s stated goal in Afghanistan is to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda. Why, then, did McChrystal argue for fighting the Taliban and remaking Afghanistan? Why has Obama agreed? Assuming that al Qaeda will set up bases in Afghanistan recalls predictions that Saddam Hussein would give his imaginary weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda. It assumes that the Taliban are irrational and unaware of their interests. And it rests on much more fundamental assumptions, too: that al Qaeda is a significant threat to the United States and that the best way to reduce the threat is by attacking the movement itself.

The attacks on September 11, 2001 were tragic and criminal. They were painful for the victims and their families and a shock to a powerful, arrogant, and proud nation blissfully unaware that it was so resented.

But beyond the terrible murders, the attacks themselves had little impact on the American economy or way of life, though the response at home and abroad changed everything. Al Qaeda used its �A-team� on that day to attack a slumbering nation. Can a few hundred angry, unsophisticated Muslim extremists really pose such grave dangers to a vigilant superpower, now alert to potential threats?

He's not the only one who thinks that the "joined at the hip" narrative on the relationship between AQ and the Afghan Taliban, so beloved of pro-escalation proponents from Obama and McChrystal all the way down to Bruce Reidel, is a crock.

In a significant piece today, Gareth Porter writes that the narrative "is flatly contradicted by the evidence of fundamental conflicts between the interests of the Taliban and those of al Qaeda" that emerged in the wake of the latter's attack on Islamabad's "Red Mosque" in 2007.

"We make a serious mistake in equating the two organisations," said Arturo Munoz, who was a supervisory operations officer in the Central Intelligence Agency�s Counterterrorism Center from 2001 to 2009 and is now a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation.

Munoz called the Taliban "a homespun Pashtun, locally-based revolutionary movement with a set of goals that are not necessarily those of al Qaeda".

"It is well known that deals have been made between the Taliban and Pakistani commanders," said Munoz. "Obviously the Quetta Shura [the top Taliban leadership organ] is located there because of a deal with the Pakistani government."

But al Qaeda's view has been different. "The more fanatical al Qaeda types say 'let's tear apart Pakistani society'," he observed.

Veteran specialist on counterterrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan Rick "Ozzie" Nelson agreed that the relationship between al Qaeda and the Taliban that has evolved in recent years is very different from the one they had up to 2001.

"The Taliban is a nationalist organisation, which wants to govern Afghanistan under Sharia law, not attack the United States," said Nelson, who was on the inaugural staff of the National Counter-Terrorism Center's Directorate of Strategic Operational Planning in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2005 to 2007.

Nelson directed a Joint Task Force in Afghanistan until early 2009 and is now in the International Security Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"The Red Mosque was a big deal," Nelson recalled. The al Qaeda-directed assault on the mosque and subsequent Taliban reaction to its jihadist campaign in Pakistan were what convinced officials that "their goals have become more divergent", he said.

More recently, counterterrorism analysts have noted that the gap has widened even further, as the Taliban leadership has gone public with a "nationalist" line that openly departs from al Qaeda's global jihadist stance.

So, an impossible tactic to fulfill an un-needed mission - but why? Former CIA station chief for Kabul, Graham Fuller, who agrees that "Taliban leaders, once rid of foreign occupation, will have little incentive to support global jihadi schemes", points to one answer. He writes that Obama has "kicked the can down the road" for domestic political reasons:

I had hoped that Obama would level with the American people that the war in Afghanistan is not being won, indeed is not winnable within any practicable framework. Obama possesses the intelligence and insight to grasp these realities. But such an admission - however accurate - would sign the political death warrant of a president to be portrayed as having snatched defeat out of the jaws of "victory."

Or, as we've taken to calling it here, the Wuss Factor.