Some Thoughts on Counterinsurgency

I was having an argument on the internet and wrote this, which I thought I'd share here as well:  

Counterinsurgency is predicated on the idea that an insurgent's greatest strength is the population, inasmuch as an insurgent can hide in, receives logistical support from, and is able to recruit from the population. The objective, then is to separate the insurgent from his greatest strength so that you can assert your will over him through force (which is why it's war, not diplomacy). This does not necessarily imply removing "the underlying cause of ill content," and indeed, removing the underlying cause of ill content might be counterproductive if, say, the underlying cause of discontent is an ideological opposition to infidel Americans (which is true of at least a percentage of the insurgents in the last two wars), or a desire to take control of the local, regional, or national government (true for a majority of counterinsurgents, some of whom are very adamant about taking over).

But specifically, successful counterinsurgency involves removing a counterinsurgent's ability to hide among, receive logistical support from, and recruit from the population. The first two of those things can be accomplished entirely by military means, provided you're respectful to civilians, aren't killing innocents, are providing locals effective opportunities to provide intelligence, and are proactively patrolling, etc. The third can be accomplished to a significant extent through solely military means, inasmuch as the majority of insurgents are insurgents of opportunity who aren't particularly ideologically committed, and if the opportunity cost becomes too high, they'll play nice. The ideological fanatics absolutely must die, which leaves only ideologues who are committed because of the societal injustices that you were talking about. Those are the only sort of regenerating insurgents.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea was to provide a stable security environment to allow the host nation to develop its own functional government (with US help, which was theoretically supposed to come primarily from the State Department) to address those injustices. In Iraq, I'd argue that there were significant failures at the place where the operational and strategic meet that neutered the ability of civilian agencies to provide effective support to the local populace when the Iraqi government was in its infancy and prevented the effective distribution of civilian resources throughout the war which, when exacerbated by policy decisions at the highest levels that led to a significant erosion of security throughout the country and decimated Iraq's bureaucratic infrastructure, caused mission creep and a military takeover of nation-building functions. In Afghanistan, I'd argue that policy decisions exacerbated corruption and feudalism, which combined with a security vacuum to give insurgency a second life.

All of the decisions with long-lasting negative systemic impacts on the redress of societal injustice occurred at a higher level than even an infantry division, and is fundamentally beyond the scope of the mission given to the military. More importantly, an infantry battalion or regimental combat team simply doesn't have the capabilities required to effect the systemic change required to address the major societal injustices that lead to the constant replacement of insurgents motivated by those injustices. It would be a fool's errand to try. An infantry battalion does, however, have the capabilities to provide physical security, conduct a census, field local complaints, interact with sheiks, and all the other tools that counterinsurgency provides to help them kill insurgents. I'm not saying that the majority of our time should be spent doing kinetic operations, but rather that to look at the tools counterinsurgency gives us to kill insurgents as the mission itself rather than the means by which to accomplish the mission is a mistake.

If we had been given the mission of using military governors to improve security, develop infrastructure, recruits locals into the government, turn control of the province over to (coalition) civilian governors once certain criteria had been met, and ultimately replace the civilian government with native government like we were when we occupied the Philippines, it'd be a different story, but that wasn't the mission that we were given.