Lecture 12. Counterinsurgency

Question 1

Counterinsurgency

Answer 1

is military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taking by a government to defeat insurgency.

Question 2

Afghanistan counterinsurgency strategy

Answer 2

Population centric (not terrain nor enemy centric)

• Winning hearts and minds (WHAM): emotive and cognitive.
• very specific
• merged in 1950s

o Any time COIN failed  they lose respect in eyes of the population  very difficult to deliver.
o COIN gets attacked

Question 3

Winning hearts and minds (WHAM)

Answer 3

• The population must be convinced that it is in their long-term interest that the coin wins. They must be convinced that the counterinsurgency is going to win and that they will stay protect them
  o Very contradictory; the US left Afghanistan…
• It is not about “being liked”, it is more about “being respected”
• It is about building bridged  self-interest
• Based on “liking” will not hold on in case of emergency.

Question 4

Population is the price- David Galula

Answer 4

must easier to convince the population

Question 5

Clear, Hold, Build

Answer 5

Increase the governments legitimacy

Clear: teritory from enemy
Hold: territory
Buiild: on the territory

It happened many times that the COIN cleared the territory from the enemy, but that it didn’t hold it, it left and later on the enemy would often be back.

Question 6

Insurgency is very hard to identify

Answer 6

they attack whenever they can: they are fluid

Question 7

Assumption within coin

Answer 7

possible to control population, only one local population that does not move: easier to focus on this, rather than of the flexible insurgency

Question 8

Kinetic and non-kinetic

Answer 8

kinetic: military action
Non-kinetic: helping elders, education

Question 9

Two sides of the same COIN

Answer 9

link between waging a war and buildig a state.

its not ust about what is happening at local level

Question 10

Karzai bad partner for the USA

Answer 10

He does know at the time whats going on in Afghanistan: very skilled at managing the patronage politics. Yet he doesnt know what to do with the US

Question 11

Was COIN an investment trap?

Answer 11

• You can not get out
• The more you are investing, the harder it gets to get out
• The idea is to do a last push and then to draw back
• Bureaucratic culture in military: most of the time they are reluctant to go in: but once they are in, they do want to win: it becomes very hard to leave for them!

Question 12

Coin was about social change

Answer 12

it is not the task of the military

Question 13

McCrystal: There is no alternative than COIN

Answer 13

believed so strongly in COIN that he couldnt see its defaults.

Question 14

Was COIN too ambitious?

Answer 14

If you do not know what you are exactly building= very vague

There is no end state= never been defined

Constant adaptions: ‘it is not a 20 year mission, but it has been 20 years a mission of one year’

• It was more a delusion
• They convinced themselves that if things would go perfectly, it would work out things cannot go perfectly.

Question 15

Insurgency VS COIN

Answer 15

much freer in using coercion than COIN.
And: better understanding of the area, language, culture etc.

Question 16

Did COIN even make sense?

Answer 16

Part of the Taliban couldnt care about its ideology : they were fighting their own local wars: they gave themselves their own labels.

Who to fight? It constantly changed.

Reality was different from what they initially thought