Lecture 12. Counterinsurgency Flashcards
Counterinsurgency
is military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taking by a government to defeat insurgency.
Afghanistan counterinsurgency strategy
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
Winning hearts and minds (WHAM)
- 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.
Population is the price- David Galula
must easier to convince the population
Clear, Hold, Build
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.
Insurgency is very hard to identify
they attack whenever they can: they are fluid
Assumption within coin
possible to control population, only one local population that does not move: easier to focus on this, rather than of the flexible insurgency
Kinetic and non-kinetic
kinetic: military action
Non-kinetic: helping elders, education
Two sides of the same COIN
link between waging a war and buildig a state.
its not ust about what is happening at local level
Karzai bad partner for the USA
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
Was COIN an investment trap?
- 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!
Coin was about social change
it is not the task of the military
McCrystal: There is no alternative than COIN
believed so strongly in COIN that he couldnt see its defaults.
Was COIN too ambitious?
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.
Insurgency VS COIN
much freer in using coercion than COIN.
And: better understanding of the area, language, culture etc.
