Archive for the 'Counterinsurgency' Category

Stéphane Taillat has a very smart post on his predominately French blog, but this one is in English so it will be friendly to most readers.  It is well worth the time spent to study his entire article.  The “money” quote follows:

COIN has no principles. In my mind, it’s the contrary, and that can explains this narrative. COIN is “context-driven”, so most of the procedures that seem to succeed now come from the field and were implemented at the beginning by many officer and leaders. COIN, as a mission, is a contingent phenomenon. It relies on doctrine, formation and training, tactical procedures that integrates technology, social skills and knowledge as well as situational awareness and leader’s initiatives. It cannot be deduced from principles but rather from a progressive and close intimacy with the social and psychological terrain, both local and of own units. last but not least, remember that today’s insurgencies are not like past insurgencies, as a result of which counterinsurgency can’t simply apply “lessons learned” from History without any harm.

On the whole we agree with him on the general thrust of the article.  Counterinsurgency is indeed “context-driven,” or situation-specific (although we do think that some basic ideas may be deduced from experience).  The post on COIN Analogy of the Day brought some degree of opprobrium concerning our dismissal of the British experience in Northern Ireland as being relevant to counterinsurgency in Iraq or anywhere else.  Whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, greater U.K. or English, the fact of the matter is that this was COIN among their own people.  They were the same, at least as compared to Iraq.  The religious, cultural, societal, and political framework was the same; the ethical morays were the same; the language was the same; and by and large the history is the same.

When the British landed in Basra, they may as well have been placed on a different planet.  Nothing was the same, and thus whatever the British learned in Northern Ireland instantly became irrelevant.  In 2003, the British Army fished in the waters of the Shaat al Arab on their days off.  In 2007 when the British retreated from Basra, they did so while telling the tall tale that since the very presence of the British themselves was causing the violence, it would be better if they just left.  In other words, no one would shoot at the Army if the Army wasn’t there.

These things are being said not just at this blog or by U.S. mouthpieces.  British Colonel Tim Collins has criticized the overall strategy, saying among other things that there were too few troops, and that “Britain’s withdrawal from a chaotic Basra has “badly damaged” its military reputation.”  The post on “COIN Analogy of the Day” was written partially in humor.  This post is not.

The American strategy was horribly bad, and if for no other reason than the inability to stand up the Iraqi Army due to cultural differences, most anyone with brain matter could have told the administration that “standing down when they stand up” was not a plan.  Fortunately, U.S. forces in Anbar did their own thing after 2004 regardless of command confusion.  And they won – this may be Stephane’s point.

Even today there seems to be yet more admissions of failure in Basra by the British envoy to Basra, while at the same time he looks for reasons and excuses (such as it was inevitable anyway) rather than force size, force projection and a learning strategy.

On a serious note, the British generals failed.  The British rank and file include warriors as brave and qualified as any armed forces in the world.  It behooves the Brits to become as open and learning about this whole affair as the U.S. has become.  Taking posts such as this one as insulting is not helpful and doesn’t make progress.  To use an American phrase, the “cookie-cutter” approach to COIN doesn’t work.

Abu Muqawama posts a COIN analogy of the day.

An insurgency is like a staircase. At the top of that staircase, you have the insurgent leadership. Below them, you have the actual bomb-throwers or gunmen. On the step below, you have the primary enablers — the people who provide the bombs or the rifles. Below them, you have secondary enablers — like look-outs. Below the enablers, you have the neutral population. And below the neutrals, at the bottom of the staircase, you have the openly friendly elements of the population.

Bad counter-insurgency strategy and tactics have the effect of turning the staircase into an escalator. If you wage a counter-insurgency campaign by kicking down doors and smashing heads against the wall, you move everyone up on the staircase: primary enablers become actual insurgents, secondary enablers become primary enablers, neutrals become enablers, and the friendly population either gets killed or becomes neutral.

Good population-centric counter-insurgency strategy and tactics, by contrast, throw the escalator effect into reverse. Neutrals become friendly and enablers become neutral.

It sounds erudite enough.  The Captain’s Journal (TCJ) would like to counter with one of our own.  Now, we know the drill.  We’re a U.S. Marine friendly blog, and so the following conversation necessarily ensues between academic COIN specialists and their wives when they see us coming.

Academic COIN Specialist (ACS): Dear, remember that I have talked to you about those hairy chested men who drag their knuckles and grunt?  Well, they’re here.

Wife (W): Eeeeww honey, make the ‘bad men’ go away – they scare me.  I’ll bet they club their women over the head and drag them into their caves.

ACS: Dear, they are reported to have smaller cranial volumes and therefore shorter attention spans, so if we pretend like we’re listening they’ll eventually forget what they’re grunting … um, talking about.  Bear with it and I’ll protect you.  Now, ssshhhhh, we don’t want to confuse them or make them aggressive.

W: They look mean and they’re dragging clubs and rocks in their hands, honey … I’m really scared.

ACS: Ssshhhh .. I’ll hold you tight dear.  The ‘bad men’ won’t hurt you.

Now that y’all have the children hidden and the wives secured and are ready to listen, here it goes.  Counterinsurgency has no center of gravity, notwithstanding Clausewitz.  Any theory that has as its suffix “centric” is mistaken, whether it is enemy-centric, population-centric, or whatever.  An insurgency and the salient conditions that surround it should be seen as a living organism, with insurgents as a cancer that occupies and sometimes attacks its host, and the population as the interstitial cells.  They have a symbiotic and interrelated living arrangement.

Lines of operations and lines of effort are necessary to kill the cancer and restore health to the organism.  As we’ve said before, it is necessary to pursue relentless kinetic operations against the cancer, while at the same time ameliorating the unhealthy condition in which the cancer has left the host body.  So a field grade officer can attend a city council meeting and adjudicate between complaints and disputes of the various cells as a scholar of international affairs and interpersonal relationships, while his men are simultaneously handing out food bags in one part of the organism and laying metal down range and kicking the doors in on homes that are known to harbor cancer cells in other parts of the organism.  In COIN, we do not restrict our actions to a single focus.  This is the strategy of losers.

There.  Whew!  We surprise even ourselves that TCJ didn’t lose focus while trying to explain the analogy.  As for Abu’s statement concerning the author of these words:

Sir John would be the last person to say the British Army has it all figured out with respect to COIN and is himself suspicious of the notion that the British have an advantage in places like Iraq and Afghanistan because of their institutional experience in Northern Ireland. But the general himself is a serious COIN intellectual …

To be serious for a moment, while we here at TCJ do not for a moment disparage our brothers in arms in the UK, and this is especially true of those who have made sacrifices in the campaign alongside U.S. forces, at TCJ we wouldn’t mistake for one moment the UK having an advantage in COIN due to experience in Northern Ireland.  She has nothing whatsoever to do with the cultural ethos in the Middle East, where Osama bin Laden says that the stronger horse gets the vote of the population (and we have pointed out that the U.S. Marines were the stronger horse in Anbar).

Besides, if for no other reason than the difference between the results of the Anbar campaign and the Basra failure, we would not point to the British experiment as meaningful.  Finally, our friends the Brits just simply need to get some humor.  If they were funnier and a little looser, you know, they might have won in Basra.  Like maybe this.

“I got nothing but mad props for 2/6. With another unit from October 2006 to April 2007, many of us often found ourselves questioning the logic of how we were doing certain things, and positing “why can’t we do such and such.” 2/6 came in and, well, did such and such. During the relief-in-place with the company that replaced us replaced my faith in the U.S. Marine Corps; I’ve never been more impressed.” (courtesy of Michael Totten)

The whole persona of the 2/6 [Marines], the way they’re running operations, is to provide for the citizens. The IPs [Iraqi Police] are like that too, they’re out there engaging the people. They [used to get] attacked so much that they were a military force, doing military-type operations. When they showed up, they showed up hard. Now it’s more ‘Hey what’s going on? How are you doing? What can we do for you?’ It’s yielded huge gains.” (courtesy of Bill Ardolino)

The Small Wars Journal blog has an interesting continuation of the debate over strategy in Iraq by Pete Mansoor, entitled Misreading the History of the Iraq War.  Part of Mansoor’s commentary follows:

In his latest missive on the U.S. endeavor in Iraq (“Misreading the Surge Threatens U.S. Army’s Conventional Capabilities”), Army Lieutenant Colonel Gian Gentile claims that the Surge forces and the new U.S. Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency doctrine had little effect on the situation in Iraq. Rather, U.S. forces paid off the insurgents, who stopped fighting for cash. Once again, Gian Gentile misreads not just what is happening today in Iraq, but the history of the war.

To borrow a quote from Ronald Reagan, “Gian, there you go again.”

Gentile’s analysis is incorrect in a number of ways, and his narrative is heavily influenced by the fact that he was a battalion commander in Baghdad in 2006. His unit didn’t fail, his thinking goes, therefore recent successes cannot be due to anything accomplished by units that came to Iraq during the Surge.

The facts speak otherwise. Gentile’s battalion occupied Ameriyah, which in 2006 was an Al Qaeda safe-haven infested by Sunni insurgents and their Al Qaeda-Iraq allies. I’m certain that he and his soldiers did their best to combat these enemies and to protect the people in their area. But since his battalion lived at Forward Operating Base Falcon and commuted to the neighborhood, they could not accomplish their mission. The soldiers did not fail. The strategy did.

This is a common narrative concerning the security plan and revised strategy for Operation Iraqi Freedom, i.e., “it’s all about the combat outposts.”  If the troops are on a FOB (Forward Operating Base), they cannot possibly engage in counterinsurgency.  This may be true under certain conditions for the mega-bases such as Camp Fallujah.  But this perspective seems very incomplete and truncated.  The experience of the Marines of 2/6 during Operation Alljah shows us why.

With the Anbar province pacified it might be difficult to recall the condition as recently as late 2006 in Ramadi and throughout the province.  The condition was bad almost beyond words, but with the success of the Marines and tribes in combating al Qaeda and other insurgents in the Western part of Anbar, the Eastern parts fell subject to their horror.  Fallujah, which had always been a very hardened city, was the new home to rogue elements from all across the globe.  Libyans, Chechens, and other hard core jihadist fighters called Fallujah home in early 2007.  They had utter and complete control, and were protecting a huge weapons cache in the industrial area, including small arms, explosive ordnance and chlorine.  The Marine command in this area of operations called Fallujah “unwinnable.”  At this point, the Anbar campaign could just as easily have taken a turn for the worse, and in fact could have turned completely in favor of the insurgency.

Into this came the Marines of the 2nd Battalion, 6th Regiment.  The population had clearly sided with the insurgents.  On one occasion the Marines witnessed the ultimate commitment being made by the locals (or perhaps the ultimate cowardice, or perhaps both).  The neighborhood children were sent out to demarcate the location of Marines on patrol by encircling the area and raising black balloons for insurgent mortars.  Soon enough, the mortar rounds started dropping.

Fallujah was pacified, but the Marines of 2/6 didn’t do it by living in combat outposts for seven months.  In fact, they were deployed to a FOB named Reaper, constructed specifically for 2/6 on the South side of Fallujah.  Upon 2/6 leaving Reaper, this FOB was never to see U.S. troops again.  This episode – the narrative, the FOB, the experiences, the unique things accomplished – remains not only important in the history of the Marines, but an un-mined jewel of counterinsurgency practice.

The Marines of 2/6 were rotated out to combination combat outposts / Iraqi police precincts for weeks at a time, and then rotated back to FOB Reaper to provide force protection for weeks, or conduct patrols, or nighttime census missions, or intelligence driven raids, or whatever the mission happened to be at the time.  These rotations were staggered so that the combat outposts were never unmanned, FOB Reaper always had adequate force protection, raids always had manpower, kinetic operations always took place against insurgents, checkpoints were always manned, and Iraqi police always had U.S. presence.  Sleep was a luxury, and all of the Marines were always busy.  Close and constant contact with the police and population and relentless kinetic operations against the insurgents was characteristic of the time that 2/6 spent in Fallujah.  The closest analogy that can be given of this operation is that of a swarm.  The Marines swarmed over Fallujah until the insurgents were killed or captured and the population sided with the U.S.  This close contact was not allowed to diminish the implementation of force protection.  While force protection was maintained, force projection was the hallmark of the final Marine Corp battle for Fallujah.

Whatever else can be said of the Iraq campaign, there were not enough troops (force size) to accomplish the mission (force projection).  This is not a fault of Gentile’s unit.  Concerning strategy, only Lt. Col. Gian Gentile and his reports can know if they accomplished the force projection needed to win a counterinsurgency.  If so, then his unit should be seen as a continuation of the overall campaign for Iraq.  After all, for those who claim that counterinsurgency takes ten to twelve years, it should not be surprising that a single deployment is only a part of the campaign rather than the thing in its entirety.  Time was necessary to convince the population that the U.S. troops were not “short-timers,” and thus Gentile may be right.  Neither the strategy nor the troops failed, but again, only Gentile knows if the force projection was adequate.

It all comes down to having enough troops and doing the right things with those troops.  Whether those troops man a checkpoint or conduct an intelligence-driven raid or take population census or go on patrols, where they live is only of logistical importance.  If it is beneficial to live at a combat outpost in some particular circumstance, then that’s where they should be.  If it is beneficial to live at a FOB but rarely spend time there because of constant contact with the population, they that’s where they should be.  While this experience raises the issue of Marine deployment length (7 months) and whether another branch of the service could survive longer deployments (e.g., 12 or 14 months) at the same pace, nonetheless, the salient points are unimpuned.  They key is what the troops do and how often they do it, not where they sleep.

On February 27, 2008, In Everyone Thought the Taliban Would Not Fight!, The Captain’s Journal said:

The “whack-a-mole” brand of counterinsurgency didn’t work in Iraq, and will not work in Afghanistan.  For COIN operations to succeed, two elements must be present as we have learned in Iraq.  First, the force size must be right.  If there aren’t enough troops to take, hold and rebuild, the campaign will fail in the brave new world of the global religious insurgency.  Second, having the right force size in itself does nothing to ensure the proper use of those troops.  The corollary or companion axiom for force size is force projection … Pushing the insurgency into surrounding areas doesn’t work, either short term or long term.

On March 2, 2008, stating that there would be no significant reduction in U.S. force presence in Iraq for the time being, General David Petraeus said:

“Al Qaida is trying to come back in.  We can feel it and see it, and what we’re trying to do is rip out any roots before they can get deeply into the ground.  Al Qaida is incredibly resilient, and they are receiving people and supplies through Syria — although numbers through Syria are down as much as 50 percent.”

“The key is to hang on to what you’ve got. You cannot, in your eagerness to go after something new, start to play ‘Whack-a-mole‘ again. You have to hang onto the areas you’ve cleared; you have to have that plan to do before you go.”

The Captain’s Journal obviously keeps good intellectual company.  Concerning the terror campaign in Afghanistan at the moment, one has to consider the recent history of Iraq and the campaign of brutality in which al Qaeda engaged in order to get the context right.  Reminiscent of our article Hope and Brutality in Anbar, Entifadh Qanbar writing at The New York Sun gives us a recent rundown of the houses of horror al Qaeda used to brutalize and torture their victims in Iraq.

• Baquoba, June 2007: Discovery of the first torture house. Victims had drill holes in their bodies and deep gouges caused by blow torches; an Al Qaeda flag was in the torture house; many of the torture wounds were in the bottom of the feet of the victims. Torture equipment included: Drills, blow torches, chains hanging from the walls and ceiling, blood trails, saws, drills, knives, weapons, masks, and handcuffs. An execution site outside of building where Iraqi victims were lined up and shot.

• Khan Bani Saad, August 2007: Discovery of rooms filled with torture tools and murdered Iraqi victims.

• Arab Jibour, near Dora, south of Baghdad, August 2007: Blood splattered on the walls. Piles of corpses found outside the house.

• Tarmiyya, September 2007: Nine prisoners were freed; many victims had been chained in place.

• Muqdadiyah, December 2007: Beds wired for electrical shock with electricity still on. Masks, whips, bloody knives, and chains hanging from ceiling on the site. Twenty-six bodies found buried on site: most had hands tied and were shot in the head. Locals said Al Qaeda was intimidating the area with threats of torture and execution.

Al Qaeda overplayed their hand with the Iraqis, an example of which was hardened Sharia law unlike anything the Iraqis had ever seen.  In one instance, al Qaeda had warned street vendors not to place tomatoes beside cucumbers because the vegetables are different genders.  Under such oppression, the Iraqis could acquiesce or fight.  Fighting meant certain death if they had to go it alone, or if the U.S. troops were “short timers.”  It became apparent that the U.S. was the stronger horse in Iraq (Bin Laden had believed that al Qaeda would be the stronger horse), and that they were around to stay.  In other words, the population felt that the U.S. could secure them from the violence perpetrated by al Qaeda.

Back to Afghanistan.  The population’s concern has to do with exactly the same thing: security.

Afghan lawmaker Helaluddin Helal says [the gains don’t] matter. Helal, a former general, says the Taliban tactics have badly damaged NATO’s reputation in Afghan eyes. So has the growing separation between the Afghan people and their government.

He says people are far less inclined now to report suspected bombers in their midst. Not because they support the Taliban, but because they fear that the police can’t protect them if the Taliban comes after them.

In addition to the roads and other infrastructure being built in Afghanistan, robust offensive kinetic operations must be present to inhibit Taliban activity, and the force size is not yet appropriate for this force projection.  In Center of Gravity versus Lines of Effort in COIN, we argue that there isn’t a single center of gravity in counterinsurgency.  Rather, an insurgency is “a loosely coupled and dynamic machine, or even organism, which has no tipping point, thus requiring in response parallel lines of effort that target different aspects in different ways and with different means – sometimes simultaneously and sometimes sequentially.”

In Rethinking Insurgency, Professor Steven Metz states that “Decentralized, networked organizations tend to be more survivable. No single node is vital. They may not have a “center of gravity.”  Professor Metz also uses his heady and highly useful paper to examine the notion of transnational insurgencies.  In part, he observes that it is:

… more likely that a regime born out of insurgency would be focused inward, concentrating on consolidating power. In this era of globalization and interconnectedness, new regimes are particularly vulnerable to outside economic and military pressure and thus unlikely to undertake actions which would give the United States or some other state a justification for intervention. Even if the Iraqi or Afghan insurgents won, for instance, they would probably have learned the lessons of 2001—serving as a host to transnational terrorists is a dangerous business.

This is true enough for indigenous insurgencies (some of the Sunni insurgency was indigenous and some was al Qaeda, or foreign), but in Resurgence of Taliban and al Qaeda we examined the influx of foreign jihadists into the NWFP and FATA of Pakistan, and how this is a globally born transnational insurgency.  The lesson is that indigenous insurgencies might remain local, but globally born insurgencies are transnational by nature.  For this reason Admiral Michael Mullen can make the prediction he did concerning the insurgency in this region.

“Defense Department officials told members of Congress on Wednesday that Al Qaeda was operating from havens in “undergoverned regions” of Pakistan, which they said pose direct threats to Europe, the United States and the Pakistani government itself. Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, predicted in written testimony that the next attack on the United States probably would be made by terrorists based in that region.”

This prediction is doctrinally solid for what is at its core a transnational insurgency.  Counterinsurgency doctrine, that is, lines of effort, transnational movements, the trust of the population, robust kinetic operations against the enemy, and logically sequential actions such as take, hold and rebuild, far from being dry doctrine on the pages of a book, is critically important to the present and future campaigns in which the U.S. is engaged and will engage.

The publication of Army Field Manual 3-0, Operations, gives us a chance to pause and ponder definitions, concepts, and going forward doctrine for the global war on terror, much or most of which is likely to be small wars, irregular engagements and counterinsurgency.  But some background is in order before considering the new field manual.

In 2002, Antulio J. Echevarria II authored an interesting analysis entitled Clausewitz’s Center of Gravity: Changing our Warfighting Doctrine – Again!  There is probably no more copiously quoted military strategist than Clausewitz, and it pays to correctly understand what he said.  To begin, Echevarria briefly traces what he sees as the glasses through which the branches within the U.S. military have “seen” Clausewitz.

… each of the services – shaped by different roles, histories, and traditions—tended to view the CoG concept in their respective images. The U.S. Army and U.S. Navy, for example, typically thought in terms of a single CoG, which usually resided at the core of one’s land or naval power and provided the “source” of one’s physical and psychological capacity to fight. The U.S. Air Force, on the other hand, pursued the notion of multiple CoGs, each of which could be “targeted” from the air to achieve the paralysis of the enemy.  And, finally, the U.S. Marine Corps (USMC), with the difficult mission of conducting amphibious forcible entry operations, preferred for a time to think of the CoG as a key weakness, or critical vulnerability, the exploitation of which would give it a decisive advantage.

Echevarria argues that Clausewitz sees CoG neither as a weakness nor a strength, but a focal point at which force may be employed to force the enemy to become unbalanced and topple.  Much like the martial art of Jiu jitsu, the goal is to find the point of maximum leverage against the enemy and exploit it to upend the enemy.

Clausewitz did not distinguish between tactical, operational, or strategic CoGs. The CoG is defined by the entire system (or structure) of the enemy, not by a level of war … According to Clausewitz, a local commander might determine a center of gravity for the portion of the enemy’s forces that lay before him, providing those forces demonstrated sufficient independence from the remainder of the enemy’s forces. However, this separate CoG would only amount to a local rather than a tactical or operational CoG. For us to speak of a tactical CoG, the tactical level of war would have to exist independent of the operational and strategic levels of war. Similarly, for CoGs to exist at the operational and strategic levels of war, those levels of war would have to have an existence separate from the rest of warfare. This notion defies the principle of unity – or interconnectedness – that German military thinkers from Clausewitz to Heinz Guderian had ascribed to warfare.

Translating “On War” from the German, Echevarria gives us an important point in understanding Clausewitz.

The first principle is: To trace the full weight (Gewicht) of the enemy’s force (Macht) to as few centers of gravity as possible, when feasible, to one; and, at the same time, to reduce the blow against these centers of gravity to as few major actions as possible, when feasible, to one.

. . . reducing the enemy’s force (Macht) to one center of gravity depends, first, upon the [enemy’s] political connectivity [or unity] itself . . . and, second, upon the situation in the theater of war itself, and which of the various enemy armies appear there.

Antulio J. Echevarria II recommends a redefinition of CoG: “Centers of Gravity are focal points that serve to hold a combatant’s entire system or structure together and that draw power from a variety of sources and provide it with purpose and direction.”

This is a complex construction of thoughts, and it bears unpacking a bit.  Clausewitz’s background was in the physics, and so it necessarily stands to reason that a CoG should be single and unitary.  The CoG is a theoretical construct with which one can evaluate and predict the behavior of objects as they are acted upon by gravity.  It requires other things such as computation of the centroidal axis of an object.  For a single object, there is a single CoG.  For multiple objects there can still be a CoG as long as the objects are not dynamic.  But if the objects are moving in Cartesian space with respect to the other objects in a system, there can be no single CoG.

Clausewitz understood this, and while there are arguments for seeing an Army as a dynamic system, he is compelled to see it more as an object with a unitary CoG.  There are not multiple CoG, only one, and this point is critical to understanding Clausewitz.

Speaking at the Center for a New American Security along with Lt. Col. John Nagl, Sarah Sewall of Harvard University stated the following:

If the civilian is the center of gravity, securing and protecting is the main function of military forces, not destroying.  If restraint in the use of military force is fundamental to the successful campaign, then that is in fact the opposite of overwhelming force.

Sewall goes on to give nonkinetic operations a place of primacy over kinetic operations.  In finding a sole CoG, she is true to the Clausewitz idea of a unitary CoG.  But is this notion of locating and articulating a unitary CoG in counterinsurgency (COIN) based solely on Clausewitz, FM 3-24, the newly released FM 3-0, or something else?

Regarding the Counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-24, the phrase “center of gravity” appears only three times (except for the definition), and the most interesting is found in section 4-12:

In model making, the model describes an approach to the COIN campaign, initially as a hypothesis.  The model includes operational terms of reference and concepts that shape the language governing the  conduct (planning, preparation, execution, and assessment) of the operation. It addresses questions like  these: Will planning, preparation, execution, and assessment activities use traditional constructs like center  of gravity, decisive points, and LLOs? Or are other constructs—such as leverage points, fault lines, or  critical variables—more appropriate to the situation?

Rather than CoG being the central doctrinal concept in COIN, a different concept begins to appear, that of lines of operation, appearing first in Section 1-36:

The Vietnamese conflict offers another example of the application of Mao’s strategy. The North Vietnamese developed a detailed variant of it known as dau tranh (“the struggle”) that is most easily described in terms of logical lines of operations (LLOs). In this context, a line of operations is a logical line that connects actions on nodes and/or decisive points related in time and purpose with an objective (JP 1-02). LLOs can also be described as an operational framework/planning construct used to define the concept of multiple, and often disparate, actions arranged in a framework unified by purpose. (Chapters 4 and 5 discuss LLOs typically used in COIN operations.) Besides modifying Mao’s three phases, dau tranh delineated LLOs for achieving political objectives among the enemy population, enemy soldiers, and friendly forces. The “general offensive–general uprising” envisioned in this approach did not occur during the Vietnam War; however, the approach was designed to achieve victory by whatever means were effective.  It did not attack a single enemy center of gravity; instead it put pressure on several, asserting that, over time, victory would result in one of two ways: from activities along one LLO or the combined effects of efforts along several. North Vietnamese actions after their military failure in the 1968 Tet offensive demonstrate this approach’s flexibility. At that time, the North Vietnamese shifted their focus from defeating U.S. forces in Vietnam to weakening U.S. will at home. These actions expedited U.S. withdrawal and laid the groundwork for the North Vietnamese victory in 1975.

Here the concept of lines of operation appear, by example, in a linear implementation.  If this line of operation doesn’t work, another will be implemented.  In FM 3-0, this concept is upgraded and explained as something other than unitary, singular, sequential actions (6-61).

Commanders may describe an operation along lines of operation, lines of effort, or a combination of both.  Irregular warfare, for example, typically features a deliberate approach using lines of operations complimented with lines of effort … with this approach, commanders synchronize and sequence actions, deliberately creating complementary and reinforcing effects.  The lines then converge on the well-defined, commonly understood end state outlined in the commander’s intent.

The concept of lines of operations and lines of effort appears many more times in FM 3-0.  If FM 3-0 represents an advancement over the Clausewitz doctrine of a unitary CoG, then what are we to make of this notion of COIN as “armed social science”?  This view certainly doesn’t cohere with Osama bin Laden’s summary of the psyche of the population in this part of the world: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.”  Similarly, we have claimed that the Anbar campaign was won because the U.S. was the strong horse.

The seeds of this view are actually contained within FM 3-24 itself.  In Section 1-159, we read that “COIN is an extremely complex form of warfare. At its core, COIN is a struggle for the population’s support. The protection, welfare, and support of the people are vital to success.”  In Section 5-42, we read that “Essential services address the life support needs of the HN population. The U.S. military’s primary task is normally to provide a safe and secure environment.”  In Section A-60, we read that “Whatever else is done, the focus must remain on gaining and maintaining the support of the population. With their support, victory is assured; without it, COIN efforts cannot succeed.”

True enough within the right context, statements such as these give ammunition to those who see COIN as “armed social science,” and allow theoreticians such as Sarah Sewall to focus in on a singular CoG, that being the population.  Gaining their support is key, and kinetic operations are secondary or even tertiary in importance.  It is a small next step to the claim that restraint in military force in the key to winning the population.  How Sewall expects to provide security for the population without kinetic operations against the enemy remains a mystery.  After all, “armed social science” is more like U.N. “peace keeping” missions that routinely fail to keep the peace than it is the actual campaign in Iraq.

The security plan for Iraq, however, is in many ways modeled after the Anbar part of that campaign, in which military force was the pretext to the successes with the tribes, neighborhood muktars, and heads of households.  It might be countered that the focus on lines of operations (kinetic) and lines of effort (nonkinetic) represents a more tactical focus, but in the end, theory bows the knee to tactics and logistics because all counterinsurgency is local.

National unity, political reconciliation, fair participation in the political scene and infrastructure and services are all significant actors in whether the more local lines of operations have lasting effect.  But if FM 3-24 represents the softer side of COIN, FM 3-0 seems to see COIN as the multifacted complexity that it is.  Rather than see a singular, unitary CoG in COIN, FM 3-0 seems to view an insurgency as a loosely coupled and dynamic machine, or even organism, which has no tipping point, thus requiring in response parallel lines of effort that target different aspects in different ways and with different means – sometimes simultaneously and sometimes sequentially.

No astute observer of the campaign in Iraq – especially in Anbar and subsequently in and around Baghdad during the security plan – seeing the high number of intelligence driven raids, heavy use of air power, and kinetic operations against foreign terrorists and indigenous insurgents, can claim that kinetic operations have taken on a secondary or tertiary role to anything.  In other words, when the successful practice in the field doesn’t comport with the theory in the books, only the disconnected theoreticians can continue the mantras.  It was time to update doctrine to recognize the nature of the gains in Iraq.  By so robustly enveloping lines of operations and lines of effort within its pages, FM 3-0 may represent a significant advancement in military doctrine over FM 3-24.

In “Everyone thought the Taliban would not fight!” I observed concerning the difference between modern day insurgencies and classical insurgencies that “In addition to an insurgency being a function of counter-forces within a nation state, they can be (and have been in the case of Iran) funded, supported and trained by nation states to undermine the stability of the host country.”

Today we have yet another indication of Iran’s actions in Iraq, given to us straight from someone who would know.

Iranian secret service agents are working to “sabotage” the operations of groups fighting Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Baghdad’s intelligence chief said on Wednesday.

Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani issued the statement shortly before a landmark visit to Baghdad on Sunday by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“We have information confirming that Iranian secret services have sent agents to sabotage the Sahwa experience in Iraq,” the statement said, referring to mostly Sunni groups fighting Al-Qaeda in Iraq alongside the US military.

Shahwani “stressed the need for the Iraqi people to be vigilant in facing these activities.”

Vigilant indeed.  They should kill the Iranian usurpers.  Another example is given to us in the Pakistan / Afghanistan region, but this example is not of a formal nation-state actor (although it is being allowed to exist by a nation-state).

Al Qaeda is taking a greater role in coordinating the Taliban and other Islamist militant groups operating in Afghanistan’s volatile border region with Pakistan, a top U.S. commander said yesterday.

U.S. military officials are concerned the activity is part of an ongoing effort to escalate violence in Afghanistan against U.S.-led NATO forces as attacks in Iraq subside.

Similar to Vietnam where the Viet Cong were supported by North Vietnam who was supported by Russia and China, this is the brave new world of transnational movements that David Galula didn’t get to experience.

In Our Deal with Mullah Abdul Salaam, I concluded the discussion on the British negotiations with erstwhile mid-level Taliban commanders who vowed to “switch sides” and fight against the Taliban, their forces failing to materialize when the battle for Musa Qala began.  From the Oxford Mail we get an update on the situation in and around Musa Qala.

When the British captured Musa Qala, they discovered a heroin refinery in a row of derelict garages – and a stock of opium which would have produced heroin with a street value of £5m. It was burned on a bonfire.

British soldiers are now sheltering in the open-fronted buildings, which offer little protection against the rain, snow and intense cold – night-time temperatures often fall to -10 C.

Up to seven heroin refineries in the district have been destroyed by the allies – depriving the Taliban of vital funds, collected through tithes from farmers and protection money paid by smugglers.

But while Musa Qala’s battered, bullet-holed district centre may have been retaken, the Taliban are still out there in the hills and villages, murdering anyone suspected of collaborating with the British or Afghan government forces, ambushing convoys, firing rockets and mortars, and planting roadside bombs – so-called Improvised Explosive Devices.

This is fine form indeed.  In addition to the Taliban roaming freely about the countryside to perpetrate violence, NATO forces are mixing up the global war on terror with the war on drugs, and destroying the population’s cash crop in their brainy rendition of “winning hearts and minds.”

Fred Kaplan relates a conversation he had with a British officer not too long ago concerning their view of the campaign: “The assumption, on the part of the NATO nations, was that the mission would be shifting away from “counterterrorism” to “counterinsurgency”— that is, from “going after bad guys for the sake of going after bad guys” (as one British officer snidely put it to me when I visited Afghanistan that summer) to securing areas for the sake of promoting economic development.”

Ah yes, the “deep magic” of counterinsurgency.  Enough money, military transition teams and roads, and the insurgency simply disappears.  Military power and kinetic operations is for uneducated knuckle-draggers and brutes – creation of infrastructure is for thinkers and scholars.  A variant of this view is present to the South in Pakistan, where the government is courting the idea of the implementation of sharia law in order to appease the extremist tribes in Waziristan.

As I discussed in Short Lived Ceasefire with the Taliban, a truce, or ceasefire, was negotiated only several days ago between the Taliban and Pakistan, but most good analysts believe that this can only be advantageous for the Taliban.

The same “deep magic” that causes British commanders to mock the idea of killing bad guys in Afghanistan also causes the Pakistani military command to call off military operations against Baitullah Mehsud and his forces in what is becoming a troubling sign of the lack of will concerning the tribal areas.  This lack of will apparently runs up through the highest levels of military command in Pakistan.

The announcement of a cease-fire just a few weeks into a determined military operation against one of Pakistan’s most wanted men, the militant leader Baitullah Mehsud, has once again raised questions about the Pakistani government’s commitment to combating militancy in the country’s tribal areas.

Pakistani analysts said they feared that the cease-fire was reminiscent of past deals that allowed the militants to regroup and fortify their stronghold, turning the tribal areas into a veritable ministate for the Taliban and Al Qaeda. United States officials have long voiced reservations that any further deals with the militants would be counterproductive.

Spokesmen for Mr. Mehsud, who Pakistani and American officials say is linked to Al Qaeda and the attack that killed the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, announced the cease-fire last week. The government has not confirmed it, and a military spokesman said military operations against Mr. Mehsud and his followers, estimated in the thousands, were continuing.

But two senior security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to journalists, said a cease-fire was in place.

The cease-fire announcement followed three weeks of intensive fighting that began in a mountainous part of South Waziristan on Jan. 16, when security forces mounted a large-scale offensive against Mr. Mehsud and his forces. Reports of the clashes said scores of soldiers and militants were killed.

The army imposed a debilitating economic blockade, coupled with a three-pronged operation to box in Mr. Mehsud and his militants, using the full force of the army’s arsenal, including fighter jets and artillery. The blockade was so effective that for weeks little information about the campaign emerged from the area.

The campaign has been part of the most serious push against militants in several years, led by the new army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who Western diplomats had hoped would refocus the military’s effort in the tribal areas.

The acting interior minister, Hamid Nawaz Khan, suggested that military operations were bearing fruit and that the militants were on the run. “They start asking for negotiations themselves after they find themselves weak due to the military operation,” he said.

The reasons for what appears to be a reversal by the government remain unclear. But given the bitter experience of past deals, and the army’s apparent readiness to pursue military operations against Mr. Mehsud this time, the news of the cease-fire has been greeted with dismay by some Pakistani analysts.

In an interview, Mehmood Shah, a retired brigadier who served as the chief civil administrator of the tribal areas after 9/11, said he understood that the military operation was going well and according to plan, despite difficulties because of the terrain and the harsh winter weather.

He warned that any cease-fire or peace deal with Mr. Mehsud, before his forces were sufficiently degraded, would work against the military’s goals. “The army should not be doing a deal, and in the case that they are, it would be a mistake,” he said.

The problem, however, is that ceasefires have never helped the Pakistan military, and the Taliban have always come out better due to such deals.  In Afghanistan, military transition teams who aren’t really looking for a fight are left alone by the Taliban because they aren’t a threat to Taliban ambitions, and the same roads built by NATO are used by the Taliban to emplace IEDs and travel far and wide to kill and maim as part of their intimidation campaign.  Driving the Taliban from the urban centers, rather than a chase by NATO forces, means sending them into the countryside to lie in wait to “murder anyone suspected of collaborating with the British or Afghan government forces, ambush convoys, fire rockets and mortars, and plant roadside bombs.”

The “deep magic” of counterinsurgency fails its advocates, because there is a deeper magic still.  Just as there are some who take counterinsurgency to be equivalent to kinetic operations against the enemy, there are also some who lurch to the other extreme.  COIN is all about hearts and minds, infrastructure, reconstruction and societal stability.  This ‘either-or’ approach jettisons the ‘both-and’ approach to COIN in favor of a sequence rather than a concept.

Leadership is needed in Pakistan where the Taliban are being allowed to regroup and plan for the spring.  Leadership is needed throughout Afghanistan where chasing insurgents brings scoffs among the military elite, and where kinetic operations against the enemy is relegated to special forces operations against high value targets and prominent personalities.

The British officer to whom Kaplan talked snidely ridiculed “going after bad guys for the sake of going after bad guys.”  I might also snidely retort that I do not at all advocate going after bad guys for its own sake either.  Rather, I advocate “going after bad guys” for the same reason that I advocate building infrastructure and sacking totally worthless officers: for the sake of the counterinsurgency campaign and the future of Afghanistan.

Prior: Doctrinal Confusion in COIN: What do you do when your forces no longer want to fight?

The Small Wars Journal editors discuss the views of Mike Vickers, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations / low intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities, concerning the campaign in Afghanistan.

The senior civilian adviser to the defense secretary on special operations says the key to success in Iraq and Afghanistan is through “the indirect approach” — working “by, with and through” host-nation forces — rather than “surges” of U.S. troops.

“Insurgencies have to be won by local capacity,” Mike Vickers, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations/low intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities, told a group of defense reporters in Washington on Feb. 6.

Because “it typically takes a decade or more” to achieve victory in a counterinsurgency, Vickers said, “a key measure of success” for the “supporting country” — in this case, the U.S. — is whether domestic political support for the mission can be sustained for such an extended period.

This view runs parallel to the special forces command views and talking points for Pakistan’s problems (see The Special Forces Plan for Pakistan: Mistaking the Anbar Narrative), and is exactly what I would expect a champion of special forces operations to advocate.  But it is difficult to fathom that there are any advocates of the small footprint model remaining, especially after witnessing the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past half decade.  The worn out talking point about COIN taking ten years also ignores the rapidity of change in U.S. politics, something we have discussed before.  It might be the case that U.S. forces will remain in Iraq through another ten years and that Iraq will remain a protectorate of the U.S. for some time into the future.  But this presence will not include constant constabulary operations – or else the force presence will lose popular support.  The notion that any COIN campaign which includes losses from active kinetic operations can maintain popular support over two and a half Presidential administrations simply ignores the realities of American politics.

Further, the small footprint model of COIN (a) is the reason the Afghanistan campaign is languishing to begin with, and (b) almost lost Operation Iraqi Freedom prior to the surge.  Rather than see the surge as a subset of ideas that can work only under certain circumstances, it should be seen as a subset of the larger doctrine of force projection that won the Anbar campaign almost prior to the surge.

Counterinsurgency will never be the same as it was even twenty years ago.  The advent of religious motivation, standoff weapons (such as IEDs), transnational cultural movements, and instantaneous communications and intelligence-gathering through technology, has forever changed the face of low intensity warfare and terrorism.  Even Vickers mentions the situation in Pakistan in troubled language, saying:

“The situation in Pakistan is very worrisome,” he said. “It’s getting worse in Pakistan.”

The Pashtun tribal belt along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border has become a safe haven for al-Qaida’s senior leadership, according to Vickers.

“Al-Qaida’s goals remain to catalyze a global Islamic insurgency against the West and to carry out spectacular attacks against the West and the United States in particular,” he said. “And there really has been no diminishment in those goals … But in the past year-and-a-half or so, there has been an improvement in their capacity to do so as they’ve enjoyed greater sanctuary in western Pakistan.”

Vickers has neatly separated the two problems of Afghanistan and Pakistan, a mistake of huge proportions (I have elsewhere argued that the fates of these two countries are inextricably tied together).  Vickers should be as concerned about Afghanistan as he is about Pakistan.  They are the same campaign.

The focus on personalities and high value targets, special forces operations, and overly heavy reliance on indigenous forces is the Rumsfeld model of COIN.  It is a proven loser.  Standing up the Iraqi and Afghan armies will take time, as will reconstruction and building of infrastructure.  Security is the pretext for the success of either, and this security can only be provided with force projection.  Hope married to bad doctrine is not a plan.

The News in Pakistan is reporting some interesting developments in the recent engagement of some high value targets in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

PESHAWAR: Following unconfirmed reports of killing of a high-profile al-Qaeda commander Abu Laith al-Libi, there are now rumours that an American al-Qaeda militant Adam Gadahn, also known as Azzam al-Amriki, had been killed in the alleged Predator attack by the US on a house in Mirali, North Waziristan, a few days back.

32-year-old Adam Gadahn, who is American citizen belonging to southern California, has been accused by the US of praising the perpetrators of September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington and attending al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistani tribal areas.

According to sources, American officials who are yet to publicly confirm the killing of Abu Laith al-Libi, had reportedly sharing information with western media that most likely another most wanted figure, Adam Gadahn, has also been killed in the air strike by the CIA-operated unmanned drone on a house in Khushali Torikhel village near Mirali town.

According to sources, the American al-Qaeda militant, who has been reportedly spending much of his time in Afghanistan and Pakistani tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, had reached Mirali for an important meeting with other senior al-Qaeda commanders for planning the so-called spring offensive against US and Nato troops in Afghanistan.

However, there were no details whether he arrived in the town when a house reportedly housing some senior al-Qaeda operatives including Abu Laith al-Libi, was blitzed. US military officials based in Afghanistan are reportedly collecting details about those killed in the attack on the house and in this regard two of their spy planes continued flying over the same area even after the tragic incident.

Local tribesmen, who were kept at bay by hundreds of armed militants from visiting the house until all the bodies, mostly dismembered, were retrieved, said that US spy planes might have taken pictures of the entire rescue operation as well as of the funeral ceremony.

Like US officials, Pakistani authorities have been constantly keeping silence over what had happened in their jurisdictions. It may be recalled that the US State Department had offered US$ one million reward for capture of Adam Gadahn.

However, some military officials felt that declaring Gadahn as dead in the Mirali incident, the US wanted him to speak for his defence or make some telephone calls so that they target him like rest of al-Qaeda operatives.

The Captain’s Journal is going on record declaring Adam Gadahn to be completely irrelevant to the global war on terror.  The normally clear-headed Threats Watch is focusing on the person of Gadahn, as is the Jawa Report.  We have also focused on individuals, as in Baitullah Mehsud: The Most Powerful Man in Waziristan, but only to the extent that it bears on political and cultural movements and broad strategic analysis that points directly to necessary countermeasures by the U.S.  This silly focus on so-called “high value targets” and special operations to capture or kill them is a waste of resources and energies.  The issue in counterinsurgency is not the personalities, but the people.  This is why special operations cannot win counterinsurgencies.  The recruitment pool never dries up unless force projection provides the security for cultural amelioration and reconstruction to become effective.

Let’s provide a case in point.  The BBC is providing us with an account of why funds for reconstruction isn’t working in Afghanistan, once again giving an example of the need for force projection in counterinsurgency.

Journalist Zaki Shahamat believes Nato should put more money into provinces which have stability.

I have seen dramatic changes in my country since Nato arrived but the changes haven’t been balanced or spread equally throughout the provinces in this country.

It is those provinces where forces are stationed and where there is great turmoil which seem to get more money and reconstruction. Provinces which have seen less turmoil have also seen less funding.

The policy has been to reconstruct unstable areas to provide security. I think this has failed.

There are many reports that the Taleban are approaching Kabul. Another neighbouring province, Wardak, also has a strong Taleban presence.

My family live in Ghazni province and it experienced increased lawlessness. Last year South Korean aid workers were abducted in Ghazni. The Taleban are present but they operate as criminals. The real problems are in the outlying districts.

People who travel from the centre of the province to the districts have to pay – sometimes with their money, their cars, their property and sometimes with their lives.

Nato forces operate mainly in the centre of the province. They can’t and don’t do much for the people outside.

Monies to provinces and areas that are lawless and have no security (due to lack of force projection) go to waste, as does the expensive and time consuming targeting of personalities in the Jihad.  Counterinsurgency is not as simple as throwing money around and sending a JDAM into an enemy home.

But there is something divulged in the press release (other than the useless and boring report about Adam Gadahn) that makes it entirely worthwhile.  It is that the alleged meeting took place to plan the Taliban spring offensive against NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, once again underlining our own analysis of dual Taliban fronts– one in Afghanistan and the other in Pakistan.  This is important intelligence analysis, and again runs directly contrary to the position of Major General Rodriguez and his intelligence apparatus who claim otherwise.  Listening to the details irrespective of the emotional hype has its rewards.

FM 3-24 is a fine addition to counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine, and should be studied by all aspiring military leaders and strategists.  Two problems become apparent when COIN doctrine is applied in theater.  The first problem is the belief that the doctrine outlined in any single text or system is comprehensive.  This view can be characterized as the ‘either-or’ belief.  Common to this view is the tendency to find a single “center of gravity” in COIN.  If the center of gravity is the population, it is said, kinetic operations take second place to non-kinetic operations.

The second problem is one that teachers in just about every endeavor know all too well: the student is oftentimes more extreme than the teacher.  If social concerns, job creation, national reconciliation, and infrastructure are important concerns in COIN, then waging counterinsurgency is all about “armed social science.”  Lt. Gen. David Barno’s account of COIN in Afghanistan is important, found in Fighting the Other War: Counterinsurgency Strategy in Afghanistan , 2003 – 2005.

As we switched our focus from the enemy to the people, we did not neglect the operational tenet of maintaining pressure on the enemy. Selected special operations forces (SOF) continued their full-time hunt for Al-Qaeda’s senior leaders. The blood debt of 9/11 was nowhere more keenly felt every day than in Afghanistan. No Soldier, Sailor, Airman, or Marine serving there ever needed an explanation for his or her presence—they “got it.” Dedicated units worked the Al-Qaeda fight on a 24-hour basis and continued to do so into 2004 and 2005.  In some ways, however, attacking enemy cells became a supporting effort: our primary objective was maintaining popular support.

Note the critical error in judgment that had its seeds in the (mis)development of COIN doctrine.  Kinetic operations against the enemy took on the characterisitic of special operations by a small number of special forces operators against high profile personalities and so-called high value targets.  The fight became particular rather than comprehensive, while the nonkinetic operations took on the more comprehensive nature.  According to Lt. Gen. Barno, the campaign could be focused on either the enemy or the people (but apparently not both at the same time).  U.S. forces transitioned from one focus to the other.  How does this manifest itself in current operations in Afghanistan?  A recent report gives us a glimpse into the thinking of field grade officers in theater at the moment.

To undercut the insurgents – whose forces are an unusual mix of al-Qaeda operatives and fighters loyal to American nemesis Gulbuddin Hekmatyar – Kapisa is fast becoming a litmus test for the US military’s new and improved counter-insurgency campaign.

That means added urgency and stress on the work of a 75-man US-North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led Provincial Reconstruction Team – or “PRT”. But while senior US officers see these teams – 12 of them run by the US military – as the “new wave” in non-combat counter-insurgency, in practice their soldiers look a lot like old-school peacekeepers and “nation-builders”, the kind you find across the developing world under the oft-slandered banner of the United Nations.

Ten years ago, the fast-track US colonels and majors who now lead the Afghan mission would have referred to what goes on here in the name of counter-insurgency as “mission creep”; work well beyond the scope of serious American soldiering.

Now, the US soldiers who do the best peacekeeping aren’t afraid to boast about their deeds over the grumbles of colleagues who sport T-shirts that read: “The Taliban Hunt Club.”

“We have not been attacked while traveling alone, only when we are out with other teams or combat units,” says air force Captain Eric Saks, whose job description includes diplomacy, aid work and peacemaking. “Even the bad guys know we are not really looking for a fight.”

That is because Saks and his comrades are the folks to talk to for millions of US dollars in economic development funds.

Kapisa residents, leaders and youth groups approach Saks for investments in projects that address the standard list of developing world problems: women’s rights, youth employment, free speech and health care. The captain, a 30-something Long Islander, draws on a dollar budget of millions to lend support to the best and most “sustainable” project ideas.

For several years after the US invaded the country in 2001, economic development played second fiddle to the hunt for al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Villagers looked on as US soldiers shot and literally “bagged” their foe, then turned a cold shoulder to the populace.

That zero-sum strategy was making more enemies than friends, US officers admit now.

“Instead of killing them and seeing the insurgency just replace its own, we need development as a means of isolating the enemy,” says Ives, an engineer from Washington State, who heads up the larger Task Force Cincinnatus under which Saks serves.

This same theme presents itself in this more recent report.  Even though only PRTs, when the bad guys know “we aren’t really looking for a fight,” the doctrine has been misconstrued to be something that it isn’t.  It is seen to work alone and disconnected from a significant reason for the presence of U.S. forces in the region: kinetic operations against the enemy.

Isolation of the enemy by the development of infrastructure is one prong of the strategy to prevent the inducement to join the insurgency.   But lack of kinetic operations against the insurgency does nothing to address the large and growing membership of the Taliban and their increasingly violent attacks inside both Afghanistan and Pakistan.  In fact, if infrastructure is a necessary element of long term counterinsurgency, then the 50% reduction in foreign investments in 2007 due to the declining security situation runs counter to the intent and proves that one prong of COIN remains kinetic operations to kill or capture the enemy and thus provide security so that reconstruction of infrastructure can be effective.

Successful COIN, as we have seen in Iraq, isn’t about a singular ‘focus’ and cannot be characterized as an ‘either-or’ choice or transition in phases.  Successful COIN is characterized by ‘both-and’ in all phases of the campaign.  The deployment of 3200 Marines to the theater will force review and reconsideration of the very nature of the campaign.  The Marines will not conduct their part of the campaign “not really looking for a fight.”  Poor leadership has wasted time in Afghanistan.  The presence of the Marines might possibly reverse this trend by taking counterinsurgency back to its roots and clarifying the doctrinal confusion that clouds the current thinking.