I noted to two friends that if David Petraeus manages some kind of victory in Afghanistan, he might well be acclaimed as the next great American military commander, maybe even as some kind of counter-insurgency genius. America has been struggling with counterinsurgency and Petraeus’s seemingly winning formula in Iraq has been a godsend to both the Bush and Obama administrations, providing them with political fig leaves that give them cover while they try to implement some kind of policy in the two theaters. The pressures and contradictions of American policy in Afghanistan have been great enough, however, to ruin McCrystal’s career, and one wonders how much damage Afghanistan will continue to do.
The worrying thing is that America will replace the simplistic approach of “conventional war and firepower” in so-called counter-insurgency with the seemingly equally simplistic one being pushed by the COIN crowd of “civic action.” I hope this isn’t the case and I will withhold judgement until history rolls around.
In this instance, I once again limit myself to observations of public, media perceptions of insurgencies and such, again noting how vague and ill-defined these kinds of military actions really are. This will be problematic for America later because as it attempts to either disengage or continue on in Afghanistan and Iraq, these etymological vagaries will be areas of acrimonious debate. Indeed, they already are. A lot of the debate, for instance, is underpinned by a very narrow understanding of war.
Because I have to study the academic version of military history for a living, I sometimes forget just how narrow its appeal and reach really is. The “new military history” may be all about culture and difference, but the vast majority of people still think of war in rather simplistic, statist, front-line-rear-line, uniformed soldier terms. It’s the whole Napoleonic, Jominian spiel of terrain, battle, armies engaging and the like. I shouldn’t be surprised, but there it is, I am. Anything more than this is dismissed and American culture being what it is, I notice that a lot of amateur military historians dismiss what they perceive to be the complexities of the new military history rather angrily. Or if they don’t, they sort of vaguely accept the premise of culture and pretty much follow the Samuel Huntington and VD Hanson approach of West is Best Against the Rest.
These so-called insurgencies highlight just how difficult to understand the phenomenon of war really is. As I have said here previously, my personal model is to think of war as a means of social negotiation– a kind of academic mumbo-jumbo way of adapting Clausewitz’s thesis that war is a continuation of political discourse. The model works pretty well for me, though, since it’s a reminder that the objectives of violence change per time and place, which means that the means or tactics of violence will change with the objectives as well. Additionally, it is important to remember there are no continuums, so violence can be deployed concurrently with other means.
This helps put so-called insurgencies into perspective. It helps strip away some popular images of insurgencies that have been larded onto the idea by history. For instance, the associations of insurgencies with Maosim has meant that there is an assumption of “total takeover.” That is, it’s still linked to ideas of “total war” and “total conquest” but just done through indirect or assymetric warfare. In the Philippines, for instance, the Abu Sayyaf is very doubtfully out to create some kind of Islamic state. If anything, they’re continuing the tradition of Muslim raiders in the Philippines. In this case, perhaps they are using violence for economic ends– since they would normally be barred from economic advancement– and for the purposes of social esteem. That latter has certainly succeeded, given the fame and notoriety of the Abu Sayyaf– which has given the men a certain degree of perverse public fear and respect.
In many cases, the mere act of existing constitutes a victory for many insurgent groups. They’re a direct challenge to claims by the central government of sovereignty and authority. If you couple this with an actual ability to inflict harm, even if it isn’t harm that can bring down the central government, and you have an insurgent group capable of influencing political discourse without having to engage the “traditional means” from which its members had been barred in the first place.
Issa Sesay was classified by John Mackinlay as the leader of a "lumpen" insurgent group, whose main aim wasn't anything more radical than economic survival or advancement.
I believe the bottom line there is that the American military establishments, intelligence establishments and most of its public are incredibly bad at getting into the head of the enemy. The other side is assumed to think like you. The Bush administration’s faith in elections in Iraq was a good case in point there, with the assumption that elections would be equated to freedom, which Iraqis would like. The Americans are lucky in that it’s created some kind of stability for now.
Imposing American standards of freedom and progress on Afghanistan might have potentially disastrous consequences. The over-emphasis on “rooting out corruption” there and “good governance” might belie the fact that people haven’t actually figured out how the Afghanis define government, let alone good government. What if their notion of governance is unintelligble to Americans– to the point that it would be beyond American ideology to accept it? The original mujehadeen were partially protesting attempts at modernity being imposed by the Soviet-backed government, after all. Certainly, faith in American notions of politics and government didn’t work out for the US in Palestine, where the Palestinians voted for Hamas. Was there a naive belief in the West that they’d vote for Abbas and his people, since this was “best” for America, and therefore surely “best” for the Palestinians?
I had the misfortune of reading bits from the last Tom Clancy novel The Teeth of the Tiger. His fury at not being able to understand this new world and these new enemies is rather painfully clear. The book therefore presents a fantasy where just going out and killing everybody will make it right with no need to understand the enemy. This is matched with his incredibly naive depiction of “the enemy.” Clancy clearly misses the Russians. If this is how a “defense expert” understand the world, well, god help us. We’re in for a long war and even longer and more acrimonious aftermath.
Posted by callitaweasel 
