The Population-Centric COIN
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By Giulia Miraglia
After 9/11, two consecutive U.S. administrations tried to help Afghanistan and Iraq to create a state inhospitable for terrorist organizations. The doctrine of counter-insurgency or COIN had been rediscovered around 2006 by the American military as a tool to rescue the failing Iraq and Afghanistan occupations. It was adopted and codified in Field Manual 3-24. This doctrine was guided by the texts of a French veteran of the War for Algerian Independence, David Galula. At the beginning of the 21st century, Galula’s practices appeared to be a revelation underlining the importance of information operations besides defending the population. Due to the asymmetry between the insurgent and the counterinsurgent, the first would have carried the fight to a different ground where he had better chances to balance the odds against him. Once the new ground was identified with the population, insurgents tried to physically control and to win the hearts of civilians.
First Lt. Kevin Sweet and an interpreter speak with an Afghan man in the village of IbrahimKhel, Nerkh District, Wardak Province, Afghanistan, May 27, 2010 (Sgt. Russel Gilchrest | U.S. Military)
COIN is a specific way of doing counterinsurgency that excludes the use of brute force against civilians. What is really surprising is the centrality of the population in this approach and the narrative of “winning hearts and minds” of the local population to achieve legitimacy and effectiveness of this asymmetrical warfare. COIN is recognized as asymmetrical warfare by a powerful military against irregular combatants who are usually supported by civilian populations. For this reason, civilians are at the heart of any strategy adopted to eliminate the threat of insurgency inside a territory, such as Afghanistan or Iraq. David H. Petraeus, the then up-and-coming army general, participated in almost every important U.S. intervention overseas including Vietnam, Haiti, El Salvador, Bosnia and Iraq. In 2007, he was appointed as the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and later he served as commander of U.S. Central Command and of NATO forces in Afghanistan. General Petraeus stressed the centrality of the “human terrain” as the principal focus during a counterinsurgency operation that allowed counterinsurgents to live with people and to locate forward operating bases in the neighborhoods or villages. He affirmed that it was all about people and counterinsurgency operations were wars mainly for the people.
USN Hospital Corspman Amy Housley, right, gestures during a class for Afghan children given by the US Marines Female Engagement Team (FET) from the 1st battalion 7th Marines Regiment on June 7, 2012. (Adek Berry | Global Post)
Since COIN is a competition to mobilize popular support, it is useful to know how people are mobilized. The American military attempted to redress basic social and political problems, carrying out no more military operations by implementing civil-military operations as central activities. Civil-military operations are tools for restructuring the environment to displace the enemy from it. The population is perceived and described as the center of gravity of both insurgency and counterinsurgency. The winning hearts and minds strategy includes non-military factors, such as political propaganda, economic development, health care and education.
The failure of the U.S. strategy, as demonstrated by the Operation Strike of the Sword in Helmand province in Afghanistan in July 2009, accelerated the development of disastrous scenarios in the country.
Why did this type of counterinsurgency fail in Iraq and Afghanistan? Although COIN had a comprehensive approach, including state-building and rule of law, the reintegration of former insurgents and penal institutions (like a place of re-education and reconciliation), it rarely worked in practice. Instituting a democracy, supporting the central and weak government as in Afghanistan, was often a façade for COIN warfare because a critical element of a real state was missing: a bond between population and the central government. Foreign powers and international organizations attempt to strengthen fractious countries’ governments, most of the time corrupted and accelerating the likelihood of violence.
U.S. Soldier engages in armed social work. (Wired)
One of the most important military writers and practitioners behind the Surge campaign in Iraq during 2007 and 2008, David Kilcullen, famously described COIN as “armed social work.” The idea was that the U.S. military would have included social programs into their tactics, focusing on the mission of improving the lives of the people they should protect, rather than merely on the logistics of conquest.
In the summer of 2009, Stanley McChrystal, the senior commander in Afghanistan, leaked a secret document on the necessity of increasing the numbers of troops. Describing the counterinsurgency as a “controversial” doctrine and implying that the general would have used Afghanistan as his personal laboratory to test, he ignored the lessons of Malaya, Northern Ireland and other successful counterinsurgencies which were the exceptions and not the rule.
U.S. aid and assistance to corrupt, inefficient, repressive or illegitimate central governments did not help to reach the goal of “clearing” the insurgents, militarily “holding” the territory providing basic services, and successful “state-building” through the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT). This latter was not a complete novel invention, but it is reminiscent of the way the French used to organize administrative territories in Algeria: governance shifted to the countryside and a small amount of economic and social development. There could be similarities between the old French counterinsurgency policy in Algeria, and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the US counterinsurgency approach in Afghanistan.
The consequences of this strategy often clashed with civilians. The number of killed and injured civilians reported by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) increased to more than 10,000 in 2019. These casualties highlighted the failure of the COIN strategy in Afghanistan, which encouraged the population to seek protection in insurgents rather than in foreign troops.
The counterinsurgency’s impossible trilemma consists of three objectives – force protection, destruction of insurgency and civilians’ protection – that are impossible to be simultaneously achieved. In pursuing any two of the three, a state leaves out a portion of the third goal. Counterinsurgents can discriminate between noncombatants and combatants while attacking insurgents, but only by sacrificing their troops, as the U.S. and ISAF did in Afghanistan. Corruption is still present,54,5% of the population lived below the national poverty line in 2016,life expectancy in Afghanistan is the lowest in the world, for every 1,000 babies born in 2018,62 died before their fifth birthday. Last but not least, the Taliban still control more than half of the country, and in February 2020, they signed a peace agreement with the U.S. government and opened peace talks with the Afghan government.
Giulia is a political writer for La Tonique. You can follow Giulia on Twitter @gm_miraglia.
