India: Fleeting Attachment to the Counterinsurgency Grand Strategy

India’s success in dealing with insurgency movements was based on adherence to four key rules of engagement: identifying a lead counter-insurgent force, launching population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) operations, non-use of excessive force and confining the role of the COIN operations to preparing a ground for a political solution. While the country does not yet have a COIN doctrine, these four rules of engagement do constitute what can be referred to a COIN grand strategy. Analysis of the several continuing insurgencies, however, reveals the country’s inability to adhere to the grand strategy. Political considerations, incapacity to manoeuvre through the demands of various stake holders, and even the wish to expedite the decimation of insurgent outfits through a force-centric approach has produced a long history of failures in dousing the fires of discontent.     

Iraq, 2003–2011: succeeding to fail

ABSTRACT

This study examines the US experience during the Iraq war, from the planning phase that began in 2001 to the withdrawal of US forces in 2011. It reveals a dearth of planning and intelligence leading up to the invasion; reluctance by conventional coalition military forces to conduct reconstruction, political and security capacity-building; and, later, full spectrum counterinsurgency operations. These forces took on some missions traditionally reserved for special operations forces, and they increasingly assumed diplomatic roles as they interfaced with the Iraqi leadership and local kingpins. Although these efforts yielded some impressive organizational learning and limited operational successes, they were hampered by lack of adequate preparation, a poor understanding of the human terrain, shortsighted strategies, and ultimately a dearth of political will to stay the course. The outcome was far from the model Middle East democracy envisioned by the invasion’s architects, and the American experience in Iraq instead became a cautionary tale for military intervention.     

Multinational counterinsurgency: the Western intervention in the Boxer Rebellion 1900–1901

This article proposes a case study of the multinational counterinsurgency operations that occurred in China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900–1, to provide a better understanding of the political and military dynamics specific to this type of mission. The study focuses primarily on the nature of the cooperation on the ground, the various national approaches to counterinsurgency, and the asymmetry of strategic approach between the Westerners and the Chinese. A discussion is also proposed, highlighting that combined counterinsurgency is not per se an obstacle to the unity of command, but that politically international coalitions create unique challenges to counterinsurgency operations.     

Size Still Matters: Explaining Sri Lanka’s Counterinsurgency Victory over the Tamil Tigers

The military effectiveness literature has largely dismissed the role of material preponderance in favor of strategic interaction theories. The study of counterinsurgency, in which incumbent victory is increasingly rare despite material superiority, has also turned to other strategic dynamics explanations like force employment, leadership, and insurgent/adversary attributes. Challenging these two trends, this paper contends that even in cases of counterinsurgency, material preponderance remains an essential—and at times the most important—factor in explaining battlefield outcomes and effectiveness. To test this, the paper turns to the case of the Sri Lankan state’s fight against the Tamil Tiger insurgency, a conflict which offers rich variation over time across six periods and over 25 years. Drawing on evidence from historical and journalistic accounts, interviews, memoirs, and field research, the paper demonstrates that material preponderance accounts for variation in military effectiveness and campaign outcomes (including military victory in the final campaign) better than strategic explanations. Additionally, a new quantitative data-set assembled on annual loss-exchange ratios demonstrates the superiority of materialist explanations above those of skill, human capital, and regime type.     

Birth of the Cold War: irregular warfare first blood in Greece

ABSTRACT

While often held up as a model of successful American counterinsurgency, the Greek Civil War presents a unique case. Peculiar local conditions and geopolitics contributed to the defeat of communist forces in Greece. A firm British and later American commitment to combating communism stood in contrast to ambiguous support from the Soviet Union in an area they considered outside of their sphere of influence. Strong nationalist feeling among the Greek population buttressed support for the government and undermined the ‘internationalist’ concessions of communist forces. These characteristics make the extrapolation of broader lessons focused on victory through the application of overwhelming American resources and the financing of local forces problematic. If lessons are to be gleaned from this case, they should focus on the critical roles played by internal political dynamics and geopolitics in undermining the strength of the insurgent forces and how these provided a stable platform from which the counterinsurgents could operate.     

‘Legitimacy is the Main Objective’: Legitimation in Population-Centric Counterinsurgency

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to the understanding of the role of legitimacy and different forms of legitimation in population-centric counterinsurgency. An analysis of the logic underlying this counterinsurgency concept sheds a light on the former as it identifies legitimacy as the crucial mechanism through which a collaboration strategy seeks to obtain control over the local population. An exploration of Weber’s primary types of legitimate authorities provides the insight that counterinsurgents might operationalize legitimation through either rational-legal ways or by co-opting local power-holders who hold a position as traditional or charismatic leaders. The exact choice of strategy depends on the pattern of legitimacy in the target society and therefore so-called cultural legitimation is pivotal.     

Dealing with disputes in Afghanistan: principles and rules for the tactical level

This article addresses the principles that should guide commanders, and the rules they must adhere to, when dealing with community disputes in Afghanistan. An important feature of these principles and rules is that they have been developed to ensure that coalition forces minimize the harm caused to the local population; and that members of the coalition do not violate their own laws and policies. The principles and rules have also been developed to be consistent with counterinsurgency guidance as practiced in Afghanistan. The article concludes with a number of ‘Dos and Don'ts’ concerning dispute settlement that are relevant for coalition forces dealing with disputes at the tactical level. The article also has two appendices, which are intended to guide commanders to better understand dispute settlement systems in Afghanistan.     

Beyond the Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora: Countering Comando Vermelho’s Criminal Insurgency

Ten years ago, in 2008, the Brazilian Government adopted a strategy to regain control over the favelas in Rio de Janeiro – the Pacifying Police Units (UPP). In spite of initial favorable results, the main threat, namely the Red Command (CV), fought back and by 2014 the UPP strategy was badly frayed. In order to defeat this threat, it is necessary to reconceptualize CV as a criminal insurgency and to pinpoint and address the social and political factors that sustain it. This allows for a response inspired by the ‘shape-clear-hold-build’ counterinsurgency approach, which while cost-intensive is, in the long term, the most sustainable path to achieving security within the favelas and integrating these neglected areas within the broader city of Rio de Janeiro.     

Counterinsurgency Challenge in Post-2001 Afghanistan

Although the Taliban insurgency was internally divided and unable to coordinate its activities in 2014–2015, the Afghan security forces were not able to contain it and steadily lost ground throughout 2015. Until 2015, there had been little effort to develop an indigenous Afghan counterinsurgency strategy, but a sense of urgency emerged after a string of Taliban victories. At the beginning of 2016, it was still not clear if and when the National Unity Government would be able to produce a counterinsurgency strategy and, in any case, the need for a coherent counterinsurgency approach became questionable as the Taliban appeared to be transitioning towards conventional warfare.     

Building Legitimacy: Interactional Dynamics and the Popular Evaluation of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey

Abstract

Previous research has identified a variety of general mechanisms to explain how insurgents build legitimacy. Yet, there is often a gap between these mechanisms and the interactional dynamics of insurgencies. This article attempts to bridge this gap through a theoretically informed analysis of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s (PKK) insurgency in Turkey. I show how the PKK’s efforts to cultivate legitimacy, Turkey’s counterinsurgency strategies, and civilian perceptions of the PKK, all mutually influenced one another. Based on this analysis, I argue that the mechanisms that produce popular legitimacy coevolve with insurgents’ behaviors, states’ interventions, and civilians’ perceptions.     

All Counterinsurgency is Local: Counterinsurgency and Rebel Legitimacy

Abstract

Although the concept of legitimacy is central to Western counterinsurgency theory, most discourse in this area black-boxes the concept. It hence remains under-specified in many discussions of counterinsurgency. Fortunately, recent research on rebel governance and legitimacy contributes to our understanding of the problems faced by counterinsurgents who want to boost state legitimacy while undermining that of the rebels. Taken together, this research illustrates that a rational choice approach to legitimacy is simplistic; that micro-level factors ultimately drive legitimacy dynamics; and that both cooption of existing legitimate local elites and their replacement from the top–down is unlikely to succeed. Western counterinsurgency doctrine has failed to grasp the difficulties this poses for it.     

Learning in counterinsurgency: what do we really know?

Since the publication in 2002 of John Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, organizational learning has been widely presumed an important ingredient for success in counterinsurgency. But sampling the literature from before and after this time shows remarkably little analytical treatment of the issue of learning and even confusion over what it may mean. This article considers the theories, hypotheses, research strategies, threats to validity, methods of measurement, treatments of time, and general lack of statistical analysis in the work to date and recommends a course for future research.     

Population-centric counterinsurgency and the movement of peoples

The theory of population-centric counterinsurgency rests upon the untenable premise that the population within a theater of operations is fixed in place. By showing that people tend to move away from contested rural areas towards the relative safety and prosperity of counterinsurgent-controlled areas, this article demonstrates that this crucial premise is empirically false. Furthermore, a theory of counterinsurgent resource deployment, population movement, and incumbent strategic ineffectiveness is presented. Ultimately, the application of counterinsurgency resources actually dislocates the population from their place of residence and causes them to move into cities. When the urban areas' ability to absorb newcomers is overwhelmed, localized negative externalities emerge and can give rise to crime and insecurity. Such increased insecurity then creates an incentive for the counterinsurgency to retrench its resource use into the cities. As more physical territory is conceded to the insurgency, the relative strategic effectiveness of the counterinsurgency declines.     

Counterinsurgency as armed reform: The political history of the Malayan Emergency

Despite the emphasis in doctrine and academia that counterinsurgency is in its essence political, these operations are all too commonly discussed and approached as primarily military endeavors. Informed by the need to refocus counterinsurgency studies, this article revisits a foundational case of the canon – the Malayan Emergency – to discuss its political (i.e., not military) unfolding. The analysis distinguishes itself by emphasizing the diplomatic processes, negotiations, and deals that gave strategic meaning to the military operations underway. In so doing, the article also generates insight on the use of leverage and elite bargains in creating new political settlements and bringing insurgent conflicts to an end.     

Panjwai: a tale of two COINs in Afghanistan

The US Army has two approaches to counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan. One is hard, or combat-focused, and the other is soft, or development-focused. This study examines two US Army task forces deployed to Panjwai District, Afghanistan from 2012 to 2013. CTF 4-9 and 1-38 offer a meaningful comparison because they pursued these contrasting approaches among the same population and against the same enemy at the same time and place. The study compares each unit’s approach and finds that neither approach was successful absent the other. The article concludes by recommending further research into combining the approaches at the operational level.     

A best practice for assessment in counterinsurgency

In September 2011, the Commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan directed the Afghan Assessment Group to redesign the way in which ISAF was assessing the status of the war, and to be ‘revolutionary’ in so doing. The resulting assessment paradigm was novel, non-doctrinal, and effectively addressed the unique complexities of the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and the needs of the ISAF Commander. It had a two-tier structure consisting of both strategic and campaign assessments. The former focused on answering a set of strategic questions in narrative, analytic form to address the strategic environment, while the latter used a set of standards and accompanying narrative responses to gauge accomplishment of campaign tasks. Both tiers captured the current state of the war while maintaining an eye on future challenges and opportunities. The two assessments and their associated processes were designed to stimulate discussions leading directly to decisions by senior leaders on actions they could take, direct, or request. While any assessment paradigm will have advantages and disadvantages, an examination of the pros and cons of this assessment paradigm makes clear that it should be considered a ‘best practice’ in the field of counterinsurgency assessment.     

Counterinsurgency in Vietnam – schizophrenia until too late

ABSTRACT

Insurgencies remain political projects, and thus the American experience in Vietnam remains relevant in any search for approaches. A population-first strategy – with tactics compatible with protecting people and winning their willing support – is essential, as much for success in local pacification as in retaining support in the homeland which has deployed its personnel abroad to assist another state. In the actual area of operations, decentralization of effort is required to get as close as possible to the population base being targeted by the insurgents. This remains essential for all mobilization in support of a polity, regardless of the extent to which insurgent challenge is grounded in grievances or simply based on coercive power.     

Countering global insurgency

This article suggests that the War on Terrorism is actually a campaign against a globalized Islamist 1 1 In this article, the term ‘Islamist’ describes the extremist, radical form of political Islam practiced by some militant groups, as distinct from ‘Islamic’, which describes the religion of Islam, or ‘Muslim’, which describes those who follow the Islamic religion. In this article the term is used to refer primarily to Al Qaeda, its allies and affiliates. View all notes insurgency. Therefore, counterinsurgency approaches are more relevant to the present conflict than traditional terrorism theory. Indeed, a counterinsurgency approach would generate subtly, but substantially different, policy choices in prosecuting the war against Al Qaeda. Based on this analysis, the article proposes a strategy of ‘disaggregation’ that seeks to dismantle, or break, the links in the global jihad.2 2 This article uses the short form of the Islamic term jihad to mean ‘lesser jihad’ (armed struggle against unbelievers), rather than ‘greater jihad’ (jihad fi sabilillah), i.e. moral struggle for the righteousness of God. View all notes Like containment in the Cold War, disaggregation would provide a unifying strategic conception for the war – a conception that has been somewhat lacking to date.     

Supporting allies in counterinsurgency: Britain and the Dhofar Rebellion

From 1964 to 1975 a small group of British officers, advisors, and trainers guided the forces of the Sultanate of Oman to victory in their conflict with the Marxist insurgents of the People's Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG). This campaign provides a clear example of how to effectively support an ally's counterinsurgency efforts with a minimal commitment of men and material. In particular, the critical assistance provided by the British consisted of experienced leadership and skilled technical support personnel as well as a viable strategy for victory. However, more important for the ultimate success of the counterinsurgency campaign was the emergence of new progressive leadership with the accession of Sultan Qaboos. The most important lesson from this study is that while security assistance can reinforce positive political efforts, it is not enough on its own to bring about a victory in an unfavourable political environment.