Can we dispose of a tiny quibble first? Douglas Porch’s new book, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War (Cambridge University Press), contains some annoying errors. Forgive me for being sensitive, but “Bacevitch” is not an approved alternative spelling of the surname bequeathed by my father.
Counter-insurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War
By Douglas Porch (Cambridge University Press)
Yet such matters aside, Porch, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, has written an illuminating and feisty book. Actually, it’s two books in one. In the first, he recounts the Western experience with “small wars” over the past two centuries. In the second, he takes a chainsaw to the myths served up during Washington’s recent infatuation with counterinsurgency, aka COIN. By the time he finishes, nothing remains but a stick or two of charred kindling.
That infatuation has now passed. In that sense, Porch’s subtitle misleads. COIN is not America’s “new way of war.” But it’s bound to return, marketed as a sophisticated and humane alternative to conventional combat. So if you don’t read this book now, keep it for handy reference when op-eds once again start touting the genius of T.E. Lawrence and David Galula. If Porch has a bottom line, it’s this: Counterinsurgency theory is hokum. Fall for it and you’re halfway down the road to perdition.
Porch’s history begins with the French in the early 19th century and ends with the Americans in the 21st. In between, he attends to the Germans in Africa and the British everywhere from India to Northern Ireland.
His main findings are these:
First, COIN is neo-imperialism in drag. The same “ethos of paternalism” that empire-builders once devised to justify their actions persists. What we have and represent is what they—Algerians, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans—want and need. COIN ostensibly offers the means to make good on this invented obligation. Underlying “contemporary COIN as a hearts and minds, good governance, state-building exercise,” Porch writes, is a tacit assumption that “non-Western societies exist in a time-warp which the adoption of Western practices ... will allow them to overcome.”
Second, this duty to liberate, civilize, or uplift provides a pretext to do the otherwise impermissible. “This small wars tradition,” Porch writes, “views insurgents as beneath the respect accorded combatants by the laws of war.” The bad guys are mere outlaws or criminals—in contemporary parlance, terrorists. As a consequence, Western soldiers engaged in small wars cite “the barbarous nature of their enemies” to exempt themselves “from the requirement to follow civilized standards of warfare.” In practice, this provides a tacit authorization for torture, prisoner abuse, and collective punishment of local populations deemed insufficiently cooperative in helping to out the insurgents.
Third, peel back the grand claims, and there’s remarkably little substance underneath. Counterinsurgency inverts Clausewitz. Rather than defining war as the continuation of politics, it employs violence as an excuse to avoid tough decisions, compensating for a “lack of a strategy with tactical solutions.” COIN offers technique devoid of larger purpose, amounting to “a doctrine of escapism.” What purports to be a thinking man’s approach to war actually gives policy makers license to stop thinking.
Fourth, when put to the test, counterinsurgency doesn’t work all that well. Even when nominally achieved, mission accomplishment exacts enormous costs. Solutions—the French “victory” in the Battle of Algiers is one example—tend to come unstuck. For this very reason, sustaining a COIN campaign finds supporters conjuring up some vast existential threat—monolithic communism or the prospect of a new caliphate controlled by rabid Islamists. Put another way, counterinsurgency stokes fantasies that undermine strategic realism.
Finally, sooner or later, COIN-incubated chickens come home to roost, appearing as intrusive surveillance systems, militarized police forces, and profiling that categorizes certain citizens as “subversives because of their ethnicity or ideas.” Porch also emphasizes counterinsurgency’s corrosive impact on civil/military relations. COIN undermines military professionalism. Selling small wars converts officers into hucksters, with senior commanders subordinating truth-telling to the imperatives of public relations as they court politicians and curry favor with journalists. Worse, counterinsurgency campaigns that end badly foster resentment among soldiers who feel misused or stabbed in the back.
Yet all of this is mild stuff compared with what follows once Porch trains his gun sights on “the White Knights of American Exceptionalism” who, in 2007, arrived in Baghdad with a recipe for redeeming the war in Iraq. Don’t count Porch as a member of the David Petraeus fan club.
As Porch tells the tale, the conditions leading to a reduction in the overall level of violence in Iraq were already forming before the famous “surge” was launched. “Petraeus and his acolytes,” Porch contends, “merely boarded a train that had already left the station.” Well before Petraeus rolled out his famous Field Manual 3-24, individual units were adopting kinder-gentler methods, having figured out that simply locking up every military-age Iraqi male wasn’t doing the trick.
In Baghdad, meanwhile, Shia death squads had just about completed the ethnic cleansing of previously mixed neighborhoods. The temporary pacification of Anbar Province was already under way as field commanders forged highly contingent partnerships with Sunni warlords. Rather than some bold innovation, this so-called Sunni Awakening simply offered, Porch writes, “the latest installments of an opportunistic Orientalized reliance on compliant or unsavory local collaborators.” Ouch.
So what did the surge accomplish? It allowed U.S. forces to leave in an orderly fashion. If Iraq by the end of 2011 wasn’t quite, in Porch’s snarky formulation, “Vietnam with a happy ending,” at least it wasn’t people fleeing the Green Zone on one last helicopter. Yet even this limited version of success enjoyed only a brief shelf life. Subsequent efforts to export COIN to Afghanistan fizzled. Revelations of Petraeus’s affair with an adoring biographer dented his reputation as the nation’s “savior general"—albeit not in the eyes of university administrators keen to embellish their campuses with a four-star ornament. As for Iraq itself, although Americans appear disinclined to notice, the place is once more descending into chaos.
Mostly, the surge gave high-ranking U.S. civilian and military officials a convenient out. A dollop of 11th-hour military success relieved them of any obligation to assess the magnitude of the policy failure that the United States sustained in Iraq. The surge obviated any need for second thoughts and soul-searching. So rather than actually contemplating the Iraq War, policy makers rest content with trivializing it, thereby perpetuating the strategic vacuum that COIN had briefly camouflaged.
As counterinsurgency falls out of favor, drones and special forces fill the void. If the United States has a new way of war, missile-firing Predators and SEAL Team Six define its signature. Together they provide not a basis for strategy, but a further excuse not to have one, even as they sustain illusions of kick-ass military supremacy. Of course, the Rambos who raided bin Laden’s compound and those who pilot drones operate in secret. Should we take it on faith that behind closed doors everyone’s doing the right things for the right reason—and that turning the globe into a free-fire zone is promoting world peace? Porch won’t. Neither should the rest of us.
