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Before the US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the subsequent outbreak of insurgencies in those countries , counterinsurgency was a badly neglected part of the US defense establishment's security repertoire. During the 1990s, civilian leaders, academic specialists, and the officer corps convinced themselves that insurgency was essentially a Cold War phenomenon. Today, the US armed forces are occupied with counterinsurgency to a degree unseen since the 1960s. The campaigns in Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) and Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) are shaping an entire generation of military leaders. Effective counterinsurgency always entails a protracted and sometimes painful period of institutional learning. In Afghanistan, and to a lesser degree in Iraq, the insurgencies are "black boxes" whose organizational structures remain largely obscured, at least to US eyes. As a political-military strategy, insurgency has enduring requirements, such as the need to recruit, generate resources, and acquire safe havens. But as with any other human phenomenon, insurgency continues to evolve.
FRONTIERS OF CONFLICT waging modern war
Before the US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the subsequent outbreak of insurgencies in those count r ies , counterinsurgency was a badly neglected part of the US defense establishment's security repertoire. During the 1990s, civilian leaders, academic specialists, and the officer corps convinced themselves that insurgency was essentially a Cold War phenomenon. Instead of understanding it as enduring political-military strategy, they perceived insurgency as an operationalized form of Marxism-Leninism (and Maoism, in particular) made irrelevant by the decline of the Soviet and Chinese communist projects.
Today, the US armed forces are occupied with counterinsurgency to a degree unseen since the 1960s. The campaigns in Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) and Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) are shaping an entire generation of military leaders. The professional military literature is awash with articles on counterinsurgency and related (and overlapping) topics such as irregular warfare and stability operations. This heightened interest is also reflected in recent doctrine. The joint Army-Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual, published in 2006, is widely seen as the most coherent and insightful statement on the subject since the Marine Corps' Small Wars manual of 1940. Senior national security officials are deeply committed to the notion that irregular warfare, rather than conventional conflict between states, has become a major security challenge to the United States. Indeed, irregular warfare "is as strategically important as traditional warfare," according to a December 2008 Pentagon directive.
This growing attention is not confined to the uniformed services. Civilian agencies such as the Department of State, the Agency for International Development, and the CIA, which have for decades considered counterinsurgency a distraction, backwater, or worse, have now embraced it-not with the fervor of the Department of Defense, perhaps, but certainly to an intensity not present since the Kennedy administration. The US Government Counterinsurgency Guide, published in January 2009, reflects Washington's commitment to a "whole of government" approach to counterinsurgency that includes major roles for departments and agencies beyond the Pentagon. Civilian officials, military officers, and policy specialists have already gleaned important lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan, such as the need to keep the application of US combat power to a minimum; the requirement to understand the local peculiarities of the conflict milieu; and the importance of civilian agencies and nongovernmental organizations in promoting stability and development. These lessons are all quite sensible and prudent. However, as the Obama administration crafts its policies and strategies for and waging irregular war, other important aspects of contemporary insurgency and corresponding counterinsurgency must be considered.
Counterinsurgency's Learning Curve
Effective counterinsurgency always entails a protracted and sometimes painful period of institutional learning. For the British, long considered the pre-eminent practitioners of "imperial policing,"the first five years of the "emergency" in Malaya were marked by a laborious, hit-or-miss approach that yielded few operational or strategic successes. It was not until the late 1960s, more than a decade after the United States began its efforts to ensure the survival of South Vietnam, that US military forces, development officials, and intelligence officers began to win the so-called "other war" by rooting out the "Vietcong infrastructure" and "pacifying" the countryside.
Nor are painfully acquired lessons always transferred to later counterinsurgency campaigns. In Northern Ireland during the early 1970s, the British army, despite decades of counterinsurgency experience, waged a clumsy, brutal, and largely ineffective campaign to suppress the Provisional Irish Republican Army. The US military, despite relatively unambiguous counterinsurgency successes in Vietnam during the late 1960s and in El Salvador during the 1980s, failed to transfer hard-won skills and lessons to Iraq or Afghanistan in an appropriate manner.
It is also essential for military officers and civilian officials to be alert to the dangers of "overlearning" lessons from the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although theorists and practitioners stress that all insurgencies are unique-and thus, require tailored responses-there is a possibility that Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom will exert undue influence on our thinking about insurgency and counterinsurgency. Those campaigns have involved large-scale US combat operations, an extensive effort to rebuild the state and civil society, and a gigantic logistical "footprint." However, this "maximalist" approach is not the only model. US assistance to the Philippines, which faces several formidable insurgencies, represents what might be termed a "minimalist" approach. US support has involved low-key, "small footprint" training, advice, and support to Filipino air, ground, and naval forces rather than the direct application of US combat power on a conventional battlefield. This does not imply that a minimalist strategy is necessarily superior. Rather, it simply suggests that we must avoid the pitfalls of seeing all unconventional conflicts through the lenses of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Insurgent "Black Box"
The requirement for counterinsurgents to understand the internal dynamics of the armed opposition would seem self-evident. But remarkably little analytical attention has been devoted to questions of insurgent motivation, recruitment, morale, and leadership. In Afghanistan, and to a lesser degree in Iraq, the insurgencies are "black boxes" whose organizational structures remain largely obscured, at least to US eyes. Although valuable lessons have been learned from past military experiences, the US study of counterinsurgency remain curiously inward-directed, concerned more with perfecting the minutiae of tactics, techniques, and procedures than with grasping what might be termed the homeostatics of violent underground groups. Without a profound understanding of the political, economic, social, and psychological motivations behind those who participate in insurgent groups, and the organizational dynamics inside those organizations, our ability to devise effective counterinsurgency policy is obviously limited. This is in marked contrast with the US approach during the Vietnam War, when the Pentagon invested considerable resources in understanding the motivation and morale of enemy combatants-an effort that paid off handsomely in operational and strategic dividends.
Despite the arguments of "netwar" theorists who emphasize decentralization, capable insurgencies require structure and organization-without them, insurgents can do little more than serve as tactical irritants. Indeed, Al Qaeda in Iraq only achieved its deadly relevance when it reached a higher and more bureaucratic level of organizational coherence. In contrast with Vietnam, where attempts were made to "map" the Vietcong infrastructure, little effort has been made in Afghanistan, Iraq, or other theaters of conflict to understand the insurgent underground. The consequent gaps of knowledge are substantial, for as the security analyst Michael Innes noted in 2007, we know little of the clandestine world of armed groups "beyond what its denizens choose to reveal to us."
Similarly, no systematic attention has been paid to the key subject of subversion by insurgent groups and their support networks. During the Cold War, the US government and its allies devoted considerable effort to understanding how insurgents infiltrated government agencies, security forces, and political parties; how they established front groups; and how they conducted strikes,riots, and industrial sabotage. Today, despite ample evidence of subversion in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the US government remains largely uninterested in the phenomenon, its evolution since the Cold War, and ways to counter its influence. Nor has the US military or intelligence community set aside any serious analytical resources for understanding insurgent intelligence operations, despite the fact that all "high performance" armed groups, from the Vietcong to Al Qaeda, create sophisticated structures for the purpose of spying on their adversaries and rooting out suspected traitors. Given our own belief in the power of intelligence, and its "force-multiplying" effects, it is particularly ironic that the subject of insurgent intelligence is so largely ignored. In lacking a substantive comprehension of how insurgents gather and process intelligence, we and our allies remain vulnerable to insurgent espionage. And lacking any real awareness, we are left without any real countermeasures.
The Perils of Statebuilding
The final issue is more theoretical, but also more fundamental. Since the 1960s, US counterinsurgency policy and strategy has been relentlessly state-centric, and in some respects counterinsurgency has been virtually synonymous with statebuilding. Under the US approach, building capacity and infrastructure, ensuring the provision of public services, and promoting good government are all essential tools in a broader quest to bolster the legitimacy of an embattled host nation's government. Insurgencies are seen first and foremost as contests over legitimacy, with both the armed militants and the incumbent power struggling to win popular allegiance. According to the statebuilding approach, a strong state can gather and distribute resources, thus winning "hearts and minds." Moreover, a powerful state will, by definition, establish a political presence, and through the development of a civil service, police forces, and military units is able to extend its reach down to the lowest levels of society. A Leviathan-like state will therefore be more able to identify and remove insurgents and other armed opponents which threaten its governance.
But counterinsurgency-as-statebuilding is a deeply problematic strategy if applied to all cases. As a practical matter, rebuilding (or more often, simply building) a Western- style state-the only kind we can reasonably claim to know how to create-is a formidable and perhaps insurmountable challenge, particularly under the conditions of a full-blown insurgency. Iraq and Afghanistan are the most recent examples of the failures of counterinsurgencyrelated statebuilding. South Vietnam-rarely considered in the statebuilding literature-is another. Fashioning a Western-style state from the ruins of a post-conflict polity also presents a daunting set of challenges for outside "donors." Moreover, given the recent global economic crisis and the war-weariness induced by Iraq and Afghanistan, it seems unlikely that the United States will seek out fresh statebuilding responsibilities in the near future.
However, the necessity of countering insurgencies will remain-certainly for the threatened regimes themselves, but for the United States and its allies as well. Rather than embark on massive efforts to shore up embattled incumbents-a maximalist approach-the United States should consider adopting (on a case-by-case basis, of course) a minimalist strategy. At the core of such a strategy is the decoupling of counterinsurgency and statebuilding. The modern world, the anthropologist Paul Richards observed in 2005, has a "love affair with the concept of the sovereign state." But across the global south, where many of the world's violent internal conflicts occur, the traditional concept of the state is in retreat, increasingly hollowed out by forces above (e.g., globalization), and forces below (eg, rampant, almost industrial-scale criminality and corruption). The United States and the rest of the international community continues to maintain the fiction that mere legal entities, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Philippines, and Pakistan, are actual, functioning states. Strong states, capable of living up to the Weberian ideals of monopolizing violence and exercising control over the entirety of their national territory, should be recognized as representing an aspiration rather than a non-negotiable policy objective.
What would such a realization mean for the evolution of US counterinsurgency policy? While developing any US response to insurgency, military and civilian planners might consider whether it would make sense to bypass state structures (such as they are), and focus instead on real and existing indigenous institutions that could play a significant role in countering armed groups that are in violent opposition to the state. Under this new approach, government security forces would not necessarily have sole responsibility for opposing armed groups which operate against the state. In some instances, it may make sense to delegate some (or most) of this responsibility to what scholars have termed "non-statutory armed groups." In much of the developing world, the state is both unable and unwilling to ensure public safety to any meaningful degree. Police forces, in places where they exist, are typically sources of violence, corruption, and insecurity, undercutting any claim of their credibility as lawful, effective institutions. Filling this public-safety vacuum is a rich array of neighborhood watch groups, ethnic militias, vigilantes, armed wings of political parties, and sometimes insurgents. Of course, in some cases these non-statutory armed groups are themselves sources of insecurity. But in many instances, these homegrown, self-help measures have far greater legitimacy and capacity than state forces have or can expect to achieve.
A key task for counterinsurgency planners will be to determine which groups can and should be engaged, under which circumstances, for what purposes, and at what price. Again, such decisions will have to be made on a case-by-case basis, as there are significant costs, political and otherwise, associated with the act of bypassing the state. Supporting and leveraging non-state armed groups will inevitably erode already low levels of state authority, legitimacy, and capacity. Moreover, the support of armed groups always carries with it the possibility of exacerbating conflict and complicating disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration efforts. In some circumstances, the United States might judge these costs to be too high. When such instances occur, US support for official security structures of the kind advocated by the current Defense Department leadership will be a better course of action.
Ultimately, there is nothing terribly novel about incorporating the support of non-state forces into counterinsurgency. All of the major counterinsurgency practitioners of the nineteenth and twentieth century organized, trained, and equipped militias, tribal irregulars, and paramilitary forces that operated under varying degrees of state control. The history of US counterinsurgency is replete with such instances. In Vietnam, for example, US Special Forces organized highland ethnic minorities into a "Civilian Irregular Defense Group" to combat communist guerrillas.
Counterinsurgency for the 21st Century
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, there have been indications that pragmatism has begun to trump any lingering Hegelian reverence for the state. US military officers, faced with extremely violent insurgencies and weak and feckless central governments, have looked to tribal forces as security providers. As part of the Awakening movement in Iraq among the Sunni tribal leaders, the US military assisted the Sons of Iraq, a bottom-up nongovernmental security force designed to combat Al Qaeda in Iraq. And in Afghanistan, the military wants to ally with tribes to fight the Taliban and to "bring law and order to the vast areas of the country beyond the government's authority," according to an October 2008 report in the Christian Science Monitor. Although the Awakening has generally been considered a success, it is far too soon to judge the tribal strategy in Afghanistan. While official US counterinsurgency policy remains state-centric, these approaches are important signs that a transformation may be under way.
As suggested above, US counterinsurgency strategy and policy should place far more emphasis on demystifying the insurgent underground. Without clandestinity, competent and coherent armed resistance is impossible. Under a minimalist approach, US assistance would focus less on building elaborate state structures that meet Western standards and more on developing the means to strip away insurgent secrecy. To be sure, this may require some statebuilding, given the logical role that police and intelligence agencies could play by investigating and potentially infiltrating insurgent black boxes. However, this is an inherently more modest enterprise than building or rebuilding the broad range of state capacity traditional US counterinsurgency has entailed. Moreover, the role of exposing the underground should not always be confined to state security forces. In some instances, nonstate actors, such as neighborhood watch groups, could play a key role in identifying the contours of the underground.
To have any real relevance and impact, such assistance must be based on a more profound understanding of how insurgent groups recruit, organize, and operate. The multiple, highly variegated violent militant movements in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines, Nigeria, and Somalia remind us of the rich array of individual and group motivations, leadership, and operational approaches which characterize contemporary insurgencies. More fundamentally, we need to develop a deeper appreciation of the insurgent's mental universe. Before we can provide support, we need to devote much more consideration to the question of why, how, and under what circumstances individuals enter the underground, and what happens to them within the covert world. The removal of subversion from its Cold-War era analytical mothballs, and the devotion of more energy to understanding insurgent intelligence operations, should be part of a more sophisticated approach to the insurgent underground.
As a political-military strategy, insurgency has enduring requirements, such as the need to recruit, generate resources, and acquire safe havens. But as with any other human phenomenon, insurgency continues to evolve. A fundamental challenge is to identify changes and continuities in contemporary insurgency. To take just a few examples of the questions that need to be explored: To what extent does state support-a major aspect of Cold- War era insurgency-continue to exist, and in what form? Does criminal activity allow contemporary insurgencies to become self-sustaining? In operational and organizational terms, do Islamist insurgencies differ significantly from insurgencies led by Marxist-Leninists? Is the modern city the "graveyard of revolution," as Fidel Castro once claimed, or is it essential to victory in the armed struggle? If the Pentagon is correct in its assessment of the importance of irregular warfare, the answers to these questions are likely to have profound operational and strategic relevance to future military strategy.
WILLIAM ROSENAU is chairman of the RAND Insurgency Board and an adjunct professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of RAND or its sponsors.
Copyright Harvard International Relations Council Spring 2009