War From the Ground Up (25 page)

In Nagl's earlier book,
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife
(2005), he argues convincingly, by way of comparing the British experience in Malaya with the US experience in Vietnam, that the ability to learn and adapt is the vital variable in armed conflict, more so perhaps than being well prepared at the outset, as reality often unhinges the best laid plans.
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The campaigns of both the British in Malaya, and the United States in Vietnam, experienced low points early on, but differed in their ability to adapt and evolve, as a result of difference in institutional culture. The dramatic changes that General David Petraeus brought about in Iraq in 2007–8 would support Nagl's thesis. Nagl cites Brigadier General H. R. McMaster to make the point that the conflict we now see in Afghanistan will probably not be anomalous in the future:

Correcting the persistent flawed thinking about future conflict requires overcoming significant obstacles and acknowledging that adversaries will force real
rather than imaginary wars upon military forces until those forces demonstrate the ability to defeat them.
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This makes sense. Until there exists a more effective operational approach that can gain purchase in the fragmented political environment of Afghanistan (and its regional context) to achieve current policy goals, counter-insurgency remains the best operational approach. A more conventional approach would require, for a start, a clear enemy, which there is not in Afghanistan. When the coalition tries to force insurgents to fight conventional battles, they generally refuse, leaving a small group to fight a delaying battle while the rest are temporarily evacuated. This was the standard reaction that the Gurkha battlegroup I was part of experienced in 2007–8 across southern Afghanistan; and it was precisely our role to act as the Regional Command South Manoeuvre Battlegroup to strike insurgent base areas.

That the coalition in Afghanistan conducted counter-insurgency adequately across the civilian-military effort before General McChrystal's 2009 reforms seems untenable, because even if commanders were thinking in terms of ‘armed politics' (and many, military and civilian, were), resources and structures did not sustain such an approach. Counter-insurgency requires civilian-military cooperation (which is traditionally understood as a policy-level issue) at the tactical level; until the ‘civilian surge' post-2009 there were very few civilians operating at the tactical level in contested areas, so even if military commanders wanted to apply counter-insurgency pre-2009, there was a basic resourcing issue in terms of the relevant civilian expertise. As
Figure 11
illustrates, the configuration of intelligence resources illustrates the same point: in counter-insurgency, most intelligence comes from the ground up, not from the top down, yet the pyramid was until recently still resourced for conventional war.

The second criterion proposed here for counter-insurgency to be used as an effective operational approach is that its doctrine must be interpreted pragmatically. Bob Woodward in
Obama's Wars
describes one side of the US Afghan policy debate in 2009 in terms of how ‘failure to perform a textbook counter-insurgency would doom the US mission'.
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He describes counter-insurgency in the Glossary as ‘the doctrine for using military force to protect a local population'.
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While criticism of Woodward is unfair, since he is not a counter-insurgency specialist, his definition is noteworthy because it captures how tranches of the public
might well understand counter-insurgency as this narrow, fixed practice of protecting the people to gain their support.

Colonel Gentile is right to challenge dogmatism in application of counter-insurgency doctrine. He takes issue with the maxim that ‘the people are the prize' in all counter-insurgency operations. The ‘prize' in any armed conflict is defined according to the goal of policy, which may, or may not, have to do with the political affiliations of the population.
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In my view, in Helmand, for British brigade commanders to have defined the people as the prize (which I think British soldiers started saying colloquially around 2007) was actually a legitimate slogan in that context; it was a useful way at the time of modifying an overly enemy-centric mentality. But Gentile is right that the slogan is not necessarily transferable. Gentile also acknowledges that counter-insurgency as a military method, rather than a strategy, can have utility in certain circumstances, although he specifically defines counter-insurgency in terms of its ‘population-centric' version, which is a narrower method and a less flexible conception than what is actually available within counter-insurgency as a whole.
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Counter-insurgency theory is the distilled experience of how insurgencies have successfully been countered in the past. In practice, counter-insurgency
is simply the countering of insurgency, an end-state which is meaningless outside of a specific political context. Insurgencies have been countered successfully by a diverse range of methods suited to a particular political context. In some cases this has involved large troop numbers, in other cases very few troops have been successful. The appropriate level of force used is subjective and variable. Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer stated that counter-insurgency was ‘20 percent military and 80 percent political', but that was said in reference to the specific political context of the Malayan Emergency. This ratio is all too often dogmatically restated in significantly different contexts.

A distortion to the current debate has been caused by those who see ‘population-centric' and ‘enemy-centric' forms of counter-insurgency as mutually exclusive. This is incorrect: each situation is distinct, and will require a particular application of means; to emphasise one approach over the other in the abstract rejects the notion that in many circumstances they can be combined, and that their relative configuration will be situationally dependent. To argue in the abstract about the value of any operational approach can be to get into debates with deadends. The Roman General Pompey, for example, ‘on hearing that his soldiers were disorderly in their journeys' ordered his soldiers to put a wax seal on their scabbards during an operation in Sicily in 82 BC, and demanded an explanation for any broken seals.
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His emphasis on restraint to maintain the consent of the local population was common sense. Neither was Pompey averse to highly aggressive combat operations; he was, after all, known as the ‘teenage butcher' as a young general. He could be said to have blended population-centric and enemy-centric methods!

The need to deal with the enemy threat is common sense in any population-focused approach. One can build medical clinics and schools, and conduct other developmental activity, but if the population cannot use them for fear of insurgent intimidation, they achieve little. Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, in the context of Vietnam, expressed this pithily: ‘security may be 10 percent of the problem, or it may be 90 percent, but whichever it is, it's the first 10 percent or the first 90 percent. Without security nothing else will last'.
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General Sir Frank Kitson anticipated the need to combine both in his conclusion to
Low Intensity Operations
(1971). Kitson stated that the operational emphasis of counter-insurgency operations:

will swing away from the process of destroying relatively large groups of armed insurgents towards the business of divorcing extremist elements from the population which they are trying to subvert. This means that persuasion will become more important in comparison with armed offensive action, although both will continue to be required, and both will equally depend on good information.
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Yet the killing or arrest of insurgents in combat, or aggressive targeting of insurgent commanders by special forces, is often reported as not being ‘hearts and minds' nor ‘not counter-insurgency'.
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Such statements cannot be made in the abstract. The killing or arrest of insurgents who make a peasant's life a misery may be very well received; conversely, they may be his children: one can only make such judgements in context with reference to one's actual audiences. The post-1945 history of countering insurgency shows that the pragmatic selection and application of doctrine in relation to a specific, not an abstract, political context is what has distinguished successful campaigns. There is not space here for a full survey, but a few vignettes exemplify the utility of pragmatism in the construction of an operational approach to deal with an insurgency by tailoring it to the particular political problem, and thus dealing with it on its own terms.

‘Classical' counter-insurgency, which is often associated with the British experience in Malaya 1948–60, was far more about population control than about popular support. ‘Hearts and minds' in Malaya involved forcing 400,000 ethnic Chinese peasants into ‘strategic hamlets' which were guarded with barbed wire and searchlights.
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Hearts and minds were meant to attack the insurgency as an idea through a combination of practices, which comprised both carrots and sticks. Basic rights were removed from whole communities unless they stopped supporting the insurgency. Many of these methods would be illegal today. Although Malaya is sometimes taken as an example which underscores the principles of being seen to act within the law, this was clearly a subjective concept. Alex Marshall has argued that the emphasis on action within the rule of law loses meaning when the counter-insurgent is also the colonial sovereign power which has legislative authority.
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The operational approach that worked in Malaya succeeded in a very specific political context. The British had over a century to build up a colonial state, even though interrupted by Japanese occupation during the Second World War. This was essential to the concept of having the military act with legitimacy in support of the civil power. Moreover, the
British were aiming to leave. The entire premise of the campaign was the handover of authority to a Malay-dominated government, and not being seen as an occupying power. The communist insurgency in Malaya was strongly associated with the ethnic Chinese community. Hence separation of the insurgent from the population was in many cases the forced internment of the Chinese population which played on existing divisions within Malay society and essentially backed the majority group as the basis of a stable government.

In the early 1960s Sir Robert Thompson, one of the key counter-insurgency theorists in Malaya, was invited to aid the American effort in Vietnam. He lifted the idea of the strategic hamlets programme, which had worked in Malaya, and encouraged its use in Vietnam by President Diem's regime. In the latter context, the relocation of thousands of peasants was a disaster. It infuriated the peasantry and further encouraged support for the Viet Cong. The programme was abandoned by 1964. The physical articulation of the disjuncture between operational idea and political context was what Neil Sheehan reported as ‘the ghosts of strategic hamlets' that were visible on the roads in the provinces around Saigon; most of these hamlets remained only as statistics on charts.
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Moreover, given the fine line between government village militias and the insurgents in many areas, several thousand US weapons went to the Viet Cong; one estimate puts the number at about 200,000.
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Sheehan's narrative suggests that an abstract template, which saw war as polarised between two sides, failed to comprehend the complex political dynamics of the conflict on its own terms.

The Dhofar campaign of the 1960s and 1970s in southern Oman illustrates how a style of counter-insurgency different from that developed in Malaya worked equally well because it was suited to a particular context. While Malaya emphasised the need to have large troop numbers to secure populated areas, the campaign in Dhofar deliberately kept a very low profile. Mass deployment of British troops was not used, as it would have caused more political problems than it solved.

The most effective methods, used by the Special Air Service (SAS), involved the development of local forces, called
firqa
, who were mentored and could operate in that political and cultural environment far more successfully than foreigners. A report by a British adviser following a year of service with the
firqa
states that: ‘the main reasons for joining and fighting for a
firqat
[
sic
] are financial and political in nature; political
control of the individual's tribal area, and gains in cash, food, land or livestock… The aim must be to select a force of men who have their own motivation for fighting—not necessarily in tune with the aims and motivations of the advisers'.
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This comment identifies how the political dynamics were understood on their own terms, and plans based on this; facts were not straitjacketed by idealised doctrinal models. Indeed the first
firqa
to be raised failed because it was recruited on a mixed tribal basis. The subsequent recruitment of
firqa
units on a single tribal basis encouraged the alignment of the tribesmen's own interests with that of the wider campaign.