Oh Max . . . Posted by Michael Cohen

There is so much to comment on in Max Boot's response to Andrew Exum's response to Max Boot's response to Andrew Exum, but this graf really is the gold standard:

Population-centric counterinsurgency has worked in countries as diverse as Iraq, Malaya, the Philippines, Northern Ireland, Oman, and Colombia. Historically speaking (and I say this based on research I’m currently doing for a book on the history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism), it is the most successful counterinsurgency strategy there is. Does that mean it will work in every instance? Of course not. But it works more often than not, and I have yet to see any evidence that Afghanistan is uniquely resistant to such an approach.

Where does one begin? Did population-centric counterinsurgency work in each of these places - well I suppose it depends on how you define work, but one thing is clear: the COIN approaches used in Malaya, the Philippines, Northern Ireland and Iraq look almost nothing like the approaches we are currently using in Afghanistan. Each of them relied on healthy doses of coercion and violence against the civilian population; things like forced relocation in Malaya and the Philippines and ethnic cleansing and enclaving in Iraq and to a lesser extent Northern Ireland. These are of course tactics that are quite different from the approaches we are using in Afghanistan today. Indeed, as I've written before what makes the COIN fight in Afghanistan different from nearly all other COIN fights is the lack of coercion and violence against the civilian population. This is an apples to bicycles comparison.

Also to argue that population-centric is the determinative element of successful COIN strategies is even more bizarre. What about enemy centric approaches like those utilized by Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Russia or even the US in the American Civil War? For heaven's sake the Roman method has been used by countless countries over the millennium and with some demonstrated level of success. And again, none of the approaches that Boot cites really qualify as population-centric at least in the sense of how that term is understood in the US military today.   

Next Boot makes a key category error; Colombia with has no foreign troops is not the same sort of COIN fight as Malaya, which was a colonial effort led by British soldiers, and it's not the same as Iraq or Afghanistan, with foreign troops supporting a sovereign (ish) government. Moreover, success in places like the Philippines and Malaya was due to a number of factors; in Malaya the ethnic homogeneity of the insurgent force helped a great deal, but so did the lack of a safe haven in both places. In fact, there is a whole body of scholarship on the importance of sanctuaries for a COIN fight. And as I don't have to remind any regular DA reader . . . the Afghan Taliban have an unmolested safe haven in Pakistan.

To argue that Boot has "yet to see any evidence that Afghanistan is uniquely resistant to such an (population-centric) approach" is to suggest a rather shallow understanding of what makes for a successful counter-insurgency strategy - and a real set of blinders to the mounting evidence that the assumptions underpinning American's COIN strategy in Afghanistan are fatally flawed.

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Very sharply explained but in Afghanistan, the people are the prize in a three way power struggle between the Government, the Mullahs, and the Elders...

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To argue that Boot has "yet to see any evidence that Afghanistan is uniquely resistant to such an (population-centric) approach" is to suggest a rather shallow understanding of what makes for a successful counter-insurgency strategy - and a real set of blinders to the mounting evidence that the assumptions underpinning American's COIN strategy in Afghanistan are fatally flawed.
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