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July 3, 2010
In Against counterinsurgency in Afghanistan in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Hugh Gusterton says that the US's counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is failing because it is an inherently flawed project. He says:
historically, counterinsurgency campaigns have almost always failed. This is especially so when the counterinsurgents are foreign troops fighting on the insurgents' territory. The U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Vietnam failed. The Soviet counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan failed (as did the British one about a century earlier). The British counterinsurgency campaigns in Northern Ireland and Kenya failed. The white Rhodesians' counterinsurgency campaign against black guerrillas failed. And the French counterinsurgency campaign in Algeria failed--although that has not stopped the U.S. military from building their current doctrine around the theories of David Galula, one of the leaders of that failed campaign. A rare example of success is the recent Sri Lankan campaign against the Tamil Tigers, but success was achieved by a government on its own territory following a military strategy of exterminist ferocity. Surely the U.S. does not want to go down that path, does it?
He adds that In what was until recently called the "Global War on Terror," counterinsurgency plays the sort of framing and orienting role that containment and deterrence played in the Cold War. The U.S. military is already thinking about future counterinsurgency campaigns in Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines.
Afghanistan is at the beginning, not the end, of the counterinsurgency road on the U.S. military horizon. His argument is that counterinsurgency has failed in Afghanistan:
not because of flaws in its execution but because, as I have argued before, counterinsurgency campaigns almost inevitably contain within themselves the seeds of their own failure. Counterinsurgency forces stand little chance of defeating the insurgents without large numbers of troops, but the presence of foreign troops inevitably excites nationalist hostility from the local population; the more foreign troops there are, the more hostility there will be. Also, the more troops there are, the more military casualties there will be, and this undermines support for counterinsurgency at home--as we are now seeing in the UK and the U.S
He adds that counterinsurgency campaigns also benefit from being allied to a strong and popular local government. Almost by definition, a leader who relies on external occupying troops for his power will be seen as a foreign puppet and will be compromised in the eyes of his people.
The inference? The US should get out.
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"...Afghans, it seems, know the difference between genuine apologies and bribes, true commitment and false promises, generosity and self-interest. And since the whole point of COIN is to gain the hearts and minds of "the population," those angry Afghans are a bad omen for the US military and President Obama..."
After being screwed over for so long, the Afghan people have good reason to second-guess the motivation of their "benefactors"
More here: www.thenation.com/article/36948/counterinsurgency-down-count-afghanistan