Wrong Turn

America's Deadly Embrace of Counter-Insurgency

Gian Gentile

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781595588968
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique militaire

A searing indictment of US strategy in Afghanistan from a distinguished military leader and West Point military historian—"A remarkable book" ( National Review ). In 2008, Col. Gian Gentile exposed a growing rift among military intellectuals with an article titled "Misreading the Surge Threatens U.S. Army's Conventional Capabilities, " that appeared in World Politics Review. While the years of US strategy in Afghanistan had been dominated by the doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN), Gentile and a small group of dissident officers and defense analysts began to question the necessity and efficacy of COIN—essentially armed nation-building—in achieving the United States' limited core policy objective in Afghanistan: the destruction of Al Qaeda. Drawing both on the author's experiences as a combat battalion commander in the Iraq War and his research into the application of counterinsurgency in a variety of historical contexts, Wrong Turn is a brilliant summation of Gentile's views of the failures of COIN, as well as a trenchant reevaluation of US operations in Afghanistan. "Gentile is convinced that Obama's 'surge' in Afghanistan can't work.... And, if Afghanistan doesn't turn around soon, the Democrats... who have come to embrace the Petraeus-Nagl view of modern warfare... may find themselves wondering whether it's time to go back to the drawing board." — The New Republic

1

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE COUNTERINSURGENCY NARRATIVE

Her [Kim Kagan’s] account details the ways in which the American military developed and applied counterinsurgency principles in Iraq, at a time when many said the war was unwinnable or even lost. This is an indispensible guide to those who wish to understand how the U.S. military adapted to Iraq’s political landscape and how it began turning failures into successes.

—Senator John McCain, 2009¹

In his endorsement of Kimberly Kagan’s 2009 book The Surge: A Military History, Senator John McCain noted that it offered a view into how an army transformed itself from failing at counterinsurgency to succeeding at it. The senator’s endorsement repeated the basic outline of the counterinsurgency narrative: of armies fumbling at COIN and losing a war but then being transformed into an army that goes on to win. Knowingly or not, Senator McCain had come to recite the stock narrative of counterinsurgency.

That narrative has an important history of its own. Institutions, governments, and even armies spend a great deal of time and energy trying to influence and shape perceptions,² as in America’s recent war in Iraq. Just weeks into the fighting in 2003, President George Bush told the American people that it had been a roaring success, complete with a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner on board a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier where he was speaking. A few years later, by 2005–2006, that initial triumphant narrative had given way to a new one. Among those in the know, Iraq had now become a quagmire, a disastrously failed war that directly paralleled the unhappy experience of Vietnam. A few years later, the narrative morphed again: now a wise general had ridden out to the theater of war, reset a failed army that had gone off the rails, and rescued victory from the jaws of defeat.

There are many reasons why the story of the Iraq surge and General Petraeus’s application of COIN simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The story depends heavily on historical precedent, on other stories of other wars in different and distant places. The COIN argument is a blend of some history, a lot of myth, and suppositions about roads not taken, as analysts today imagine what might have been if different strategic decisions had been made in the past. COIN depends on a narrow and selective view of histories that are messy and complicated. Revisiting those histories, in all their messiness, is essential for understanding why COIN has failed and will continue to fail as an American way of war. Until we do so, the explanation of these wars will be dominated by writers who conform their stories uncritically to the narrative.³ The historical bedrock on which the narrative developed was a very different war, involving very different antagonists: the British war against Malayan insurgents. From Malaya, the story traveled to Vietnam. A British colonial officer during the Malayan Emergency, Sir Robert Thompson, thought that the British model for defeating Communist insurgents in Malaya in the 1950s could be applied directly to fighting the Viet Cong insurgents in the jungles of South Vietnam in the early 1960s, and he told the South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem as much. Thompson saw no significant differences between Malaya and Vietnam: the “enemy,” he noted, was “exactly the same.”⁴

Senior American military advisers on the ground in Vietnam at that time saw Thompson’s proposals as unrealistic, a naive attempt to transfer the Malayan experience to a location in which the existing military conditions, society, culture, and politics were very different.⁵

After America lost the war in Vietnam, explanations began to emerge. Many, looking back with Thompson’s recommendations on their minds, concluded that the war could have been won if the U.S. Army had used different tactics. One school of thought among “if-only” historians argued that the war could have been won if the U.S. Army under Westmoreland had done counterinsurgency correctly, by focusing on winning hearts and minds, as Thompson had earlier suggested. The counterinsurgency narrative as it would later emerge in Iraq and Afghanistan was born with the if-only histories of the Vietnam War. Arguments of the hearts-and-minds, if-only school resonated deeply in the ranks of some American army officers after Vietnam and would come to fruition in the writing of FM 3-24.⁶

The term counterinsurgency came into use by the American military in the late 1950s because of the American army’s discomfort with the label used in the French and British armies: counterrevolutionary warfare. In the Cold War context, and given America’s own revolutionary heritage, it became a matter of political and social sensitivity to reframe these kinds of military operations as counterinsurgency.⁷

Modern counterinsurgency is age-old antiguerrilla warfare in new clothes. As he cut a swath through the Middle East in the fourth century B.C., Alexander the Great countered rebellious indigenous peoples while at the same time fighting opposing armies that were similar to his own. King Henry V of England had to worry about angry French peasants sniping at the rear of his army as he moved around northern France in 1415, before and after the battle of Agincourt. Prussian General Helmuth von Moltke faced the prospect of a French people’s war against his army as it laid siege to Paris during the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. In the Korean War, from 1950 to 1953, the United States and its allies had to deal with Communist guerrillas attacking their lines of supplies. Rebellion, guerrilla attacks, and insurgency are nothing new to war.⁸

The American war in Vietnam has produced a focus on insurgencies and guerrilla warfare to the point where some policy makers and analysts have convinced themselves that war in the future, as the retired British general Rupert Smith has argued, will be fought primarily, if not only, “amongst the people.” Writing in 2005, in the years following the end of the Cold War, General Smith, in his book The Utility of Force, argued that “war no longer exists.” For Smith, the type of war that no longer existed was what he characterized as “industrial war”—war that ended, as he says, with the two atomic bombings of Japan in 1945. At that point a new kind of war took over, what he calls “wars amongst the people,” which he largely puts in a direct line with irregular, small wars and counterinsurgency warfare in the past.⁹

For the American army and many parts of the American defense establishment, Smith’s vision has become the model for future war. Since the publication of FM 3-24, counterinsurgency has moved beyond simple doctrine and has become gospel. FM 3-24’s effect permeates other army doctrinal manuals, such as FM 3-0, Operations, and FM 3-07, Stability Operations. Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell IV, who was charged with overseeing the writing of the army’s stability operations doctrine, posited that:

The future is not one of major battles and engagements fought by armies on battlefields devoid of population; instead, the course of conflict will be decided by forces operating among the people of the world. Here, the margin of victory will be measured in far different terms than the wars of our past. The allegiance, trust, and confidence of populations will be the final arbiters of success.¹⁰

The idea of populations as the prize in war, that they are the focus, that the “trust” of local populations is to be won by military forces and then connected to the supported host-nation government—these ideas are drawn directly from the pages of FM 3-24.

The dogmatism of American counterinsurgency has obscured from view the reality of American war, which has primarily been one of improvisation and practicality. Over the course of American history, there have been strategic shifts in terms of the threats and enemies that the United States had faced. With each of these shifts came a different approach to fighting wars or preparing for them in peacetime. For example, in the American Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant carried out a strategy of exhausting the Southern armies through large-scale combat. A quarter of a century later in the Philippines, the American army improvised and adapted to fight and ultimately defeat an insurgency against the U.S. colonial government. The U.S. military’s approach has not been an ideological one of wanting to fight only wars consisting of big battles.¹¹

Hearts-and-minds counterinsurgency has become the primary operational instrument in the army’s repertoire for dealing with insurgency and instability throughout the world.¹² Since the golden rule of American counterinsurgency is that local populations must be “protected” so that they can be won over to the side of the government and separated from the insurgents, America has been led down a one-way street in its efforts to combat local insurgencies: long-term nation building. The surge in Iraq, led by General Petraeus, seemed to make it all workable, even potentially doable elsewhere. Even in the wake of this disastrous war and the parallel quagmire in Afghanistan, pundits and writers still see a bright future for more counterinsurgency operations in foreign lands.¹³

This theory and practice of American counterinsurgency traces its roots to Western military attempts to counter Communist revolutionary movements in Third World countries after World War II, especially to the fall of China to Mao Tse-tung’s Communists in 1949. Indeed, it was the Maoist model of Communist revolutionary movements after World War II that so captivated Western militaries and produced a theory of countering insurgencies. Since Mao proclaimed metaphorically that it was the insurgent fish who swam in the sea of the local population and gained support and protection from them, the counterinsurgency theory that developed had as its basic guiding principle that the population had to be won over to the counterinsurgent side. These were basic principles derived by military officers and analysts from the British experience in Malaya, the French in Indochina and Algeria in the 1950s, and the United States in the early 1960s as it began to look toward an increasing military effort in South Vietnam.¹⁴

The Malayan Emergency, as it came to be called, was a struggle between the British-led forces against the Malayan Communist Party from 1948 to 1960. The British won. But flawed interpretations like Sir Robert Thompson’s as to how they won influenced early American actions in Vietnam and, more important, reactions in the years following America’s loss. Thompson played a substantive role in the formulation of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem’s Strategic Hamlet Program. As a high-level foreign adviser to Diem, Thompson was sure the Malayan model would work in Vietnam, and he convinced Diem to apply it, almost blindly. In Vietnam, though, resettling hundreds of thousands of rural folk with long-standing ties to the land proved to be an utter failure.¹⁵ These two wars—their conditions and context—were starkly different, yet the faith in counterinsurgency and its contemporary model of perceived success in Malaya blinded people like Thompson into thinking it would automatically work in Vietnam if only its precepts and rules were adhered to.¹⁶

As the Vietnam War turned sour for the United States after the Tet Offensive in 1968, there began a sustained criticism that the American army had become too firepower-intensive and had lost sight of the key to victory: winning the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people by better methods of counterinsurgency. The notion of the possibility of a “better war” had emerged in circles of American military officers and generals in Vietnam as the United States withdrew its forces between 1969 and 1972. The better-war thesis essentially argued that the war against the South Vietnamese insurgents, or People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), was turned around by General Creighton Abrams after he took command from his predecessor, General Westmoreland. The latter, as the better-war proponents tell it, had fought the war wrongly by trying to win it with conventional military operations and massive usage of American firepower. The right approach would have been pacifying the rural countryside and winning the Vietnamese population over to the government’s side. Westmoreland, in the better-war thesis, becomes the failed general who didn’t “get it,” but Abrams did and turned the tide of the war toward victory in the South by 1972.¹⁷ But alas, the Vietnam War was lost not by the military but by weak politicians back in Washington, D.C., who refused to continue material support to America’s South Vietnamese allies. The seeds of the better-war thesis were planted, and they grew into a powerful treelike belief system in the years that followed.¹⁸

As with the counterinsurgency narrative’s explanation of Malaya, the notion of a better war in Vietnam and a savior general there who turned his army around is fiction. The primary historical record does not support the idea of a better war under Abrams, who was more like Westmoreland than not. Both Westmoreland and Abrams relied primarily on massive U.S. firepower to accomplish their missions. Tapes of weekly discussions among Abrams and his key staff and commanders show that he was just not that interested in pacification and winning hearts and minds.¹⁹ And as in Malaya, where there was no tect...