Christian Tripodi
ABSTRACT
The conflict in Afghanistan 2001–2021 pitched coalition forces into the midst of a civil war. Armed political rebellion of this sort presents practitioners with a deeply intricate problem; multiple, interdependent layers of conflict and competition creating an ever-shifting ecosystem of violent competition. But in their efforts to resolve the root-causes of political rebellion in Afghanistan, Western counterinsurgents unwittingly contributed a set of philosophical, constructionist and cognitive ingredients to the dynamics powering violence on the ground. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, this article explores aspects of the campaign in Helmand and Kandahar 2008–11 in order to better explore the intersection between COIN theory, COIN practice, and the layered complexities involved for stabilisation forces seeking to instrumentalise power and influence in another nation’s internal conflict.
Introduction
In late 2007, the command team of the British Army’s 52 Brigade positioned itself outside the town of Musa Qala in the northern Helmand province. A controversial deal the previous year had seen British forces cede control of the town to local tribal elders, resulting in its re-capture by the Taliban. Developments now suggested that the insurgents were divided and open to exploitation. Coalition forces sought to capitalise upon this opportunity by assaulting the town and bringing it back under Afghan government control. Notably, their approach would be informed in detail by a new doctrine: Field Manual (FM) 3–24 Counterinsurgency. The capture of Musa Qala in December 2007 was set to be the first test of the doctrine’s ‘population-centric’ philosophy in civil-war Afghanistan. The physical seizure of Musa Qala would be followed by a series of political and developmental initiatives designed to ‘build’ upon military control and ultimately bring the town and its surroundings back into the political grasp of the Afghan Government. But whereas the military component of Operation MAR KARADAD worked well, the ensuing efforts to sustain government influence ultimately came to nought; Musa Qala would be back in the hands of insurgents once coalition forces withdrew from Helmand in 2014. But even before then, as early as 2011, in fact, COIN had failed to fulfil the expectations of its various proponents. What happened at Musa Qala helps us understand why.
The historian John Lewis Gaddis proposes that both simple and complex explanations for a given event can be equally true. War is the epitome of such reasoning. In terms of ‘simple’ truths, the battle for Musa Qala is a stereotypical tale of counterinsurgency warfare, a tactical event that ultimately changed nothing. But a more careful reading of events draws out a more complex set of observations. This article therefore uses the Battle for Musa Qala in December 2007 in a particular way. Not as a case study per se, but as a representative event amidst the broader coalition COIN campaign in Afghanistan during the period 2008–11. Acting as a microcosm of the subsequent Helmand/Kandahar surge, it allows us to use the events of late 2007 and early 2008 in Northern Helmand to explore in greater detail a set of forces that impacted how modern western expeditionary counterinsurgency, designed around certain long-standing theories and concepts, functioned amidst the complexity and upheaval of civil war in Afghanistan.
The ‘hidden hands’ of COIN in Afghanistan: the debate and the utility of theory
Much analysis of the war in Afghanistan tends to approach the subject with a certain foundational premise in mind, namely that failure was due to weaknesses with respect to the west’s strategic acumen, as well as the structural deficiencies involved in coordinating the various military and non-military lines of action required to make nation-building work to best effect in Afghanistan.Footnote5 Others emphasise that any explanation of failure also requires understanding what happened when instruments of western power rubbed up against highly reactive indigenous social and political systems and the complex interactions that were part and parcel of that interaction.Footnote6 But although both approaches help to provide a rounded understanding of the course of the war in Afghanistan, there remains room for additional contributions to the debate, particularly for military practitioners wishing to broaden their understanding of how COIN in particular functioned in that environment.Footnote7 The premise of this article therefore is that a more theoretical approach to campaign analysis can help practitioners better understand why the military-operational dimension of the COIN campaign in Afghanistan was so fraught with difficulty. This does not necessarily demand a radical re-interpretation of events or a new theoretical approach in and of itself. Instead, it requires the drawing together of a number of seemingly disparate theoretical contributions on different aspects of the campaign. Together, and using the events under discussion, these illustrate the ways in which seemingly abstract academic theorising holds genuine value for military practitioners concerned with matters of irregular warfare and its associated doctrines.Footnote8
The article will begin by addressing relevant aspects of civil-war theory, particularly those pertaining to the ways in which population behaviours and political loyalties are determined in such conflicts, a key concern of COIN. It then mobilizes three different theoretical approaches to the discussion of COIN in Afghanistan specifically. The first of these relates to the Clausewitzian concept of understanding the competing tensions between policy and war as a tension between ‘logic’ and ‘grammar’. This article suggests that any framing of debates about the efficacy of COIN in Afghanistan needs to consider the extent to which the logic of a radically transformative politico-military intervention in Afghanistan potentially confounded and contradicted the ‘grammar’ of counterinsurgency, i.e., the specific techniques used by those at the tactical and operational levels charged with dampening the causes and effects of violent political rebellion. The article then moves on to the constructionist dimension of the debate, proposing that practitioners consider COIN in the context of ‘world-ordering’ and ‘world shaping’ properties, i.e., the way that doctrine ordered their understanding of a phenomenon, i.e., the nature of insurgency in the context of Afghanistan, and their subsequent use of that understanding to shape desired outcomes.Footnote9 Lastly, the article utilises research on organisational learning dysfunction to address the cognitive ‘frames’ that shape military responses to violent political rebellion. The resultant Military Operational Code (MOC), it is argued, provided practitioners with an alternative world-view and self-identity to that demanded by doctrine, thus creating a tension with the supposedly politically oriented, population-centric model of COIN as advocated by FM 3–24. More importantly perhaps, the MOC draws the argument beyond what are often underspecified and generic explanations of ‘culture’ in relation to explaining the way in which western militaries predominantly approach the prosecution of COIN. It provides a far more granular theory of how and why military actors in Afghanistan, driven by the cognitive requirement to simplify their understanding of the operational environment, were thus apt to allow their understanding of violent political rebellion to fit with the notion of small-scale conventional war. In turn, by alluding to the logic that military defeat of the enemy would pave the way for the emergence of desired political outcomes, this encouraged a heavy and almost exclusive focus upon offensive military operations that were never able to properly compensate for the various social, political and economic drivers of violence on the ground.
Together these three aspects (logic v grammar, social construction, cognitive constraints) comprise what might be termed the ‘hidden hands’ of COIN in Afghanistan, unseen and even imperceptible forces that would nonetheless prove highly influential in affecting the Coalition’s attempts to use counterinsurgency as a war-winning approach in Afghanistan. And there are reasons why this deeper, more theoretical form of enquiry matters. The debacle of the August 2021 withdrawal from Kabul potentially encourages us to see that event as broadly symbolic of a wider malaise and to understand the West’s underwhelming performance over the course of two decades as primarily the fault of senior policymakers and the lack of an effective ‘strategy’.Footnote10 But the shortcomings of the West’s campaign cannot all be about poor policy decisions or absent strategy. It is also about what fills the gap, and the role of militaries in doing so. Analysing their contribution in a theoretical sense encourages military actors to reflect upon a different set of considerations that might otherwise be the norm and in so doing presents them with a different set of explanations as to why their vision of counterinsurgency and stabilisation in Afghanistan proved such a difficult proposition.
Civil war
Afghanistan during the period of the Coalition occupation was in a state of civil war as multiple organised groups disputed political control.Footnote11 Therefore, prior to engaging in any meaningful discussion of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, certain aspects of civil-war theory require exploration, particularly those related to civilian population behaviours amidst conditions of violent uncertainty.
The first consideration is the importance of localism and its effects upon conflict dynamics. Stathys Kalyvas emphasises the way in which civil wars inevitably unleash long-standing hostilities between different tribes, clans, kinship groups, and neighbourhood bands.Footnote12 These often have little to do with the causes of war at the national level. Instead, local, personal and historical grievances translate into forms of violence that not only contribute to the perpetuation of the conflict as a whole but which, by virtue of their local nature, are conditioned to remain largely opaque or even invisible to outsiders. In civil war Helmand, this form of ‘hyper-localism’ was prone to disguise the roots of conflict even to indigenous actors.Footnote13
The second consideration is the response of civilian populations trapped in conditions of physical insecurity amidst a society at war with itself. James C. Scott proposes that they generally shy away from formal and impersonal institutions and public services, i.e., government, army, or police, in favour of personal loyalties and patronage arrangements.Footnote14 Ultimately, when presented with a violent and uncertain contest for power, personal relationships with local power brokers are more valuable and reliable than contracts with the agents of a distant and potentially illegitimate central government.Footnote15
The third consideration is the conditions under which this mentality may shift. The issue is a complex one, but in essence, Kalyvas identifies a fundamental relationship between the physical control of a given territory and the degree of political loyalty engendered among the population therein. Control, he argues, provides a foundational basis from which the population can be encouraged to co-operate with a given political actor. Combined with the exemplary infliction of violence upon enemies and defectors, physical control of the environment allows a steady progression toward the physical protection of collaborators (shielding), increased credibility (which in turn provides a more receptive attitude toward the provision of benefits) and the ability to monitor the population with a view to ever more responsive governance.Footnote16 Certain points of relevance flow from these propositions. The first is that the ‘provision of benefits’, i.e., economic development, capacity building and the general ‘good governance’ approach rests upon a firm foundation of selective violence and long-term control. Removal of the mechanism needed for that control (i.e., the capacity to cause harm) is deeply detrimental to the chances of continued collaboration.Footnote17 The second point of note is that any population-centric method predicated on the objective of handing control over to incumbent government forces, as was the intent in Afghanistan, is engaging in a strategy that may be highly detrimental to chances for peace. Quantitative analysis of multiple civil wars illustrates that upon achievement of a military victory, government repression tends to increase; the same government that has just suffered a civil war being naturally wary of opening up the political arena. Thus, the chance of renewed conflict grows as a victorious government creates continued reasons for legitimate grievances. Footnote18
The final consideration relates to the subject of rurality. Much of the COIN campaign in Afghanistan was fought in the rural hinterlands. This lends a distinct flavour to proceedings. Rural populations in poor, economically under-developed countries often have a tradition of fostering rebellion due to their comparative isolation from the state’s administrative and security apparatus, better facilitating the formation and protection of insurgent groups.Footnote19 In combination with rural norms of solidarity and honour, insurgents stand a better chance of disguising themselves without being denounced. An economy based on subsistence farming, meanwhile, tends to favour armed resistance more than one based on wage labour. And perhaps most importantly of all for the counterinsurgent, the wide dispersion of population settlements in rural environments impedes effective policing.Footnote20
Before examining the efficacy of COIN in civil-war Afghanistan, therefore, certain key points require emphasis. First, that the conflict on the ground was often conditioned by local disputes that were often impossible for external actors to ascertain or understand. Second, that a civilian population trapped in conditions of uncertainty may well prefer bargains with known counterparties to participating in the formal institutions of the state. Thirdly, while such attitudes can be positively adjusted, physical protection of the population is paramount to that process. Even then, a government ‘victory’ has a statistically significant chance of resulting in continued or even increased violence. And finally, Afghanistan’s largely rural condition would impose a distinct challenge for a counterinsurgency doctrine developed with the far more urbanised environment of Iraq in mind.Footnote21
Intervention in Afghanistan: logic v grammar
Turning back to the Western intervention in Afghanistan, it can be proposed that matters be understood first and foremost with respect to the guiding logic at play.Footnote22 What is meant here is the theoretical notion of understanding war in the context of ‘logic’ and ‘grammar’. The former can be likened to the imperatives, assumptions or theories that shape the conceptual limits of strategy, such as the under-riding purpose of a conflict or the scale of the effort to be employed. War’s grammar, on the other hand, refers to the rules and procedures that govern the use of armed forces within that war, i.e., military doctrine and/or the various ‘principles’ that abound therein.Footnote23 Before we examine the grammar of COIN in Afghanistan, therefore, we need to understand the logic underpinning its employment. Patrick Porter suggests this was perhaps best defined by a broad consensus shared by many in Washington DC, Whitehall and elsewhere post 9/11: that the universalist values championed by the West – individual freedoms, political plurality, human rights, free trade, democracy and the rule of law – should apply to Afghanistan. Furthermore, that it was the strategic and moral duty of certain great powers to reorder part of the world as it suited them, ‘[A]l the way into the political interior of states’.Footnote24 This consensus was condensed into a warlike form of ‘security liberalism’ in which the demands of the Global War on Terror would be satisfied in part by the forced transformation of target societies by way of the imposition of liberal institutions and values.Footnote25
The logic of the war in Afghanistan was thus a radical exercise in democracy promotion and state-building that primarily reflected the preferences, interests and values of powerful external actors rather than the Afghan institutions to which it was directed. Nothing illustrated this more starkly than the imposition, under the post-Taliban, 2001 Bonn agreement, of the archetypal Weberian/Westphalian nation-state model with its emphasis upon modernization and top-down centralization of political power.Footnote26 Infrastructure, government administration and organizational reforms at the centre were to be the overriding priority, with very little attention paid to traditional social and community institutions that had so long sustained Afghan society.Footnote27 Whether through conspiracy or carelessness, the new Afghan state was to be built upon Western priorities.Footnote28
For 52 Bde as it sat poised outside Musa Qala, and for other western commanders elsewhere in Afghanistan who would soon be responsible for transforming COIN theory into practice, these various tensions and contradictions may not have been evident, but they were certainly there. Perhaps therefore, the overriding truth for professional counterinsurgents was that the ‘logic’ of war in Afghanistan, i.e., a rapid and externally mandated process of state-building by way of a turbocharged policy of modernisation, was unrealistic and contradictory. By seeking to concentrate political legitimacy at the centre, it implicitly denied the importance of pre-established, customary forms of authority in the rural periphery, a state of affairs that would not only exacerbate the broader conditions required for a state of near-permanent violence but also, at a tactical level, thoroughly complicate attempts by counterinsurgents in their efforts to engage with, support and strengthen those local actors as part of the bottom-up approach to state-building that was an explicit aspect of the COIN endeavour.Footnote29 In other words, the broader policy decisions to modernise and democratise Afghanistan and which ultimately determined 52 Bde’s (and other COIN practitioners) presence in Afghanistan served only to undermine the latter’s favoured tactical and operational approach to building security and stability at the tactical level. From the outset, the logic and grammar of the war in Afghanistan stood at odds.
World Ordering: insurgency, key leaders, legitimacy, development
FM 3–24 made a serious attempt to provide commanders with the conceptual toolkit needed to make sense of violent political rebellion.Footnote30 But its ambitions in this respect betray what Barkawi and Ansorge describe as ‘world-ordering’ and ‘world-shaping’ properties; it constructs a particular worldview or understanding (world-ordering), and it then facilitates attempts to remake the world in accordance with that understanding (world-shaping).Footnote31 FM 3–24 satisfied that process in two distinct ways. Firstly, it provided baseline understandings of key concepts/ideas such as ‘insurgency’, ‘key-leader’ and ‘legitimacy’, as well as forging an intimate conceptual link between economic development and counterinsurgency success. This world-ordering process resulted in a set of actionable principles designed to guide military actors through the process of turning that knowledge into desired political outcomes, i.e., world-shaping. But what resulted from these two processes was both the obscuration of the granular reality of political rebellion within the broader social realm of civil-war Afghanistan and the promotion of a theory of victory – Clear-Hold-Build – that was unsuited to resolving those conditions.
The insurgency narrative
With respect to its world-ordering dimension, FM 3–24 crystallises the problem at hand when it states that, ‘[P]olitical power is the central issue in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies; each side aims to get the people to accept its governance or authority as legitimate’.Footnote32 It thereby appeals to a normative understanding of insurgency/COIN that presents a neat, triangular construct, a population over which identifiably rival parties (insurgency/Government) compete to out-legitimise the other, the so-called insurgency narrative. In somewhere like Helmand, the conflict on the ground fitted that narrative to a degree. Farrell and Giustozzi portray an identifiable Taliban movement mobilised in part by the powerful strategic narrative resistance to external forces.Footnote33 Malkasian and Garfield concur, explaining the Taliban insurgency as a distinct movement motivated broadly by the defence of Islam and resistance to US (and other) invaders.Footnote34 But they all similarly acknowledge a range of very specific, local dynamics shaping the exercise of violence. In important respects, therefore, the doctrine failed to provide a clear picture of what was happening on the ground. It underestimated the relationship between armed rebellion and the very composition of the political order, which in somewhere like Helmand revolved around deeply opaque matters such as the role and importance of status, the way in which power, money and patronage were distributed, and competing claims between various sectors of that society over its economic resources, and matters of justice and authority.Footnote35 In a more practical sense, it failed to condition western counterinsurgents to recognise the ways in which the intense rivalries between tribal and kinship groups over land/water rights or drug revenues might render any distinction between population, insurgent and government meaningless.Footnote36 A given area might accommodate pro-Government and pro-Taliban elements, but those respective loyalties would be determined primarily by tribal/sub-tribal affiliation rather than ideological rivalry or political preference, and could be rapidly and repeatedly transferred as required from insurgent to incumbent and back again in defence of one’s interests.Footnote37 So elements of society might indeed be drawn toward the Government and thus give the impression of cooperation and increased support. But the immediate and hyper-local nature of disputes typically meant that once these were settled, the impetus for further cooperation no longer existed. This dynamic was a fundamental problem for the coalition, in the sense that the Taliban often became the glue that held various pro-government elements from fighting one another. Once the threat evaporated at the hands of the counterinsurgent, so did the glue, sparking yet more conflict. The historical, fluid and temporary nature of the rivalries abounding in places such as Helmand and Kandahar rendered much of the insurgency narrative meaningless.Footnote38
Key leaders
Another problematic concept that emanated from the world-ordering aspect of COIN doctrine was that of the ‘key leader’.Footnote39 A foundational aspect of colonial-era pacification methods, the idea possessed a natural logic; an authoritative and instrumental accomplice at the local/village level through which the counterinsurgent could direct communication, funds and ultimately, influence. Coalition forces in Helmand and elsewhere translated such requirements into the person of the Afghan village ‘elder’. This would be the instrument through which, as a conduit for western ‘power’ in its various forms, local communities could be bolstered and denied to the insurgency.Footnote40 But while the rebuilding or restoring of customary authorities became a major focus, such simplification of the social realm ultimately had the opposite effect. Co-option by outside authority eroded elders’ ability to solve conflicts by denying them the middle ground that they had traditionally occupied, and which was essential to their role as mediators and problem solvers. By forcing them to choose a side, the Coalition’s attempt to engage tribal elders to support community cohesion achieved, over time, the opposite effect: It increased community-level disputes while reducing the power of elders to address them, not least because they were often involved in their creation. The result was an open door for the adversary. With customary dispute resolution weakened, internal conflicts over resources (drug revenue, land, water) or other issues festered and escalated. This gave the insurgency traction, and the Taliban courts responded to these needs.Footnote41
Legitimacy
FM 3-24‘s problematic ordering of both the insurgency narrative and the instrumental ‘key leader’ concept flowed together into the broader notion of ‘legitimacy’. From the beginning, the doctrine stated that ‘Legitimacy is the main objective’, detailing the primary objective of COIN operations as being to foster development of effective governance by a ‘legitimate government’.Footnote42 But while the doctrine was theoretically justified in identifying the concept of legitimate political rule as key to defining the ultimate purpose and direction of counterinsurgency efforts, the net result in Afghanistan was a procrustean effort to force a uniform conceptualisation of ‘legitimacy’ upon the fluid contours of a political-economy constantly seeking to manage the tension between a system of patrimonial rule emanating from the centre versus alternative forms of political legitimacy at the village level.Footnote43 The result was a fundamental erosion of doctrine’s ability to both guide counterinsurgents in their understanding of legitimacy and to engage in the process of constructing it. Instead, it presented a concept that not only differed in meaning depending upon its location within that society but confronted counterinsurgents with the uncomfortable reality that their chosen techniques for building legitimacy in Afghanistan at any level were inherently destructive to such prospects.
At the broader level, for example, if legitimacy was held to lie in the form of government, then fundamentally insurmountable challenges presented themselves. As Jeffrey Michaels has illustrated, the mere presence of hundreds of thousands of NATO troops, aid officials, administrators and contractors explicitly challenged Afghan sovereignty and thus eroded Afghan government legitimacy.Footnote44 The funds they brought with them and the military support they provided in turn engineered a rentier state that had little to no requirement to pay heed to the transactional requirements needed to build legitimacy in the eyes of its population and which instead chose to pay heed to the requirements for its own continued survival, namely a ruthless focus upon political domination and economic banditry.Footnote45 The Coalition found itself in the classic Vietnam trap; it could weaken the insurgency, but it could never strengthen the Afghan government to the degree necessary to capitalise on that achievement.Footnote46
In conjunction with basic structural impediments to success, the focus on government legitimacy also left crucial questions unaddressed in relation to the importance of local legitimacy and how this aided the upward process of building Host Nation (HN) legitimacy more broadly. If for counterinsurgents in Afghanistan the question of legitimacy began in the tribal peripheries of Helmand, Kandahar, Kunar, etc., what questions needed to be asked, and what needed to be understood? What were Afghan ideas of the role of the state? What did legitimacy look like in an isolated rural society that had been subject to foreign occupation and internal conflict for the previous four decades? How did Afghans themselves perceive the role of subnational government at district level? If power was held centrally, what incentive was there for provincial and district-level administrators to focus upon their constituents? What was meant by the notion of ‘informal power’ within Afghan governance structures and why did this matter?Footnote47
The problem was acute at ground level. Doctrine may have mentioned the importance of grass-roots legitimacy but was deeply underspecified as to what this meant in practical terms. It failed to prepare counterinsurgents for the phenomenon of multiple independent ‘micro-societies’ that preserved their own notions of what ‘legitimacy’ looked like and who possessed or exercised it, and which favoured a reliance on local actors or customary authority to provide it.Footnote48 Missing was the insight provided by civil-war scholarship that sought to understand the ways in which local populations processed the notion of legitimacy, the methods by which it could be identified, created and maintained but also, vitally, to understand how it died.Footnote49 This latter point is well illustrated by Amiri and Jackson’s research into the effects of stabilisation efforts at the local level. What emerged in the form of coalition attempts to identify and work through what they perceived as ‘legitimate’ local actors, i.e., the aforementioned key leaders, was in fact a largely destructive process. The Coalition’s instrumentalization of community structures in an effort to deny the insurgency legitimacy simply resulted in the relentless targeting and assassination of elders and other customary authorities. Meanwhile, the uneven distribution of largesse fostered corruption, resulting in violent tension and further openings for the Taliban.Footnote50 In the process, institutions that people had relied on for centuries to mediate disputes and protect their community were gradually destroyed.
Development
The final important aspect of the world-ordering dimension of COIN doctrine was its belief in the crucial importance of socio-economic development as a war-winning method. FM 3–24 states that ‘Political, social, and economic programs are usually more valuable than conventional military operations in addressing the root causes of conflict and undermining an insurgency’ and proceeds to emphasise that the suppression of political rebellion is ultimately derived from the ability of military power to create the space and opportunity for the delivery of social and economic benefits to the population.Footnote51 Implicit therefore is the notion of military actors as engineers of economic improvement, and of that improvement being the sine qua non of any effective long-term counterinsurgency effort. Footnote52 Whether such a theory survives scrutiny is debatable. It appears logical to suggest that richer populations are happier populations, but this presupposes that civil war in somewhere like Helmand was the product of material grievances rather than an elemental dispute over the source of political control and authority. Money may exert a temporary effect on population sympathies, but it does not condition political loyalties in the ways imagined, particularly in the absence of a revenue-bargaining relationship (taxation/representation) between government and citizen.Footnote53 This ultimately results in an unaccountable government and a politically unresponsive citizen. Thus, the disbursement of monies, whether through civilian aid, PRT aid, or Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) aid, was generally perceived by recipients as charity rather than the basis of a genuine political exchange. Moreover, the injection of financial aid and public goods into violently unstable environments often exacerbates the problems at hand through envy and grievance generation, increased licence for competition and corruption, and broader economic distortions.Footnote54 On the development side, the involvement of military professionals untrained for the task of overseeing major infrastructure development projects was exacerbated by bureaucratic inertia dictating that the amount of money spent should become its own metric of success, but without provision of any reliable method of measuring the effects of this spending upon the ‘ground-truth’ of population sentiment.Footnote55 As one senior US official acknowledged, ‘it was easier to count the number of schools built than it was to determine … whether their construction convinced Afghans to support their government’.Footnote56
Ultimately, while the world-ordering insurgency, legitimacy and development narratives that underpinned FM 3–24 provided a coherent ‘meta narrative’ for military commanders, the specific conflict dynamics operating in places such as northern Helmand or southern Kandahar did not play to such certainties. With respect to the insurgency narrative, the loyalties, interests, and identities at play were too mutable under the pressure of the violent local rivalries and the destabilising presence of the coalition for counterinsurgents to maintain a steady understanding of what was happening or match it to the neat constructs depicted in the doctrine. As for the concept of legitimacy, this had been flagged as a fundamental foundation stone of effective COIN but, as Gawthorpe states, it had also been thoroughly ‘black boxed’; any precise understanding of how it functioned, and most importantly how it was measured, was deeply limited.Footnote57 And lastly, the powerful ‘development’ narrative encouraged military actors to conceive of financial disbursements and infrastructure contracts as ‘weapons systems’, to be deployed for the purpose of defeating an adversary but without any due consideration as to how that deployment might negatively affect the wider societal ecosystem.Footnote58
‘World shaping’
The world-ordering process dictated that even doctrinally informed counterinsurgents in Afghanistan confronted something of a conceptual void with respect to precisely what the insurgency was about, what legitimacy meant at the local level, who among various parties might hold it, and how their collaboration together in combination with the application of violence and economic development might bolster and advance Government authority in a durable sense. But the world shaping dimension to COIN doctrine – Clear-Hold-Build – betrayed no such lack of certainty.Footnote59
Clear-Hold-Build is a theory of action by which counterinsurgents use military force to clear insurgents from an area, physically hold that area while protecting the population and establishing ‘governance’, and ultimately seeking to build and refine those capabilities until the insurgent is ‘out-governed’. As each locale is pacified, a state of security and stability flows outward until it spreads across the country in the manner of multiple growing ink-spots spreading across a piece of blotting paper. As David Ucko wryly observes, ‘[I]n its snappy cadence and logical sequencing [it] sounds compelling, almost incontestable in fact’.Footnote60
But its compelling nature hid multiple weaknesses.Footnote61 First and foremost, the illustrative example of the ‘inkspot’ is dangerously reductive. On paper, the spreading oil is presented with a passive, uniform environment; the oil itself, representing the pacifying influence, is impervious to infection by that environment and the spread of the oil is marked by its expansion in all directions simultaneously, an expansion that is permanent and irreversible. In nearly all respects, that is not an accurate representation of the spread of government influence throughout a society subject to a violent insurgency or rebellion. In a practical sense, meanwhile, the hold/build aspect of the method created confusion as to the respective roles and importance of military power and development aid in addressing political rebellion. And in a political sense, the extravagant resources needed to make the method work in any durable sense threatened to subvert the proper relationship between COIN and strategy.Footnote62
Here would be the underlying problem for 52 Bde in Musa Qala and counterinsurgents elsewhere in Afghanistan. Whilst the theory of Clear-Hold-Build was plausible and persuasive, it was, as Ucko notes, ‘[An] empty schema that must at the time of its application be populated by knowledge, substance, and skill’.Footnote63 And in the context of civil war Helmand or Kandahar it was not evident that its prescriptions – increased government administration and more money spent on development – matched the problem. Consequently, although the fight for Musa Qala would be an initial small-scale attempt to put the theory into practice, the experience would characterise the sorts of difficulties faced when the coalition then adopted the technique at scale during the 2009–11 Surge and after in places such as Garmser, Marjah and Kandahar.
‘World shaping’ in action
52 Brigade’s command team appeared to acknowledge the complexity of their operating environment. They recognised the notion of a conflict ecosystem, their organisation’s position within that system, and the unpredictability of the effects that would emerge as a consequence of any interaction between the two.Footnote64 Planning emphasised knowledge of the local environment and the shaping of local sentiment; ‘We would embed Influence into all of our thinking, planning and execution’.Footnote65 Taliban forces were not to be merely defeated, but de-legitimised. The ultimate objective was not the destruction of the enemy, but the shifting of the district inhabitants’ loyalty toward the Afghan government. Military power would play its part, but so would political action before, during and after the event.
From the outset, the Brigade employed both passive and offensive information operations; the former designed to capture local sentiment, the latter to sow discord among Taliban ranks.Footnote66 That effort was supported by a parallel ‘political’ offensive at district level designed to help weaken local Taliban forces before a shot had even been fired by encouraging defections. During the battle itself, Afghan Army units were positioned prominently to advertise the Government’s involvement in the fight. Once the battle had been won, it was followed by a rapid turn to those measures designed to cement government authority and win ‘hearts and minds’. A new Governor was installed to provide locally sourced political and administrative leadership. An FM radio station was set up to broadcast anti-Taliban propaganda, and Bollywood films would be shown as a way of contrasting Government rule with the harsh asceticism promoted by the Taliban.Footnote67 There would commence lavishly funded development projects including a new mosque, police buildings, schools, roads and bridges, the re-building of the district centre, and the provision of improved electricity infrastructure, all designed to promote the benefits of Government administration.Footnote68 Operation MAR KARADAD, December 7–12 2007, would initiate the first example in Afghanistan of COIN as a genuinely politically oriented stabilisation effort.
Unsurprisingly, the only aspect of the Clear-Hold-Build effort that worked as intended was the physical assault on the town and its surrounds.Footnote69 The remainder produced far more uneven results. The parallel ‘shaping’ activity of luring local Taliban over to the government worked to a degree, but this was quickly offset by Afghan officials allied to President Karzai, who suddenly feared that outside interference in Government sponsored ‘reintegration’ schemes would threaten to expose their illicit revenue-gathering activities. The hugely knowledgeable political advisors (POLADs) responsible for overseeing the initiative were summarily expelled from Afghanistan, thus drastically weakening coalition intelligence on (and contacts with) the local Taliban at a crucial moment.Footnote70 The affair also ensured deep and lasting suspicion in Afghan Government circles of British intentions in Helmand and forcing the British Government into an embarrassing public denial that it had been negotiating with the enemy.Footnote71
Meanwhile, the Hold and Build aspects of the operation also began to falter. The British had chosen a supposedly influential former Taliban commander Mullah Salaam, drawn from the dominant local Alizai tribe as the new Governor. He had previously been in negotiation with the Karzai regime, and his appointment would be both a nod to local legitimacy and a powerful advertisement for reconciliation. But such was the lack of familiarity with ground-level politics that both the Karzai administration and the British had in fact backed a minor warlord with no real influence in local politics. The embarrassment was profound, yet it was impossible to remove him without doing immense damage to the broader reconciliation narrative. With DFID and FCO stabilisation experts unable to leave their heavily fortified base at Lashkar Gar, responsibility for his ‘political’ mentoring was delegated to a junior British intelligence officer.Footnote72 Regardless of this supposedly stabilising influence, the new Governor, infamous for his previous victimisation of the Hassenzai, a sub-tribe of the Alizai, began feuding with his tribal enemies, notably the district chief of police, while his militiamen began extorting and victimising local civilians.Footnote73 Predictably, the development initiatives for which he was responsible lacked any real substance or permanence.Footnote74 Roads crumbled; buildings lay unrepaired, schools frequently sat unattended.Footnote75 Development funds intended for the town were intercepted by the provincial political leadership based in Lashkar Gar.Footnote76
All the while Taliban forces infiltrated the area. The British Army may have controlled the town, but the Taliban maintained a presence in redoubts and villages within 15 miles, their numbers swelled by the steady stream of newly unemployed poppy farmers whose crops had been destroyed by NATO but whose subsequent compensation payments had been immediately pocketed by corrupt Afghan government officials.Footnote77 Despite 52 Bde’s efforts to establish the basis for a conclusive ‘political’ victory at Musa Qala, local sentiment appeared un-convinced. ‘We don’t want schools … we want security’, complained one local.Footnote78 It would only be the appearance of thousands of heavily armed US Marines under the auspices of the 2009 ‘surge’ into Helmand that delivered that security. Upon their arrival at Musa Qala they gazed upon a handwritten sign reading, ‘Promise Everything, Deliver Nothing’.Footnote79 The Marines would withdraw in 2014, and the Taliban were soon be back in control of Musa Qala.
The frictions encountered during Operation MAR KARADAD illustrated the difficulties of applying an abstract doctrinal theory to Helmand’s responsive social and political structures. It is assumed that local drivers of conflict were known (often not the case) and that outsiders could easily reform supposedly dysfunctional systems (very difficult). In both respects, the reality of the situation in Helmand pushed back against the theory. Drivers of conflict, particularly the toxic disputes over land rights and drug revenues and related inter- and intra-tribal rivalries, were often entirely hidden from view and, even if ascertained, remained well beyond the jurisdiction of the counterinsurgent to address let alone resolve. And these things were opaque not least because local Afghans often actively sought to obscure them from outsiders.Footnote80 The theory also assumed the presence of legitimate actors to whom responsibility could be given for overseeing a new political order. The example of Mullah Salaam not only pointed to the perils of seeking to recruit political administrators from among a cast of violent political entrepreneurs, it also illustrated the sheer lack of influence that Western actors had over the process. He may have been backed by coalition officials, but their actions betrayed the limits of their authority; neither his initial defection to the Karzai regime nor his subsequent actions as governor bore the imprimatur of Coalition influence.
These inconsistencies did not have an immediate effect. Coalition forces would remain in control until their withdrawal. If anything, Musa Qala appeared to provide a rough paradigm for future operations. From 2009 to 2011 the US surge into Helmand and Kandahar appeared to prove the utility of the Clear-Hold-Build method as ISAF Commanders initiated a far more politically oriented effort, placing greater emphasis on local political ‘buy-in’.Footnote81 The insurgency was pushed back. Levels of violence dropped. Economic activity rose. Schools and hospitals were built and community political representation established. Some sense of normalcy returned to a previously desperate situation. But these positive developments masked a repeat (albeit on a far bigger scale) of the problems encountered at Musa Qala. Coalition forces could never exert influence over that which really mattered, which with respect to Helmand and Kandahar remained the neuralgic issues of land-rights, poppy cultivation, and chronic government corruption. Security remained dependent upon the continued presence of coalition military actors and their physical suppression of the Taliban.Footnote82 The corresponding development offensive was ‘[Q]uantitively impressive, qualitatively variable, and politically indeterminate.Footnote83 Outsiders had no accurate way of measuring whether locals had genuinely embraced the new institutions provided or whether they were essentially perceived as an instrument to capture Western material benefits.Footnote84 And those benefits had little effect on the positive forging of political loyalties and the delivery of long-term stability at ground level. Quite the opposite. The economic development focusses inherent to the COIN surge led to a deluge of tens of billions of dollars flooding into theatre and an inevitable free-for-all to secure access to those funds; a hugely destabilising dynamic that reworked local power structures, created new grievances while exacerbating old ones, and ultimately created a criminal kleptocracy that forced many ordinary Afghans to turn away from the state and towards the Taliban.Footnote85
In the final analysis, the vast combined military and aid effort underpinning the surge not only distorted Afghanistan’s entire political economy and rendered its government apparatus thoroughly dysfunctional, but also simultaneously forced US politicians to acknowledge that the astronomical costs required to give life to a COIN ‘strategy’ were entirely unsustainable. In Kandahar province alone, it required tens of thousands of US, British and Afghan troops, three years of concerted effort, thousands of military and civilian casualties, and the expenditure of nearly two-thirds of a billion dollars in aid money to provide a tenuous degree of security for two million people. To put matters into perspective, at the height of the surge and with all expenditure taken into account, the US was spending twice as much annually on the war in Afghanistan than on the entire federal budget for education.Footnote86 If COIN in the form of Clear-Hold-Build was to function as its military advocates believed, then it threatened to transform a supposedly operational theory into a de-facto strategy whereby the US’s interests in relation to Afghanistan would be dictated by the resources required to prosecute a COIN campaign, rather than the other way around. It was for these reasons that the Obama administration signalled an end to the surge in 2011, and with it an end to COIN in Afghanistan.Footnote87
The cognitive dimension
Op MAR KARADAD pointed to the technical failure of population-centric COIN in Afghanistan. Despite military commanders seeking to place the local population at the heart of its tactical designs in a way unseen to that point in the war, coalition and partner Afghan forces ultimately failed in their attempts at the ‘political engineering’ of enduring peace and stability in Musa Qala. But explanations for failure cannot simply rest upon the technical applicability of doctrinal precepts or the correctness of their application thereof, as this would presume in the first instance that Op MAR KARADAD typified the coalition approach to COIN in Afghanistan. Arguably, of course, and despite an ostensibly population-centric approach being subsequently employed in places such as Garmser, Marjah and Kandahar, it did not. The broader debate over the employment of population-centric COIN in Afghanistan needs therefore to account not only for difficulties in terms of its application but also for the broader matter of the degree to which it ever truly served as an accurate portrayal of western military preferences and behaviours in response to the problem of violent political rebellion.
A common theme noted by academic and military commentators on the Coalition’s war in Afghanistan was the heavy focus on offensive military action and kinetic effect.Footnote88 Even commentators more positively inclined toward the population-centric narrative accepted that violence was a major enabler of whatever progress was achieved.Footnote89 After all, 52 Bde’s experiment with ‘political’ warfare rested upon its initial, brutally effective seizure of Musa Qala from the Taliban. Thus, one impression of the war in Afghanistan is that military priorities and behaviours, even when undertaking supposedly inter-agency, population-centric COIN operations, appeared largely indistinguishable from those associated with a more robust, enemy-centric approach. How to explain this?
As Todd Greentree shows, the simplest explanation in some respects is structural, that the deficit in civilian means to support the non-military components of the strategy resulted in the military being in charge of everything, thus everything became militarised.Footnote90 Such an explanation has undoubted merit, and other observers also note the way in which many COIN/Stabilisation campaigns present the sorts of conditions that result in the control of methods and resources being quickly passed to military commanders and their associated, ready-made organisational structures. The consequence is a blurring of the lines between policy formulation and implementation, and an environment in which military preferences tend to dominate.Footnote91 But such an explanation only goes so far. As outlined earlier in accordance with Gaddis’s notion of simple and complex explanations lying side by side, the structural explanation for events still allows us to accommodate the notion that a more complicated set of impulses relating to military behaviours in COIN had a bearing upon matters.
In this respect, some point to cultural and bureaucratic factors. In his account of FM 3-24’s development over the period 2005–6, Benjamin Jensen notes that General David Petraeus, as the motive force behind the new doctrine, had been forced throughout to wage a ‘war of ideas’ against those in the US military establishment who decried the abandonment of a conventional warfighting mentality.Footnote92 Andrew Bacevich and Douglas Porch suggest that such tensions were reflective of the fact that the ‘turn’ to COIN in Iraq/Afghanistan was less the reflection of any willing affinity on the part of the wider US military for COIN per se rather than a form of intellectual and bureaucratic capture by a small group of military leaders and policymakers who perceived such ideas as fundamental to US global strategic ambitions in the form of the Global War on Terror. Footnote93
Others seeking to explain the relentlessly offensive-minded attitude of coalition units in places such as Helmand and Kandahar go deeper, citing matters of culture, ethos, training, and bureaucratic competition in explaining military behaviours in theatre.Footnote94 But there still remains a largely ignored aspect of the debate, namely that relating to the cognitive domain. For some observers, the problem here is a relatively straightforward one; COIN doctrine deals largely with the abstract, which makes it difficult to understand and translate into action. Soldiers are apt to reject abstract theorising in favour of what they know best, which is the application of force.Footnote95 The explanation is convincing to a limited degree, but the problem is arguably much deeper than that and rooted instead in the fundamental purpose of doctrine. Professional militaries consistently search for certainty as a way of mitigating risk, organising themselves in ways designed to reduce uncertainty to the greatest possible extent.Footnote96 By providing clear principles for collective action, doctrine has historically been one way of doing so. But COIN doctrine invites military professionals to accept that their task is now defined by conditions of uncertainty in the sense of an operating environment where the enemy is often indistinguishable, where the defining problems are political rather than military in nature, and where the application of violence may well be counterproductive. FM 3–24 attempted to counteract this uncertainty with a form of reductivism; the provision of ‘key principles’.Footnote97 Yet certainty in somewhere like Helmand or Kandahar could only really be increased if the problem was artificially simplified, and if straight lines were drawn where few existed, e.g., the adherence to clear and easily understood narratives. Mike Martin describes coalition forces in Afghanistan drawing these lines as a form of cognitive ‘closure’, whereby unhelpful ambiguities and uncertainties were removed from the situation in order to simplify understanding and thus allow positive (military) action.Footnote98 The ‘insurgency narrative’ was an example of that.
This tendency toward simplification is similarly evident in Jackson’s analysis of the cognitive dimension. He adopts a form of operational code analysis to suggest that professional militaries, conditioned in decision-making terms to favour reliability and speed over accuracy or environmental fit, construct a particular mental ‘script’ where COIN is concerned; what he terms the Military Operational Code (MOC).Footnote99 Thus emerges a time-saving heuristic by which insurgencies are simplified as small versions of big wars, encouraging adherence to the notion that the military defeat of the enemy will pave the way for the emergence of desired political outcomes. When it becomes apparent that this is not the case, powerful forms of organisational self-interest dictate the need to persist with the military-centric approach lest subordination to a more nuanced ‘political’ approach negatively impacts operational autonomy and resourcing.Footnote100
Aside from the rival structural account there are potential weaknesses in Jackson’s theory. Firstly, there is the obvious existence of outliers such as Brigadier Andrew Mackay, Commander 52 Bde, who appeared willing from the outset to pursue such an alternative approach. There was also the array of bottom-up innovations on the part of ordinary soldiers on the ground that signalled an appetite for change away from purely conventional, kinetic operations in favour of more ‘political’ and recognisably COIN-type actions.Footnote101 Jackson acknowledges the importance of structure but considers it a separate matter from preferences, routines and behaviours.Footnote102 He also notes the existence of outliers such as Mackay but considers them largely unrepresentative of their profession.Footnote103 On the subject of innovation, moreover, he argues that this is tightly controlled. Any moves to encompass more indirect approaches to countering insurgency are accommodated so long as they allow continued recourse to more conventional, aggressive, military methods and preserve operational autonomy in the face of any drive for overt political control.Footnote104
A prime example of the MOC came during the surge into Helmand 2009–11. The USMC, perhaps the most effective of the coalition’s forces in southern Afghanistan, firmly illustrated the complex interplay between COIN doctrine, ethos, training, and the need to maintain a cognitive fit between all of these and the challenge ‘on the ground’. They paid heed to the doctrine by adopting recognizably COIN methods in the form of key-leader engagement, quick-impact development projects, partnering with locally raised militias, and bolstering local police units. But such activities were firmly subordinated to a broader desire for operational autonomy and adherence to relentlessly offensive, aggressive small-unit military tactics designed to take physical control of territory and destroy the Taliban’s will and ability to fight.Footnote105
Jackson’s theory of the MOC is a valuable contribution to understanding the COIN campaign in Afghanistan. It acknowledges the structural and bureaucratic aspects of COIN operations and the way that these offer military actors an outsized influence on policy but offers deeply persuasive arguments as to how that influence then manifests itself. Perhaps more importantly, it improves upon the cultural explanation for behaviours.Footnote106 If military culture is generally specific to an organisation or institution and is theoretically shaped by national and organisational traits, then the MOC offers an improved explanation for similar behaviours across organisations and nationalities, i.e., the USMC, the US Army, the British Army, and the Royal Marines.
Conclusion
Some argue that the failure of COIN Afghanistan was primarily a consequence of failing to properly arrange and deploy the levers of national power.Footnote107 Such an argument is overly self-referential. In the broadest sense, it neglects the fundamental problem of any attempt to export power in this fashion, namely the agency of those subject to such measures and the extent to which the objectives and preferences of external actors suffer against the objectives and preferences of local clients. But more specifically, it fails to acknowledge the way in which Afghanistan’s socio-political condition actively frustrated the application of those levers and denied the ability of core concepts to function as designed. As the former Vietnam-era stabilisation practitioner Rufus Phillips noted of events in Afghanistan where he acted as an advisor to the US Government, ‘Many of our stabilization efforts give the impression that we do not comprehend the political, confused and often unhinged nature of the internal struggles for stability in fragile states’Footnote108
This article has sought to better explain the latter aspect of the debate, and in the process illustrate why military practitioners in particular can benefit from a more theoretical discussion of COIN’s application in Afghanistan. In the first instance, this related to better clarifying the complex and varied dimensions of political rebellion on the ground against which the doctrine would be pitted and why this mattered in real terms to soldiers and marines on the ground. What this article illustrated, however, was the way in which these factors were supplemented by a number of ‘hidden hands’ imposed by counterinsurgents themselves; the technocratic assumptions underpinning the state-building process post-2001; the ideational and constructionist dimensions of FM 3–24 itself; and the cognitive constraints imposed upon military actors conditioned (in the main) to reject ambiguity in favour of simplicity and certainty. The frictional nature of the interplay between these various dimensions of the war revealed critical weaknesses in the ability of doctrine and its associated concepts to provide suitable guidance for counterinsurgents trying to navigate the real-world complexities of civil-war in that country.
Ultimately, the events of 2008–11 showed COIN in Afghanistan to be possessed of a severe identity crisis. The US-led surge into Helmand and Kandahar was arguably the high point of coalition success against the Taliban. Tens of thousands of Marines in combination with British, Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) and other NATO partners, continual offensive actions by both conventional and special operations forces and efforts by President Karzai and his political allies to mobilise the tribal system in order to support coalition military efforts meant that for the first time since 2001, albeit after a three-year struggle, the Taliban would be demonstrably beaten and security delivered to millions of Afghans. But it was also the case that the foundation of this (time-limited) success had been less a matter of economic development or ‘good governance’ than the combination of violent compellence and territorial control.Footnote109 Counterinsurgents were unable to perform as the arbiters of political and socio-economic change in the way intended because those things were never within their gift. Consequently, the inability to distinguish between COIN’s ‘political’ successes and the straightforward application of violence not only made it easy for sceptics to dispute the wisdom of the entire concept but smoothed the path for its abandonment in 2012 and a return to a primarily kinetic approach.
Afghanistan had shown how doctrine’s templated method had been unable to cope with the granular particularities of that particular conflict. But this is not to say it did not matter in any positive sense. Carter Malkasian, perhaps one of the most informed observers of that war, argues that for US and British marines, soldiers, advisors and special forces engaged in Afghanistan, if COIN ultimately meant anything, then it meant the mindset required to reduce frictions and to smooth the path of interaction with the population to best effect. Acknowledging cultural beliefs and practices was better than ignoring them; living near the people was better than living far from them; patrolling on foot was better than being locked in an armoured vehicle; mentoring Afghan soldiers and police was better than not doing so.Footnote110 But even in its efforts to smooth a path through the confusing contours of someone else’s fight, the experience of COIN in Afghanistan still illustrated the difficulties involved when western militaries are diverted from their primary purpose of deterring, destroying or containing the nation’s enemies and instead used as mediators or balancers in other nations’ internal wars.Footnote111
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