Culture-the missing piece of effective Counterinsurgency Policy

Counterinsurgency’s Comeback, a piece by Nasser Hussain published in the January 2010 edition of the Boston Review, discusses the effects of various counterinsurgency tactics used in Iraq and other wars in the past going back to Vietnam. Hussain also outlines the long history of counterinsurgency methods from various field manuals and publications that illustrate step by step methods for how to “win over” the “host population” in the country at hand. Such a task has proved to be nearly impossible in recent history, often due to issues of legitimacy, according to Hussain. Legitimacy is arguably the most significant reason that the majority of counterinsurgency tactics mentioned in this article have failed; they cannot win over the “host population”. Hussein mentions that almost every counterinsurgency tactic has a goal of winning the “hearts and minds” of the population, yet it is often very difficult for those in the country to see the US presence as legitimate. Why does the US fail to convince the host population that their presence is legitimate? Read the rest of this entry »