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 »

Obligations in Afghanistan

In the current issue of the Boston Review, Nir Rosen argues that the counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan is misguided and likely to fail.  Several respondents have varying analyses of Rosen’s piece: some agree with his conclusion but thinks he misses a few points; others claim that he is too pessimistic. Aziz Hakimi thinks Rosen is right to doubt the success of an American-lead COIN operation in Afghanistan, but claims that Rosen is wrong in marking Karzai’s government as illegitimate—there is hope for politics in Afghanistan, says Hakimi, as long as the central government devolves power to local officials. Hakimi, however, is not clear about what responsibilities the United States has in Afghanistan, if any. This omission clouds the discussion of what the United States should expect to accomplish in Afghanistan.

Read the rest of this entry »

Do soldiers believe in counterinsurgency tactics?

In the second of his two recent contributions to the Boston Review, Nir Rosen describes his experiences following a team of marines in Afghanistan who trained and fought alongside a force of Afghans. For most of the article, Rosen sticks to the facts and avoids drawing many explicit conclusions. However, it is reasonably clear that Rosen is skeptical of the ability of the US to succeed in Afghanistan, and he suggests several views in the article: first, it is misguided to optimistically compare the counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in Afghanistan’s to those in Iraq, second, the state of Afghanistan’s police and armed forces is very poor, and third, the military does not fully support COIN. This last suggestion is unfair.

Read the rest of this entry »

Cyberwar hysteria? Reading Morozov against recent attacks

I found Evgeny Morozov’s article in the latest BR to be a compelling argument against cyberwar hyperbole, and I thought his call for a focus on infrastructure needs rather than on overblown claims Internet terrorism was a sound one.

A friend in NYU’s Computer Science department pointed out after reading the article that he was troubled by the author’s tendency to put the weight of responsibility for cyber-security on “end-users,” that is, consumers of software systems and platforms, rather than on those who designed the systems. I think this point is valid, and while perhaps Morozov’s emphasis on user action is to be expected in a time so focused on individual responsibility rather than systemic accountability, I too am skeptical of blaming individual Internet users for any security problems they may encounter. The solutions that Morozov espouses —

be careful, and avoid trafficking data in open spaces

– are somewhat over-simplified, and while his caution about believing government hype about cybersecurity may be justified, he may be going too far in obscuring the real steps that governments can take to protect their citizens and their own classified data.

Of course, the moment I was ready to turn the page on Internet terrorism, the news media became saturated with coverage about North Korean cyberattacks on South Korea and the US. Read the rest of this entry »