The COIN Myth III: Economy of Farce

[laststeamtrain]

January 20, 2010
The COIN Myth III: Economy of Farce

Posted by Jeff Huber

Parts I and II discussed how our counterinsurgency doctrine’s requirements for a reliable host-nation government, a reliable host-nation security force, and reliable intelligence are impossible to achieve in our present wars. The third and final part of the series focuses on the futility of counterinsurgency itself as a tool of U.S. foreign policy.

Our counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan were doomed by incompetent and corrupt host-nation governments and security forces and an inability to produce reliable intelligence about cultures we have little or no understanding of. Of even greater concern, though, is that our COIN efforts have little or nothing to do with our national security objective of protecting the homeland from terrorism.

<snip>

The flimsy excuses we were given by the Bush/Cheney administration for the invasion of Iraq were the threat from Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program (he didn’t have one) and the not so subtle implication that he was involved in the 9/11 attacks. (He wasn’t. Among the Americans who still fall hook, line, and sinker for the 9/11 ploy is Fox News commentator and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.)

We successfully achieved the military objective of booting Hussein from power, but we failed to plan for the unintended consequences of an insurgency-style civil war that still rages almost seven years after the staged toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad. There’s every reason to expect that the Pentagon and/or Iraq’s President Nouri al-Maliki will trump up a security-related excuse to keep American troops in Iraq beyond the December 2011 deadline prescribed in the status of forces agreement. Gen. Ray "Desert Ox" Odierno, commander in Iraq, is on record – thanks to the Long War camp’s official stenographer, Thomas E. Ricks – as wanting to see a "force probably around 30,000 or so, 35,000" American troops in Iraq through 2014 or 2015.

Bush and the rest of the pro-war jackdaws justified our prolonged involvement in the Mesopotamia Mistake by proclaiming Iraq to be the "central front in the war on terror," but it was never anything of the kind. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was a bastard franchise of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda that may comprise as few as 850 full-time fighters whose importance in Iraq’s insurgency was deliberately exaggerated by the Pentagon’s propaganda directorate during the Bush administration. AQI would never have existed if we hadn’t invaded Iraq and beheaded a regime that managed to keep Iraq’s herd-of-cats society under control, and if we ever do leave Iraq, they have no interest in following us here.

<snip>

The only way our counterinsurgency doctrine relates to economics is as a way to justify conducting endless small conflicts in support of the Pentagon’s Long War doctrine as a fuzzy excuse for maintaining a large Army in the face of economic challenges.

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[bemildred]

1. This is all you need to know:

"Stan the Man with the plan for Afghanistan envisions an eventual escalation of forces that will include a half million U.S., NATO, and Afghan troops for the purpose of conducting a counterinsurgency campaign that may go on for decades to deny a safe haven to fewer than 400 terrorists. "

Calling this stupid simply does not do the job. We will be up to a trillion dollars per terrorist before we know it.