Caveat: I'm not bashing COIN, per se. I'm just acknowledging that the doctrine (like every military doctrine) has its limitations. Not to mention, we often understand our own doctrine so poorly, that we misapply it atrociously.

I need to show you my material on District Stability Framework...repudiates a lot of well-intentioned but hopelessly misguided humanitarian projects in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Very quickly as I am oscar mike. . .on the move: I understand connecting the local population with the government, although we could debate whether that is entirely our responsiblity?

However,we seem to have skipped what I would consider at least the prelude, if not the first step, which is getting control of the locals by providing security first, which involves ridding one's particular petite sous quartier of Taliban insurgents?

I can't keep from shaking my head when I read COIN commentary like this, and I read it all the time.

There's an entire community, inside and outside the military, evidently compelled to discuss counterinsurgency as a matter of getting the doctrine right or, alternately, as one of correctly applying the doctrine to local circumstances. It's a wonder to me how such an academic way of looking at what is supposedly the core of our Afghan war effort can absorb so much time and attention. It is as if we were starting from scratch, from the fall of 2001.

We're not. The appearance since at least 2008 has been that the military is trying to start over, after years of treading water on the battlefield and sponsoring the kind of national government that local governments are strongly motivated not to cooperate with. Years of policy mistakes have placed huge obstacles in the way of COIN success -- and yes, that would be true even if we got the doctrine absolutely right, and applied it as well as it possibly can be applied.

It's as if the COIN community were preoccupied with identifying the theory and practice of crossing a field, oblivious to the fact that the field has been mined. As a general rule, you don't get do-overs in war. In any other context, Americans with a military background would accept this as an axiom. In Afghanistan, they seem to assume the rule just doesn't apply.

If the host nation government is not worth a damn, coin is not worth a damn.

In Afghanistan we picked the wrong building materials for our experiment in nation building.

For COIN to work, the government and assisting forces need to work against an insurgency and for a local government. Absent a viable government and/or an identifiable insurgency, COIN just a fancy term that clever generals and others can use to help extract the (liberating/occupying/dithering) foreign forces and achieve the short-term appearance of success or victory.

Iraq has been a civil war or mafia war that the U.S. helped instigate and then kept stumbling into. Not too many government opponents after AQI was run to ground. Current actors just want a bigger piece of whatever Iraq or it's successor pieces will be. The efforts to promote governance and all that other COIN blather have failed (or at least not succeded), and most likely have served as a fig leaf for force-protection bribery operations as well as money gun covering fire for a "dignified" withdrawal.

Afghanistan might have more elements of an insurgeny, though the GoIRA shows itself to be ineffective and counter-productive in large swaths of the country, especially the south. Impressive how the Taleban are implementing their programs of governance, rule-of-law, anti-corruption, etc. The whole thing was a tar baby from the get-go, and can't be fixed by outsiders. We should have just left and threatened to bomb/level/interdict/reinvade whenever the Talibs acted up.

Or maybe Paula Broadwell and the other P4 Cat's Paws are right....

STAFF GUY is pointing-out that "all politics are local." He is suggesting using existing government processes that one finds working in a village. You do not say, "I'm from Washington and I'm here to help you." The Afghan equivalent is that I'll try to secure the area while I shove an Afghan national government down your throat.

We cannot transplant US government structure to a people who have been doing business a different way for centuries. STAFF GUY focuses on economics as the key - rightly so. This is where the people live. They do not live in airy fairy concepts of democracy. However, they do seek freedom from interference from anyone outside the village or tribe. They will fight for that freedom.

COIN is an old term and not a new one as some of you seem to believe. There is nothing in counterinsurgency operations that requires installing a mythical national government. Many of these people have no concept that they are part of a nation called Afghanistan nor do they know its borders.

As we scramble for the door (which I encourage) we should focus our efforts upon strengthening local government. We cannot change culture and mores in an acceptable timeframe and we should not be trying. "The emperor's law vstops at the village gate."

I agree: (paraphrasing here I believe) COIN doctrine sucks. Perhaps that is just my way of phrasing it. Not that all of the doctrine is bad, but down on the ground at the local level none of it is of much use. So apologies if I left the impression that I am advocating some doctrinal, or similar, adjustment that will magic-bullet our happy ass out of Afghanistan (apologies for the language, it is getting late). That was not at all my intent. RVN SF Vet's synopsis captures a lot of what I was aiming at, he basically says it better than I did.

A point I was trying to make was that in order to get out of Afghanistan we, coalition and particularly US, forces absolutely need to understand what we have to accomplish. Note, I do not say want but rather just what is required for us to actually do. These actions, I would argue, are determined not on the ground in Afghanistan but in the political halls of the coalition nations and led by the politics of the US. We will leave when our civilian leadership tells us to. Bottom line. What do they have to see in order to make that decision.

And I believe that in order to accomplish whatever it is that our leaders decides needs doing we, again: coalition but especially US forces, absolutely must understand what we are dealing with at local levels and how to influence at local levels. We focus too much on the Afghan Constitution. It guarantees every Afghan a college-equivalent education. Literacy is about 10-15% in this country. College degrees for all just is not going to happen and the local populations know this. This is indicative to me of our knowing something about the national government here and next to nothing about the local politics.

Politics are indeed local.

GFF: I can assure you that the "We should have just left and threatened to bomb/level/interdict/reinvade..." opinion does not go over real well here. At least that is my experience after having voiced a similar opinion.

Every time there's a discussion about COIN, fallacies and flawed thinking pop out of the woodwork. When we're discussing the conduct of Iraq and Afghanistan, the starting point needs to be the flaws in strategic thinking, not the practices of small units, because the strategic objectives and limitations define the form that tactical operations take. I'll ignore Iraq, because the strategic failing was that it should be invaded at all.

In Afghanistan, the objective was regime change and the destruction of Al Qaeda, with the implied task of replacing the Taliban with a stable government that wouldn't provide safe haven for terrorist organizations. The broad means chosen to accomplish this endstate was a light coalition footprint, with heavy reliance on Northern Alliance forces. This decision in and of itself set the stage for failure over the long run, inasmuch as the Northern Alliance consisted of a number of loosely allied militias organized along ethnic and tribal lines, allied only because of a common enemy, and with demonstrated historical tendencies to use violence to defend particular tribal interests and to attempt to take control over the government as a whole (which essentially equates to the subjugation of other tribes/ethnicities). This should have been blindingly obvious the high-level planners, given the constant civil war from the cessation of hostilities against the Russians until the present, with opposing forces organized primarily along tribal or ethnic lines.

In practice, Hamid Karzai was essentially appointed to head the government because he was the only Pashtun actively fighting the Taliban at the time of the invasion, and this leader of unproven ability was consistently undermined by US support for tribal warlords as regional leaders that undermined the centralized government. This only served to crystallize Afghan politics into a paradigm of tribal and ethnic groups attempting to gain supremacy over all other tribal and ethnic groups, similar to the sort of Pakistani political maneuvering that led to all the violence in Karachi. Accordingly, Afghan government at the national level has slid into the stasis of bickering tribes and corrupt patronage systems based largely on tribal and familial relationships.

Compare the reality of the Afghan national government to the Afghan national government necessary to end the insurgency (and future, looming ethnic violence). The Taliban recruits most heavily from historically disenfranchised or repressed subsections of the Pasthun whole. This is an indication that more fundamentally than ideology, historical tribal conflicts and injustices play a role in the decision to join the insurgency. Violence during the civil war was often just another act in centuries or millenia long plays of tribal conflict. The cycle of Afghan violence is largely predicated on the lack of the state forming a relatively neutral, unbiased authority that transcends tribalism to mediate tribal disputes. This is a necessary condition for a stable, peaceful Afghan state.

Accordingly, no matter how sound COIN operations are at the tactical level, if the systemic causes of violence aren't addressed at the strategic level, we cannot win in the long term. I'd argue that if we had paid more attention to Afghanistan between 2001 and 2006, we would have successfully created a stable state in the short term, and delayed the descent back into tribal conflict, but the violence wouldn't have been delayed inevitably. I'd also argue that it's stupid and inefficient to try to reinvent the wheel of local governance, but ultimately, without a neutral higher authority, local governance simply reinforces past trends of injustice and contributes to the violence over the long run.

Our tactical house is, generally speaking, in order. Our strategic house, on the other hand, is in shambles, and this shambles poisons our military operations as whole.

COIN can not work because problem is NOT in Afghanistan, it is in Pakistan.

Afghan President Karzai had told a news conference in Kabul on 7/29/2010 after WikiLeaks leaks that “The time has come for our international allies to know that the war against terrorism is not in Afghanistan’s homes and villages. But rather this war is in the sanctuaries, funding centers and training places of terrorism which are in Pakistan. Our international allies have the ability to destroy these Pakistani sanctuaries, but the question is why they are not doing it?“

Even Afghanistan’s national security advisor Rangin Dadfar Spanta had asked a similar question in a Washington Post article on 8/23/2010: “While we are losing dozens of men and women to terrorist attacks every day, the terrorists’ main mentor (Pakistan) continues to receive billions of dollars in aid and assistance. How is this fundamental contradiction justified? Despite facing a growing domestic terror threat, Pakistan “continues to provide sanctuary and support to the Quetta Shura, the Haqqani network, the Hekmatyar group and Al Qaeda. Dismantling the terrorist infrastructure “requires confronting the state of Pakistan that still sees terrorism as a strategic asset and foreign policy tool”.

But such Afghan pleas fall on deaf ears in Washington where powers to be are hell bent on appeasing Pakistan at the expense of Afghanistan.

Previous US ambassador Anne Patterson to Pakistan, wrote in a secret review in 2009 that ‘Pakistan's Army and ISI are covertly SPONSORING four militant groups - Haqqani‘s HQN, Mullah Omar‘s QST, Al Qaeda and LeT - and will not abandon them for any amount of US money‘, as diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show.

Ambassador Patterson had NO reason to mislead her own State Department and U. S. government.

Pakistani government has U. S. under the barrel of a gun - US can NOT use its aid leverage to force Pakistan to stop supporting terrorist groups who kill US/NATO troops in Afghanistan day in and day out because US needs Pakistan’s help in ferrying supplies to those very US/NATO troops. This is blackmail - pure and simple.

Following are verbatim quotes from what Gen (rtd) Jack Keane said at a discussion on Afghanistan organized by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think-tank on June 30, 2011:

1. "The truth is, the ISI aids and abets the sanctuaries in Pakistan that the Afghan (Taliban) operate out of. They (ISI) provide training for them, they provide resources for them and they provide intelligence for them. From those sanctuaries, every single day Afghan fighters come into Afghanistan and kill and maim us".

2. "There's a direct relationship of ISI's complicity and the deaths of American soldiers and the catastrophic wounding of those soldiers. The chief of staff of the Pakistani military is complicit. He used to be the director of ISI. He put the guy in there who is in charge now and he has full knowledge of what I'm just describing".

3. "This partnership has got to be based on that harsh reality. There are two ammonium nitrate factories in Pakistan. 80 per cent of the explosive devices that are used to kill our soldiers, kill Afghan security forces and kill Afghan people come from Pakistan."

4. "All of what I just said to you, when we confront them with this, they lie to us. They lie to us just like the Soviet Union used to lie to us“.

Recruiting terrorist State of Pakistan to fight terrorism that Pakistani State itself created, was the biggest blunder of Bush presidency for which U. S. has paid dearly with no end in sight.

I started writing a winded reply to Staff Guy but, right before submitting, read his follow up comments and saw that we're on the same page WRT "If we have never had a viable national strategy with respect to any nation where we do COIN-type stuff, why would we now?"

So this is pretty much just addressing Tom's point:

The requisite patience and fortitude are not usually warranted. As a democratic nation, we are free to strike that deal only when we find the risk of failure acceptably low and the potential payoff worth the cost. In all other cases, our government and its supporters have zero right to sympathy. Go set up an autocracy somewhere and try from there.

The bat works better in career-launching dissertations than in the real world. "A COIN approach remains a useful tactic, as part of a larger strategy -- if done well" when all the strategic stars are in alignment and leaving aside the question of whether we have any business occupying said country. In Afghanistan, where there's a cross-border sanctuary and no government except on paper, chances are slim.

COIN is historically the back end of military interventions that were wrong and/or ill-conceived. How much doctrine would we have to guide us if we chose not to rely on largely failed colonialist examples? Intellectually, it's not impossible. But I don't see how anybody could, at this juncture, expect that the moral and social price will be worth it.

That if "counterinsurgency" were done in the United States instead of abroad and if it were renamed "The Great Society" instead of "the surge", it would have been dismissed as completely unworkable 30-odd years ago, right?

"Stated another way, an insurgency is an organized, protracted politico-military
struggle designed to weaken the control and legitimacy of an established government, occupying power, or other political authority while increasing insurgent control."

Or we can rephrase: An insurgency is an organized, protracted civil-military
struggle designed to weaken the control and legitimacy of an established government or other political authority while increasing criminal control.

Poof: we have Detroit.

So yes, I understand. Or I argue I understand while others would argue that I do not. COIN, as a term, does not mean a great deal.

After reading all the comments that discuss the topic down to the micro-level, I step back and ask: Has the US ever succeeded in any large COIN campaign? Can the US ever do so? The reason I'm skeptical is because:

1. COIN depends on a coordinated military-diplomatic-political effort. Our complicated government has shown the difficulty in mounting any such coordinated effort.

2. The British have said that counter-insurgency can succeed if you are willing to be absolutely brutal. The US will never be able to do that.

3. That leaves the more gentle "hearts-and-minds" solution. But as long as we have to use line units from the combat arms, with their E-5's and O-3's, the basic tendency is to be "kinetic," with the resulting negative fallout with the locals. All the fine, intellectualized COIN philosophy and techniques don't take root easily down at the grunt level, where it's much easier to kick down doors.

4. Finally, COIN takes time and money. The American public's patience tends to be short, when a military involvement is complex and frustrating. That's picked up by the politicians, who will play the issues for their own political gain. A years-long COIN campaign depends on the National Will, which won't be there.

So....is our unique form of society and politics ever going to be able to mount and sustain what it takes to succeed in COIN? Is all this talk about COIN just grist in the mill for the academics, the war colleges, the think-tank analysts.....and, yes, the faithful readers of this blog?

hunting the last word here...

My opinion: no. The US is, I believe, unsuccessful in COIN because we see COIN, we explain COIN, we discuss COIN, like it is war. COIN is war-like in that there is, often, a lot of shooting. Juarez Mexico could be said to be at war, based on the level of violence. So if success is "win the war" then I do not think that we will get there. I am quite sure that the US will declare victory though. Over what I have no idea, but a decade into this and we cannot afford to "lose" so we will just say that we won. But we will never truly define "win," that will remain politically unpalatable.

Despite facing a growing domestic terror threat, Pakistan “continues to provide sanctuary and support to the Quetta Shura, the Haqqani network, the Hekmatyar group and Al Qaeda. Dismantling the terrorist traveling infrastructure “requires confronting the state of Pakistan that still sees terrorism as a strategic asset and foreign policy tool”.