COIN Challenges
During the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War the basic doctrine was one of securing the people and “winning the hearts and minds of the people.” After the U.S. left Vietnam a conventional war with North Vietnam, with no U.S. support to the South Vietnamese, was lost by South Vietnam.
Even today there are many political pundits, uneducated news journalist and opportunistic politicians who claim we lost the Vietnam War and counterinsurgency (COIN) will not work anywhere.
It is not a question of a doctrine and philosophy of COIN working or not working but it is a question of how you apply COIN.
For some time the U.S. Army deliberately refused to recognize irregular warfare and COIN because they fell into the trap of thinking we lost in Vietnam and their COIN doctrine was flawed. To make matters worse the Army led an effort to cleanse the U.S. thinking and quantify COIN and they undertook rewriting history with the Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency.
Unfortunately, the academics who wrote the manual, both in uniform and from academia, misunderstood the foundation of classic COIN doctrine and thus distorted the realistic view of COIN and limited the U.S. ability to defeat the insurgencies in Afghanistan and somewhat in Iraq. The main authors of the Field Manual 3-24 took a select set of historical anti-colonial COIN engagements and said their doctrine would work in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It has not and will not.
There is a unique issue in Afghanistan and Iraq and that is religion which has greatly distorted what can be learned of what has motivated religious fanatics and how to bring on and end state. Field Manual 3-24 case studies is very weak on religiously motivated struggles with an aim of a worldwide Islamic movement and which have no relationship to the earlier ideas of anti-colonialism, nationalism, and self-determination.
A single all encompassing doctrine of COIN is not possible in the Islamic world. We were facing a completely new kind of environment with a fundamentalist religious paradigm in Afghanistan and a secular dictatorship in Iraq. One model did not fit all.
Traditional data indicates that to win an insurgency it takes 12 to 15 years to defeat the insurgents. Most insurgencies can win in 5 to 7 years if their strategy and tactics are right.
Counterinsurgency is about breaking the normative system that prevailed in a given area and replacing it with something better. Democracy is not the answer in Afghanistan or Iraq but something that mirrors their traditional religious, political and economic systems acceptable by the people.
The U.S. must accept that what they are trying to do in the Middle East and Southwest Asia is not comparable to the post-colonial period and adjust to meet the new paradigm.
We are not there yet.