The Conceit of American Counter-insurgency

Abstract

The title of Paula Broadwell’s 2012 biography of General David Petraeus, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus, defines America’s broken strategy in Afghanistan and its deadly embrace with counter-insurgency (COIN). Broadwell portrays Petraeus as a committed general who has embraced with a near fanatical zeal the idea that counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan can be made to work as long as he, the American military, and the political elite go ‘all in’ to win it. But what if the United States in Afghanistan, and potentially other areas in the future, did not need to go all in with a large military force doing counter-insurgency operations? The image of Petraeus, created by people like his biographer Paula Broadwell and Petraeus himself, as a great general who can make any war work anywhere in the world, has done severe damage to American national security strategy. The damage is done by the belief that counter-insurgency operations can be made to work as long as a saviour general like Petraeus is brought on board to go all in. Unfortunately, this belief commits the United States to perpetual wars of armed state building, even if those kinds of wars are not remotely in American national interests. What Broadwell, Petraeus, and many others have done is to create a new American militarism based on the idea that any problem in the world — Syria’s civil war, violence in Kenya, al-Qaeda’s presence in Pakistan — can be solved by the American military at the barrel of a gun.KeywordsCritical PerspectiveOperational FrameworkState BuildingMilitary HistoryAmerican MilitaryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.