Counterinsurgency In Afghanistan Research Articles

ISAF and European military transformation: German, Swedish and French counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, 2003–2014

This article examines the role of a subset of European militaries in responding to the Afghan insurgency during their deployment as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). While part of a multinational coalition, their heterogeneous military transformation was crucial to fighting the insurrection and confronting American pressure. In comparing the counterinsurgency innovations of Germany, Sweden, and France, we find that Germany acted reluctantly, Sweden largely emulated American doctrine, and France became a counterinsurgency pioneer. We argue that these developments took time and were accompanied by conflicts within ISAF and between the respective national military and political leaderships.

The Quiet Violence of Empire: How USAID Waged Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan (Book Review)

The Quiet Violence of Empire: How USAID Waged Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan (Book Review)

An Analysis of Afghanistan's Postwar Condition and How to Use AI Technology to Address It

In August 2021, President Biden announced the withdrawal of the US army from Afghanistan. As the final armed force withdrew on August 30th, 2021, the long-term direct interference of the US army in Afghanistan ended. Since the Afghanistan War in 2001, US-led forces have sought to eliminate insurgencies and reestablish social and political orders. In the past 20 years, the US has spent considerable effort and funds to assist in the recovery and development of Afghanistan. The reappearance of the Taliban in power in Afghanistan and the retreat of US forces from the nation revealed that all the efforts the US had previously made did not meet the expectation they should have. Thus, the inefficiency of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan could be a sign that the currently existing methods might not be able to provide an effective solution for the situation in Afghanistan. Inspired by the development of novel technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, this article argues that the current usage and development of such technologies can foreshadow possible solutions to Afghanistan's various problems.

US intervention in Afghanistan and the failure of governance

ABSTRACT Several factors militated against successful counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, but the real failure was a failure of governance. The US and its allies created a central government which proved extremely powerful at resource extraction while dismally weak at service provision, Development aid, the opium economy and the lack of political accountability created new forms of highly pernicious corruption, akin to those in many African states. The result was that legitimacy of the Afghan government was eroded, thereby setting the scene for a Taliban victory. The article concludes with three lessons from Afghanistan for the future.

Sex as the secret: counterinsurgency in Afghanistan

AbstractI explore the construction of women as the secret for the ‘successful’ prosecution of war in Afghanistan. To do so, I take up the mobilization of gender in the US counterinsurgency doctrine as deployed in Afghanistan. I draw on the 2006 Counterinsurgency Field Manual, human rights and humanitarian reports, and scholarly works to identify and analyze this mobilization, paying attention to the colonial histories upon which COIN explicitly and implicitly relies. By critically integrating these sources and the paradigmatic moments that exemplify COIN, I demonstrate the constitutive relationship of gender and COIN. The valence of the secret – of women as concealing, revealing, being, and bearing the secret – is still a lesser explored element in the analysis of the gendering of COIN and of its ‘military orientalism’. Even as scholars have powerfully shown how, in the case of Afghanistan and elsewhere, the veil functions as an overdetermined and ‘multilayered signifier’ in its own right, symbolizing the ‘tension between disclosure and concealment that defines the dominant conception of the secret’, less subject to detailed analysis in case of Afghanistan is the ways in which Afghan women are constituted through COIN in polysemous relation to the notion of the secret.

Internal colonisation: The intimate circulations of empire, race and liberal government

This article proposes that ‘internal colonisation’ provides a necessary lens through which to explore the relationship between violence and race in contemporary liberal government. Contributing to an increasing interest in race in International Relations, this article proposes that while racism remains a vital demarcation in liberal government between forms of worthy/unworthy life, this is continually shaped by colonial histories and ongoing projects of empire that manifest in the Global North and South in familiar, if not identical, ways. In unpacking the concept of internal colonisation and its intellectual history from Black Studies into colonial historiography and political geography, I highlight how (neo-)metropolitan states such as Britain were always active imperial terrain and subjected to forms of colonisation. This recognises how metropole and colonies were bounded together through colonisation and how knowledge and practices of rule were appropriated onto a heterogeneity of racialised and undesirable subjects both within colonies and Britain. Bringing the argument up to date, I show how internal colonisation remains diverse and dispersed under liberal empire — enhanced through the war on terror. To do this, I sketch out how forms of ‘armed social work’ central to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq are also central to the management of sub-populations in Britain through the counterterrorism strategy Prevent. Treating (neo-)metropoles such as the UK as part of imperial terrain helps us recognise the way in which knowledge/practices of colonisation have worked across multiple populations and been invested in mundane sites of liberal government. This brings raced histories into closer encounters with the (re)making of a raced present.

Contemporary Afghanistan Outlook: Between Counterinsurgency and Search of the Social Contract

Abstract This article is based on reassessment of the contemporary results of counterinsurgency and nation-building in Afghanistan. Nation-building initiatives have been started in the country since the Bonn agreement in December 2001. This agreement brought into reality the current governing system of Afghanistan. Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan has been initiated in full mode since 2009 after a sound success on Iraqi frontier. However, each operational area is bringing its own specifics into play. The same was with Afghanistan. The newly established constitutional presidential republic has faced with inheritance of unresolved sensitive ethnical identity issues, confrontation between different groups for self-governing authority and security of essential resources. These preconditions have brought a diversified and even confrontational social environment into reality. Prolonged military operations in Afghanistan could show that diversified social environment and misevaluated cultural heritage has led to misleading assumptions that centralized presidential governing system could become an effective ruling model for post-Taliban country. One of the key notions of this article is that historical lessons taught by long years of colonialist rule in Afghanistan has not been learned and misevaluation of diversified and confrontational local entities has brought another historical lesson of Afghan tribal resistance. More than that, diversified and confrontational entities of Afghanistan have not been a favorable subject for possible social contract. The term social contract was introduced as explanatory method of national political behavior and systemic structure by Jean Jacques Rousseau in 18th century Europe. Afghan society has become the subject to this model of political philosophy only as counterinsurgency campaign gained full capabilities around 2009. Reassessment of long term nation building efforts in this article is based on evaluation of Afghan social contract’s progress.

Local defence forces and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan: learning from the CIA's Village Defense Program in South Vietnam

This research note makes the case that if the US and its international allies are to successfully use ‘Local Defence Forces’ (LDF) to overcome counterinsurgency constraints in Afghanistan, current initiatives need to be significantly modified. A key issue is that the Village Stability Operations/Afghan Local Police (VSO/ALP) LDF program is unlikely to be effective in filling security gaps in rural Afghanistan because, much rhetoric to the contrary, it is essentially focused on militarily combating the insurgency rather than fully developing local communities as counterinsurgency resources by winning their support for the Afghan central government. The CIA's Village Defense Program in South Vietnam, a counterinsurgency program that has thus far received cursory attention in current LDF literature, provides a useful counterpoint. Through a comparison of the VDP and VSO/ALP operational patterns, implications are drawn for current and future US counterinsurgency practice employing LDF components.

Options for Avoiding Counterinsurgencies

Abstract: How can the West continue to shape international order without over-committing itself to ruinous and ambiguous operations on the scale of Iraq and Afghanistan? This article addresses this question by examining the failures of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, and by outlining three alternatives for future engagements: the Libya model, the indirect approach, and contingency operations in support of multilateral organizations. Each presents unique possibilities, but the imperative for strategic clarity and commitment is consistent. ********** By December 2014, the large-scale Western military effort in Afghanistan will be over, ending more than a decade of direct intervention in that country and Iraq. A page is being turned in the history of warfare and, as most recognize, there is a need to take stock of the diverse but often painful experiences of the past, and to translate these into appropriate lessons for future interventions. That the recent campaigns, despite substantial investment, have yielded such limited results is difficult to accept. Yet denial will not prepare us for the future. Indeed, if the West is to remain in the business of shaping global affairs, sometimes by force of arms, it must resolve the contradictions raised by its recent campaigns. (1) Most pressingly, it seems, the West wants the rights that go along with global leadership, but not the responsibilities and costs. How can we bridge this gap? How can the West sustain its contribution to a very particular international order, without falling into the pitfalls that characterized the last decade? Creative solutions are urgently needed. This article examines three such solutions in light of the failures of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. These alternate approaches provide more limited applications of force and more modest roles. Recent history suggests that--within key contexts and preconditions--such approaches can be successful. The Challenges in Afghanistan An important first step to understanding the challenges faced in Afghanistan is to broaden the scope of analysis beyond the mere conduct of operations. Many of the mistakes in Afghanistan were strategic and, therefore, had little to do with counterinsurgency. These include the creation of a highly centralized form of governance, the wasted opportunities provided by the fall of the Taliban, the massive diversion caused by the war in Iraq, and the decision to expand the International Security Assistance Force's (ISAF's) area of operations beyond Kabul without committing a fraction of the resources necessary for security and stability. Underlying these missteps was the inability of international allies to establish common political and strategic aims. The campaign was defined by three separate and poorly coordinated efforts: the US-led counterterrorism effort of Operation Enduring Freedom-Afghanistan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) -led ISAF effort to provide security and to enable the third mission, United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), a UN effort devoted to political and economic development. On one side of the spectrum, Afghanistan was a narrow exercise in counterterrorism; on the other, it was statebuilding aimed at establishing democracy, gender equality, and human rights. Rather than a propitious division of labor, the broad spectrum of aims provided the West with the false comfort of doing it all, all at once, and with little need for prioritization. Tensions between competing interests were glossed over, but became strikingly apparent with NATO's expansion beyond Kabul and the steady deterioration of security thereafter. The bloodshed deepened strategic divisions, both between and within individual governments. In a context where victory was not really a relevant concept, the lack of political and strategic direction had serious consequences. Most importantly, it thwarted the essential process of balancing ends, ways, and means, and the mismatches therein which became increasingly obvious. …

Naw Bahar District 2010–11: A case study of counterinsurgency Conducted by Naval Special Warfare in Afghanistan

This article provides a critical analysis of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan at the tactical level. The efforts of several Naval Special Warfare detachments deployed to Naw Bahar district in Zabul Province, Afghanistan are examined in detail to identify key successes and failures in planning and execution. It defines the operating environment in which the detachments worked and identifies the goals and outcomes of the first and second phases of the counterinsurgency effort. The article concludes by placing the tactical effort in the context of the overall strategy in Afghanistan and suggests that time is the limiting factor to success.

Soldier-Scientists Join Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan

The U.S. military has been quietly deploying soldier-scientists on noncombat missions in Afghanistan—an unprecedented program, according to one geologist who served in it.

From Medusa Past Kantolo: Testing the Effectiveness of Canada's Enemy-Centric and Population-Centric Counterinsurgency Operational Strategies

Canada's counterinsurgency in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, involved two distinct operational strategies: an initial enemy-centric strategy and, after 2009, a population-centric strategy. Using insurgent-initiated attacks against civilians as a measure for the level of control and security provided by the counterinsurgency, this article tests the effectiveness of these two strategies using a quasi-experimental research design. This article finds that a population-centric counterinsurgency strategy that aimed to provide security to the population rather than destroy the insurgency resulted in the most controlled and secure environment for the civilian population. To the extent that a secure civilian population is important for successful counterinsurgency, the post-2009 population-centric operational strategy of the Canadian Forces, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), and the United States increased the chances of a successful counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

Optimization-based influencing of village social networks in a counterinsurgency

This article considers the nonlethal targeting assignment problem in the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, the problem of deciding on the people whom U.S. forces should engage through outreach, negotiations, meetings, and other interactions in order to ultimately win the support of the population in their area of operations. We propose two models: (1) the Afghan counterinsurgency (COIN) social influence model, to represent how attitudes of local leaders are affected by repeated interactions with other local leaders, insurgents, and counterinsurgents, and (2) the nonlethal targeting model, a NonLinear Programming (NLP) optimization formulation that identifies a strategy for assigning k U.S. agents to produce the greatest arithmetic mean of the expected long-term attitude of the population. We demonstrate in an experiment the merits of the optimization model in nonlethal targeting, which performs significantly better than both doctrine-based and random methods of assignment in a large network.

Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan: Comparing Canadian and Soviet efforts

After a decade of bloodshed and suffering, the western-sponsored coalition in Afghanistan led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has failed to win the “hearts and minds” of locals. The tremendous sacrifices by the United States, Canada, and their allies have produced some tangible results, but steps forward have been made on the shaky ground of overall insecurity and violence and have primarily been associated with certain urban developments, while most of Afghanistan remains deeply rural in its feudal social order and conservative Islamic traditions. Although the Canadian experience in Afghanistan has been very different in its scope and objectives from the Soviet Union’s operations of the 1980s, certain important parallels, particularly concerning counterinsurgency, can be discerned.

Women as ‘Practitioners’ and ‘Targets’

Feminist scholarship has shown how gender is integral to understanding war, and that the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was partly legitimated through a reference to Afghan women's ‘liberation’. Recognizing this, the article analyses how gender is crucial also to understanding the practice of ‘population-centric’ counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Because this type of warfare aims at ‘winning hearts and minds’, it is in engaging the population that a notable gendered addition to the US military strategy surfaces, Female Engagement Teams (FETs). Citing ‘cultural sensitivity’ as a key justification, the US deploys all-female teams to engage with and access a previously untapped source of intelligence and information, namely Afghan women. Beyond this being seen as necessary to complete the task of population-centric counterinsurgency, it is also hailed as a progressive step that contributes to Afghan women's broader empowerment. Subjecting population-centric counterinsurgency to feminist analysis, this article finds that in constructing women both as ‘practitioners’ and ‘targets’, this type of warfare constitutes another chapter in the various ways that their bodies have been relied upon for its ‘success’.

Afghanistan and the future of war

Discussion about the nature of warfare in Afghanistan is related to several larger inter-related debates in the field of military history. First, is the world witnessing a military revolution, or a military technical revolution/revolution in military affairs at the dawn of the new millennium? Second, is conventional warfare dead? Third, are we witnessing a new form of insurgency, and is the new form of insurgency part of the so-called Eastern way of warfare? Fourth, does this mean that counter-insurgency in Afghanistan is part of the West’s ongoing Global War on Terror (also dubbed the Long War)? We will try to generalize the future of warfare by making a case study of the recent conflict in Afghanistan.

The Gendering of Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan

February 2009, a team of women Marines first set out to meet with Afghan women in Farah province to find out what their concerns and needs might be. A number of so-called female engagement teams (FETs), haphazardly drawn together from those few women Marines already in Afghanistan (and generally assigned to other jobs which they continued to carry out), started operating in Afghanistan in subsequent months. The teams were poorly trained but highly motivated and were attached to male units mainly in the southern and eastern provinces that are known to be particularly dangerous. They began conversations with Afghan women wherever possible but were rarely part of any coordinated effort. They were often confronted with problems they had no capability to address and repeatedly failed to deliver on promises made to residents, as their mission was not the primary concern of military commanders. It was not until March 2010 that forty Marine Corps women formally began to train for duty on FETs and subsequently deployed to Helmand province in April 2010. 1The effort to deploy FETs is a recent consequence of the adoption of counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine in Afghanistan.2 David Petraeus, commander of the ioist Airborne Division in Iraq in 2003-4, resurrected COIN, a traditional mainstay of colonial war fighting, as an appropriate strategy. His success with the populationcentric strategy in Mosul no doubt influenced his subsequent career, including a brief stop to supervise operations of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan 2010-11, as well as the later adoption of COIN, and not just in Iraq.3 The 2006 U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3-24) outlines the key concepts of COIN doctrine. FM 3-24 repeatedly points out the limits of standard military strategy and seeks to mitigate the often unintended consequences of military force by proposing a broader strategy of development and reconstruction. Unlike pure counterterrorist warfare, the aim of which is to kill as many insurgents as possible, counterinsurgency aims to build confidence and win the hearts and minds of the population, whose support is crucial to the continuation of the insurgency the United States is trying to stop.As Laleh rChalili points out, This coding of counterinsurgency as the civilianised option which aims at winning the hearts and minds of civilian populations and persuading them to support the counterinsurgents has a particular gendered character.4 Where traditional warfare - and especially tactics often associated with counterterrorism efforts - is coded as hypermasculine, counterinsurgency is presented as the gentler, feminine option. Since the focus of the counterinsurgency is the transformation oi civilian allegiances and remaking of their social world, a further feminization is underway: In the binary categorization of war which forms the basis of mainstream discourses about war, civilian (feminine) is the opposite of combatant (masculine).5In this essay, we argue that looking at the gendering of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan provides insight into the assumptions, strategies, and anxieties about the U.S. involvement in this particular war. We see in the gendering of counterinsurgency, exemplified most strikingly in the deployment of FETs, an attempt to reframe the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan as a humanitarian, even progressive, mission. Gendering counterinsurgency efforts as a gentler (feminine) option helps to sell the current campaign to a war-weary authence in the United States (and allied countries). It is also a way of marking U.S. civilizational superiority - and the attention lavished upon FETs deployed in Afghanistan is a significant aspect of this gendered narrative.6 Besides exploring how the operational objectives of the deployment of FETs are gendered, we pay particular attention to the signaling function of their deployment directed toward authences in Afghanistan as well as citizens of the United States and its allies. …

Reviews

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Such as the works of David Anderson, Caroline Elkins and Huw Bennett on the Kenya Emergency. See Caroline Elkins, Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005); David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005); and Huw C Bennett, ‘British Army Counterinsurgency and the Use of Force in Kenya, 1952–56’, PhD dissertation, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2007. 2. See, for example, John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 3. Some of this work has already been conducted. Benjamin Valentino provides a thorough appraisal of the brutality used in some of the more extreme counter-insurgencies. Benjamin Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). However, the perception that Britain's post-war counter-insurgencies were primarily humane has previously excluded its campaigns from being addressed fully in these types of analyses. 4. John Collins's appraisal of counterinsurgency strategies, which addresses such topics as counter-guerrilla strategies, requisite force ratios and anti-underground strategies, provides an excellent example of a single-discipline approach to counter-insurgency. John Collins, Military Strategy: Principles, Practices and Historical Perspectives (Dulles, VA: Brassey's, 2002). 5. Jeremy Isaacs and Taylor Downing, Cold War (London: Bantam Press, 1998). 6. Nolan's book has a useful background chapter on the legacy of imperial policing, briefly considering campaigns from the Victorian period to the Second World War and their impact on the British Army's ‘small wars culture’. Additional informationNotes on contributorsFrancis GriceFrancis Grice is a PhD candidateAshley JacksonAshley Jackson a Professor of Imperial and Military History in the Defence Studies Department, King's College LondonChristopher CokerChristopher Coker is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political ScienceRobert CassidyColonel Robert Cassidy (US Army) served as a special assistant to the operational commander in Afghanistan in 2010–11. He is now a military professor at the Naval War College. He is the author of War, Will, and Warlords: Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001–2011 (2012)Richard SpencerRichard Spencer is a retired foot soldier and army lawyerMacGregor KnoxMacGregor Knox is Stevenson Professor of International History emeritus at the London School of Economics and Political ScienceJames GoldrickRear Admiral James Goldrick saw extensive sea service with the Royal Australian Navy, Royal Navy and US Navy, and is currently acting in command of the Defence Force Academy in AustraliaMatt InceMatt Ince is the Project Manager for International Studies at RUSI

Doubting the Global War on Terror

Soon after Al Qaeda's terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the Bush Administration described its new grand strategy: the "Global War on Terror". This article examines the 'two-track' process that US neoconservatives and 'echo chamber' media used, to promote the GWOT grand strategy. It re-examines why many experts and institutions expressed doubt about specific claims the Bush Administration made to support the 2003 Iraq War. Historical counterfactuals suggest that the Bush Administration's Global War on Terror could have evolved very differently . . . or not occurred at all.

Ending War

In “The Ethics of America's Afghan War,” Richard W. Miller argues that reflecting on whether and how to end the war in Afghanistan exposes serious deficiencies in just war theory. I agree, though for different reasons than those canvassed by Professor Miller. Miller argues that by focusing on the traditional categories of just cause, proportionality, and necessity (or last resort), just war theory obscures the importance of broader geostrategic considerations that he believes are the most plausible—though ultimately for Miller insufficient—rationale for continuing with the strategy of large-scale counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. I doubt that geostrategic considerations can play the role in moral assessment that Miller believes they do. But the phenomena he is pointing to do illuminate important defects in traditional just war theory.