Jones David Martin - The political impossibility of modern counterinsurgency: strategic problems, puzzles, and paradoxes

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The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency

Columbia Studies in Terrorism and Irregular Warfare

Columbia Studies in Terrorism and Irregular Warfare

BRUCE HOFFMAN, SERIES EDITOR

This series seeks to fill a conspicuous gap in the burgeoning literature on terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and insurgency. The series adheres to the highest standards of scholarship and discourse and publishes books that elucidate the strategy, operations, means, motivations, and effects posed by terrorist, guerrilla, and insurgent organizations and movements. It thereby provides a solid and increasingly expanding foundation of knowledge on these subjects for students, established scholars, and informed reading audiences alike.

Ami Pedahzur, The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle Against Terrorism

Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger, Jewish Terrorism in Israel

Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West

Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Resistance

William C. Banks, New Battlefields/Old Laws: Critical Debates on Asymmetric Warfare

Blake W. Mobley, Terrorism and Counterintelligence: How Terrorist Groups Elude Detection

Michael W. S. Ryan, The Deep Battle: Decoding Al-Qaedas Strategy: The Deep Battle Against America

David H. Ucko and Robert Egnell, Counterinsurgency in Crisis: Britain and the Challenges of Modern Warfare

Bruce Hoffman and Fernando Reinares, editors, The Evolution of the Global Terrorist Threat: From 9/11 to Osama bin Ladens Death

Boaz Ganor, Global Warning: The Rationality of Modern Islamist Terorism and the Challenge to the Liberal Democratic World

The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency

Strategic Problems, Puzzles, and Paradoxes

M.L.R. SMITH
and DAVID MARTIN JONES

Columbia

University

Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright 2015 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53912-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, M.L.R. (Michael Lawrence Rowan), 1963

The political impossibility of modern counterinsurgency : strategic problems, puzzles, and paradoxes / M. L. R. Smith and David Martin Jones.

pages cm. (Columbia studies in terrorism and irregular warfare)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-17000-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-53912-8 (e-book)

1. CounterinsurgencyHistory21st century. 2. TerrorismHistory21st century.

I. Jones, David Martin, 1950 II. Title.

U241.S64 2015

355.02'18dc23

2014025193

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .

COVER DESIGN: Fifth Letter

COVER ART: The Noun Project, Creative Commons

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Contents

I n many ways, this book represents the culmination of work on the relationship between strategy and violent nonstate actors stretching back the best part of three decades. The content of the chapters that have come to compose this volume has passed through many iterations, both verbal and written, over many years, beginning with doctoral research in the mid-1980s and extending to the teaching of courses on strategy and counterinsurgency, first at the National University of Singapore in the early 1990s, then at the Royal Naval College in the mid-1990s, and finally at Kings College London from the early 2000s. David Martin Jones and I thank the editors and reviewers of the following journals and periodicals for being receptive to our work throughout these years: International Affairs, Review of International Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, The World Today, and World Defence Systems. We are very grateful for their support. Likewise, we extend grateful appreciation to our friends and colleagues Celeste Ward Gventer and John Stone. Celeste provided acute insights into the U.S. policymaking world that would come to elevate counterinsurgency to a position of explicit importance in military and defense circles. From her skeptical and questioning approach, based on hard experience of the most troubled times during the Coalition occupation of Iraq, we learned much. John is a fine strategic theorist, and he undoubtedly helped refine many points of our thinking, thus enhancing the quality of the analysis in the following pages. We are very appreciative of all the excellent work that Anne Routon, Whitney Johnson, and the staff of Columbia University Press have put into commissioning the volume and bringing the manuscript to publication. We are particularly grateful to the anonymous readers who reviewed both the initial proposal and final manuscript for their many helpful insights and recommendations. Finally, we owe much thanks to Bruce Hoffman, the editor of the series in which this study appears, for his always pluralistic, open-handed approach to academic inquiry and his constant encouragement in supporting the publication of this volume.

MLRS

London

I still thought we had a good chance of turning things round merely by adjusting our counter-insurgency tactics, reflecting lessons learned in Malaya, Algeria, Vietnam or Northern Ireland, Sherard Cowper-Coles, the former British ambassador to Afghanistan, lamented. Although he started from the premise that counterinsurgency was a logical, historically proven set of understandings that confronted violent challenges to established authority and stabilized volatile regions, his experiences led him to recognize the constituting ambiguities in the notion of COIN, which once seemed to represent a magic panacea for the conduct of complex interventions in faraway places.

The Rise of COIN

The rise of modern counterinsurgency thinking begins with the events of September 11, 2001 (9/11), when members of the al-Qaeda jihadist network hijacked four airliners. The loss of nearly three thousand lives when two of the planes commandeered as weapons flew into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, while the third struck the Pentagon in Alexandria, Virginia, and the fourth crashed into a Pennsylvania field, defined the political contours of Western foreign policy for the succeeding decade. It was the events of the 9/11 era that saw counterinsurgency evolve as the seemingly logical response to this asymmetric threat.

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