Interview with Dr. David Kilcullen
Octavian Manea
What would success and victory look like in a counterinsurgency (COIN) operation? What specific role should the Western expeditionary forces should have in this fight?
What would victory look like? It doesn’t look like victory in a conventional military campaign. Insurgency is much like a disease. It has very negative symptoms that affect the whole of society. Victory in COIN is a lot less like military victory and a lot more like recovering from a disease. If you think about the last time you were sick, you may not able to get out of bed, you had to take medicine, you couldn’t do the things you wanted to do, but gradually you got stronger and you were able to do more. You might have continued to take antibiotics for a few weeks until you were completely better, but basically, sooner or later, you forgot that you were sick.
When we see societies that have recovered from an insurgency, we typically don’t see a single big military victory. What we see is a slow gradual improvement to the point where a society comes back to full functioning. Now in the case of Afghanistan the problem is that the country hasn’t functioned properly for at least one generation. Afghanistan in particular is not a counterinsurgency in a classical sense. It is actually a stability operation. We really care about the Taliban because they make the country unstable. But there are other things that make the country unstable as well, including the Afghan government, the destabilization by Pakistan, the corruption and criminal activity, the drugs. There are a lot of things that must be dealt with. If we were to defeat the insurgents, in a military sense tomorrow, and not fix all those others problems, a new Taliban would arise next year. We must think more broadly than counterinsurgency in the context of Afghanistan.
What is the role of foreign forces? I think that the role of foreign forces is to create an environment that is conducive to stability and societal recovery. If you think that victory is when the society recovers, then what we have to do is to create an environment that fosters this recovery. But there are limits to what we can do: we can set the conditions for the Afghans to come together or Iraqis to come together and solve their problems. But the long history of counterinsurgency emphasizes that foreigners can’t fix all these issues. It has to be the locals.
One of the key quotes in your book Counterinsurgency is that of Bernard Fall’s: A counterinsurgent that is losing is not outfought, but out-governed. Is the ability of providing governmental services the right metric to assess winning in a COIN campaign? How do you win a governance contest?
Governance is extremely important in pretty much every counterinsurgency. But how it needs to be addressed is different from campaign to campaign. In the case of Afghanistan, for example, ISAF still has in its campaign plan the statement that the aim is to extend the reach of the Afghan government. But the problem with the Afghan government is not that is doesn’t have the reach but that it is corrupt and oppressive. In fact the better you do at the strategy of extending the reach of an oppressive government, the worse the situation can get. What I have been arguing for years is that we need to change the focus of governance in Afghanistan; away from extending the reach of the Afghan government towards reforming it. What we need is a process of governmental reform, noting that we were responsible for a lot of the problems that are on the ground. We have to deal with this problem. If you are going to succeed in the COIN governance contest, you have to deliver to the people legitimate, responsive, just and effective government. It is not enough to be effective but not just. You got to be just. Justice, or fairness, is probably right now the most important aspect for the Afghan population. People are not happy with the Taliban, but they do see them as more fair and just than the Afghan government. And that is a very significant problem for us.
How would you assess the Marjah operation? There are a many critics who say the failure of “in box government” is a symptom of a larger failure-of the whole Obama surge and strategy.
It is too early to say if the surge is a failure or not. But Marjah in itself as an operation is a lesson in how important just and effective governance is and how important is that the government has to be locally legitimate. It is not enough to have somebody in place we think as legitimate, it has to be someone the local people respect and believe will look after their interests. A lot of people start their assessment of Marjah from a period of two years ago when it was a stronghold of the Taliban. But they are actually forgetting chapter one of the story - that Marjah was held by the government until 2008. The government was so oppressive, so abusive to the population that the town elders got together, banished the government officials from their own village and then invited the Taliban in. So the root of the problems in Marjah is not the Taliban. They are the symptom, they came later. The root of the problem is bad, oppressive government behavior by the Afghan government officials. When we went in Marjah and drove the Taliban away, that wasn’t the end of the operation, that was the beginning and what the population was looking to see was – are we going back to the same oppressive governance from the Afghan government that we had before the Taliban or are we going to have a better solution? I don’t think that we have offered them a better solution. The military side of the operation has gone actually very well. But it is a symptom of the broader issue - that military operations in counterinsurgency are actually not central. Governance, legitimacy, effectiveness are central and if you don’t have that piece then it doesn’t matter how good you are on the military side. We are back at the Bernard Fall - “a government that is losing is not outfought, is out-governed”. I would argue that we are not losing in Afghanistan, but we are certainly being out-governed right now. We need to change that or we will lose.
How powerful should the counterinsurgent be in order to compel the insurgent to negotiate?
A counterinsurgent needs to convince the insurgent they are better off negotiating than continuing the fight. So it is about convincing the adversary that the insurgency will not attain strategic objectives. You can’t get there using insurgency alone. Sometimes you can do that through a combination of negotiation and targeted violence against the insurgency. Usually we don’t get there just through violence. It is usually a combination. In my experience insurgents keep fighting for decades until they believe they have a better option than fighting. A solely coercive approach can drive the insurgency to a point where it’s reduced but that doesn’t fix the problem. You have to deal with the underlying causes - the political grievances. The role of the military is to create conditions under which negotiations become possible. But negotiation in itself is the key activity.
What is the decisive terrain for an insurgent?
The decisive terrain for an insurgent is the population. I am thinking of an insurgency like being like an iceberg - only the top 10% of an iceberg is above waterline, only about 10% of an insurgency are the fighters, the command group and the planners. The actual base of the insurgency (the other 90% of the iceberg that is underwater) is the population group. The ability to manipulate and mobilize and organize that group is the fundamental thing in an insurgency. Fighting the insurgent guerillas without dealing with the population base is like shaving the top of an iceberg-it is not going away.
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