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Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.  Here is part II. of a three part series by Charles, entitled “CONFLICT OF COMMANDS”.

PREFACE: 

I would like to state quite categorically that I am not in the business of making “moral equivalences” here. I have culled these quotes from a wide variety of sources – from friend and foe alike, moderate and extremist, local and far-flung. The fact that I juxtapose a variety of quotations in which the issue of divided lines of command comes up in no way means that I equate the principled opposition to state brutality of one quotation with the wilder reaches of conspiracist rhetoric in another. Part I has further details and provides my context. Please note too that as an appendix, I have attached two quotes that only indirectly address the issue of conflict of commands – a white supremacist quote, immediately followed by a principled quote about militia movement members “disgust at the genocidal fantasies in white supremacist discourse” – because I believe it is important to be aware just how far the rhetoric of hatred can go, and just how firmly it can be rebutted.        – Charles Cameron

Conflict of Commands II: Quotations

by Charles Cameron

Principle IV, Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nüremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, 1950.

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

*

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other…

Jesus Christ, in the Gospel according to Matthew, 6.24

*

Archbishop Romero to the Salvadoran military, March 24, 1980:

No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God. Now it is time that you recover your consciences and that you first obey your conscience rather than an order to sin.

Carolyn Forche, “Oscar Romero” in Susan Bergman, ed., Martyrs.

*

And we call on every soldier working in the crusader armies and puppet governments to repent to Allah and follow the example of the heroic Mujahid brother Nidal Hassan, to stand up and to kill all the crusaders by all means available to him supporting the religion of Allah and to make the word of Allah most supreme on earth.

Operation by the Mujahid brother Omar Al-Farooq the Nigerian, AQAP statement, 26 December 2009

*

Oath-Keepers’ Declaration of Orders We Will NOT Obey:

Recognizing that we each swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and affirming that we are guardians of the Republic, of the principles in our Declaration of Independence, and of the rights of our people, we affirm and declare the following:

1. We will NOT obey any order to disarm the American people.

*

US Special Forces have conducted multiple raids into Pakistani territory, local daily The Nation reported today in a front-page article that was basically just quoting an earlier Guardian story. 

One previous US raid that occurred in 2008 was already known about. And when it happened, there was serious concern as to whether such actions by the Americans might lead to the breakdown of the Pakistani army. One respected London-based Pakistan academic said if American troops kept crossing into Pakistani territory he could envisage a situation where Pakistani commanders would lose control over soldiers who would want to fight the incursions.

Londonstani, blogging on CNAS’ Abu Muqawama

*

SINCE its meeting on 28th Shvat 5765, the Sanhedrin has deliberated the initiative of the Prime Minister of Israel, the decisions of the government, and legislation enacted by the Knesset regarding the plan known as “The Disengagement,” henceforth referred to in this document as “the uprooting.”

This plan involves the uprooting of Jewish communities in the Gaza strip and northern Samaria, the forced expulsion of Jews from their homes, and the willful transfer of these lands to a foreign power. Following an intensive study which took place regarding the halachic (authentic Jewish law) questions that arise from the government’s decision, the Sanhedrin hereby brings its conclusions and decisions to the public’s attention. [ … ]

7. Any Jew – including a soldier or policeman – who supports the uprooting, whether directly or indirectly, whether by voting in its favor, or by giving council, or by supplying vehicles or materials, and obviously, anyone who actively participates in the uprooting… by so doing, transgresses a large number of Torah commandments.

*

Members of all branches of the United States Military will soon be facing a most critical decision. A report emerged that Obama is using the deployment of additional troops to Afghanistan to cover for the movement of some 200,000 troops, presently on duty in countries other than Iraq and Afghanistan, to USNORTHCOM to prepare for the “expected outbreak of Civil War within the United States before the end of winter.”

LewRockwell.com

*

Rabbis and teachers from Hesder yeshivas, which offer Torah studies alongside military service, released a letter to students in which they reiterated their assertion that soldiers must refuse orders if they are commanded to evacuate settlements, arguing that Torah law is above the Israel Defense Forces. … “Unfortunately, the IDF has been used for purposes unrelated to Israel’s defense and directly opposed to God’s wishes for quite some time,” the rabbis wrote in the letter. “This situation faces IDF soldiers with a contradiction between Jewish commandments and commanders’ orders.”

Chaim Levinson, “Hesder yeshiva rabbis: Torah law is above IDF”, Ha’aretz, Deecember 18, 2009.

*

AL-JAZEERA: How can you agree with what Nidal did as he betrayed his American nation?”

AL-AWLAKI : More important than that is that he did not betray his religion. Working in the American Army to kill Muslim is a betrayal to Islam. American today is Yesterday’s pharaoh; it is an enemy to Islam. A Muslim is not allowed to work in the American Army unless he intends to walk the steps of our Brother Nidal. Loyalty in Islam is to Allah, His messenger and the believers, and not to a handful of soil they call “nation.” The American Muslim’s loyalty is to the Muslim Nation and not to America, and brother Nidal is a proof on that through [executing] his blessed operation, so may Allah reward him with the best of the rewards for that.

Al-Jazeera Interview with Anwar al-Awlaki regarding Maj. Hasan, December 23, 2009

*

You must understand that the desire of the nation isn’t meaningful for someone who believes in the creator.

Rabbi Ariel Bareli, quoted in Christian Science Monitor

(more…)

Previously, I took a look at an academic paper by David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith that engaged in a critical analysis of COIN theory and found fault with its underlying premises. Now, I would like to examine the rebuttal offered by John Nagl and Brian Burton of CNAS.

David Martin Jones* and M.L.R. Smith**. “Whose Hearts and Whose Minds? The Curious Case of Global Counter-Insurgency”. The Journal of Strategic Studies. Vol. 33, No. 1, 81-121, February 2010.

*University of Queensland, Australia. ** King’s College London, UK.

John A. Nagl and Brian M. Burton. “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Modern Wars – A Reply to Jones and Smith.  The Journal of Strategic Studies. Vol. 33, No. 1, 123-138, February 2010.

Center for New American Security (CNAS), Washington, DC, USA.

The rebuttal of Nagl and Burton, at a mere 15 pages including bibliography, was a more persuasive and focused argument than the COIN opus offered by Jones and Smith. Their tone was less academic and more practitioner-oriented, both in terms of policy shapers and soldiers in the field. Strategist Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett, thought the entire debate was “too inside baseball” but nonetheless, that Nagl and Burton had the better of the exchange:

It is a sadly ghettoized argument–very inside baseball. And I am dismayed to see it happening in a sub-field that should be more inclusive than the usual war-discussed-within-the-context-of-war with the added dimension of the fight for political control in developing/failed economies (the whole national liberation bit, references to Maoism, etc.). So we’re still basically treated to two legs of the stool: security with the addition of politics/culture, but the economics remains a no-go-land that elicits the mention of jobs on occasion (the assumption usually being, public-sector financed with aid), but that’s it.

….I thought Nagl’s closing comment in response was fine: difference in degree but not kind. The first article reminded me of nuclear targeting theory, it was so esoterically wrapped around itself.

The intellectual insularity to which Tom complains arguably stems from COIN, an operational doctrine, being required to “pinch-hit” as a long-term strategy due to the abdication of responsibility by the civilian political elite to come to a strategic consensus among themselves on the war that would frame our global conflict with radicalized Islamist terror groups and insurgencies and enunciate the objectives we hope to achieve.

This unwillingness or inability of deeply divided USG civilian leaders to effectively, coherently and consistently articulate the nature of the war itself and our adversaries deprives our senior military leaders of appropriate policy guidance in designing campaigns and carrying out military operations. It is also a partial explanation for the determined resistance of COIN policy advocates like John Nagl and David Kilcullen to address the religious ideology dimension raised by Jones and Smith.

In “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Modern Wars – A Reply to Jones and Smith”, Burton and Nagl firmly showcase “Neo-COIN’s” formidibile strengths as policy but cannot escape its’ enduring weakness. Here most concisely:

“Insurgencies, like other forms of armed conflict are better defined by methodologies than by ideologies. While causes change regularly, the fundamentals of insurgent strategy remain relatively constant”

A powerful throwing down of the theoretical gauntlet. It’s an appealing argument rooted in pragmatism, and to some degree, empiricism, becoming more true as one moves down to the level of small unit counterinsurgency and outward from jihadism’s core leadership toward insurgency’s marginal adherents of convenience, the “$10 a day Taliban” and Kilcullen’s “accidental guerrillas”. While it is the case that occasionally in COIN we have actions of “strategic corporals”, most of the warfighting concerns of NCO’s and junior officers will be tactical and eminently practical a majority of the time.

Earlier, Burton and Nagl expounded at greater length and specificity:

But this argument [by Jones and Smith] overemphasizes the superficial features of conflict. While specific characteristics of individual insurgencies have changed with local conditions and the technology of the day, the fundamental dynamics of insurgency remain largely the same. The essential competition remains between the existing power and the insurgents for influence and ultimately control over populations. The insurgent ’cause’, of which extremist religion can be a component, is generalized and malleable in order to mobilize the broadest possible base of followers.

….the fundamental dynamic of any insurgency is that, as David Kilcullen aptly describes, it needs the people to act in certain ways.[It] needs their sympathy, acquiescence and silence, or simply their reactions to provocation, in order to further [its] strategy

[Emphasis in original.]

There are pros and cons to this theoretical position. It is always a good idea to consider who an intended doctrine is written for; instrumentally, COIN doctrine is foremost for the soldiers who are expected to wage that kind of battle on the behalf of the rest of us. Only secondarily, is COIN doctrine intended as a kind of policy talisman for the government officials, politicians, journalists, academics and bloggers whom it has entranced or repelled. It is important to remember, it critiquing the evolving panoply that is USG COIN policy that the fundamental criterion of measurement is not theoretical niceties but real world results, which have been produced. Not perfection, not instantly, not everything we want plus a pony too, but progress in operational and tactical success. Even some strategic success if stabilization of an Iraqi government holds That weighs heavily on the pro side of the ledger.

The cons are of a different nature.

First, in terms of the Maoist paradigm, classical COIN theory is problematic because it extrapolates only from a very short period of Mao’s career as a guerrilla leader, mostly 1946 -1949 when the political dynamic in China’s civil war was a bilateral conflict between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and Mao ZeDong Communist Party and Red Army. This was a period when Mao, courtesy of the Soviets, had suddenly inherited a great quantity of Japanese arms and could field divisions of semi-regulars to fight conventional battles in addition to insurgent units. Most of China’s long civil war was actually heterogeneously anarchic and Mao’s Communist armies were usually much inferior not only to those of the Kuomintang, but to those armies fielded by many provincial warlords and certainly inferior to the invading Imperial Japanese Army, which Mao strove to avoid fighting whenever possible. Much of Mao’s legend as a military genius is political myth constructed after the fact, and his ultimate success in China owed at least as much to Chiang, Hirohito, Stalin and Truman as it did to Mao’s real but frequently exaggerated political and military talent for insurgency.

Vietnam, another historical touchstone of COIN, acheived the bilateral conflict dynamic described in COIN theory only because initially the Vietcong, on the orders of Hanoi, tacitly supported Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime by eschewing military activities while Diem and Nhu systematically destroyed or weakened other potential military/political rivals to the Communists in South Vietnam. Namely, General Ba’s Hoa-Hao, the Binh Xuyen gangs and the Buddhist political clergy ( the Vietnamese Nationalist Party had previously been decimated by the French in 1930). Russia after WWI, Lebanon in the 1980’s, Somalia, Afghanistan and the Congo in the 1990’s are others examples of societies devolving into anarchic, social darwinian, violence before some became conflicts that are somewhat recognizable in COIN theory.

The heterodox Iraqi insurgency of the “surge”, where Neo-COIN found its proving ground, is really the recent historical rule and not the exception that classical Maoist COIN theory might lead you to believe. The theory in other words, is based upon flawed premises of a bilateral conflict. John Robb’s “open–source insurgency” concept gets closer to the probable reality of future COIN wars.

Secondly, the strong dismissal of religious drivers by Nagl under his “Kilcullen Doctrine” is tailor made for “disaggregating” the accidental guerrillas at the tactical level, but it seriously misleads us in understanding or effectively countering the “professional guerrillas” at the strategic or the moral levels of war. Instead, it blinds us by projecting our own elite culture’s secular assumption of religion as merely a cynical and antiquated facet of politics on to adversaries for whom such thought is both fundamentally alien and entirely blasphemous. Such a position is what ideologists of  jihad  argue that they are taking up arms against in the first place.

Erasing the religious or ideological motivation makes incisive analysis of the adversaries strategic decision-making impossible because it removes the driver for which he left home, comfort, family for the danger and privation of war. How can we walk in our enemies shoes, get inside his head, if we deny what is in his head has any relevance?

This position makes no sense on the strategic level. Ignoring the influence of Islamism is a prescription for errors and missed opportunities. It is a politically comfortable position for COIN theorists because our political elite are deeply enamored of a PC ideology that provides an excuse to punish and destroy the careers of officials who challenge the orthodoxy of multiculturalism with frank discussion of facts. Avoiding the question of Islamism in front of politicians greases the skids for COIN. Have you heard many members of Congress make a robust defense of liberal, democratic, capitalist, open societies as a morally superior alternative to autocratic Islamism lately? No? Well now you understand why the COIN gurus are not doing it either. Powerful people in Washington and the media do not want to hear thart message.

Yet without confronting Islamism and the attraction of its call to a dissatisfied “pious middle class” in the Islamic world, we can hardly hope to bring the war to a satisfactory close, much less victory.

Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.  Here Charles begins a three part series entitled “CONFLICT OF COMMANDS”.

Conflict of Commands I: Intro

by Charles Cameron

What happens when people in the military find themselves torn between the requirements of two chains of command?

I came to this question because two of the topics I have recently addressed here — that of Major Hasan and the Fort Hood shootings, and that of Major Luckert and his monograph on the risk of millennial beliefs driving US foreign policy — have this much in common: that in both cases the issue of obedience to military orders when they are perceived to be in conflict with divine commands came up.

Having stumbled on this correspondence between two otherwise fairly remote incidents, I began to notice similar elements cropping up elsewhere.

Aha, a pattern worth pursuing! I thought.

I have phrased my inquiry in terms of “two chains of command” without specifying that one of them is military and one divine, though that will be the general rule, because there are also instances where the potentially supervening command comes from international law or individual conscience .

I have decided to approach this issue in a three-post series.  This post introduces the issue, the second post consists of a series of quotes that illustrate it, the third post zeroes in on the issue as it affects Muslims in the US armed forces, and contains a link to a significant MEMRI post on the subject, and the full text of a US Department of State document, both of them dating from shortly after 9-11 — and as far as I can tell, not referenced previously in our post-Fort Hood thinking.

My overall purpose in this sequence of three posts is to show that the dilemma of a double chain-of-command is a prominent feature of a variety of different contemporary situations, some of them religious in nature, some revolving around other moral or legal concerns. 

*

The second post in the series deserves some commentary, but I wanted to restrict it to the body of the quotes themselves rather than attempting to comment on individual quotes.

I have culled them from a wide variety of sources — friend and foe alike, moderate and extremist, local and far-flung.  I have included sources from Iran, Israel, El Salvador, Pakistan, Burma, and within the United States from an Aryan Nations “archbishop” (in an appendix, see below) to the sitting President — and in some cases I have included quotes from opposite ends of a given political spectrum.  On the whole, I have tried to avoid any explicit patterning and just skip around from one nation, part of the globe or religion to another, although in the case of three different “takes ” on Maj. Stuckert’s monograph, I  have kept the three together for easier comprehension. I do not claim to have been exhaustive, and make no claims of sympathy or disapproval for the individual views expressed.

Indeed, my hope is that as we move through the different examples, many if not most of my readers will find themselves in sympathy with first one side then the other in terms of the need to obey military orders in general, and the need to disobey them in certain situations. 

I imagine, for instance, that the majority of my readers will in general disapprove of inserting a divine obligation between a soldier and his or her plain duty of obedience to orders from a superior officer — but that in the case of the current Iranian government ordering members of its military to attack crowds of protesters, our sympathies are liable to be on the other side of the equation.  In this way, the diversity of the instances may facilitate a deeper understanding of the nuances of the question.

I would also like to state quite categorically that I am not in the business of making “moral equivalences” here. The fact that I juxtapose a variety of quotations in which the issue of divided lines of command comes up in no way means that I equate the principled opposition to state brutality of one quotation with the wilder reaches of conspiracist rhetoric in another.

The final quote in the body of the second post is of particular interest, since it alludes to the theory of Preference Falsification — the only theoretical model for making predictive analysis of this type of conflict that I have seen.

Please note that as an appendix, I have attached two quotes that only indirectly address the issue of conflict of commands — a white nationalist quote, immediately followed by a principled quote about militia movement members “disgust at the genocidal fantasies in white supremacist discourse” — because I believe it is important to be aware just how far the rhetoric of hatred can go, and just how firmly it can be rebutted. 

*

The double trouble of Sgt. Hasan Akbar and his influence on Major Nidal Hasan is worth exploring in a little more depth, because Sgt Akbar, who tossed grenades into a tent in Kuwait killing two officers, seems to have been something of a research project for Major Hasan, who apparently asked about Sgt Akbar in an intercepted email to Sheikh al-Awlaki in Yemen:

One e-mail in particular is getting attention from investigators now.

In that e-mail – which the Washington FBI office didn’t see – Hasan mentioned the case of Sgt. Hasan Akbar. He is the Muslim soldier who threw grenades at fellow troops in Kuwait at the beginning of the Iraq war. The attack killed two soldiers and wounded 14 others.

In the e-mail to the imam, Hasan asked whether Akbar would have been considered a shaheed – or hero – for his actions. Given what happened later at Fort Hood, investigators say this e-mail now appears suggestive. But at the time it was not conclusive. Investigators in San Diego weren’t alarmed by the query because it appeared to be consistent with research Hasan was doing at Walter Reed. The Akbar case was thought to be at the center of his research.

For an Army psychiatrist counseling soldiers returning from, or about to enter, combat in Iraq and Afghanistan — and perhaps with a heavier than average caseload of Muslims, with whom he would share a common language — researching jurisprudential aspects of the Sgt Akbar case would be natural.

As Juan Zarate, Bush’s deputy National Security Advisor quoted in the article cited above pointed out:

It is very difficult in the moment I think for analysts and agents and his cohorts and coworkers to piece this together and see they had a ticking time bomb on their hands.

In fact, as we’ll see in the third post in this series, Major Hasan needn’t have troubled the Sheikh in Yemen for an opinion.  The State Department had posted a note on this very topic in October 2001.

But he did contact the Sheikh, and the Sheikh presumably eulogized Akbar’s action, as he was later to eulogize that of Maj. Hasan.

And as I suggested recently in a comment on David Ronfeldt’s fine blog, we can see with the 20/20 hindsight that Juan Zarate also mentioned, that whatever was true regarding the double chain of command that Sgt Akbar was under, which Maj. Hasan was on the face of it legitimately studying, might also hold true for Maj. Hasan himself — for whom the issue was both a research topic and a personal dilemma.

So the FBI gives a pass to the research topic — and the personal dilemma gives rise to the tragic shootings at Ft. Hood.

*

One final point:

The problem of conflict of commands has its origin in religion, so it makes sense to take quick note of the theological basics.

The shema or daily faith statement of the Jewish people states “the Lord our God, the Lord is one”, while the first Commandment in the Jewish scripture, the Torah, declares “You shall have no other gods before Me”.  The central tenet of Islam, similarly, is tawhid, the unicity of God as expressed in the first part of the profession of faith or shahada, “There is no God but God” — while to treat any person or other part of creation with the respect due to that God is shirk, the unforgivable sin.

From a secular perspective, these may seem high-flown philosophical and devotional matters, but for the believer they may also have “real-world” consequences, in a way that is prefigured in Christ’s observation, recorded in Matthew 6.24, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other…”

But here we are entering the terrain of Part II of this essay: the collection of quotes.

The Insurgent Archipelago by John Mackinlay

At the strong recommendation of Colonel Gian Gentile, I ordered The Insurgent Archipelago: From Mao to Bin Laden by Dr. John Mackinlay of King’s College, London and a hardcover copy just arrived this afternoon. Judging from the table of contents and the sources in Mackinlay’s endnotes, The Insurgent Archipelago will present a tightly written argument on the nature of COIN. For a well regarded  and informative review, see David Betz of Kings of War blog, brief excerpt below:

Review: The Insurgent Archipelago

….The book is sweeping, as the subtitle ‘From Mao to Bin Laden’ suggests; yet it is also admirably succinct at 292 pages including notes and index.[2] In design it is exceedingly clear, consisting of three parts-‘Maoism’, ‘Post-Maoism’, and ‘Responding to Post-Maoism’, which reflect the basic components of his argument. Insurgency’s classical form is the brainchild of the carnivorously ambitious strategic and political genius Mao Zedong who gave meaning to the now familiar bumper sticker that insurgency is ’80 per cent political and 20 per cent military’. Mao’s innovation was to figure out what to fill that 80 per cent with: industrial scale political subversion by which he was able to harness the latent power of an aggrieved population to the wagon of political change, to whit the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War which ended with the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949

….The problem is that what we now face in the form of ‘global insurgency’ is not Maoism but Post-Maoism-a form of insurgency which differs significantly from that which preceded it.[6] We have, in essence, been searching for the right tool to defeat today’s most virulent insurgency in the wrong conceptual tool box. This is perhaps the most uncomfortable truth to be laid out in this book; another worrying one is that the security interests of Western Europe differ markedly from those of the United States-because the threat in the former emerges from their own undigested Muslim minorities which are alienated further by their involvement in expeditionary campaigns which, arguably at least, serve the needs of the latter well enough

Oddly, this will be the second book by a former British Gurkha officer that I’ve read in the last six months; the first being The Call of Nepal: My Life In the Himalayan Homeland of Britain’s Gurkha Soldiers by Colonel J.P. Cross, which I played a minor role in getting reissued here by Nimble Books, along with Lexington Green. After just thumbing through a few pages, Dr. Mackinlay already strikes me as a far less mystically inclined military author than does the esteemed but eccentric Colonel Cross.

I am way behind in my book reviews. Fortunately, Charles Cameron is stepping up with a new series of posts this week, which will give me some time to write reviews at least for Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld and Senator’s Son: An Iraq War Novel and then read Mackinlay. Ah, this designated guest blogger business is proving to be most convenient! 🙂

Read a very interesting theoretical paper critiquing the merits of “Neo-Classical COIN” contrasted with the concept of “Global Insurgency” by Dr. David Martin Jones and Dr. M.L.R. Smith in The Journal of Strategic Studies, which drew a sharp rebuttal from Dr.John Nagl, the president of CNAS, and Brian M. Burton in defense of a universally applicable COIN paradigm (big hat tip to Steve Pampinella). 

The papers deserve much wider circulation and I encourage you to find yourself a copy. Unfortunately, they are behind an irritating subscription wall, so we have to do this in 20th century, stone-age, fashion….

David Martin Jones* and M.L.R. Smith**. “Whose Hearts and Whose Minds? The Curious Case of Global Counter-Insurgency”. The Journal of Strategic Studies. Vol. 33, No. 1, 81-121, February 2010.

*University of Queensland, Australia. ** King’s College London, UK.

John A. Nagl and Brian M. Burton. “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Modern Wars – A Reply to Jones and Smith.  The Journal of Strategic Studies. Vol. 33, No. 1, 123-138, February 2010.

Center for New American Security (CNAS), Washington, DC, USA.

Jones and Smith are dissecting “the extraordinary renaissance of counter-insurgency thinking within the U.S. military establishment” which they argue has “produced two distinctive schools of thought about counter-insurgency”; the “neo-classical” which constructs a framework for waging COIN from the historical understanding of Maoist guerrilla warfare, and “global counterinsurgency” which is “post-maoist”, conceptual and networked rather than territorial and hierarchical and centered in the ideological turmoil or radical salafist-jihadi Islamism. Together, the two schools comprise “neo-COIN” which yields an “incoherent” and “confused and contradictory understanding” of insurgency which is rooted in a hostility and miscomprehension of Clausewitzian thought.

The breezy summary above was, by the way, a gross simplification of a forty page, heavily footnoted, academic argument, which really needs to be read in its entirety.

Jones and Smith go into considerable depth investigating the intellectual orgins of “neo-COIN” and the leading personalities who shaped the doctrine, including Nagl, Sewall, McFate, Kilcullen, Hoffman and commanding generals like Petraeus and Chiarelli.

Of the two schools, the authors find greater flaws on the neo-classical approach to COIN:

….Ultimately though, excessive deference to Maoist theories of guerrilla warfare led neo-classicism into a strategic, Iraq-centric, cul-de-sac….

….Such crude reductionism, ultimately leads to a cdrude Maoist/Counter-Maoist paradigm that assumes holding on to physical territory, no matter the cost, is the ultimate goal of any combatant. This neo-classical reductionism not only implies that any withdrawal of forces from an occupied territory represents a defeat, it also risks inducing the kind of certainties that influenced the French approach to COIN during the Algerian War with manifestly disastrous consequences

But the global insurgency school, while more accurately conceptualizing the transnational nature of the enemy in the view of Smith and Jones, is not without problems either:

However, when it comews to identifying the drivers of jihadism, global COIN theorists are surprisingly coy. Significantly, global neo-COIN writing goes to great lengths to dismiss the religious and ideological motivation for Islamist activism. Instead, it focuses upon organizational characteristics, social networks, psychological profiling, and patterns of recruitment to understand the new global threat….Like the notion of a War on Terrorism, global counter-insurgency denotes an amorphous threat, conceals hidden assumptions and obfuscates the object of the war, namely militant, ideologized Islam or Islamism.

This “negation of ideological motivation” identified by Jones and Smith in global counter-insurgency, is blamed on two sources. First, Dr. David Kilcullen, the deeply influential Australian Army officer and anthropologist who has been the COIN adviser to the Departments of State and Defense and CENTCOM, who argues for the primacy of “sociological characteristics” as drivers to jihadism; secondly, on a fear of the implications of Clausewitzian theory that causes neo-COIN advocates to purposefully “misunderstand” On War:

From a political perspective, however such neo-COIN misunderstanding is not so strange at all. McFate evidently recognizes Clausewitz’s central premise that  ‘War is a continuation of political intercourse, carried on by other means’. It is this recognition though, that unsettles COIN theorists. The reluctance to attribute religious motives to jihadist action, the emphasis on post-Maoism and the dismissal of Clausewitz, all evince a profound neo-COIN discomfort with the political dimension of war. It is the politics of modern jihadi resistance that contemporary counter-insurgency theorists wish to avoid: for politics denotes complexity, particularity, ambiguity, controversy and the need to challenge or defend specific value systems.

COMMENTARY:

Smith and Jones have identified some real weaknesses in COIN theory, a useful service. However, either they commit the same error in diagnosing the inability of COIN theorists to wrestle frankly with Islamism as they accuse Kilcullen, Nagl, McFate etc. of having made and do so for the same reason, or they evince a childish understanding of politics. I lean toward the former.

The ignorance of irhabi-salafist radical religious ideas and internal debates is a very serious analytical problem for the United States. Few scholars or analysts can boast of simultaneously having fluency in critical langues, a deep understanding of Islamist theology and expertise/experience in terrorism/counter-terrorism studies. And really, to make astute judgments, you need to have a grasp on all three. Avoiding the religious ideology dimension is a serious error on the part of COIN thinkers and Smith and Jones are right to call them out on it.  It would be very helpful, if COIN theorists in crafting doctrine, would avail themselves of the deep understanding of Islamism offered by a Gilles Kepel or an Olivier Roy.

That said, the religious ferment of Islamism applies more to the “professional” and not the “accidental” guerrilla. To the recruiter, ideologists, operational planner and other senior leaders of al Qaida and the Taliban and far less to the rootless cannon fodder, idle adventurers, middle-class losers, itinerant tribals and other flotsam and jetsam who compose the foot soldiers of modern jihad. Applying social network analysis or organizational theory adds a useful perspective to understanding to the mass-movement characteristics of violent Islamist groups.

That is not why Kilcullen or Nagl de-emphasize religious motivations though. It is not that COIN gurus at CNAS do not understand or are uncomfortable with political dimensions or are mystified about Islam and Islamism. That’s an absurd assessment. To the contrary, they understand politics exceptionally well. COIN advocates downplay the religious motivations of Islamist terrorists and insurgents because emphasizing them will cost COIN strategy the political support of many liberal-left Democrats in Congress whose PC ideology cannot tolerate such arguments to be heard, the facts be damned. To make such an analysis, before a group that is not overly supportive of the war to begin with, is to be tagged an “Islamophobe” or a “racist” (even though the latter insult makes no sense whatsoever).

For the same reason, academia having its own PC fetishes to an even greater degree than politicians, Smith and Jones do not specifically identify the domestic political incentives COIN advocates have for ignoring religious ideology.