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Dr. John Nagl, president of CNAS, lead author of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, retired lieutenant colonel and top COIN expert, has penned an important review of Accidental Guerrilla by Col. David Kilcullen, in the prestigious British journal RUSI. Unfortunately, at present no link is is available, but my co-author Lexington Green is a subscriber and sent me a copy of the review, which I read last night. I now look forward to reading Kilcullen firsthand and have put Accidental Guerrilla near the top of my summer reading List.

I state that Nagl’s review is important because beyond the descriptive element that is inherent in a review, there is a substantive aspect that amounts to an effective act of policy advocacy. First, an example of Nagl’s descriptions of Kilcullen’s arguments:

We do not face a monolithic horde of jihadis moti vated by a rabid desire to destroy us and our way of life (there are some of these, although Kilcullen prefers to call them takfiris); instead, many of those who fight us do so for conventional reasons like nationalism and honour. Kilcullen illustrates the point with the tale of a special forces A-Team that had the fight of its life one May afternoon in 2006. One American was killed and seven more wounded in a fight that drew local fighters from villages five kilometres away who marched to the sound of the guns – not for any ideological reason, but simply because they wanted to be a part of the excitement. ‘It would have shamed them to stand by and wait it out’, Kilcullen reports

Tribal and even “civilized” rural people, often find ways of making social status distinctions that relate to behaviour and character rather than or in addition to the mere accumulation of material possessions (Col. Pat Lang has a great paper on this subject, “How to Work with Tribesmen“). We can shorthand them as “honor” cultures and they provide a different set of motivations and reactions than, say, those possessed by a CPA in San Francisco or an attorney in Washington, DC. People with “honor” are more obviously “territorial” and quick to defend against perceived slights or intrusions by unwelcome outsiders. This is a mentality that is alien to most modern, urbanized, 21st century westerners but it was not unfamiliar all that long ago, even in 19th and early 20th century, Americans had these traits. Shelby Foote, the Civil War historian, quotes a captured Southern rebel, who responded to a Union officer who asked him, why, if he had no slaves, was he was fighting? “Because you are down here” was the answer.

While relatively short and designed, naturally, to help promote a book by a friend and CNAS colleague, Dr. Nagl has also taken a significant step toward influencing policy by distilling and reframing Dr. Klicullen’s lengthy and detailed observations into a reified and crystallized COIN “doctrine”. A digestible set of memes sized exactly right for the journalistic and governmental elite whose eyes glaze over at the mention of military jargon and who approach national security from a distinctly civilian and political perspective:

There is much first-hand reporting in this book, based on Kilcullen’s [Robert] Kaplan-esque habit of visiti ng places where people want to kill him. After chapters detailing his personal experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, he returns to his doctoral fieldwork in Indonesia, discusses the insurgencies in Thailand and Pakistan and evaluates the complicated plight of radical Islam in Europe. While all of these confl icts are related to each other, they are not the same, and cannot be won based on a simplistic conception like the global War on Terror; instead, the enemy in each small war must be disaggregated from the whole, strategy in each based on local conditions, motivations, and desires. One size does not fit all, and there are many grey areas. A ‘with us or against us’ approach is likely to result in far more people than otherwise being ‘against us’ in these conflicts.

John Boyd would have agreed that isolating our enemies and winning over groups as allies is much preferred to needlessly multiplying our enemies. That paragraph is more or less boilerplate in the COIN community but this RUSI review is aimed not at them but at political decision makers, national security bureaucrats, diplomats and elite media and constituted a necessary set up by Nagl for “The Kilcullen Doctrine” [bullet points are my addition to Nagl’s text, for purposes of emphasis]:

….In direct oppositi on to the ideas that drove American interventi on policy two decades ago, Kilcullen suggests ‘the anti -Powell doctrine’ for counter-insurgency campaigns.

• First, planners should select the lightest, most indirect and least intrusive form of intervention that will achieve the necessary effect.

• Second, policy-makers should work by, with, and through partnerships with local government administrators, civil society leaders, and local security forces whenever possible.

• Third, whenever possible, civilian agencies are preferable to military intervention forces, local nati onals to international forces, and long-term, low-profile engagement to short-term, high-profile intervention.

New doctrines emerge because ideas are articulated at the moment in time when they both fit the circumstances and the intended audience is ready to accept their implications. George Kennan, the father of Containment in 1946-1947 had attempted to give the State Department and the Roosevelt administration essentially the same advice about Soviet Russia in the 1930’s and the reaction of the White House was to order the State Department’s Soviet document collection destroyed and exile critics of Stalin like Kennan from handling Eastern European affairs ( Kennan saved the collection by storing it in his attic). Neither Stalin’s nature nor Kennan’s opinion of the USSR changed much in the next decade, but the willingness of American liberal elites to consider them did, making Containment doctrine a reality.

The post-Cold War, Globalization era elite is in the ready state of mind for a “Kilcullen Doctrine”. They are ready to hear it because systemic uncertainties have made them justifiably skeptical of old prescriptions and they are seeking new perspectives the way the Truman White House invited Kennan’s Long Telegram. This situation is both good and bad in about equal measure.

The good comes from the fact that the Kilcullen Doctrine is operationally sound, at least for specifically handling issues of complex insurgencies. It is also politically astute, in that it encourages statesmen and military leaders to first tinker with minimal measures while listening acutely for feedback instead of charging in like a bull in a china shop, to empower locals rather than engaging in the military keynesianism equivalent of enabling welfare dependency, as the U.S. did in South Vietnam and initially in Iraq. Kilcullen is also a reluctant interventionist, a healthy sentiment, albeit one unlikely to survive in doctrinal form.

The bad is multifaceted. None of these are dealbreakers but all should be “handled” by the COIN advocates of a “Kilcullen Doctrine”:

First, Kilcullen’s three principles are an operational and not a genuinely strategic doctrine. In fairness, no major COIN advocate has ever said otherwise and have often emphasized the point. The problem is that a lot of their intended audience – key civilian decision makers and opinion shapers in their 30’s-50’s often do not understand the difference, except for a minority who have learned from bitter experience. Most of those who have, the Kissingers, Brzezinskis, Shultzes etc. are elder statesmen on the far periphery of policy.

Secondly, this operational doctrine requires a sound national strategy and grand strategy if it is to add real value and not merely be a national security fire extinguisher. Kilcullen may say intervention is unwise but that is really of no help. Absent a grand strategy with broad political acceptance, policy makers, even professed isolationists, will find situational (i.e. domestic political reasons) excuses for intervention on an ad hoc basis. That George W. Bush entered office as a sincere opponent of “nation-building” and proponent of national “humility” should be enough to give anyone pause about a president “winging it” by reacting to events without a grand strategy to frame options and provide coherence from one administration to the next.

Thomas P.M. Barnett, a friend of this blog, has been articulating a visionary grand strategy since 2004 in a series of books, the latest of which is Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, where he essentially models for the readers how a grand strategy is constructed from historical trajectories and economic currents to make the case. Barnett’s themes have a great consilience with most of what COIN advocates would like to see happen, but Dr. Barnett’s public example of intellectual proselytizing and briefing to normal people outside of the beltway is even more important. Operational doctrine is not enough. It is untethered. It will float like a balloon in a political wind. It is crisis management without a destination or sufficient justification for expenditure of blood and treasure. If these blanks are not filled in, they will be filled in by others.

COIN advocates will have to bite the bullet of working on national strategy and grand strategy, building political coalitions, speaking to the public and wading into geoeconomics and the deep political waters of the long view. For a some time, they have had the excuse that as uniformed officers, such questions were above their pay grade – and this was the scrupulously, constitutionally, correct position, so long as that was the case.

That era is swiftly passing and most of these brilliant military intellectuals now have (ret.) in their titles and wear business suits rather than fatigues. COIN is not an end in itself. The horizon is much wider now and we should all be ready to pitch in and help.

ALSO POSTING ON THIS TOPIC:

SWJ Blog –  Weekend Reading and Listening Assignment

Thomas P.M. Barnett – Safranski on Nagl on Kilcullen

The Strategist – Sunday reflection: on “The Accidental Guerrilla”

MountainRunner –Recommended Reading: Kilcullen Doctrine

Abu Muqawama – Dogs and cats, living together. Mass hysteria!

HG’s World – A Brief on the Accidental Guerrilla by Zenpundit

Information Dissemination – New Doctrines Without Strategic Foundations

Galrahn is right, I have not quite fleshed things out in my post and could use the help. He’s also clarified that the discussion needs to shift to the “why”, the objectives, with which I was not particularly clear by the use of “strategy” which means different things to different people, even those versed in military affairs.

Drew Conway of Zero Intelligence Agents asks a great question of all social science and humanities folk in the readership: 

Nye and Drezner on Quantitative Scholarship

As a student in a department that covets rational choice and high-tech quantitative methods, I can assure you none of my training was dedicated to learning the classics of political science philosophy. On the other hand, what is stressed here-and in many other “quant departments”-is the importance of research design. This training requires a deep appreciation of qualitative work. If we are producing relevant work, we must ask ourselves: “How does this model/analysis apply to reality? What is the story I am telling with this model/analysis?”

Whether you are a producer, consumer or tourist of political science research you probably have an opinion on this debate, and I’d like to hear it.

Drew asks an important question. “Research Design” is inherently an act of qualitative and normative judgments. If the researcher is lacking a consciously constructed and identifiable intellectual framework or lens, they will still have one by default, except it is likely to be composed of contradictory hodgepodge of unconsciously acquired biases, hiding under a presumption of objectivity. That’s not an optimum perspective from which to select objects to measure and yardsticks with which to measure them.

The comment I left at Drew’s site was:

Quantitative analysis is sharpening the focus of the telescope or microscope. Qualitative analysis is knowing what’s worth looking at.

Being trained as a historian, I’m a qual dude but quant tools can tell me when I’m on target or by how much I may be off. Or if I am full of crap. On the other hand, quant scholars can be like drunks looking for their car keys under a streetlamp because that is where the light is. Quants need data and not every significant variable is the one that is easiest to isolate and measure. Or measure beyond mere correlation. Or at all.

Quant-Qual can never be either/or any more than we should try walking on one leg.

We need more consilience and less compartmentalization in intellectual life.

My esteemed colleague, Michael Tanji, goes knuckles over Think Tank 2.0.

Tanji has my 100 % endorsement.

Steve Hynd at Newshoggers made the intriguing suggestion of an independent Pushtun state as a solution to the strategic problems of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. The Pushtuns, like the Kurds are one of the world’s largest ethnic groups without a state:

The Punjabi and Sindh populations have always regarded the Pashtun as mountain wild men, bandits and reivers. The Pashtun have always regarded their neighbours as prey for their raids. It’s been that way since before the British arrived and shows no sign of abating anytime soon. The Pashtun were only forced at gunpoint into accepting the splitting of their traditional tribal ranges by the Durand Line in 1893. The situation is entirely analogous to the old border reiver clans of the English/Scottish border – another bunch of inter-related hill country wildmen who raided their neighbours irrespective of nationality for over 300 years before finally calming down and accepting imposed nationality. That territorial stramash was only solved by exiling the worst offenders to the American colonies.

….More, with the Pashtun in their own homeland free from outside overlords their reason for supporting the Taliban politically would disappear and the incompatibility between the Taliban’s extreme form of Islam and the Pashtun’s own traditional religious forms would put the two at odds more often than not.

Rather than insisting on fighting the Pashtun, the amswer in Af/Pak may lie in giving them back the independence they once had.

Read the rest here. 

Sort of like Ralph Peters famous re-drawing of the Mideast map a few years ago, Steve’s suggestion is provocative.The Kurds took decades to get beyond the Talabani-Barzani rivalry and seize the de facto independence that the U.S. invasion of Iraq made possible and “frontier agents”, whether British or from the ISI , have always succeeded in playing off one Pushtun group against another with only the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 creating even semi-unity among Pushtuns – and then temporarily. This is the stuff of Pakistani nightmares but a latent sense of Pushtun nationalism lurks in the shadows, with Afghanistan being thought of as a “Greater Pushtunistan”.

The post title is tongue in cheek. Herman Kahn was anything but wrathful and came across in his day as a remarkably cheerful strategist of the apocalypse and deep futurist. Long time readers have noted my admiration for Kahn’s metacognitive strategies but for those unfamiliar with Herman Kahn, he was one of those polymathic, individuals of the WWII generation who, like Freeman Dyson and Richard Feynman, could jump into high level nuclear physics research without bothering to first acquire a PhD in the field (Feynman later received a doctorate, Dyson and Kahn never did). Kahn was noted for his forthright willingness to consider humanity’s long term prospects despite the worst calamities imaginable – unlike most optimists, he assumed the events most terrible could happen – but life nevertheless would go on. A position that caused many of his critics to go ape, including the editors of Scientific American.

I bring this up because his daughter, Deborah Kahn Cunningham, emailed to say that Kahn’s classic On Thermonuclear War  had been reissued by Transaction Publishing and there would soon be a new edition of On Escalation the latter of which will have a new foreword by the eminent nuclear strategist Thomas Schelling.

This could not come at a better time. The Obama administration is making grandiose gestures with America’s nuclear deterrent based less on a hardheaded and comprehensive strategic analysis than self-serving political showmanship, tailored to mollify a Left-wing base deeply resentful of the COIN strategy the administration is starting to take in Afghanistan. Nuclear weapons affect the strategic calculus across the entire spectrum of potential decisions, they’re not just shiny, anachronistic, bargaining chips but the overwhelming reason that great power war came to an end in 1945. Period.

Human nature has not made much moral progress since the end of the Third Reich but its very worst instinct for total destruction has, so far, been held at bay by the certainty of self-destruction.

We need someone to remind us again of how to think about the unthinkable.