Winning a war is not the same as winning a country

In his article on counter-insurgency in May’s edition of Parliamentary Brief David Lonsdale argued that the problems experienced by western democracies in counter-insurgency are partly to do with the inherent complexity of counter-insurgency, but that they are mainly about a lack of understanding of how strategy functions. Successful counter-insurgency requires the defeat of the enemy forces. Military victory is the foundation of this success.

My argument is largely the reverse of this. Decision-makers do sometimes forget that counter-insurgency is still war. Mainly, however, modern counter-insurgency is difficult because of its inherent complexity, and no amount of focus on military victory will change this.

It is certainly true that counter-insurgency needs to be thought of as a form of war: it is not a bloodless exercise in reassurance. It is because counter-insurgency is a form of war that it is subject to violence, friction and uncertainty.

However, the argument that more emphasis needs to be placed on military victory and the use of force is problematic. It proceeds from the assumption that operations in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan are somehow liberal ‘pillow fights’ in which ‘hearts and minds’ activities have been allowed to get in the way of the serious business of confronting the insurgents.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In both cases, substantial amounts of coercion and force have been, are being, and will continue to be used up to, and including, air strikes, artillery barrages, the use of tanks and even bayonet charges.

The fundamental challenge to our attempts to fight counter-insurgency operations is that whilst counter-insurgency has never been easy, the context in which contemporary operations are being conducted, in terms of the goals we are pursuing, the external situation and internal politics of the areas in which we operate, makes counter-insurgency even more difficult.

Put simply, placing more emphasis on ‘military victory’ won’t work, because ‘military victory’ cannot be achieved in ways that will support our political goals.

Why is this? First, let me touch on the issue of Western objectives. Counter-insurgency in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan is difficult because our goals are so wide-ranging and ambitious. If our aims had simply been to topple Saddam Hussein and punish the Taliban then both operations could long ago have been declared outstanding victories.

However, our goals are much broader: state-building; democratisation; stability; pro-Western governments. In a sense neither Iraq nor Afghanistan are ‘counter-insurgency campaigns’: they are exercises in nation-building in which the increasing emphasis on counter-insurgency operations is a symptom of failures in the broader strategy, the ‘grand strategy’, that we are pursuing. Force needs to be used to support ideas; if those ideas are flawed then no amount of force or coercion will achieve the desired goals.

It is possible to enforce stability through the extravagant use of force and terror — we know this because Saddam Hussein did it in Iraq. But authority established through terror will not achieve the sorts of goals that we want to achieve.

The problem is that whereas nation- building worked after the Second World War in places such as Japan and Germany, the context is decisively different in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. In Germany and Japan, for example, there were already strong concepts of nation and statehood; we were re-building states. This is not the case in weak states such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

In fact, if we remove examples from the end of the Second World War it is difficult to identify any unequivocal nation-building successes. There is no consensus or established strategy by which states can be democratised by outside military intervention. The basic lesson then, is that if we wish to conduct counter-insurgency as part of an ambitious nation-building ‘grand strategy’ it is always likely to be a challenging enterprise.

A second issue is local context. Here, the problem is that the local political dynamics in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan are hugely complex and make successful counter-insurgency very difficult. In both, it is not ‘our’ authority which is being tested: Western forces are struggling to establish the authority of an indigenous government.

The presence of large numbers of Western forces is a military necessity, but the presence of such forces undermines the authority of the Iraqi government because, in the present geo-political climate, such governments are protrayed as serving malign Western interests. The very presence of Western forces provides a powerful mobilising symbol for anti-government groups.

Neither is there a coherent insurgent force against which we can assert our authority through force. For example, in Iraq, the war is not a two-sided conflict between insurgents and government forces with the mass of the population in between: it is a multi-sided, often sectarian struggle in which by far the largest casualties are suffered and inflicted by local Shia and Sunni communities.

It is difficult to see what ‘military victory’ means in such a context: to protect one community would require making war on the other ­— logically then, are we arguing that in order to protect both communities, we must attack both communities?

Indeed, since local militia groups have made good progress in populating the Iraqi police and army, a broad attempt by Western forces to assert themselves against the ‘insurgents’ would require them to destroy elements of the Iraqi government’s own security forces.

A third issue is the external context: the global environment in which counter-insurgency must be be conducted makes a focus on ‘military victory’ politically difficult.

Lord Kitchener, British War Minister from 1914-1917, argued that ‘we must make war as we must, not as we would like’. It would be easier if the public and media scrutinised (and criticised) counter-insurgency operations less. But they do, and there is nothing that can be done about this.

Even if more constraints were placed on such activities at home, the internet and globalised media mean that scrutiny is unavoidable. It could certainly help if external sources of insurgent power were blocked. But most contemporary conflicts have strong trans-national dimensions.

Are our objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan worth punitive action against neighbours such as Syria or Iran, or some, such as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia that are our allies? It would undoubtedly be easier if more military resources could be applied for longer in contemporary counter-insurgencies, but economic and domestic political realities make this difficult.

In any case, it is not certain that such things are decisive. Britain deployed 20 troops per thousand population in Northern Ireland, but successes have been achieved with far fewer (Germany, for example) and failures with far more (the Soviets in Afghanistan).

Victory in counter-insurgency is always possible, in the sense that we should not assume that Western democracies are doomed to fail. History bears this out — Britain, for example, achieved success in Malaya, Borneo, and Dhofar. Indeed, we should not assume that undemocratic countries are necessarily better — witness the problems experienced by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.

What is also true, however, is that counter-insurgency operations vary in their difficulty. British success in Malaya was faciliated by the evential adoption of an effective counter-insurgency strategy, but this strategy was facilitated by a relatively benign context — the fact, for example, that the UK was committed to leaving; that it was fighting in support of an effective indigenous government; that there was limited outside support for the insurgents; that the insurgents were drawn predominantly from a distinct minority racial group; and that there was less domestic scrutiny of the methods being used.

Historically, when the context has been more complex Britain has also experienced problematic campaigns and downright defeats: in Palestine in the forties; in Kenya, Cyprus and Aden in the fifties and sixties.

Fundamentally, the more complex the context is, the more ambitious and grandiose the objectives, the more fragmented and conflictual local politics, the less permissive the international environment, the more difficult it will be to frame a workable counter-insurgency campaign.

The sorts of campaigns that we are waging in Iraq and Afghanistan are complex in all of these areas.

In conclusion, then, the chances of success in modern counter-insurgency relate less to our willingness to strive for ‘military victory’ than they do to the relative complexity of the campaigns that we choose to fight. This complexity will vary, dependent on the local context, international conditions, the objectives we pursue and the means that we bring to bear.

Thus, in counter-insurgency, victory may always be possible but the context, both domestic and international, may make the chances of success so small that victory is improbable.

Strategy is the art of the possible: in the future, it is incumbent on us not just to understand strategy better, but to make greater efforts to realise the limits of counter insurgency as a tool and not to expect more from it than conditions allow.

If our ‘grand strategy’ is flawed, even the best counter-insurgency techniques may mean that it simply takes us longer to lose. In the real world, perhaps some victories simply cannot be won.

Chris Tucker is a Lecturer in Defence Studies at Kings College London.