I am of course aware that what has been described as U.S. ‘counterinsurgency’ operations in Afghanistan have not always, or even often, subscribed to the principles of FM 3-24, or of COIN theory more generally. I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel with Marine Colonel Dale Alford at a recent conference at the Naval War College, where he presented a very persuasive and memorable paper on this very point. A different version of this paper can be found here (pp. 12-15), on the site of a Marine Corps University conference on counterinsurgency, which I regrettably did not attend. Col Alford’s point, as stolen from that conference transcript, was that:

We need to re-position a significant portion of our FOBs and COPs among the population because right now they’re not. The problem is they were built for CT missions in ’02 and ’03 and in ’04 in wrong locations for a population-centric COIN effort.
And the second thing is we talk about it a lot, we write about it a lot but we are not focused on the Afghan army and the Afghan police and the Afghan border police. We don’t live with them as partnered units. We consider partnering to link up and do operations. If you’re not sleeping with them, eating with them, and crapping in the same bucket, you’re not partnered and we’re not partnered in Afghanistan.

So there is some resonance between Col Alford’s account and that of Lt-Col Goya. Nonetheless Goya’s account of U.S. force posture in Afghanistan still strikes me as something of a predictable caricature, or at least as somewhat anachronistic; it reminds me of the way Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo was crititised for isolating troops from their operating environment, or of some of the criticism of the unreal life in the ‘Green Zone’ in Iraq. Is it really the case that nothing has changed, that these bad habits of counterinsurgency still prevail? Has there been no operational learning of counterinsurgency? And what then of the many soldiers who conducted counterinsurgency so well in Iraq as part of the surge?

These are the questions I am currently trying to find some answers to. At this point, it seems to me that Goya is a little bit harsh on the conduct of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and that perhaps this criticism would have sounded more appropriate a few years ago. At the same time, Goya may also be a little too nice to his own compatriots: he contrasts the U.S. military effort with that of France, specifying that (loosely translated) “the Afghans have a good image of the French, whose community-oriented approach makes them less confrontational, more patient and more successful”. Is this simply another case of French anti-Americanism?

Of course, it is my duty to draw your attention to ‘Whither NATO?’, the chapter written by Professor Mats Berdal, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and myself on the evolution of NATO and its possible role in international peace and security. Offering an overview of NATO’s attempts at transformation since Kosovo, the chapter points to the need for NATO, on one hand, to embrace, more than it has done, stabilization and wider peacekeeping as core activities, and on the other, to think about more modest, yet still important military tasks that it has the capabilities to conduct and around which political agreement may also be struck, now between 28 member-states. It is not an entirely pessimistic take on the future of the trans-Atlantic alliance, but it should be considered a call for much greater realism regarding its constraints on NATO’s role as a global security actor.

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