David H. Ucko

Counterinsurgency theory emphasises that understanding your environment – its politics, economics, history and culture – matters, a lot. Counterinsurgents must understand the area’s formal and informal structures and actors, the relation between them, as well as the fears, aspirations and mindsets of the people among whom they will operate. These types of exhortations are made consistently in both scholarly and doctrinal works on counterinsurgency. Yet is the full importance of knowing history, of understanding the culture and the language, fully understood, or are we engaging in a self-delusional form of sloganeering?

In his recently released book, Building Peace After War, Mats Berdal comments on the frequently affirmed importance of understanding your environment:

To many this will appear obvious and as hardly meriting separate treatment. Yet it is striking just how absent, beyond the superficial and glib acknowledgement that ‘history matters’, the significance of complex historical legacies has been from the deliberations of Western governments contemplating interventions in societies which, while fractured and traumatised by war, retain a profound sense of their own history and cultural worth, and whose basis of social order often differs sharply from those of the intervening powers.

I agree wholeheartedly: there is a difference between saying that ‘history matters’ or that ‘culture matters’ and doing the difficult work to understand, to really understand, the areas in which interventions are to take place or are currently ongoing.

Another Norwegian academic, Reidar Visser, takes this argument further, in a challenging but also very interesting post on the Obama administration’s experience with counterinsurgency in Iraq and its plans for counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Most of the blog entry focuses on internal political wranglings in Iraq and will be fascinating for anyone, such as myself, keen to follow these developments. The part that really stuck with me though, because of its wider implications, is where Visser takes the American leadership to task for failing to acknowledge their own poor understanding of politics both in Iraq and Afghanistan and the limiting effects their lack of understanding will have on their ability to ‘conduct state-building’ in either country. He says: “these people cannot know what is right for Afghanistan because they lack a profound cultural understanding of those countries”.

Vissar then raises a bunch of thorny yet for the most unanswered questions about the Afghans’ preferred form of government, and adds that:

No attempt will be made to answer these complicated questions here. Rather, that is something that should be left for true Afghanistan experts who know the languages, the religions and the history of the country. The question today is whether such experts were ever consulted before President Barack Obama made his decision on strategy.

There is a sense of frustration, if not of anger, here, but it may not be wholly unjustified. While we cannot expect Obama and Biden to develop a ‘profound cultural understanding’ of Afghanistan, we may ask for area specialists and regional experts to be consulted — but are they? Planning for the Somalia intervention in 1992 infamously ignored the advice of area experts and ethnographers; the Iraq invasion was made without consulting, or at least listening to, those well versed with the country’s politics and society; and the same could fairly be said for the Afghanistan invasion of 2001. I would be interested in seeing whether, after so many years of experience with counterinsurgency and with so many injunctions to ‘understand the human terrain’, it is now really déjà vu all over again?

I encourage you to check out Mats Berdal’s book here and to read Vissar’s blog post here.