R2P is NOT the new COIN, but Ulfelder is just as wrong as Safranski about why*

I’ve got about a half-dozen half-written posts on the subject of R2P, which – thanks largely to Anne-Marie Slaughter – seems to be the hot topic in my blogospheric circles of late. The fad is both reflected and observed by Mark Safranski at ZenPundit, who yesterday asserted that “R2P is the New COIN.” This claim struck me as a bit aggressive and not altogether accurate, and I was heartened by its coincident rejection by Jay Ulfelder (a much smarter man than I). I do think, though, that Jay and Mark are talking past one another to some extent, so my contribution here is an attempt both to dispel what I see as a few misconceptions and to highlight how these two may have misunderstood one another.

* Ok, so the post title is sort of inflammatory, and it's not really a terribly accurate representation of what I think. But sometimes you've got to do crazy stuff to get ahead in this game, you know?

Safranski’s point – if I’m reading him properly – is a pretty simple one: he argues that R2P has the intellectual heft and internationalist “elite” sanction to replace counterinsurgency as the new “it” phenomenon for enlightened commentators and policymakers – basically that it can (or will) become the new narrative for those who are uncomfortable advocating for American primacy on its face to justify continued internationalism. Here’s how he puts it:

[I]n it’s current policy trajectory, R2P is going to become “the new COIN”.

This is not to say that R2P is a military doctrine, but like the rise of pop-centric COIN, it will be an electrifying idea that has the potential fire the imagination of foreign policy intellectuals, make careers for it’s bureaucratic enthusiasts and act as a substitute for the absence of a coherent American grand strategy. The proponents of R2P (R2Peons?) appear to be in the early stages of following a policy advocacy template set down by the COINdinistas, but their ambitions appear to be far, far greater in scope. […]

R2P is following the same COIN pattern of bureaucratic-political proselytization with the accomplished academic theorist Anne-Marie Slaughter as the “Kilcullen of R2P”. As with David Kilcullen’s theory of insurgency, Slaughter’s ideas about sovereignty and R2P, which have gained traction with the Obama administration and in Europe as premises for policy, need to be taken seriously and examined in depth lest we wake up a decade hence with buyer’s remorse.

I want to very strongly endorse Mark’s recommendation that we examine in depth any theoretical construct on which we intend to base American grand strategy or foreign policy in the future, but I think he overstates the influence of both Slaughter’s and Kilcullen’s ideas. It’s worth noting that the U.S. does not actually pursue a foreign and security policy that is geared to defeat “globalized insurgency,” whatever the Australian guru may have recommended, and that Slaughter’s thoughts on the erosion of state sovereignty – even paired with the advocacy of folks like Sarah Sewall – haven’t driven a significant uptick in armed humanitarian intervention. But I’m drifting away from the point somewhat.

The point (which Safranski acknowledges to some extent in his fourth paragraph): the recent “institutionalization of COIN” across the American political and military cultures is more attributable to its apparent viability as a policy expedient in difficult circumstances than a testament to the overwhelming power of the so-called COINdinistas’ “bureaucratic-political proselytization.” The way that “COIN wisdom” has infiltrated both doctrine and the vernacular of the political class is unlikely to be replicated by R2P for the simple fact that COIN was pitched as the necessary savior of American Iraq policy, not a new, clean-slate paradigm for U.S. engagement in the world. The COINdinistas were obviously more than disinterested spectators, and their politically-astute advocacy certainly greased the skids for widespread acceptance of their politico-military concepts. But they wouldn't have even had a hearing were it not for the deteriorating situation in Iraq. If FM 3-24 had been published in the insurgency-free context of say 1999, the foreboding parallel to R2P would make more sense.

Ulfelder agrees in principle:

In my opinion, R2P stands no chance of becoming the next COIN because attempts to make civilian protection a guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy will be resisted stiffly by the U.S. military.

The specific collection of beliefs and ideas we now call COIN (link) became ascendant in the latter half of the 2000s because it spoke to the needs and desires of civilian and military leaders alike. In the mid-2000s, the U.S. and its allies appeared to be losing the wars they had started a few years earlier in Iraq and Afghanistan, or at least not winning them. Policy-makers responded to the risk of failure by groping around for fresh ideas on how to tip those messy and costly wars toward “victory.” COIN took shape in response to this demand. COIN gave military leaders new things to try in place of the old ones that were failing, and it fanned policy-makers’ hopes for a way to bring those costly wars to some successful end.

But I think Jay is wrong to focus so much on the acceptance of the military, which is, frankly speaking, a matter of near irrelevance to policymakers. (As the occupation of Iraq should have amply demonstrated, the White House doesn’t ask “do you have doctrine for this?” before assigning a mission to the military.) The principles of R2P may not be codified into military doctrine the way COIN has, but this isn’t nearly so important as it seems: doctrine is a guide to tactical and operational action, but viewed from another perspective it can be boiled down to “the list of tasks that I as a military leader need to train my forces to perform.” And there’s not a whole pile of stuff under the “R2P” heading that doesn’t also fall into one of the other bins the U.S. military is already training on.

R2P is a legal concept and perhaps even a prescriptive guide to state action, but it’s not a military mission. What are the “R2P tasks” for military forces that aren’t already covered by offense, defense, and stability operations? There may be some additional responsibilities for operational and strategic leaders, but the tactical tasks are essentially those of combat operations, peacekeeping, and peace-enforcement. (We have a legitimate expert on this subject here at the blog, so I hope he’ll chime in, but I’s also encourage others in the know to please correct me if I’m wrong.)

[Added for clarity: "additional responsibilities for operational and strategic leaders" are the sphere of policy, not doctrine; it's reasonable to assume that DOD might drag its feet on putting out policy (that is, issuances or directives) as to the specific functions and responsibilities associated with civilian-protection operations. But such policy already exists for combat operations and stability operations, so this seems to me a bit of a red herring.]

The military may not like the idea of armed humanitarian intervention gaining pride of place in American security policy, but that won’t keep it from executing the missions or training on the required tasks. After all, there wasn’t much enthusiasm for small wars in general (including COIN), Military Operations Other Than War, humanitarian assistance, security cooperation and security force assistance, and so on over the last several decades, but we’re still doing ‘em. After all, the SECDEF might not have favored the Libya intervention, may not have understood the alleged strategic rationale, may not have had high confidence in our ability to constructively shape conditions there, etc., but: U.S. forces still created and enforced a no-fly zone, waged interdiction operations against Libyan regime assets, and supported the operations of NATO allies in the Libyan AO… all without liking it much or having adapted culturally or doctrinally to the mission. The success (however fortunate) of the NATO operation weakens the claims of those who might argue that new doctrine and concepts are needed to effectively execute an "R2P mission."

All of which is just a long way of saying this: Ulfelder is likely right that R2P is unlikely to form the basis for future American security policy, and Safranski is likely wrong. But Ulfelder is likely wrong about the reasons why not, or at least those that pertain to the military – he’s on much more solid ground when he emphasizes the “emergency” justification for COIN in both the military and political spheres.

Is COIN dead?

That's the contention of this piece in The National Journal, which runs with the subtitle "It isn't just people who are dying in Afghanistan. So is an entire concept of war." Michael Hirsh and Jamie Tarabay give a thorough accounting of the way the so-called "COIN narrative" has played out in policy discussions, but they fail to prove the contention that counterinsurgency's time has come and gone.

I'm not going to go into this in depth right now, because I'm on vacation (at least for 36 more hours). I've stayed away from Twitter and blogs for a week, and I didn't even listen to the president's speech on Wednesday. But consider for just a second what COINdinistas Dave Barno and Peter Mansoor's very different arguments tell us about counterinsurgency's place in America's future approach to warfighting. Here's Mansoor:

[T]here's not going to be any stomach in the United States for this kind of thing going forward... We're going to shy away from regime change or these really large-scale counterinsurgency conflicts. That's why you see, in Libya, the reluctance of the Obama administration to do more than what they're doing.

And here's Barno:

You're never [going] to see a conventional war ever again that doesn't not [sic] have a very robust irregular component to it. [Nice editing, NJ.]

What's missing from both men's vision of the future is any discussion of regime change -- narrowly-focused conventional warfighting missions -- absent a post-war cleanup: stability operations and counterinsurgency. The debate about Libya has been characterized by a decided reluctance on almost all sides to commit American military power to the acknowledged aim of ending Qaddafi's rule. Why should this be so? We have the tools at hand to kill Qaddafi, to destroy his army, to target the regime's resources and infrastructure and to make life very, very difficult for what remains of the government in Tripoli. Why won't we use them? The answer is simple: because we can scarcely conceive of using force to achieve our military objectives without then making an effort to shape outcomes in the postwar period. (I know of no individual, even among proponents of regime change, who believe that U.S. involvement should or can begin and end with the regime's destruction.) We can't even imagine a world where breaking it does not mean also buying it.

Of course, preventive or punitive raiding will always be a part of the spectrum of possible response to threat and provocation, but this has meaningful consequences: we must either accept that the security challenges of the future will be less amenable to solution with the military instrument, or we must struggle to retain (or one day regain) our appetite for expensive, time-consuming, manpower-intensive irregular conflict.

"COIN Stars": Columbia Journalism Review

A few weeks ago, I answered some questions over email for an Afghanistan-based freelance journalist working on a piece about the rise of the COIN blogs. The piece that resulted -- which quotes Old Blue, Tim Lynch, Josh Foust, and the gents of SWJ, but apparently needed to include at least one dilettante -- went live last week. A taste:

Ideologically, the “COIN Commentariat” can generally be split into two groups: What some call the “COINdinistas,” those that supported the military’s adoption of counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq and believe fundamentally in COIN doctrine; and “COINtras,” who are skeptics of COIN or its applications in Afghanistan. But no matter where they fall on the spectrum, most members of the COIN blogosphere seems united in their disdain for the mainstream media’s coverage of the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. “Most journalists wouldn’t know the difference between good COIN and bad COIN when they saw it,” said Old Blue of Afghan Quest. “The mainstream media has largely if not completely missed the opportunity to bring accountability through the wider conversation.”

Newspaper opinion pages too often give platforms to influential people with definite political agendas, according to some. “It’s 90 percent boosters of COIN, and a few cranks, and no substantive discussion,” said Joshua Foust. Others criticize the media for having accepted what they see as a facile explanation of counterinsurgency doctrine that emphasizes “winning hearts and minds” over the more aggressive or coercive tenets of counterinsurgency strategy.

Gulliver at Ink Spots, however, thinks that the popular understanding of COIN might finally be evolving. “There seems to be a general consensus settling over both the policy world and the media,” he said. “We have a better idea of how to do COIN well than we used to, and that understanding has helped to convince us that we ought to do it as rarely as possible, and only when it’s absolutely necessary.” So long as the war in Afghanistan continues, debate and dialogue over the counterinsurgency will undoubtedly thrive in the blogosphere. As the founders of the SWJ Blog write, “We do this in our spare time, because we want to. McDonald’s pays more. But we’d rather work to advance our noble profession than try to super-size your order or interest you in a delicious hot apple pie.”

Read the rest here. Most of what's covered will be familiar to our readers, but it's definitely worth a look. Especially since we're so, um, costive these days.

Thoughts on others' thoughts on "Responsible Transition" (EDITED)

I'm not going to offer a comprehensive critique of Dave Barno and Andrew Exum's new report on the path forward in Afghanistan, because I'd like to spend a little more time going over it before I comment in depth, and because I'm not interested in spending a lot of time on it right now. But I'd like to say a few things about what other people have said, because it's easier to criticize than to do any kind of deeper analysis.

First of all, full disclosure: I'm not going to make any disclosure statements. FFS, you don't even know my name! Why would I disclose anything else? Seriously though: Ex and I are friends, but we have significantly different ideas about the war in Afghanistan. I read a draft of this paper two months ago and gave some very brief but critical feedback. So let me just say up front that 1) my friendship with Ex doesn't keep me from busting his balls and telling him when I think he's wrong, and 2) if I had any organizational or philosophical fealty to CNAS, I'd be at their Christmas party right now instead of defending their institutional integrity on the internet.

That said: it is very, very bizarre to criticize CNAS or the paper's authors for failing to recant previously articulated support for a broad-based, well-resourced counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan. Here's Bernard Finel:

Finally, about CNAS.  I know it has no “institutional positions” and hence no obligation to explain shifts in analysis.  But that is wildly disengenuous [sic]. We are seeing a major reversal in CNAS’s position on COIN issues — which are their signature area of research and influence – and refusing to acknowledge past mistakes or address new assessments is, well, creepy.  It is vaguely Stalinist — you know, we’ll just rewrite history and pretend nothing happened.  I am pretty sure that if Heritage new year started promoting higher taxes they would feel obliged to explain why their views had changed. The “no institutional positions” line from CNAS leaders is just a cop out.  Own your past mistakes. Acknowledge them and learn from them.

And then there's Michael Cohen, who tweeted that "CNAS has gone 180 on COIN and offers no explanation." [EDIT: Let me clarify here that I'm not dealing with Cohen's criticism of the report in any kind of comprehensive way. He feels like he's been unfairly lumped in with Finel here, and that's probably true. So go read his criticism of the paper, which repeats some of Bernard's goofy lament about how wrong Ex was a year ago, but also makes an important point about how he and Barno have mostly overlooked the reconciliation process.]

"Bizarre" is probably not the right word for this; that suggests that this kind of criticism is unexpected and inexplicable. Anyone who's read Bernard's blog (or Cohen's, for that matter) could've predicted this sort of overwrought critique --- "major reversal," "creepy," "vaguely Stalinist, "rewrite history," etc. -- simply by observing how many of those who have been advocating withdrawal for some time seem so aggrieved at never having been suitably acknowledged. In fact, that seems to be some critics' main takeaway from "Responsible Transition": not satisfaction that formerly outspoken advocates of an expanded effort in South Asia have come 'round to their point of view, but rather outrage that CNAS seems not to have been sufficiently punished for giving a home to those advocates who, in Bernard's words, "were simply wrong based on the available evidence at the time." Finel is pissed, and not just at the fact that there are still people who disagree with him, or that the U.S. is still in Afghanistan -- he's pissed that everyone didn't agree with him in the first place. After all, "[d]evelopments in Afghanistan since the 2009 surges have been exactly as any informed observer would have expected," he writes. They were wrong "based on the available evidence at the time"! By this line of thinking, anyone who pushed a different policy course than he and his fellow sober pragmatists must be a charlatan, "a courtier (and worse)," a war profiteer, or a liar.

But what of CNAS' "disingenuous" refusal to excoriate its very own institutional self for "past mistakes" and a "shift in analysis"? For a "180 on COIN" with "no explanation"? Well, Bernard's own words satisfy this nutty complaint: "I know it has no 'institutional positions'..." What further need is there for qualification? They don't have institutional positions! The analysis of their employees does not constitute the analysis of the organization! To say that COIN is CNAS' "signature area of research and influence" simply because Nagl and Exum have been vocal in support of that operational approach is just as absurd as saying that Brookings' "signature area of research and influence" is the Bush Doctrine because it employs Pollack and O'Hanlon. And to say that CNAS has undergone a "major reversal in its position on COIN issues" when it DOESN'T HAVE AN INSTITUTIONAL POSITION ON ANY ISSUES is just damned goofy.

So is this the great "reversal" that Bernard is trumpeting, the "180 on COIN" of Cohen's dreams? Well, in short, no. First of all, as the report notes, the COINdinistas didn't get everything they wanted out of the so-called "surge": the president offered a more limited vision and rejected a massive, protracted troop presence. Exum and Barno are adapting to the reality of 2010: the president has elaborated his strategy, we've had an additional year to observe the progress of the war, and the U.S. government, NATO, and the Afghan government have demonstrated over that period their collective seriousness about the drawdown-by-'11, transition-by-'14 timeline. The authors aren't saying "my bad, this COIN stuff is a bunch of nonsense and it's not working, so listen up while I pimp some other plan." They're saying "look, no matter what anybody said before, these are the decisions the president has made about the near and mid-term, so here's how we get the best results out of that over the long term." To put it simply, anyone who is painting this as a "reversal" or "180" on COIN is completely full of shit.

Now, are the recommendations themselves any good? As I said before, I've got my own complaints. [EDIT #2:] For what it's worth, here's a snip of what I wrote about the draft that I originally saw:

So I guess in conclusion, I like what you're trying to do here, and I very much like the acknowledgement that the current strategy doesn't have a real, concrete end point. But I have some major concerns about a) your justification for continued involvement (i.e. WHY winning is important); b) your explanation for how this approach actually works better to achieve our goals in Afghanistan (i.e. HOW we win this way); c) your apparent willingness to sacrifice on the big picture (not getting Americans blown up by al-Qaeda) in order to meet with some limited success in the small picture (keeping Afghanistan from collapse to the Taliban) (i.e. WHAT the point of what we're doing here is).

I objected to the bits about increased leverage on the Pakistanis, both because I think we're already trying pretty hard on that one and because there's no concrete elaboration of exactly how to do it. I'm a bit uncomfortable with the sizing of the "residual force" for the same reasons: it's not that 30K is necessarily the wrong number, but I'd like to see them show their work. Why 30,000 and not 25,000? Or 15,000? Or 40,000? And then there's the bit about shifting investment away from the central government in Kabul and increasing support for local government, which I think is plainly inconsistent with an indirect approach that will necessarily be largely dependent on Afghan Security Forces... that are organized, trained, equipped, and directed by the national government. How do you keep building up ANSF while shifting investment to local government? How do you support decentralized militias/arbakai without getting them shot at by previously U.S.-trained and -equipped ANSF? Without creating yet more unpredictable conflict dynamics? And so on.

But all in all, "Responsible Transition" is something to be happy about. People with influence are taking a pragmatic approach to post-"surge" Afghanistan and trying to understand how we get from where we are and where we will be to where we need to be. They're not saying they wish the last year hadn't happened, they're not arguing that the president is dumb and shouldn't have made the decisions that he did, and they're not working with fantasy counterfactuals about woulda, coulda, shoulda or if only we hadn't. They're trying to understand America's vital and enduring interests, to make sense of what those mean in South Asia, and to move the state of play in the region from where it is now to where it ought to be under the resource and political constraints we can all feel confident will obtain in coming years. We ought to applaud that, not act butt-hurt about the fact that nobody listened a year ago.

Other criticisms of "Responsible Transition":

• Keith Boyea, "For Afghanistan, a Wind of Change From Washington," guest post at Newshoggers
• Josh Foust, "'A Responsible Transition'," Registan.net
• Herschel Smith, "Afghanistan: Responsible Transition," The Captain's Journal (LULZ)

All hail the COIN-istas!

In what is otherwise an excellent and comprehensive profile of the SecDef, Gordon Lubold of the Christian Science Monitor drops in this line about the two major factions contesting the future of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan:

Put simply, there are two poles in Washington: the counterinsurgency experts, or COIN-istas, who believe Afghanistan's deteriorating security can only be reversed by adding tens of thousands of troops – perhaps as many as 80,000; and those who believe US interests in Afghanistan are few, and the best way to keep it on a low simmer is to employ a counterterrorism-like model – using drones, bombs, and special forces teams to keep Al Qaeda at bay.

Come on, Lubold, you know better. "COIN-istas"?! That doesn't even make sense! It's even worse than Michael Cohen's consistent misspelling of the term as COINdanista!

Let's give credit where it's due: to SNLII, erstwhile commenter on this and other blogs, birthday boy, and creator of both "COINdinista" and "COINtra." This may mark the first (botched) use of either term in the non-blog media, so happy birthday, SNLII! (Do you get more than a dime for this mainstream infringement of your patent?)