COINery--and liberal internationalism

A bit of intellectual agitation from BruceR. at Flit:

...this was thought-provoking. Yglesias has already made the (trite) communism parallel. What I thought was more interesting was this bit:

"We must also contend with the effects of the media, and a world population that cringes when it is witness to overt aggression and the marginalization of people. In this response, the leaders of this campaign have taken too many precautions to ensure that everyone is content with the tact taken."

The author is saying the top-down control of our conduct in Afghanistan that is strangling the counterinsurgency effort exists because of domestic pressure to do good. But if that's the case, then what you're really saying is counterinsurgency fights are not winnable because domestic disapproval of the specific actions taken in any kind of more distributed, effective strategy would be prohibitive, outweighing public support for the mission as a whole. If the only effective way to do things is quasi-Kurtzian independent actors operating free of media scrutiny, that's basically saying there is no effective way. Which means the West will never, can never win at COIN, which probably begs the question why we would even want to try.

To bring this post full-circle, I think that the Canadian detainee controversy is a perfect example of this. If there are any Canadian liberal internationalists left [paging Mr Travers], they might want to ponder what the burden of only intervening in countries where there's a functioning and rights-respecting judicial system already [see here for what happens in the contrary situation] will do to any future prospect of Canadian peacemaking or peacekeeping anywhere in the world after 2011. (Leaving aside the point that if a country has a well-functioning justice system, it doesn't need any security sector assistance from us, anyway.)

*In other news, Andrew Exum, of all people, has decided full-up COIN's a waste of time. Which may sound drastic, but it all comes back to what's been said here and elsewhere about FM 3-24 and counterinsurgency theory. That theory says that when local forces can fight the war on their own, you've won. That's your end state. You can achieve it by degrading the enemy or building up local forces, or both, but that's what winning means. But take that to the logical next step (which 3-24 never does), and that means all the other COIN stuff is a distraction. The FID/army mentoring mission, backed up with air power but otherwise with as light a footprint as possible, seems the future of western "low-intensity" fighting, not this massive-conventional-forces/"government in a box"/remaking societies stuff.

As for light footprints:

A CIA COINdinista’s Misgivings on Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan

Update: And more on working with tribal societies (except of course Gurkha, Sikh and other such units of the British Indian Army came from "martial races", not tribes).