David Brooks Has A Lot to Learn About COIN

David Brooks Has A Lot to Learn About COIN
Posted by Michael Cohen

I wish I had the time and the inclination to do a blogging-style machete attack against David Brooks valentine to COIN and St. Petraeus in the New York Times today. But instead a quick, pin-point strike will have to do. Brooks writes:

"They say that intellectual history travels slowly, and by hearse. The old generation has to die off before a new set of convictions can rise and replace entrenched ways of thinking. People also say that a large organization is like an aircraft carrier. You can move the rudder, but it still takes a long time to turn it around.

"Yet we have a counterexample right in front of us. Five years ago, the United States Army was one sort of organization, with a certain mentality. Today, it is a different organization, with a different mentality. It has been transformed in the virtual flash of an eye, and the story of that transformation is fascinating for anybody interested in the flow of ideas."

The first thing here is that Brooks' history of how that change occurred - because of the tireless advocacy of David Petraues and his merry band of academic-warrior COINdinistas - is not only simplistic, it's offensive to the many military officers on the ground in Iraq who were forced to adapt and transform the way the war was being fought. They weren't waiting for Petraeus and other general to parachute into their FOBs and tell them what to do. And this was happening well before 2006-2007.

But the more important point here is that while there has been a transformation in the US military toward COIN . . . why is that necessarily a good thing? The fetishization of COIN is as bad, if not worse, than the "old generation" thinking that Brooks dismisses because it silences alternative viewpoints and tactical options from which civilian policymakers must choose.

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But the better example of course is that there is no perhaps no place in the world worse to do counter-insurgency than Afghanistan. Perhaps instead of writing love letters to David Petraeus, Brooks could buy the Army's Counter-Insurgency Manual, FM 3-24 and try to figure out how to square this statement from pg. 199 "Success in counterinsurgency (COIN) operations requires establishing a legitimate government supported by the people and able to address the fundamental causes that insurgents use to gain support," which the current corrupt and illegitimate regime that is our "ally" in Afghanistan.

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http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2010/05/david-brooks-has-a-lot-to-learn-about-coin.html