Civilianising warfare: ways of war and peace in modern counterinsurgency
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Civilianising warfare: ways of war and peace in
modern counterinsurgency
Colleen Bell
Department of Politics, School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of
London, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX, UK.
This article examines the emergence of counterinsurgency doctrine in Coalition
interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. While counterinsurgency is complimentary
to the tenets forwarded by its classical military predecessors in several respects, the
article shows that it is also more than a refashioning of conventional military
practice. Counterinsurgency is intimately tied to institutional practices that shape
global liberal governance. It can be traced to dominant trends in international
humanitarian, development and peace interventionism since the end of the Cold
War and it deepens the links between the social development of war-affected
populations and the politics of international security. Rather than simply a shift in
military practice, counterinsurgency is distinguished by its investment in civilian
modes of warfare. Counterinsurgency retells the narrative of intervention as part of
the evolution of political and economic liberalisation, marking a passage from
interventionary force to post-interventionary governance. Modern counterinsur-
gency, it is concluded, exposes the widening indistinction between contemporary
modes of peace and those of war in international relations.
Journal of International Relations and Development (2011) 14, 309–332.
doi:10.1057/jird.2010.16
Keywords: counterinsurgency; development; global governance; intervention;
liberal peace; war
Introduction
If this sounds unmilitary, get over it.
(David Kilcullen 2006a: 104)
The logic of the War on Terror was originally guided by the belief that hunting
down and eliminating terrorists and the rogue leaders who supported them
would improve international peace and security. Accordingly, the beneficiaries
of counterterrorism efforts were said to include not only those in whose
name military action was undertaken, but also the resident populations living
in targeted states. And yet counterterrorism efforts sparked substantial
Journal of International Relations and Development, 2011, 14, (309–332) www.palgrave-journals.com/jird/
r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1408-6980/11Journal of International Relations and Development
Volume 14, Number 3, 2011
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insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, evidenced by rising death tolls,
humanitarian disasters and spiralling instability. Rather than strengthen
security, counterterrorism efforts weakened it. Rather than lead to peace,
counterterrorism efforts deepened the devastation of war.
This article examines the re-emergence of counterinsurgency doctrine among
Coalition partners as a response to the failure of counterterrorism strategy.
Counterinsurgency signals a movement away from exclusive reliance on the
extermination of ‘enemies’ towards the targeting of whole populations for
political support and a treatment of those populations as the decisive
‘variables’ that determine mission success or failure. Some might suggest that
the distinction between ‘insurgency’ and ‘terrorism’ is simply a matter of
terminological preference. It is true that there is some conflation in
terminology. Yet the discourse of counterinsurgency hinges the fulfilment of
strategic aims on a broadened and modified understanding of threats, periodic
lengthening of mission time-frames, revaluation of appropriate uses of force
and a robust commitment to civilian forms of intervention. While both
counterterrorism and counterinsurgency draw on methods of irregular warfare,
counterinsurgency is broader and more discretionary. It not only encompasses
counterterrorism tactics but also represents a more complex form of
engagement, which connects military interventionism to long-term post-
intervention governance in which Coalition and international actors seek to
play a pivotal role. Coalition forces now emphasise defeating subversion,
encouraging support for new governments and promoting ‘collaborative
partnerships’ between Coalition forces, the host government and the local
population. Comparatively, de-emphasised are the detection and hunting down
of terrorist cells. Locating the ‘enemy’ is now appreciated as a delicate matter
of negotiation and networking among the population, not an effort best
effected through housing raids and mass displacement or the technical
endeavours of mobile sensory systems and precision bombing. Counter-
insurgency, in other words, marks a decisive shift away from the overwhelming
crudity of ‘shock and awe’ towards the labyrinthine craft of winning ‘hearts
and minds’ (Long 2006; ICoS 2006; Sepp 2007; Gompert and Gordon 2008).
While contemporary counterinsurgency is complimentary to the tenets
forwarded by classical military predecessors in several respects, the aim of this
article is to show that the practices that flow from counterinsurgency thinking
today represent more than a refashioning of conventional military practice.
The article argues that counterinsurgency has another lineage derived from
liberal internationalism in general, and post-Cold War international develop-
ment and peace interventionism in particular. It shows that while the War on
Terror has often been construed as a distinctively military enterprise, it is very
much shaped by the politics and practices of liberal peace in global relations.
Counterinsurgency is part of a deepening nexus between security andColleen Bell
Civilianising warfare
311
development which merges the social reconstruction and reform of societies
and peoples to the strategies of war and intervention. Managing internal
conflict, promoting cultural understanding and rebuilding war-torn societies
are no longer just the work of NGOs and UN agencies, but form the ideational
remit of contemporary counterinsurgency warfare for Coalition states in
Afghanistan and Iraq. Counterinsurgency’s principal rationale in stabilising
and reconstructing host societies resides, to a large degree, within and through
civilian forms of interventionism established as programmes for the political
and economic development of ‘illiberal’ societies.
This article contributes to critical reflections on the intellectual and policy
implications of the ‘liberal peace’, which is composed of developmental, peace-
building and at times humanitarian operations that are usually posited as
technical responses to conflict and state failure. Some have argued that while
technologies of liberal peace claim to offer universally valid solutions, they
often demonstrate more of an interest in governing ‘others’ and instantiating a
‘victor’s peace’ than in addressing core political problems that the West has
helped to produce (Richmond 2006; Heathershaw 2008). The article builds on
this assessment and suggests that counterinsurgency harnesses technologies of
liberal peace as a way of war. In this respect, counterinsurgency is one axis of
the liberal way of war (Dillon and Reid 2009). It is connected to the
problematisation of the efficiency of coercive force, even as it channels the belief
that the expansion of liberal governance, liberal conduct and liberal institutions,
at whatever cost, will lead to peaceful coexistence within and among human
societies (Doyle 1983, 1986). Reflecting on the shared space between
technologies of liberal peace and counterinsurgency contributes to critical
assessments on the bankrupt models of peace that liberal technologies of peace
have on offer (Pugh 2005; Richmond 2005). It also helps to expose the deep and
multifarious investments of liberal forms of power in the pursuit of war.
There are three aspects to this argument. First, the article begins by laying out
the basic narrative of modern counterinsurgency (focusing on US, UK and
Canadian doctrines) in terms of its connection to classical doctrine, conventional
‘enemy-centric’ military strategy, and mission setbacks in Afghanistan and Iraq.
What separates counterinsurgency and distinguishes it from other forms of
warfare, I argue, is its functional response to the limits of deploying stand-alone
or unmitigated military force. The forms of engagement prized in counter-
insurgency are traditionally civilian and quasi-civilian roles and activities,
overseen or performed by military personnel. Yet counterinsurgency, even as a
re-strategisation of military activity toward civilian operations, remains instru-
mentally a form of warfare. I demonstrate this in the second section by exploring
how we might redress the Clausewitzean dictum that war is simply policy by
other means. Following Foucault, the article adopts a reversal of Clausewitz’s key
thesis that war is policy by other means. It argues that the civilian interventionsJournal of International Relations and Development
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integral to counterinsurgency render policy as a war by other means. Such
a reversal accounts for the way in which civilian power relations — and in
this context, those power relations at play within the institutions of liberal
modernity — are themselves invested with the force of war. That is, war can be
understood as occurring not simply in the meeting of two adversaries on a
battlefield, but as mobilised in and through civil relations.
In the third section, I demonstrate that counterinsurgency embodies and
exposes this dynamic by widening the battlespace of interventionary warfare
beyond terrorism and armed struggle to place a more direct focus on occupied
populations. The rolling out of counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan and
Iraq demonstrates this shift in focus by emphasising economic and institutional
development, and by mobilising new modes of civilian interventionism in the
form of cultural and ethnographic intelligence. It deepens partnerships with
non-military actors on the battlefield and relies on the use (and misuse) of
civilian expertise. These characteristics of modern counterinsurgency, the
fourth and final section show, rearticulate the basic interconnection between
security and development which forms the overriding problematic of
contemporary liberal peace interventionism. Here it is not enemies, but the
mutually reinforcing link between underdevelopment and conflict among
destitute populations of the global borderlands, which must be managed and
contained for international security. While it is certainly possible to conclude
that counterinsurgency therefore represents a militarisation of international
development, humanitarian practices and culture knowledge in order to
control and manipulate societies, the article suggests that the relationship may
be the other way around. Modern counterinsurgency represents a civilianisa-
tion of warfare that is rooted in liberal peace interventionism. Its re-emergence
exposes the deepening entwinement between contemporary modes of peace and
those of war in international relations as well as the investment of liberal peace
interventionism in extinguishing alternative forms of life.
From counterterrorism to contemporary counterinsurgency
In important respects, contemporary counterinsurgency thinking draws on the
insights of classical insurgency and counterinsurgency thinkers. David Galula’s
(1964) formative ideas on the theory and practice of counterinsurgency, taken
from his experiences especially as a Lieutenant Colonel in the French Army
during the Algerian War of Independence, provided much of the ground work
for the US Army (and Marine Corps) manual (2006); so much so in fact that its
authors have been subject to accusations of plagiarism of Galula’s writing as
well as those of several other intellectuals (Price 2007). Roger Trinquier’s
classic Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (1964) has alsoColleen Bell
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313
been revisited in the implementation of ‘a countrywide intelligence system’ of
population monitoring in Iraq and Afghanistan to ‘separate the fish from the
sea’ (Tomes 2004: 19; US Army (and Marine Corps) 2006: 5 12). Drawn from
the memos of T.H. Lawrence (1917), recommendations to soldiers today include
cozying up to locals (especially women) and involving indigenous actors in
decision making and operations whenever advantageous (Petraeus 2006; Kilcullen
2006a). Counterinsurgency intellectuals have also heeded Mao Zedong’s assertion
that that revolutionary war is only 20 per cent military activity and 80 per cent
political. This view is even more relevant given the wide-ranging use of multi-
media technologies that document the activities of the Coalition, insurgents and
the perspectives of locals. Counterinsurgency, it appears, ‘may now be 100 per cent
political’ (Kilcullen 2006b: 123). The amalgamated views of Galula, Trinquier,
Mao and Lawrence point to a notable similarity between some of the most basic
features of classical counterinsurgency and contemporary formulations. Both
claim to be population-focused rather than enemy-focused; both hold that the use
of military force must be used sparingly; and both insist that counterinsurgency is
more about political than military manoeuvring.
Yet there are differences. For instance, contemporary counterinsurgency
doctrine has its own specific context in relation to intra-military debates over
strategy and operational design, which is concretely related to mission setbacks
in Afghanistan and Iraq. In official terms its revival lays principally with key
developments in US military doctrine and leadership, especially the appoint-
ment of General David Petraeus, who led the 2007 troop surge in Iraq —
dubbed ‘The New Way Forward’ — and who was instrumental in formulating
the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Us Army
(and Marine corps) 2006). Also important is the Manual’s sequel, the Stability
Operations Field Manual (2008), produced under the direction of William
Caldwell of the Combined Arms Centre. The shift towards counterinsurgency
can also be sourced to a wider cadre of defence intellectuals who straddle the
world of armed force and the social sciences, most notably David Kilcullen,
John Nagl, Montgomery McFate and Joseph Kipp. These individuals have
popularised the modern contours of a population-focused strategy of warfare
to solve the problem of insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq. They have been
credited with programmatic initiatives to improve cultural awareness in the
military and forging more integration with experts in international diplomacy,
development and humanitarian operations. While these people have been
identified as contributing to the militarisation of academic and civilian
knowledge by some (NCA 2009), they have also been praised for thinking
‘outside the box’ by innovatively fusing civilian techniques to military strategy.
Even if these strategists have looked to the past era of classical doctrine to
guide the future to some extent (Nagl 2005), a distinctive feature of modern
counterinsurgency is that it is an explicit response to the narrower strategicJournal of International Relations and Development
Volume 14, Number 3, 2011
314
impulses of both technological warfare and counterterrorism. In the first place,
contemporary counterinsurgency doctrine is set up from the perspective that
insurgency and terrorism are different forms of action that require different
responses. The latter is simply one tactic whereas the former is a movement of
resistance that may include terrorist action but is not limited to it. Thus, while
the US Department of State defines terrorism as a ‘premeditated, politically
motivated form of violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by
subnational groups or clandestine agents’ (DoS 2005: 1), insurgency has
received a broad definition by the US Army and Marine Corps as ‘an
organised, protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken the control
and legitimacy of an established government, occupying power, or other
political authority while increasing insurgent control’ (US Army (and Marine
Corps) 2006: 1-1). In contrast to high-profile terrorists — who are touted as
small in numbers, international, transient, self-funded and well-resourced
relative to the local population — insurgents are considered to be opponents in
greater numbers who are intimately connected to the population and reliant
upon its support and protection (Kilcullen 2006b: 112 7). According to this
thinking, the motivations of terrorists, particularly those associated with Al-
Qaeda, are said to have global or ‘pan-Islamic’ ambitions. Most insurgents in
Iraq and Afghanistan, however, are thought to be ‘accidental guerrillas’
because they lack universalist ambitions (Kilcullen 2009). They are not
concerned with creating a different global order, but with ousting an occupying
force and establishing national independence and rule. Insurgencies, in other
words, are considered to be more limited in their objectives, seeking to gain
control over a national population and territorialised space as an end in itself.
Certainly, Al-Qaeda’s evolving strategic approach to foment indigenous
insurgency has sustained its relevance to operational change in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet, it is precisely the distinction between
insurgency and terrorism and its application to military strategy which has
reanimated an old debate — or more accurately, an intra-military ideological
struggle — between ‘old school’ neo-traditionalists and ‘new school’ thinking
of inter-state, network-centric warfare (Der Derian 2008). The Western
predecessors of today’s neo-traditionalists fashioned the irregular warfare
and pacification campaigns of imperial powers during the colonial era, as well
as the ‘stabilisation’ campaigns that sought to shape and at times thwart
decolonisation. The last whisper of the neo-traditionalists, until today, was a
brief appearance — what some have interpreted as a final act of desperation —
in the latter half of the US–Vietnam War before US withdrawal. What the neo-
traditionalist era was largely replaced with thereafter was a ‘Revolution in
Military Affairs’ guided by the technological mantra of superior fire power and
a new dawn of the ‘scientific way of war’ (Bousquet 2009). The technological
imperative to develop ever more sophisticated weaponry has guided militaryColleen Bell
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315
industries in the US, other Western states and Israel for some time and, until
recently, remained the operative dogma of the War on Terror.
Yet despite remarkable battle capacity, firepower and detection stealth, the
conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven to be irresolvable through military
dominance and technological savvy. Western counterinsurgency doctrine today is,
in fact, an explicit response to contemporary failures in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Assessments have concluded that Coalition forces in Afghanistan are failing to
win the war. There have been dramatic (and documented) increases in civilian
deaths in 2006, 2007 and 2008 (Human Rights Watch 2008; UNAMA 2009) and
steadily growing military casualties from 2005 through 2009, which has diminished
already-tenuous civilian support in Coalition states and which threatens to
compromise mission funding (Koring 2009). Prior to the troop surge and shift in
operational strategy in Iraq, civilian and military service deaths from direct
violence peaked in 2006 and 2007 (IBC 2009), alongside bleak assessments made
about Coalition performance (Baker 2006; Evans and Evans 2009). Military
historian Andrew Bacevich (2006) has interpreted these outcomes to be indicative
of a ‘new Islamic way of War’ in which, he bluntly claims, ‘the East has solved the
riddle of the Western Way of War’, leaving history’s mightiest military ‘unable to
defeat an enemy force of perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 insurgents equipped with post-
World War II vintage assault rifles and anti-tank weapons’.
This view captures a new consensus among strategic thinkers who have sought a
more precise distinction between counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, in
which the former is credited with perilously ignoring how Coalition-supported
regimes may lack legitimacy and be seen as inept and corrupt by the people they
purport to serve. Rather than leading to a bright future that was supposed to
arrive as soon as the terrorists were ‘smoked’ out of their ‘holes’ (Bush 2004), the
counterterrorist approach produced the opposite: complex emergencies involving
widespread corruption, humanitarian crisis and growing violence. In assessing
these failures, the RAND Corporation argues that the counterterrorism strategy
has been not just strategically out of touch but counterproductive to the
Coalition’s own objectives of defeating terrorism:
Recognizing organized Islamic violence as insurgency, with local and global
aspects, also demands that we face up to its scale, breadth, and shades y
the number of individuals prepared to fight against U.S. forces in the
Muslim world is two orders of magnitude greater than the number of
terrorists U.S. forces have been sent over there to fight y only 1 per cent of
Iraqis approve of terrorism, while over 50 per cent approve of attacks
against U.S. troops y The COIN [counterinsurgency] paradigm exposes
and confronts with danger; the GWOT [Global War on Terror] paradigm
overlooks and aggravates it. (Gompert and Gordon (2008: xxvi); for similar
assessments also see Lopez (2007) and ICoS (2008)).Journal of International Relations and Development
Volume 14, Number 3, 2011
316
Accordingly, crushing an insurgency — particularly after having played an
instrumental role in producing it through offensive operations — simply
validates the grievances of insurgents and strengthens their appeal (Gompert
and Gordon 2008: xxiii). That the very method that was expected to crush an
insurgency actually helped to proliferate it exposes not just the limits of
superior firepower, but the inapplicability of the whole model of conventional
warfare to concluding conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. This problem, or
perhaps conundrum, in which conventional military engagement proliferates
and internationalises the conflict it encounters is partly captured by a paradigm
of conflict described by Rupert Smith (2006) as ‘war amongst the people’. This
form of conflict, according to Smith, lacks a military solution since the
problem it seeks to confront is mostly political.
Yet what is less accounted for in Smith’s analysis, and that of the military
intellectuals who have advanced counterinsurgency along these lines, is the
extent to which counterinsurgency has deceptively little to do with military
expertise. Counterinsurgency is articulated as a military doctrine, yet the forms
of engagement that it calls forth are mostly non-military. Certainly this is not
to understate the lethal operations at work in any military strategy. But while
counterinsurgency involves the use of force, the characteristics that distinguish
it from counterterrorism and intrastate warfare are precisely activities ‘other
than war’ in a context that is nevertheless defined by violent conflict and social
upheaval. While certainly concerned with the elimination of ‘enemies’,
particularly the ‘die-hard’ ones, a defining feature of counterinsurgency
strategy is to attack the insurgents’ ‘will’ (UK MoD 2007: B-2-A-1) and to
demobilise opposing forces by gaining the support or acquiescence of the
population (Canada National Defence 2008: 1–14). In this respect, the
objective is partly to provide an alternative to lethal extermination. While
official accounts may claim it is a re-strategisation of military practice,
counterinsurgency is more accurately an acknowledgement of the limits of
conventional military activity in general. It needs to be understood as a way of
war, but one which relies heavily upon civilian practices. The following section
attempts to situate this point theoretically within a specific reading of
Clausewitz’s ruminations on war. Doing so allows for a subsequent, alternative
reading of counterinsurgency as a mostly civilian form of warfare which
reflects civilian forms of peace interventionism at least as much as military
interventionism.
From war to war by other means
The conventional analytics of war have typically built upon the work of Carl
von Clausewitz, in particular his dictum that war is ‘a mere continuation of
policy by other means’ (Von Clausewitz 1832/1968: 119). For many strategistsColleen Bell
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317
of war this dictum has been treated principally as an expression of the
necessary subordination of war to the political ends of sovereignty, and
therefore as a practical recommendation for the political management of its
aims. Yet as Julian Reid (2006) has insightfully pointed out, for Clausewitz,
war was neither reducible to the instrumental standpoint of the state, nor was it
simply captured by the overburdened dictum of policy by other means. War,
for Clausewitz, was also an ‘act of force’, a ‘conflict of living forces’ and
‘commerce’. These other aspects of war have been influential in the
development of what Reid has termed ‘counter-strategic thought’, that is, the
interrogation of those relations of power that have typically been left
unquestioned within political thought. Thinking in such terms exposes war
not simply as the duelling of two armies, but as a social relation entailing both
productive and divisive dimensions. The latter dimension has informed the
development of a dialectical conception of war, in which war is conceived of as
a principle of opposition or antagonism between two historically rooted and
discrete camps that are politically irreconcilable. This view informed Marx’s
and Engels’ characterisation of modern societies as defined by a ‘more or less
veiled civil war’ (Marx and Engles 1848/1998: 11). And seeing this antagonistic
division between oppressors and oppressed, Antonio Gramsci conceived of a
‘war of position’ in which raising class consciousness of opposing interests
would foment revolutionary change (Gramsci 1971: 229 39). According to
these formulations, war is not simply a utile instrument of state coercion but is
entwined with the development of modern political order. War is the
expression, in other words, of the ‘already determined historically founded
divisions which structure antagonisms within society’ (Reid 2006: 246).
This view of war stands in sharp contrast to Hobbesian-inspired narrative of
state formation, in which modern societies are conceived of as products of the
cessation of war (Luttwak 1999). Yet the idea that war exists within the fabric of
societies as a ‘province of social life’ (Von Clausewitz 1832/1968: 202), rather than
prior to their formation or simply at their demise, has also been picked up in order
to explore how war can serve as a condition of possibility for the emergence of
new forms of subjectivity. In his 1976 lectures published under the title Society
Must be Defended, Michel Foucault (2003) began to develop an argument which
rejected the idea that Western societies were products of the resolution of war.
Rather, he sought to explore how they had come to be shaped by the internal
refinement of war within civil relations. This view, while not exactly a complete
departure from the Marxist view of liberal, capitalist society as a ‘veiled’ civil war,
is unique in suggesting that if war is the expression of historically founded
divisions which structure social relations, its prosecution points not only to its
divisive dimensions, but also to its productive potential. War, in other words, can
be a way of reconstituting social relations by disrupting existing divisions and
creating new possibilities. As Reid points out, for Foucault, the social relationsJournal of International Relations and Development
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that shape Western societies operated ‘dynamically through the inculcation and
dissemination of the force of war’ (Reid 2006: 285).
What is significant about this move in Foucault’s work is not that it
represented a departure from his preceding analyses of disciplinary power in
relation to the functions of social institutions, but rather that it signified a
development in his thinking along these very lines. The schema of war, he
proposed, might provide the optimal political tool for the study of civil society.
To this end, Foucault began his 1976 lectures by inverting Clausewitz’s dictum,
suggesting that war is not so much policy by other means, but that policy is war
by other means. In ways that can be historically specified, power relations
within society are invested with force. Political power is the ‘perpetual use of
silent war’, inscribed into the institutions of society, the economic system,
language and even bodies (Foucault 2003: 12). Thus, while political power is
used to end battles of war, subsequent efforts to establish a reign of peace
within society are also a means of maintaining the ‘disequilibrium’ of relations
of power that were instantiated by the last battle (ibid.: 15). It is the political
framework of civil peace (within the contours of Western modernity),
therefore, which sanctions and reproduces the relations of force manifested
in war. What is typically construed as ‘peace’, a state of peace, a standing down
of the state’s exercise of violence is not, consequently, a condition antithetical
to war. Likewise, activities construed as peaceful, or non-coercive, even
empathetic, do not simply represent a cessation of war. Rather, strategies of
war may function in specific ways on the terrain of peace.
While this inflection of peace with war appears to muddy the conceptual
waters, it has a practical utility. It allows for a consideration of the forms of
political power that emerge, within a context of war, when military dominance
cannot produce victory. As shown in the following section, counterinsurgency
exposes and embodies this dynamic by collapsing the objective to ‘win the war’
into the civilian techniques that are meant to reduce the motivations for conflict.
That is to say, counterinsurgency reformulates the objective of war from defeating
of one’s enemies to securing a population, strategising power to the level of society
and deepening links between military aims and civilian modes of interventionism.
In doing so, counterinsurgency posits itself as a more inclusive, culturally sensitive
and humane way of war, while it simultaneously constitutes the population (in this
case the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan) as its battlespace. In re-orientating
warfare around the life of the population, counterinsurgency effectively sanctions
and reproduces the relations of force manifested in war.
From eliminating enemies to knowing the population
In adding to the increasingly convoluted lines between military and civilian
space and between war and peace within crisis zones, counterinsurgencyColleen Bell
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319
exposes the very dynamic of force within civil relations that Foucault
identified. While counterinsurgency is, on the one hand, concerned with the
elimination of threats, it mobilises an alternative logic: that the threats to be
eliminated are not simply the enemies of the Coalition, but are the enemies of
the people. As such, counterinsurgency takes up a liberal problematic
of population insofar as it takes the life of the people as its primary point of
reference (Mehta 1999). In a ‘war amongst the people’, to recall Smith’s incisive
phrasing, learning about and establishing rapport with the people is usually
more productive than lethal operations (US Army (and Marine Corps) 2006:
1 27; UK MoD 2007: B-3-13; Canada National Defence 2008: 1–14).
Insurgency, therefore, is not so much a problem of enemies as it is a
consequence of the people’s ‘unrequited aspirations’ (Kipp et al. 2006: 9). This
is a strategic shift away from enemy-centric warfare towards addressing and
managing the expectations of the civilian population. To be sure, the
population was also an interest of classical counterinsurgency thinking which,
as Galula famously declared, comprises the battleground of the war (Galula
1964: 8). And as has become clear once again with the growth in insurgencies in
Iraq and Afghanistan, the political nature of these conflicts has been deemed to
mean that the outcome will be decided not between armies, but among the
people.
Yet while counterinsurgency thinking in general represents a movement
away from enemy-centric warfare, contemporary thinking demonstrates a
significant move beyond military knowledge from that of classical formula-
tions. The US Marine Corps’ (1940) Small Wars Manual (SWM), for example,
articulates the centrality of the population, but the substantive focus is on
military conduct and intelligence (often of things, such as boats and animal
husbandry). The Counterinsurgency Field Manual (US Army (and Marina
Corps) 2006), by contrast, focuses much more on what the military does not
know. The manual demonstrates a particular interest in how knowledge is
shared and exchanged within the population and in social networks — an
interest that has as much (if not more) to do with how the population lives as
with how insurgents fight. The knowledge sought is partly about topography
and insurgent activities, but it is especially about the population in historical,
socio-cultural, political and demographic terms. This is evident in the emphasis
on concepts such as ‘race’, ‘culture’, ‘ritual’ and ‘social structure’ in the 2006
Manual (US Army (and Marine Corps) 2006; Canada National Defence 2008:
1–15). Interestingly enough, while these concepts are used in remarkably static
and decontextualised terms (Ansorge forthcoming), they are derived from not
military expertise or skill, but the un-sourced intellectual labour of generations
of social theorists (Price 2009: 66). According to this shift in knowledge and
priorities, the population is not simply seen as an asset, but as a whole datum
of social variables that are be discovered and acted upon.Journal of International Relations and Development
Volume 14, Number 3, 2011
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Modern counterinsurgency also relies on more than ‘psychological
operations’ and ‘reconnaissance’ featured in classical doctrine (US Marine
Corps 1940: Chapters 1 and 6). It is concerned with complex human and
ethnographic intelligence which requires the development of highly unconven-
tional roles for the military, as well as greater integration and involvement of
the experts who hold this specialised knowledge in quantifiable form (Renzi
2006; UK MoD 2007: B-3-7; Canada National Defence 2008: Chapter 7-1–7-2,
6A). Contemporary counterinsurgency calls for strengthening partnerships
between civilian specialists and military actors, including the involvement of
anthropologists and social scientists in programmes of ‘human terrain
mapping’, urban planners, policing and security sector reform. It also calls
for targeted reconstruction efforts that address local culture, community and
networks in ways that will improve military effectiveness, transform the rules
of engagement and elicit desirable behaviour from the population. Thus, while
the SWM offers the homely advice, ‘Don’t dabble in politics’ (US Marine Corps
1940: 45), the US Counterinsurgency Manual takes a starkly different position,
calling for the deliberate collection of socio-cultural knowledge and stressing the
need to improve relations on the ground and deepen cultural awareness (US Army
(and Marine Corps) 2006: 5–24; UK MoD 2007: B-3-7, B-3-12). Soldiers and
commanders are counselled to ‘[l]earn about the people, topography, economy,
history, religion and culture’ and to ‘know every village, road, field, population
group, tribal leader, and ancient grievance’ (US Army (and Marine Corps) 2006:
A-1). Here the dynamics of the ‘local’ are particularly in vogue. Consequently,
‘open source’ information also carries a high premium, while covert intelligence is
to be used sparingly since it may lead to distrust and constrict collaboration from
the population (Gompert and Gordon 2008: xlii).
Getting soldiers and commanders to become knowledgeable, versatile, and
capable of being tasked with diplomacy and public relations, policing, aid and
humanitarian duties, has lead to a number of initiatives which are a product
not simply of military doctrine but of civilian expertise as well. The Human
Terrain System (HTS) (Finney 2008) is one such hybrid effort. The HTS is the
brainchild of military anthropologists (particularly Montgomery McFate and
Joseph Kipp (McFate 2005a; Kipp et al. 2006). It has led to the attachment of
anthropologists and social scientists to the combat brigades in Afghanistan and
Iraq (Mulrine 2007). As one US Army captain noted, the expertise of human
terrain teams has helped commanders gain a ‘well rounded understanding of
[their] battlespace’ without which their actions and those of their soldiers
would be ‘random and inefficient’ (Beall 2009: 1–2). Although it is certainly
true that some anthropologists worked for the national security agencies in the
US and elsewhere in the past, ‘the Cold War acted on anthropology more as a
kind of repressive censorship than (as with physics) a positive reshaping of the
discipline in response to military funding’ (Gusterson 2009: 47). Today, byColleen Bell
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321
contrast, there are unprecedented forms of collaboration in the field and a
notable proliferation of unsolicited cultural and demographic data, which
speaks to more implicit integration between the social sciences and regimes of
national and international security (Yousufzai and Gohar 2005; Giustozzi
2006; Gizabi 2006; International Crisis Group 2006; Lin 2006; Aziz 2007;
Bhattacharjee 2007; Cordesman 2007; Hassan 2007; Liebl 2007). More
explicitly, there are also organisations which compile solicited information in
annotated form for Western agencies on mission (Christine Fair et al. 2006;
GFN-SSR 2007; Tribal Liaison Office 2008a, b). These initiatives are only
likely to intensify with the creation of a high-profile Pentagon funding scheme
called the ‘Minerva Consortia’ which claims to support academic research to
‘open channels of communication’ and create a ‘collaborative and cooperative’
relationship between academia and the national defence industry (Mahnken
2008). Fundable topics at the Minerva Consortia include ‘terrorist organiza-
tions and ideologies’ and ‘future ideological trends within Islam’ (ibid.).
Efforts to know and understand local populations at the centre of strategic
conflicts has increased the involvement of civilian actors in the missions in
Afghanistan and Iraq, even as it has raised a number of ethical questions.
Concern that culture is being misappropriated for strategic advantage has led
some anthropologists, including the American Anthropological Association
(2009), to mount a critique of the HTS and the use of ethnographic knowledge
in warfare. While proponents of infusing national security with anthropology
argue that anthropology is a ‘discipline invented to support warfighting in the
tribal zone’ (McFate 2005a: 43), detractors have argued that the collusion of
social scientists with war efforts compromises and misuses professional ethics
and adds to the militarisation of academic knowledge that is now several
decades in the making. In this respect, the HTS has been denounced as a form
of ‘mercenary anthropology’ (Gonzales 2007) that is mostly designed to help
the army ‘aim better’ (Sahlins, quoted in Jacobsen 2008). Recalling
anthropology’s role in advancing Western imperialism — a tradition that is
well documented (Hooker 1963; Asad 1973) — an organisation called the
Network of Concerned Anthropologists (NCA 2009) formed to challenge,
most recently in book form, the witting or unwitting use of anthropological
knowledge and expertise in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The importance of interrogating the ethical status of the HTS and other
established links between civilian knowledge and national security cannot be
overstated. Yet there is also a subtler point worth addressing that reveals
notable links between the logic of counterinsurgency and that of humanitarian,
development and peace interventionism. Some defenders of the HTS, such as
McFate — who unequivocally argues that anthropology has always been
(and apparently should remain) the ‘handmaiden of colonialism’ (McFate
2005b: 24) — offer a clear basis for starkly exposing the imperial fibre ofJournal of International Relations and Development
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counterinsurgency. Yet this position is only one end of the spectrum of
thinking that sees a legitimate role for civilian social science in the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. At the other end is a comparatively restrained narrative
emphasising that social scientists have a role to play in mitigating the horrors of
war. To paraphrase one member of a human terrain team in Iraq: the purpose of
providing open source, socio-cultural information to the military is precisely to
save lives and promote non-lethal operations (e-mail communication with
member of the HTS, 21 August 2009). According to this view, social scientists
need not agree with the justifications for the particular war in question nor have
an interest in defending national security. Rather, their involvement in increasing
cultural awareness and sensitivity is said to play a decisive role in harm
reduction, conflict prevention and resolution (Lucas 2009: 4).
The similarities of this logic to that of contemporary humanitarian, develop-
ment and peace interventionism in zones of crisis are immediately recogni-
sable.1 While some rationales for counterinsurgency, such as that of McFate,
demonstrate a generic, militaristic agenda in their advocacy for civilian
expertise, others express a distinctive liberal philosophy of peace which is well
established in theories of peace-building and among international development
agencies, doctrines of foreign aid and some NGOs. According to this logic,
blunt force may suppress conflict, but only the building blocks of peace can
resolve and prevent it. As Boutros Boutros-Ghali argued in rather pragmatic
terms in the early 1990s, the international community needed ‘action to identify
and support structures which will tend to solidify peace in order to avoid a
relapse into conflict’ (Boutros-Ghali 1992: 32). A new tone was set for this era
of liberal internationalism that emphasised preventing and resolving conflict,
promoting good government and the rule of law, building representative
institutions, advancing security sector reform, strengthening civil society and
so on. It is precisely these tools of peace that are advocated in counter-
insurgency strategy. Just as war, once confined to the disciplinary strictures of
military and strategic studies, has become central to international humanitar-
ian and development discourse (Duffield 2001), the reverse has also occurred.
Contemporary international peace and development discourse has become
central to strategic thought. Following on the development of contemporary
counterinsurgency’s focus on the population, the final section of this article
lays out this connection in detail. It shows how modern counterinsurgency
takes its inspiration as much from the lessons of liberal peace interventionism
as from classical military doctrine.
From liberal peace to counterinsurgency
Counterinsurgency is promoted as a relatively humane, inclusive and effective
way of war. As such, it is concerned as much with the use of legitimating tacticsColleen Bell
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323
as with the use of coercive ones. Accordingly, military strategists argue that a
strong counterinsurgency campaign uses lethal force sparingly, looking less like
war per se and more like robust foreign aid and assistance alongside carefully
articulated publicity that includes savvy diplomatic manoeuvring (Kilcullen
2009: 16). The importance of this approach to shaping the battlespaces of
Afghanistan and Iraq is prefigured by the endorsement of the US Army’s
doctrine by prominent human rights legal experts, including Sarah Sewell of
Harvard University’s Carr Centre for Human Rights, who wrote the
introduction to the US Counterinsurgency Manual’s Chicago University Press
edition. It is evinced by the strategic value attributed to protecting human
rights, promoting the rule of law and good governance (US Army (and Marine
Corps) 2006: 1–24; UK MoD 2007: A-2-10, B-1-1–B-1-4; Canada National
Defence 2008: 2–14). Despite being a military doctrine, contemporary
counterinsurgency has much to say about the promotion of peace.
This view is, in fact, the contention of some prominent voices in peace
circles, despite the perception that Coalition forces and humanitarian agencies
have incompatible politics or that humanitarian space has been compromised
by Coalition counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq (Jaimet 2006).
Contrary to these views, Hugo Slim argues that liberal counterinsurgency ‘in
its best form’ shares much in common with the concerns and methods of
humanitarian and development work (Slim 2004: 34). For Slim, the problem
presented by the intersection of these different form of intervention ‘is not one
of cooptation of humanitarian agencies by Coalition powers, but genuine
moral overlap’ (ibid.: 44). Both, he continues, are integrally committed to the
advancement of liberalism as the most legitimate and desirable form of social
organisation.
This united objective is consistent with the deepening synthesis between
security and development in international relations (Duffield 2001). Since the
close of the Cold War, the rationale that security requires development, and
vice versa, has spread exponentially. Today the connection is considered to be
axiomatic, forming the basis of international development policy for many
Western states (DFID 1997, 2005; Government of Canada 2005). While it
might be concluded that the merging of security and development represent a
corruption of the former by the latter, the development and aid industries have
been critically assessed as having an enduring connection to Western security
interests (Duffield 2007). The explicit nature of the connection today holds that
alienation and exclusion caused by poverty and lack of opportunities will be
exploited by terrorist organisations to increase support for their cause.
Insurgent populations, violent networks and criminal trades are identified
within this policy framework as the new global threats that the West must
address (ibid.: 127; DAC 2003; Abrahamsen 2005). Across all development
sectors there has been an increase in spending towards countries, either as alliesJournal of International Relations and Development
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324
or neutral frontline states, which are considered to have a significant role to
play in the War on Terror (Beall 2005). What is suggested here is that
technologies of building peace in zones of crisis have for sometime been
ideologically integrated with the basic spirit of contemporary counter-
insurgency. The explicit return of counterinsurgency doctrine among Western
states is consistent with dominant trends in international peace and
development strategies, leading to an expansive and universalising moral logic
that unites security and development as it widens the concept of security to
account for populations affected by conflict.
The overlap between security and development is reflected in the remedial
rationale that sets up strategies of peace interventionism as the utile
instruments of long-term low-intensity warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan (US
Army (and Marine Corps) 2006: 2-1; US Army 2008: C-1). In Canada’s
doctrine, the military is merely ‘one part of a COIN campaign that will involve
a whole variety of other government and non-governmental agencies’ (Canada
National Defence 2008: 1 14). In other words, humanitarian, aid and conflict
management techniques honed by various international actors are thought to
be perhaps the most prevalent and efficient means of responding to insurgency.
From this perspective as well, the union between conflict and deprivation in the
context of insurgency means that the basic problem facing military strategists
‘comes not in the form of terrorism or ambitious powers, but from fragile
states either unable or unwilling to provide for the most basic needs of their
people’ (US Army 2008: Foreword). Hence, like the problematic of security in
peace interventionism, the aim of counterinsurgency doctrine is not battling an
opposing force, but ‘conflict transformation’; that is, the process of ‘reducing
the means and motivations for violent conflict while developing more viable,
peaceful alternatives for the competitive pursuit of political and socioeconomic
aspirations’ (US Army 2008: 1 6; Canada National Defence 2008: 1 14).
Reflecting the motivations of international development, in counterinsurgency
the centres of gravity are the populations of ineffective, fragile, states.
Indeed the re-emergence of counterinsurgency presents an important, if
belated, contribution to the convergence of different forms of intervention
currently referred to in policy circles as the ‘integrated mission’. First proposed
in the UN-commissioned Brahimi Report (2000), the integrated mission is an
‘overall political-strategic crisis management framework’ whose task is to bring
‘resources and activities closer together and ensure that they are applied in a
coherent way across the political, military, developmental and humanitarian
sectors’ (Eide et al. 2005: 5). While the integrated mission is a concept specific
to UN peace operations as part of an effort to achieve greater coherence
between different forms of intervention, it has become a metaphor for the
convergence of conflict management tactics in complex emergencies char-
acterised by political instability, economic collapse and humanitarian crisis inColleen Bell
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325
conflict and post-conflict contexts. According to the present-day recognition
that ‘three domains of operational work are intertwined, and thus difficult to
address separately’ (Miller and Rudnick 2008), integration thinking is
connected to a whole host of other policy terms that follow on its heels.
Today, the ‘comprehensive approach’, ‘whole of government’ approach,
‘3 lines of operation’, ‘joined-upness’, ‘three block wars’ and ‘unity of effort’
are widespread in foreign and international policy discourse. The difference
between these terms may reflect separate institutional origins — from the
OECD, donor states, the UN or the US Army — but their meaning is
effectively the same (Eide et al. 2005) and several of them have been directly
instructive in the formulation of contemporary counterinsurgency (US Army
(and Marine Corps) 2006: 2-1–14; US Army 2008: 1–4; Miller and Rudnick
2008: 14–15). What they tell us is precisely what contemporary counter-
insurgency tells us: that reducing conflict and promoting stability requires the
scrupulous mobilisation of every element of society.
According to this logic, these wars can only be won through a compre-
hensive framework for governance that may begin with the military but must
reach into the broad areas of what it means to secure, indeed to constitute,
civilian life: formal and informal economies, structures of authority, client-
patron relationships, political participation, culture, law, identity, ethnic and
linguistic particularities, social structure, material needs and so on (US Army
(and Marine Corps) 2006: Ch. 2–4; Brown 2008: 354). Hence, counter-
insurgency is guided by the principle not of ‘total war’ but of total governance.
In seeking to mobilise ‘unity of every effort’ its premise holds that
contemporary threats to global peace and security are primarily a problem
of underdevelopment, illiberal social order and inadequate governance in
fragile states. Certainly, Afghanistan and Iraq are currently confined to a
special category of threat, but the basic view that the salvation of Southern
states lies with their liberalisation is widespread in Western foreign and
international development policy (Escobar 1999; Duffield 2007).
Proponents of the re-emergence of counterinsurgency have rested their
policy advice on the changing nature of the opposition encountered,
information technology and globalisation (Kilcullen 2006b). What is especially
unique about counterinsurgency, however, is that the way in which it is
intimately bound up with an international interventionary culture has reshaped
the face of warfare in general — involving advancements in a ‘humanitarian
ethic’ for war, the blurring of lines between martial and peace efforts and
actors, deepening interagency work and the compulsion to coordinate and
communicate results at greater and greater frequency and across ever greater
numbers of international actors. As a policy shift that subordinates enemy-
centric warfare to governance and reform, therefore, counterinsurgency does
not so much co-opt the policy trends that have animated development andJournal of International Relations and Development
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326
peace interventionism for some time but rather builds on them. The re-
emergence of counterinsurgency indicates that the conflicts at hand are not
primarily military concerns but are considered to be the consequence, in the
immediate sense, of inadequate knowledge of the host society, an over-
emphasis on conventional military strategy, and the scourge of under-
development and illiberal social organisation. Addressing wide-ranging policy
deficiencies is central to the means by which counterinsurgency warfare is
waged. Moreover, this understanding of the problem of conflict and its
solution is not merely reflected in the concerns of development and peace
interventionism, but leaves counterinsurgency strategy as the attempt — from
the military domain — to catch up with them. It suggests that counter-
insurgency, rather than simply misappropriating development and peace
efforts, earnestly follows and replicates them.
Conclusion
While counterinsurgency doctrine is complimentary to aspects of classical
military doctrine in several respects, this article has sought to trace another
lineage, finding contemporary counterinsurgency thinking to be very much
fixed to current trends in humanitarian, development and peace intervention-
ism. More than simply a military strategy, counterinsurgency is deeply tied to
practices in liberal peace interventionism and global governance that link
the social, political and economic character of societies and peoples
to international security. Examining counterinsurgency in this way certainly
constitutes critical commentary on the philosophy of peace that pervades
liberal internationalism. With this view, dominant philosophies of peace
appear as recurrent attempts to foster a ‘victor’s peace’ that pursue pacification
for a thin stability in opposition to perceived threats (Richmond 2006: 376).
But counterinsurgency’s connection to liberal peace thinking also illuminates
the shifting face of Western warfare. In other modes of warfare, a way of war
may be understood as an art shaped by its own economy of discipline and
reason; by contrast, much of the substance of counterinsurgency and the
practices that it calls forth exist beyond military doctrine and expertise.
Counterinsurgency rides on the coattails of the moral trusteeship over life
embodied in contemporary international development and peace activism. Just
as ‘development assumes a teleology to the extent that it proposes that the
“natives” will sooner or later be reformed’ (Escobar 1999: 53), counter-
insurgency centralises this objective within the schema of war. And as a
response to the limited efficacy of lethal force and the mobilisation of civilian
expertise in international practices, counterinsurgency may be the vogue of
long-term occupation in demanding that the objectives of liberal organisationsYou can also read
