Raphael S. Cohen
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in late summer of 2021 brought more than just the collapse of a country and diminished American prestige. It discredited an idea that was part of U.S. military strategy for the better part of two decades—population-centric counterinsurgency. Premised on Mao Tse-tung’s famed analogy likening guerrillas needing popular support to fish needing the sea, the theory posited that by winning over the population through a series of economic and political inducements, a government could starve an insurgency of its lifeblood. Advocates pointed to lessons from Cold War insurgencies like the Malayan Emergency and Vietnam to argue that this approach held the key to winning the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
America’s fascination with population-centric counterinsurgency proved short-lived. For a time, the adoption of this strategy during the 2006 Iraq “surge” seemed to vindicate this theory. But a similar “surge” in forces and shift in tactics failed to yield comparable success in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010. And while Iraq remained relatively stable for a period, eventually the Islamic State came roaring back in 2013. And so by the time the United States ceded Afghanistan back to the Taliban in 2021, many analysts viewed population-centric counterinsurgency theory as an ill-conceived recipe for costly, bloody defeat.
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