LILLIAN FIGG-FRANZOI
With the official closure of the NATO ISAF mission at the start of the New Year in 2015, the West’s involvement in Afghanistan will demand analysis and reflection for decades to come. As one of the most important intervention exercises in modern history, it will be essential to reflect upon the Afghanistan campaign, and its gradual unravelling. As a small contribution to this discussion, I reflect here upon a concept that, in the first decade of the 2000s, dominated the intervention’s strategic paradigm, nominally referred to as the “cult of counterinsurgency”.
The phrase “cult of counterinsurgency” was made popular by former the UK Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative to Afghanistan, Sir Sherhard Cowper-Coles. In his 2011 memoir-policy-critique, Cables From Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign, he outlined the axioms of counterinsurgency that may have contributed to stabilisation in Afghanistan from a security perspective, but through its domination of intervention strategy may have also contributed to the mission’s continued failures.
While the counterinsurgency doctrine helped war strategists adjust to street-conflict, in contrast to conventional battlefield conflict, and while the doctrine also identified the characteristics of new kinetic warfare, it has arguably overstretched itself when dealing with the very real elements that constitute the necessary “3-D” responses to modern instability, namely, defense, diplomacy and development. As pointed out by Cowper-Coles, counterinsurgency quickly became a misguided goal rather than what it was designed to be, namely, a tactic. Yet, In the case of Afghanistan, we now realise that the strategy of the long-term operation should not have been a military one that primarily involved countering insurgents (Ringsmose & Thruelsen 2010; Mikolashek & Kalic 2011); such a strategy now appears to have been overstretched.
