Abstract
Public opinion surveys have been used in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to evaluate support for counterinsurgents and insurgents. Insufficient attention has been given to the limitations of surveys when used as metrics in counterinsurgency (CI) efforts. The chapter delineates what is of value and what is dubious in the relations between evidence-based CI and survey research, entering into dialog with Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla (2009). Examples from existing survey research are analyzed on a series of topics: the U.S. as a hegemonic actor; Muslim-majority countries’ reactions to U.S. strategy and tactics; and several specific CI issues in Iraq, the Gaza Strip, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The chapter draws a sharp distinction between military fieldwork and public opinion research. Military fieldwork tends to focus on conflict zones and no-go areas, with shifting boundaries and populations. Public opinion research surveys pre-existing polities with historical and political origins of their own that are not interlocked with researchers’ assumptions: only the second lends itself to correctly executed random sampling. Finally, using surveys to learn whether and how a national population distinguishes between various militant groups is recommended for further research, with concrete value for evidence-based CI.
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Notes
- 1.
Kilcullen, p. 23. Here is the full passage:
The second implication of this massive asymmetry is that because its military superiority gives the United States the capability to destroy any other nation-state on the face of the earth, belief in the fundamentally benign intent of the United States becomes a critical factor in other countries’ strategic calculus. Intelligence threat assessments typically examine the twin factors of capability and intent, focusing on capability because intent is subject to much more rapid and unpredictable change. But the destructive capability of the United States is so asymmetrically huge vis-à -vis every other nation on Earth that it poses what international relations theorists call a “security dilemma.” Unless other countries can be assured of America’s benign intent, they must rationally treat the United States as a potential threat and take steps to balance and contain American power or defend themselves against it. And efforts to improve U.S. military capacity, which American leaders may see as defensive, may therefore have a negative overall effect on U.S. national security because of the responses they generate.
- 2.
Kilcullen’s full argument runs as follows: “Because capabilities for irregular or unconventional conflict are much cheaper to acquire than those for conventional conflict, and require less hardware and industrial capacity, they are paradoxically less likely to be developed. This is because, through the military – industrial complex,’ a substantial portion of the American economy, and numerous jobs in almost every congressional district, are linked to the production of conventional war-fighting capacity. It takes factories, jobs, and industrial facilities to build battleships and bombers, but aid workers, linguists and Special Forces operators are vastly cheaper and do not require the same industrial base. So shifting spending priorities onto currently unconventional forms of warfare would cost jobs and votes in the congressional districts of the very people who control that spending. This makes it structurally difficult…Hence…the pattern of asymmetric warfare, with the United States adopting a basically conventional approach but being opposed by enemies who seek to sidestep American conventional power, is likely to be a long-standing trend” (pp. 26–27).
- 3.
A table showing this Gallup question back to 1987 is available at http://www.pollingreport.com/defense.htm. Alternately, see the iPoll Databank at the Roper Center, University of Connecticut, http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/data_access/ipoll/ipoll.html.
- 4.
Here is his full argument: “I have noted that during the initial stage of development of an extremist presence, there is usually a local opposition to the terrorist group (albeit often cowed, impotent or intimidated). But during the intervention phase, the entire local dynamic shifts. The presence of the intervening outsiders causes local groups to coalesce in a fusion response, closing ranks against the external threat… A high-profile, violent, or foreign-based intervention tends to increase support for the takfiri terrorists, who can paint themselves as defenders of local people against external influence… Although the terrorists may have been seen as outsiders until this point, their identity as such has been not fixed but “contingent”: as soon as foreigners or infidels appear in the area, by comparison the terrorists are able to paint themselves as relative locals…. The completely understandable (and necessary) imperative for the international community to intervene and prevent extremist contagion can thus act as a provocation, causing the next stage in the process: rejection” (Kilcullen, pp. 37–38).
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Ramsay, C. (2012). Public Opinion Research and Evidence-Based Counterinsurgency. In: Lum, C., Kennedy, L. (eds) Evidence-Based Counterterrorism Policy. Springer Series on Evidence-Based Crime Policy, vol 3. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0953-3_13
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