‘The Population Is the Enemy’: Control, Behaviour, and Counter-insurgency in Central Helmand Province, Afghanistan

Abstract

American counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine places a war zone’s population in an analytically salient position and is therefore premised on assumptions based in social theory. This military doctrine, institutionalised in the US Army Field Manual FM 3–24, makes explicit arguments about the social roots of substate armed conflict and posits tactical and operational methods to resolve them in favour of stability. It argues that political reforms and service provision can resolve or at least sufficiently suppress those roots. FM 3–24 draws on the anecdotal best practises of various practitioner-theorists with involvement in wars of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century and derives a model often referred to as ‘population-centric’ counter-insurgency,¹ rather than providing an empirical basis for these assumptions and arguments. The most prominent of these practitioner-theorists, the French military officer David Galula, even referred to counter-insurgency as ‘the conduct of sociological warfare’.² Despite the input of a small number of social scientists in the doctrine’s formulation, the academic community has not rigorously engaged with the assumptions of counter-insurgency doctrine from a social theory perspective. Rather, most engagement from the scholarly community has focused on the ethics of social scientists’ involvement in advising and informing military organisations, doctrine, and operations. While ethical debates are important, the social assumptions underlying counter-insurgency doctrine demand substantive engagement from social scientists and sociologists in particular.