Abstract
The book in which this chapter appears comes at a special historical moment: the last months of the Western combat commitment against the Afghan insurgency and the first months of the Malian and wider North West African commitment. French, Canadian, and Dutch combat units have left Afghanistan. The US and UK combat roles are to end in 2014 by the latest, but the pace of departure is accelerating. Planning for extraction of heavy equipment is an increasing preoccupation, complicated by Afghanistan’s distance from the sea, and the complexities of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO’s) relationship with Pakistan and the Russian Federation.1 A good enough endgame, leaving behind Western trainers for the Afghan Security Forces and perhaps US drone bases, with associated force protection, is now the limit of NATO’s admitted aspiration in South Central Asia. But in mid-January 2013, amid considerable public anxiety, France committed troops and aircraft in Operation Serval, at the request of the Government of Mali, to repel Islamist advances, supported by American transport and command assets, and small specialist detachments from European Union (EU) states.
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Notes
For an angry example, attacking the credentials of theorists and experts in COIN, see C. Christine Fair, ‘The COIN of the Realm... Is a Wooden Nickel’, Time, US, 13 March 2013, http://nation.time.com/2013/03/13/the-coin-of-the-realm-is-a-wooden-nickel/. More measured accounts have also been critical of the quality of American and British decision-makers responsible for recent COIN: ‘A cull should be instigated of the senior commanders not fit for their role in the war at hand. promotion systems need to be torn up and replaced’. General Andrew MacKay, quoted in Frank Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 117.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War within the War for Afghanistan (London and New York: Random House, 2012), pp. 331–2.
Rory Stewart, ‘The Plane to Kabul’, in Can Intervention Work, eds Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus (New York: Norton Co, 2011).
Max G. Manwaring and John T. Fishel, Uncomfortable Wars Revisited (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006).
John Mackinlay, The Insurgent Archipelago: From Mao to Bin Laden (London: Hurst, 2009).
Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).
Joseph Holliday, ‘The Assad Regime: From Counterinsurgency to Civil War’, Middle East Security Report 8 (Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of War, 2013).
For a critical analysis of the Russian style in COIN see Yuri M. Zhukov, ‘Counterinsurgency in a Non-Democratic State: The Russian Example’, in The Routledge Companion to Insurgency and Counter Insurgency, eds Paul Rich and Isabelle Duyvesteyn (London: Routledge, 2011).
Cyn Ganguly and David P. Fiddler, eds, India and Counterinsurgency: Lessons Learned (Oxford: Routledge, 2000), pp. 207–24.
Mark Urban, Task Force Black: The Explosive True Story of the SAS and the Secret War in Iraq (London: Little Brown, 2010).
‘One important secret that had never been reported... was the existence of the CIA’s 3000 man covert army in Afghanistan. Called CTPT, for Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, the army consisted mostly of Afghans, the cream of the crop in the CIA’s opinion... Paid, trained and functioning tool of the CIA... authorised by President Bush. The teams conducted operations designed to kill or capture Taliban insurgents, but also often went into tribal areas to pacify and win support’. Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars: The Inside Story (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010), p. 8.
At worst, this situation could be portrayed as the self-interested passing on of danger, summed up and denounced by Martin Shaw as ‘risk-transfer militarism and the legitimacy of war after Iraq’, in 11 September 2001: A Turning Point in International and Domestic Law?, eds Paul Eden and Thérèse O’Donnell (Ardsley, New York: Transnational Publishers, 2004).
Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007), p. 274.
See Jim Frederick, Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death (New York: Harmony Books, Random House, 2010).
Thomas Rid, ‘Deterrence Beyond the State: The Israeli Experience’, Contemporary Security Policy 33, no. 1 (April 2012): 124–47.
Robert Pape and James K. Feldman, Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (New York: NYRB Classics, 2006).
George-Henri Soutou, ‘How History Shapes War’, in Oxford Handbook of War, eds Julian Lindley-French and Yves Boyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 54.
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Schulte, P. (2014). ‘What Do We Do If We Are Never Going to Do This Again?’ Western Counter-insurgency Choices after Iraq and Afghanistan. In: Gventer, C.W., Jones, D.M., Smith, M.L.R. (eds) The New Counter-insurgency Era in Critical Perspective. Rethinking Political Violence series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336941_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336941_18
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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