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I ran into Tara McKelvey at a thing the other night and she told me to keep an eye out for a forthcoming piece she did for Columbia Journalism Review on Tom Ricks. Well,the piece is out now and I haven’t finished reading it yet, largely because this is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me:
In The Gamble [Ricks] is particularly enthusiastic about counterinsurgency, an approach to small-scale war known in the military as coin, which in its most recent incarnation places less of an emphasis on killing insurgents than on protecting the civilians and attempting to win their “hearts and minds.”
Ahhhhhh Dear God stop saying that please let this misunderstanding die. Tara: I am not picking on you. This is ubiquitous. Counterinsurgency is not not not about hearts and minds, no matter how many times over the years you’ve read that it is. Even Sir Gerald Templer, the British officer who suppressed the Malayan insurgency, expressed regret over coining (har har) what he called "that nauseating phrase."
Think back to our recent counterinsurgency experiences and the point becomes clear. At no time did the U.S. set its aims back more stunningly than when we presumed that Iraqis and Afghans would rally to the nebulous cause of "freedom." That sort of ideological effort is the actual meaning of "hearts and minds," and experience demonstrates that amidst an insurgency it’s the strategic equivalent of prayer. Counterinsurgency, by contrast, gains its force from the recognition that offering up nice ideological platitudes is gibberish when a population is getting killed at will; has no plausible path to material prosperity; and no legitimate means to settle its grievances.
In short, counterinsurgency isn’t about winning hearts and minds. It’s about tending to heartbeats, stomachs and wallets. (Yes, that’s a tweaking of a previous formulation of mine.) For a better exposition of this distinction, viewed through the framework of legitimacy, read this PDF. Now let’s never make this mistake again, OK?
*Confused by my headline? Then read this. I am proud to note that if you Google "kufi smack Jim Jones," I wrote the third and fourth links that pop up.
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“It’s about tending to heartbeats, stomachs and wallets. (Yes, that’s a tweaking of a previous formulation of mine.)”
That’s also a terrible idea. The way most HA is handled in the country amounts to treating Afghans like dogs who will take any treat you toss out of a truck. It fundamentally misunderstands the social and cultural and political side of COIN as much as the shorthand “hearts and minds” (though you can get some inventive combinations of the two).
Thing is, reducing COIN to economic considerations (stomachs and wallets) and physical security (heartbeats) only gets you like 1/3 of the way there.
I know you know this, but I’m just saying.
No, it’s a fair point, and the cultural elements at work are underappreciated. But I want some more-accurate shorthand to replace “hearts and minds,” otherwise the fucking phrase will live forever. How would you add/replace/tweak mine?
Umm, Spencer, this bug won’t get killed dead. Did you check out the URL of the very PDF you’re citing as drawing the distinction properly?
As I see it, we’re never going to win hearts and minds over there. They no more want to be us, or be like us, than we want to be them or be like them. That doesn’t, however, mean that very different peoples, who don’t particularly like or admire each other can’t work together. We DO need to get to that point, and better that than being despised, or the object of revenge attacks.
One thing that annoys me — something this blog and much other popular writing on the topic is guilty of — is talking like there was no such thing as counterinsurgency before Kilcullen et al. started pushing for population-centric counterinsurgency. That is to say that people use the term to mean only the latest version of an activity that’s been around for a very, very long time. And it’s not like it’s a new term to describe an old activity. The press spoke of counterinsurgency in the Philippines and El Salvador back in the 1980s. British gulags in Kenya in 1960 were also a form of counterinsurgency, as were Sudanese campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the Nuba mountain.
Maybe I’m nitpicking, and maybe being more specific would just result in a longer (and less catchy) acronym, but as long as we’re trying to be precise, let’s do it all the way.