That’s me, reading these Michael Cohen quotes to Noah Shachtman:

“If there is one constant in population-centric COIN it is the element of violence and coercion against a civilian population,” e-mails the New America Foundation’s Michael Cohen, using the military acronym for counterinsurgency. “Certainly, that was the case in Malaya, Algeria, Kenya and Vietnam — to name a few places often cited as COIN successes. Now granted, the level of coercion varied significantly. But whether it was the Briggs plan, the Battle of Algiers or the Phoenix program (and its precursor with the Strategic Hamlet program) coercion was endemic. This was even the case in Iraq, although the majority of violence there was perpetrated by a third party.”

He adds, “Has a population-centric COIN operation ever succeeded that didn’t rely on coercion and violence against the civilian population, which is near I understand it, is what we are trying to do in Afghanistan?”

Lots of things are being conflated here. Phoenix was, to be only slightly reductive, an assassination program. It was not in any relevant sense “population-centric.” For a really good and subtle account of the swoop of the whole of French counterinsurgency in Algeria, break out the Gil Merom. Briggs and the Strategic Hamlets has some relevance to population-centric counterinsurgency in the abstract. But just not to this debate, since we’re not engaging in forced resettlement. The idea that it’s a bad thing that we’re not “rely[ing] on coercion and violence against the civilian population” is just bizarre.

Gen. McChrystal said in his recent congressional testimony that his campaign plan is not a doctrinaire counterinsurgency strategy, and that strikes me as rather unproblematic. Different cases require different approaches. FM 3-24 wasn’t chiseled onto a stone tablet. And even if it was, it doesn’t ever look at any of the examples cited by Michael and say, “You company commanders should do shit like that.”

But the broader point: there are lots of good arguments against lots of aspects of the Afghanistan war. There are good arguments against counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. But there are no good arguments of the form “In these materially-different cases, lots of bloodshed occurred; but now we’re not shedding so much blood? I dunno about this.”