Andrew Exum passes on his new Boston Review piece on Afghanistan. And maybe Ex is seized with the holiday spirit, but he’s declaring an end to what he calls the “Third Counterinsurgency Era.” What he means is that earlier eras of COIN were fought for colonialist or imperialist reasons, while “the United States has, unlike France or the United Kingdom, usually fought its counterinsurgency campaigns—in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—on behalf of host nations.”

His argument that the era is over isn’t actually an argument; it’s a declaration of hope. “It is best to avoid such conflicts in the first place,” Exum writes. “I, then, am one of many hoping that the Third Counterinsurgency Era will soon draw to a close.” I know this kind of sentiment rankles some of his critics, who see either an insincerity on his part (that I know isn’t there) or a naivete to the institutional prerogatives that the COINdinistas are building into the defense bureaucracy (and there I’m unconvinced). Wouldn’t a better tactic be to say, Even such counterinsurgency theorist-practitioners as Andrew Exum believe that we should avoid counterinsurgency whenever humanly possible?

I’ll table that, but in the spirit of self-criticism, I’ll note this pitch-perfect insight of Ex’s:

The goal of contemporary counterinsurgency is less to propagate empire than to end a conflict. So the humanitarian means it often employs have co-opted many in the progressive community who grew up in the post-Vietnam and postcolonial eras suspicious of all things military.

I resemble that remark! Even if I think it applies to an older generation. Mine (ours, since Ex is only slightly older than I am) didn’t grow up with a suspicion of all things military; we can fairly be called more bellicose than our parents, I suspect, even on the left.

This, however, goes a bit off the rails:

And it is no surprise that the people who advocated for and executed the counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan are rarely from the same collection of neoconservative ideologues and incompetent field commanders who led the United States and its allies into Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively.

“Rarely,” I guess, except for the Kagans, and the Weekly Standard, and AEI, and every neoconservative who washed their intellectual failures in the blood of counterinsurgency.