Table Of ContentThe Political Impossibility
of Modern Counterinsurgency
Columbia Studies in Terrorism and Irregular Warfare
Columbia Studies in Terrorism
and Irregular Warfare
BRUCE HOFFMAN, SERIES EDITOR
This series seeks to fill a conspicuous gap in the burgeoning literature on ter-
rorism, guerrilla warfare, and insurgency. The series adheres to the highest
standards of scholarship and discourse and publishes books that elucidate the
strategy, operations, means, motivations, and effects posed by terrorist, guer-
rilla, and insurgent organizations and movements. It thereby provides a solid
and increasingly expanding foundation of knowledge on these subjects for
students, established scholars, and informed reading audiences alike.
Ami Pedahzur, The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle
Against Terrorism
Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger, Jewish Terrorism in Israel
Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West
Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works:
The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Resistance
William C. Banks, New Battlefields/Old Laws: Critical Debates on
Asymmetric Warfare
Blake W. Mobley, Terrorism and Counterintelligence: How Terrorist Groups
Elude Detection
Michael W. S. Ryan, The Deep Battle: Decoding Al-Qaeda’s Strategy:
The Deep Battle Against America
David H. Ucko and Robert Egnell, Counterinsurgency in Crisis:
Britain and the Challenges of Modern Warfare
Bruce Hoffman and Fernando Reinares, editors, The Evolution of the
Global Terrorist Threat: From 9/11 to Osama bin Laden’s Death
Boaz Ganor, Global Warning: The Rationality of Modern Islamist Terorism
and the Challenge to the Liberal Democratic World
The Political
Impossibility
of Modern
Counterinsurgency
Strategic Problems, Puzzles,
and Paradoxes
M . L . R . S M I T H
and DAV I D M A R T I N J O N E S
Columbia
University
Press
New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, M. L. R. (Michael Lawrence Rowan), –
The political impossibility of modern counterinsurgency : strategic problems,
puzzles, and paradoxes / M. L. R. Smith and David Martin Jones.
pages cm. — (Columbia studies in terrorism and irregular warfare)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN ---- (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN ---- (e-book)
. Counterinsurgency—History—st century. . Terrorism—History—st century.
I. Jones, David Martin, – II. Title.
U.S
.'—dc
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable
acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States of America
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cover design: Fifth Letter
cover art: The Noun Project, Creative Commons
References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither
the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that
may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
1 What Is Counterinsurgency Meant to Counter? The Puzzle
of Insurgency
2 Counterinsurgency and Strategy: Problems and Paradoxes
3 Counterinsurgency and the Ideology of Modernization
4 The Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency and Globalization
5 The Illusion of Tradition: Myths and Paradoxes of British
Counterinsurgency
6 The Puzzle of Counterinsurgency and Escalation
Conclusion
Notes 187
Bibliography 225
Index 247
Acknowledgments
I
n many ways, this book represents the culmination of work
on the relationship between strategy and violent nonstate ac-
tors stretching back the best part of three decades. The content
of the chapters that have come to compose this volume has passed
through many iterations, both verbal and written, over many years,
beginning with doctoral research in the mid-s and extending to
the teaching of courses on strategy and counterinsurgency, first at the
National University of Singapore in the early s, then at the Royal
Naval College in the mid-s, and finally at King’s College London
from the early s. David Martin Jones and I thank the editors and
reviewers of the following journals and periodicals for being recep-
tive to our work throughout these years: International Affairs, Review
of International Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Small Wars and
Insurgencies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Cambridge Review of
International Affairs, The World Today, and World Defence Systems.
We are very grateful for their support. Likewise, we extend grateful
appreciation to our friends and colleagues Celeste Ward Gventer and
John Stone. Celeste provided acute insights into the U.S. policymak-
ing world that would come to elevate counterinsurgency to a position
of explicit importance in military and defense circles. From her skep-
tical and questioning approach, based on hard experience of the most
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
troubled times during the Coalition occupation of Iraq, we learned
much. John is a fine strategic theorist, and he undoubtedly helped re-
fine many points of our thinking, thus enhancing the quality of the
analysis in the following pages. We are very appreciative of all the
excellent work that Anne Routon, Whitney Johnson, and the staff of
Columbia University Press have put into commissioning the volume
and bringing the manuscript to publication. We are particularly grate-
ful to the anonymous readers who reviewed both the initial proposal
and final manuscript for their many helpful insights and recommen-
dations. Finally, we owe much thanks to Bruce Hoffman, the editor of
the series in which this study appears, for his always pluralistic, open-
handed approach to academic inquiry and his constant encourage-
ment in supporting the publication of this volume.
MLRS
London
Introduction
I
“
still thought we had a good chance of turning things round
merely by adjusting our counter-insurgency tactics, reflect-
ing lessons learned in Malaya, Algeria, Vietnam or North-
ern Ireland,” Sherard Cowper-Coles, the former British ambassador
to Afghanistan, lamented. The memoir of his time as the United
Kingdom’s man in Kabul charts his mounting disenchantment. Yet
Cowper-Coles began his posting believing in the efficacy of counter-
insurgency—or COIN, as it popularly known. However, after sitting
through one too many PowerPoint presentations, replete with abstruse
graphics and flow charts on COIN metrics, listening to the “hope-
ful vocabulary of stabilization,” and experiencing the “eager-earnest
syntax over counter-insurgency,” Cowper-Coles felt his faith fading.
Although he started from the premise that counterinsurgency was a
logical, historically proven set of understandings that confronted vio-
lent challenges to established authority and stabilized volatile regions,
his experiences led him to recognize the constituting ambiguities in
the notion of COIN, which once seemed to represent a magic panacea
for the conduct of complex interventions in faraway places.
This volume explores the ambiguities and dissonances—the puz-
zles and enigmas—in the contemporary appreciation and practices of
counterinsurgency: an idea that in the first decade of the twenty-first
