RETHINKING SECURITY

The concept of “hearts and minds” is fairly controversial within the discussion of counterinsurgency. Let’s lay down a few ground rules.

First, contrary to this recent Kings of War post, the concept of “hearts and minds” is not an eternal aspect of warfare but a recent invention. It cannot be removed from the context of the early Cold War. Military and political thinkers within the United States saw themselves as engaging in ideological warfare with a monolithic global Communism over the allegiances of shattered postwar Europe and the postcolonial world. Take the period novel “The Ugly American,” which was about a development worker trying to modernize a frontline country. This crusading spirit drove Kennedy’s interest in special warfare and fueled his call to “pay any price and bear any burden.”

The problem is, as Gian P. Gentile and others have pointed out, that empirical analysis of military outcomes in postcolonial wars of revolution have demonstrated that this idea does not really explain how either insurgents or counterinsurgents achieved victory. The irrelevance of hearts and minds is also laid bare in contemporary research on civil wars and even Nathan Leites’ RAND research during the highlight of the 1960s-70s era of irregular war. But while the concept of hearts and minds may not be empirically accurate, it certainly plays well to domestic biases.

“Hearts and minds” fits an distinctly American morality play very well. Those who are just or create benefits can mobilize the allegiance—or at the very minimum tactical cooperation—of the populace. Those who are corrupt, brutal, or miserly do not. But this does not track, for example, with what insurgent Chin Peng believes actually defeated him—sustained military operations. The Taliban are responsible for 77% of civilian casualties in Afghanistan, but this fact has yet to translate into any strategic gains for NATO. And recent history shows that local alliance-building and the particular nature of Cold War geopolitics had more to do with the Chinese Communist victory in 1949 than virtue per se, flouting the traditional idea that the Communists were able to gain the respect of the people by opposing a supposedly more corrupt Nationalist clique. 

So what leads to success in COIN? Well, as Karl Hack says, it’s hard to really put any one idea forward. All you really have is the age-old Clausewitzian formula that you have to have a sound strategy that can use force to either coerce an opponent or totally disarm him. It’s not too different from any other kind of war, which explains why some of the soundest guerrilla practitioners of insurgency often defy FM 3-24-induced stereotypes.  Mao’s theory of protracted war was a practical blueprint to how to use force to attain military decision, expressed in military-strategic terminology.  Ditto to Vo Ngyuen Giap, who rode into Saigon on a tank years after the military defeat of the peasant irregulars who augmented the main forces in 1968 made it imperative to rely only on mainforce North Vietnamese Army units.

If “hearts and minds” was fallacious even in the time period in which military intellectuals actively debated it, it’s even more problematic to apply the idea to pre-20th century conflicts. Beatrice Heuser is emphatic that “people’s war” is essentially a late 18th century concept. Before this, there was “partisan war”—which was merely a style of tactics that involved irregular formations—and periodic peasant revolts. As Clausewitz observed, sometimes entire communities of tribesmen would go to war, and perhaps do so using partisan techniques if the foe was stronger.

But the idea of people’s war in the sense that counterinsurgency intellectuals discuss it is really a creation of the American and French Revolutions, and it does not totally describe the American Revolution—which, for all of its ideological aspects, was still very much a courtly 18th century war of posts with a substantial irregular element. Before the late 1700s, most combatants treated the population as either an afterthought or a source of plunder. Those who rebelled were often treated harshly. Even during the age of revolution in the 19th century, irregulars and those who aided them were often targeted or even executed on the spot after drumhead court-martials, regarded as criminals rather than legitimate soldiers or civilians. The Boer War film Breaker Morant dramatizes the attitude that many soldiers had towards those who blurred the line between civilian and combatant.

We should not go so far to say, when crafting doctrine, that the people don’t matter. Plainly, they do, because they can fight us, give aid and comfort to the enemy, or potentially assist us in targeting. But this does not necessarily imply that taking the population’s participation in civil wars and rebellions seriously necessitates a hearts and minds approach or anything within the trappings of state-building. So what practically can we do?

First, counterinsurgents should be professionals and use force in a disciplined manner congruent with the laws of war. This is important not because it will gain the public’s allegiance (it won’t) but because a loss of discipline—a temptation in irregular wars with no front lines—degrades the cohesion necessary for counterinsurgent troops to survive in austere conditions with no clear enemy to target. “Proportionate” warfare does not mean symmetrical warfare, or even “fair” warfare. It means using discriminate force against the opponent unless the opponent has surrendered or is incapable of fighting, without causing undue harm to civilians.

Second, the politics of war matter. But the “political” is critically misunderstood within the concept of contemporary COIN mythology. Politics is “power over people” and governs the distribution of power and resources. Should American leaders care about what influential elites within societies they operate think about? Of course! But understand that those elites think very carefully about who they back, and do so from distinctively hard-edged calculations.

This is not because they are uniquely shifty or unrealistically rational—it is simply common sense to be calculating in a war-torn society where your life could be taken at any given moment. The fact that it is so difficult for Americans to believe that an Afghan breadwinner would care more about protecting his family than assist in the war speaks volumes about the way that the hearts and minds concept dilutes basic common sense. Try placing yourself in his shoes, and think of what you might do to keep your loved ones safe from harm in an anarchic and violent environment.

The “political” also has uncomfortable implications for the cosmopolitan beliefs that undergird the “hearts and minds” concept. Civil wars and rebellions are often existential in nature because historically someone ends up losing their head when they lose. If the Taipings had won their titular rebellion, they would have killed every Qing royal they could get their hands on. There was no soft landing for Muammar Gaddafi—he was dragged out from a drainpipe and put down like a dog by his former victims. There was no mercy for the peasants of the Vendee when the French revolutionary government, so besotted with individual liberty, razed their homes to the ground and cut a bloody swathe through the countryside. Likewise, there was little place in a post-revolutionary America for the Loyalists who supported the Crown over the Declaration of Independence. Had, for some reason, the 1979 Mecca revolt succeeded, how merciful would the rebels have been towards the Saudi royal family?

The political also dictates the basic importance of the friend-enemy distinction. It is very hard to modify someone’s chosen identity. and politics. As a recent Small Wars Journal essay about the “Forest Brothers” rebellion against the German and Soviet armies notes, the political can compel some groups to fight even when they have no chance of victory against those that they consider to be mortal enemies. Mike Few speaks to this when he writes about the men he encountered waging war against him in Iraq:

We earned the respect of our opponent because we gave them respect. We acknowledged that they were thinking, rational men acting over perceived grievances generated from either ideology or emotion. Unfortunately, we still had to fight it out for a bit until we exhausted the enemy, but we did not coddle, preach, or attempt to win their hearts, minds, or soul even when we disagreed with them. In fact, those actions were self-defeating and disrespectful to the insurgents in the Diyala River Valley.

As I type this entry two weeks after al Qaeda penetrated the Baqubah provisional government office and a day after the Taliban penetrated a luxury hotel in Kabul, I’m wondering if we really respect our enemy, or do we feel that he is just a confused, illiterate soul waiting to have his heart, mind, and soul converted by modernity?

By our own accord, free men have the right to choose. I cannot find evidence that a man deciding to blow himself up, behead his neighbor, or rebel against his government is accidental. He is not a victim of circumstance. He made a choice. Professional soldiers understand these choices. Tens years into Afghanistan, we might want to start respecting these choices.

Mike Few’s opponents did not come over to his side because he convinced them to change their ideology or identity. They did so because they were on the cusp of losing a vicious civil war with the Shiites, and al-Qaeda in Iraq stood in the way of resolving the civil war. So they cooperated with the Americans, who had proven their staying power by employing time-tested principles of war, and helped to destroy the new enemy—AQI. Had these events not occured, it is likely that they still would be at war with the primary enemy—American troops.

This is not to say that all civil wars have to end with the complete annihilation of an opponent. But even seemingly inconclusive wars decide political issues with force. The Korean War, for example, decided that neither the United States nor China would dominate a unified Korean state. “Hearts and minds,” while claiming to foreground politics, actually in many respects denies the political nature of civil war while replacing it with ideological pablum that plays to what Americans want to believe about international politics and conflict.