The RAND study found:
• Modern insurgencies last approximately 10 years and the government’s chances of winning increase slightly over time.
• Withdrawal of state sponsorship cripples an insurgency and typically leads to its defeat, while inconsistent or impartial support to either side generally presages defeat.
• Pseudo-democracies do not often succeed against insurgencies and are rarely successful in fully democratizing.
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This first story and introduction from RAND is a run down of the conclusions of the study. What I like about studies like this, is that they draw upon a wide array of past insurgencies, and it tries to find patterns and consensus. That is good, and we should be learning from these insurgencies.
The last point up top in the quote, is the one I am concerned with. Can we do this with a weak government? Or can we do business with the tribes and local leadership of cities and towns until we get a good government in place? The article below points out that it is possible to do this without a strong government, but it certainly does not help the effort. Check it out. –Matt
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Study highlights problems for U.S. strategy in Afghanistan
Ben Arnoldy
April 23, 2010
NEW DELHI — While current U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine in Afghanistan broadly conforms to historical best practices, the Taliban have a number of advantages that have produced insurgent success in the past, according to a new study of 89 past and ongoing insurgencies worldwide.
The factors that favor the Taliban include receiving sanctuary and support in another country, learning to be more discriminating in their attacks and fighting a government that’s weak and reliant on direct external support.
The historical trends suggest that the Taliban’s Achilles heel would be the loss of their Pakistani sanctuary, while the principal American vulnerability is Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s weak pseudo democracy.
The study, said the author, cannot be predictive, but it can help the U.S. address or exploit these vulnerabilities.
“A lot of the things being done in the current (U.S. military) plan are along the lines of successful things we’ve seen in the study,” said Ben Connable, the lead author of “How Insurgencies End,” published by the RAND Corp. in Washington.
“The key is if the U.S. recognizes it is working with an anocracy (a weak central government) and recognizes the limits of that kind of government, you can work on solutions to that problem.”
Solutions, he said, involve focusing on local governance and setting up local civil defense forces tied to one location. To some degree, the U.S. is already doing this. In rural Helmand province, the Marines are focused on building local government from scratch, and international forces have dabbled with setting up arbakai, traditional militias tied to local councils.
Still, weak governments have won only about 15 percent of their conflicts with insurgents. “Democratizing an anocracy in the midst of an insurgency is an unappealing but not necessarily impossible venture,” says the report.
Another lesson: Indiscriminate terror attacks on civilians tends to backfire on insurgents. The report says that the Taliban have learned to discriminate, but United Nations data challenge that. Insurgents caused most of the civilian deaths in 2009. Their killings of civilians increased by 41 percent over 2008 levels, while pro-government forces reduced civilian killings by 28 percent.
However, there’s little indication that these Taliban indiscretions have backfired on the movement so far.
There may be limits to applying international templates to a country such as Afghanistan, a tendency among U.S. military planners that’s caused unease among Afghanistan experts. The brain trust that helped prepare U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan relied heavily on counterinsurgency — not regional — experts.
“Afghanistan may well share similarities with other countries and societies, but these elements need to be documented rather than assumed,” anthropologist Thomas Barfield writes in his new book, “Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History.”
The RAND study examined 89 insurgencies dating to the 1934 start of Mao’s communist uprising in China. In order to be included, a conflict needed to have killed at least 1,000 people, among other criteria.
The final score: 28 wins for governments, 26 wins for insurgencies, 19 mixed results and 16 ongoing.
Most of the study’s findings conform to the current conventional wisdom about counterinsurgency. One exception is the common belief that insurgents have the advantage of time. The average length of government-won conflicts is greater than for those won by insurgents.
The median length of an insurgency is 10 years. However, “insurgencies with more than two clear parties involved have longer, more-violent, and more-complex endings. Afghanistan is a case in point,” the report notes.
More than half the insurgencies studied ended with some negotiation, even in cases with clear winners and losers, but for Afghanistan that doesn’t represent an easy way out.
“This is an extremely complicated negotiation theory problem,” said Stephen Biddle, a counterinsurgency expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. “If you were to say, ‘I am going to be strategist king and I am going to design the perfect solution,’ it’s like designing a mission to Mars — the complexity of it is really quite great.”
Experts have scaled back their expectations about the likely outcome in Afghanistan, particularly since Karzai’s fraud-riddled reelection.
“I doubt anybody is going to get their ideal best case out of this. The Pakistanis are very unlikely to get their Taliban government in Kabul to puppet from Islamabad. The U.S. is very unlikely to get a strong centralized, Western-style democracy,” said Biddle.
President Barack Obama’s effort to speed up a resolution in Afghanistan by planning a drawdown in 2011 elicits concern from Connable. He said that in cases where a foreign power such as the U.S. sponsored an embattled government, the premature withdrawal of support tended to result in the government losing.
“. . . Without addressing the root causes of the insurgency, without insuring the government could stand on its own two feet — then the governments tended to lose,” he said.
Story here.
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How Insurgencies End; Key Indicators, Tipping Points, and Strategy
From the lessons of the Vietnam War to the recent downfall of the Tamil Tigers in Southeast Asia, conflicts between insurgencies and governments tend to follow certain patterns as they arc toward their endings, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
The study provides a planning framework for both policymakers and strategists to help design counterinsurgency campaigns and mitigate the kind of false expectations that undermined the arc of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Counterinsurgency operations will continue to play a large role in today’s military strategy, so it is critical to understand how and perhaps more importantly, why, insurgencies end,” said Ben Connable, the study’s lead author and an intelligence policy analyst with RAND, a nonprofit research organization.
Researchers analyzed 89 insurgency cases and concluded it is possible to shape insurgency endings with sufficient forethought, strategic flexibility and sustained willpower.
However, because numerous variables help define insurgencies – local culture, terrain, economy, type of government – the study notes there is no one-size-fits-all template for dealing with insurgencies.
The RAND study found:
• Modern insurgencies last approximately 10 years and the government’s chances of winning increase slightly over time.
• Withdrawal of state sponsorship cripples an insurgency and typically leads to its defeat, while inconsistent or impartial support to either side generally presages defeat.
• Pseudo-democracies do not often succeed against insurgencies and are rarely successful in fully democratizing.
Connable and co-author Martin Libicki also identify key indicators of tipping points – when events take a crucial turn toward the final outcome. The rates at which desertions, defections and infiltrations of an insurgency occur and the willingness of civilians to report on insurgency activity to the government can be significant.
Insurgencies with more than two clear parties involved have longer, more violent and more complex endings, said Connable. Contrary to conventional wisdom, governments tend to outlast insurgents, mainly because they are typically stronger, better organized and more professional than non-state forces.
Governments are better off without external support, but tend to lose when support is withdrawn in the midst of a campaign. Insurgents need external support to survive, and they need sanctuary, but stand a better chance of succeeding if that sanctuary is given voluntarily.
Insurgent cadres formed around a traditional, hierarchical structure are more often successful than fragmented networks, and insurgencies rarely succeed in middle-income and urbanized countries, but fare better in rural or a mix of rural and urban terrain, according to the study.
The study also found that terrorism often backfires and the use of indiscriminate terror is often a sign of overconfidence or weakness. However, weak insurgencies can win, particularly if the government also is weak, loses the war through sheer ineptitude or if the causes of the insurgency are strong enough to carry the fight to its ending. The RAND study found weak insurgencies won in 50 percent of the decided cases.
The study, “How Insurgencies End,” can be found at www.rand.org.
Research for the study was sponsored by the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence Activity and conducted within the Intelligence Policy Center of the RAND National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies and the defense Intelligence community.
Publication here.