“It is clear that war is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means.” Karl Von Clauswitz
“What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.” – Sun Tzu
First off, I want to mention that this post is the product of one of my reader’s ‘a ha’ moments. What really makes this cool is that this reader is a fan of the ‘building snowmobiles’ posts on FJ and this was him putting together these random pieces and creating something out of all of it. He had attended a college course years back that covered economic theory, he is well read on the war and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, he had read Feral Jundi and knew how fun analysis and synthesis can be, and then finally stumbled on some recent news about the war and Taliban strategy, and put it all together. And this is me trying to assemble the thing based on his instructions, and I am thoroughly enjoying myself.
Simply put, this is about using economic theory as a potential tool to predict enemy strategies, so you can defeat those strategies. Because like Sun Tzu says, it ‘is of supreme importance to attack the enemy’s strategy’. Of course I am not going to go all out and say you can predict with 100 percent certainty what your enemy will do. Still, the closer you can get the better, and these are potential tools you can use for predictive analysis.
In this exercise, we will use Afghanistan and the current war against the Taliban there. At this time, we are also using a counter-insurgency strategy. The Taliban are considered the insurgents in this case, and they too are using a insurgency type strategy. Both strategies are heavily influenced by gaining the support of the population. Famous counter-insurgent David Galula had this to say about counterinsurgency:
The aim of the war is to gain the support of the population Galula proposes four “laws” for counterinsurgency:
1.The aim of the war is to gain the support of the population rather than control of territory.
2.Most of the population will be neutral in the conflict; support of the masses can be obtained with the help of an active friendly minority.
3.Support of the population may be lost. The population must be efficiently protected to allow it to cooperate without fear of retribution by the opposite party.
4.Order enforcement should be done progressively by removing or driving away armed opponents, then gaining support of the population, and eventually strengthening positions by building infrastructure and setting long-term relationships with the population. This must be done area by area, using a pacified territory as a basis of operation to conquer a neighbouring area.
Galula contends that:
A victory [in a counterinsurgency] is not the destruction in a given area of the insurgent’s forces and his political organization. … A victory is that plus the permanent isolation of the insurgent from the population, isolation not enforced upon the population, but maintained by and with the population. … In conventional warfare, strength is assessed according to military or other tangible criteria, such as the number of divisions, the position they hold, the industrial resources, etc. In revolutionary warfare, strength must be assessed by the extent of support from the population as measured in terms of political organization at the grass roots. The counterinsurgent reaches a position of strength when his power is embedded in a political organization issuing from, and firmly supported by, the population.
I wanted to put this out there first as one of the main definitions of COIN, so we have somewhere to start.(most strategies are population-centric) In this war, we are basically fighting for the support of the people, and you could easily say that this is politics with guns. You could also say that both sides of this conflict are selling to the population that they are a better idea and friend than the other guy. The Taliban use their methods to achieve population support, and we use ours. In other words, we are in the business of politics in this war. We are trying to win votes or popularity, and like politicians, we are finding all and any way to win as many votes as possible.