The Lessons of Afghanistan: Why Countering Someone Else’s Insurgency Is So Hard

The withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 marked the confirmation in the minds of many not only of the end of the United States’ longest war, but also that of counterinsurgency as a relevant and useful facet of modern military thought. “Once dynamic and desired…counterinsurgency was by then toxic and often maligned. Upon its death, the topic was buried, never praised. The consensus, post-mortem, is to quickly move on.” Such sentiments have only deepened since the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022. But the coalition experience in Afghanistan offers important and lasting insights on matters of strategic design, partnering with local forces, organizational adaptation, and irregular warfare more broadly—issues that remain important to Western militaries today.

In new research, I highlight some of the lessons of the counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign in Afghanistan—and in particular what happens when military actors must operate amid the complexities of someone else’s civil war. This matters since future missions and tasks falling under the remit of irregular warfare, be they provision of security force assistance to local forces or more directly countering the malign influence of near-peer adversaries in distant and unstable political environments, are likely to occur in similarly complex contexts. Large-scale expeditionary COIN campaigns may not occur in the foreseeable future, but the Afghanistan war points to lessons on the entrenched assumptions that stilted Western forces’ understanding of, and influence upon, local actors. The conflict also showcases the difficulties an external intervener faces when addressing and adjusting—or simply discovering—the conflict dynamics powering violence.

COIN’s Many-Layered Map

Contemplating Sudan’s civil war in 2002, then journalist Deborah Scroggins (subsequently on the staff of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) described the difficulty of understanding the fracturing state’s plight:

You need a layered map to understand Sudan’s civil war. A surface map of political conflict, for example […] and under that a layer of religious conflict and under that a map of all the sectarian divisions within those categories; and under that a layer of ethnic division containing a multitude of clan and tribal subdivisions […] and under that a layer of economic divisions, and under that a layer of colonial divisions; and under that a layer of racial divisions […] until it would become clear that the war was…a violent ecosystem capable of generating endless new things to fight about without shedding any of the old ones.

These metaphorical “layers” apply just as readily to Afghanistan’s civil war. Indeed, COIN itself can be visualized in a similar way, as a series of ideas, assumptions, and techniques acting as a set of layers, poised to mix unevenly with those already at play on the ground.

Study of the campaign from 2008 to 2011 (arguably the period when COIN found its fullest expression in Afghanistan) allows fuller exploration of this notion. Although existing scholarship does much to explain the West’s failings in Afghanistan, many analyses tend to center blame on poor policy decisions or absent strategy. Vitally important to the military practitioner, however, is understanding the chasm between strategy and the realities of actions on the ground, as well as the roles militaries play in filling that space. Analyzing that gap in a more theoretical sense encourages military professionals to reflect upon a different set of considerations than might otherwise be the norm, perhaps presenting them with a different set of explanations as to why certain ideas and concepts fell short.

Foundations

Afghanistan had been subject to some form of insurgency or rebellion for decades prior to 9/11. The Western intervention started with a civil war to displace the state and ended in one where the West’s proto-state was itself displaced. A nuanced understanding of civil war theory, therefore, and particularly as it relates to how civilians behave in conditions of violent uncertainty, is critical to understanding how counterinsurgency worked in Afghanistan.

Acknowledging the role of civil war violence in the conflict points to a series of important considerations. Firstly, internal conflict is often driven by hyper-local grievances that are frequently impossible for outsiders to understand and seldom map to any ideological interpretation that an expeditionary counterinsurgent force brings to the fight. Second, civilian populations trapped in conditions of uncertainty generally prefer bargains with known counterparties to participating in the formal institutions of the state. Third, economic development, capacity building, and a good governance approach are unlikely to shape political allegiances without resting upon a firm foundation of selective violence and the appearance of viable long-term control. Lastly, rural populations provide a very specific set of challenges (including norms of solidarity and honor, physical isolation, and subsistence farming economies’ ability to sustain rebellion). But these considerations were never properly captured by a COIN doctrine which took its practical cues from Iraq and its intellectual cues from the fields of military history, strategic studies, and some quarters of the political science canon but never really incorporated insights from civil war scholarship.

Layer One: Counterinsurgency’s Logic of State Building

To understand why COIN failed in Afghanistan, it helps to build on Scroggins’ metaphor and think about it in terms of four layers. The first layer relates to the Clausewitzian concept of the logic and grammar of war. War’s logic can be likened to the imperatives, assumptions, or theories that shape the conceptual limits of strategy, such as the overriding purpose of a conflict or the scale of the effort to be employed. War’s grammar, on the other hand, refers to the rules and procedures that govern the use of armed forces within that war, such as military doctrine and the various principles that abound therein.

In Afghanistan, the relationship between the counterinsurgent force and the ultimate strategic rationale for its presence—between the grammar and the logic of the war—was highly problematic. The logic of the war in Afghanistan was a radical exercise in democracy promotion and state-building that primarily reflected the preferences, interests, and values of powerful external actors. Seeking to concentrate power in the center, the intervention’s infrastructure projects, government assistance, and political and economic reforms prioritized Kabul, with little attention paid to traditional social, community, and security institutions that had historically (if barely) sustained Afghan society. By concentrating political authority at the center, the West implicitly denied the importance of pre-established forms of authority in the rural periphery. This not only marginalized the latter and further exacerbated conditions already favorable to near-permanent violence but also thoroughly complicated any attempts by counterinsurgents to engage with, support, or strengthen those same periphery stakeholders as part of COIN’s bottom-up approach to state-building. In such a way the logic and grammar of war in Afghanistan pulled in opposite directions.

Layer Two: Ordering the Afghan Insurgency

The next two layers have to do with the way in which American Field Manual 3-24 influenced practitioners’ understandings of the causes and symptoms of violent political rebellion and followed this up by constructing a theory of victory to match. It is a twin process of ordering and shaping. Ordering dictated an understanding of key concepts and ideas such as insurgency and legitimacy, as well as forging a powerful conceptual link in the minds of policymakers between economic development and counterinsurgency success. The subsequent shaping process advocated actionable principles (clear, hold, build) designed to guide military actors through the process of turning their understanding into desired outcomes.

In Afghanistan the contrast between the constructed theory of COIN that practitioners came to believe, and reality, was stark. The ordering process provided an uneven and incomplete picture of insurgency in Helmand and Kandahar in particular. This daguerreotype lacked the granularity required to comprehend highly localized concerns and disputes over money, status, and power. The doctrinal imperative to foster legitimacy was not only hampered by the tension between empowering the center at the expense of the periphery, but was also, when it came to the matter of grass-roots legitimacy, deeply underspecified as to what this all meant in practical terms. It failed to prepare counterinsurgents for the phenomenon of independent micro-societies: local populations that preserved their own notions of legitimacy and who favored a reliance on local actors or customary authority to provide it. Missing too were the insights into how local populations processed these notions of legitimacy; the methods by which it could be identified, created, and maintained; and, vitally, an understanding of how it died.

The concrete impact of this could be seen in the co-option of key leaders in the form of local village elders. A concept entirely logical to the doctrinal mind—the selection of grass-roots intermediaries through which to direct information and resources, thus strengthening their communities and aiding the bottom-up process of nation building—had the opposite effect. The simplification of the social realm by outside authority eroded elders’ ability to solve conflicts by denying them the middle ground that they had traditionally occupied, and which was essential to their role as mediators and problem solvers. The Western coalition’s instrumentalization of community structures in accordance with doctrine triggered relentless targeting and assassination of elders and other customary authorities. In the process, institutions that people had relied on for centuries to mediate disputes and protect their community were gradually destroyed.

Layer Three: Shaping the Western Response

The academic David Ucko has written extensively on the concept of Clear, Hold, Build. The experience of coalition forces using the concept in Afghanistan was a sobering reminder of how reductive doctrinal principles suffer when exposed to the complexities of a population at war with itself. Quite naturally, the initial clearing process accorded to the military’s primary skillset, and the Taliban was duly pushed out of these strongholds after hard-fought battles. The ensuing attempt to build political stability on the back of tactical victory was doomed to failure, however. Faulty assumptions about the role of economic development in adjusting local political allegiances and the inability to disentangle chosen political intermediaries from the local conflict ecosystem dictated that events remained at the mercy of the original drivers of conflict. Those, particularly the toxic disputes over land rights and drug revenues and related inter- and intra- tribal rivalries, were often entirely hidden from view. Even if ascertained, they remained well beyond the jurisdiction of the counterinsurgent to address, let alone resolve.

Musa Qala, Sangin, Garmser, Marjah, and countless other examples illustrated the difficulties of applying an abstract but seductively neat doctrinal theory to Helmand’s highly responsive social and political structures. Western policymakers assumed that local drivers of conflict were known (which was often not the case) and that outsiders could easily reform dysfunctional systems (which they rarely could). What Clear-Hold-Build delivered in Afghanistan was not a theory of victory, but a lesson in how seemingly logical assumptions about how to engender peace, i.e., increase material benefits and good governance, could never satisfy the primary motivations of a population trapped in conditions of violent uncertainty. Ultimately, money and violence imposed from the outside couldn’t positively shape politics for Afghans. All that could realistically be achieved was short-term physical control of space. Once the resources for that purpose were removed, all ancillary efforts connected to economic development and the forging of local political allies came to little, if not actively contributing to further violent instability by increasing the capacity and financial depth of its beneficiaries.

Layer Four: Enacting the Response

What about the practitioners charged with translating theory into practice? How did their interests, preferences, and perspectives materially shape the encounter? The question is relevant because the broader debate over the employment of population-centric COIN in Afghanistan must account not only for difficulties in terms of its application where it was properly tried, but by extension consider the degree to which it served as an accurate portrayal of Western military behaviors in response to the problem of countering violent political rebellion.

Numerous observers note that despite its population-centric rhetoric, the coalition campaign in Afghanistan featured a relentless preference for kinetic action. Some argue that this was a bureaucratic issue: the deficit in civilian means to support the non-military components of the strategy resulted in the campaign becoming over-militarized. Regardless, the overriding preference for offensive action hinted at an alternative explanation for events, and an important one where the practice of irregular warfare is concerned.

While the bureaucratic, organizational, and cultural domains are important to understanding military behaviors over the course of the campaign, the cognitive domain constitutes an additional and important explanatory factor. COIN doctrine is comparatively abstract. It invites military professionals to accept the unwelcome prospect that their task is intimately political, and thus defined by conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity. FM 3-24 attempted to counteract this with the provision of guiding principles, which in reality were a set of largely common-sense suggestions. And so in complex, ambiguous environments like Helmand or Kandahar, problems were artificially simplified and straight lines drawn where few existed. Some describe this process as a form of cognitive closure, whereby unhelpful ambiguities and uncertainties were removed to simplify understanding and thus allow positive (military) action. Others explain it as a consequence of military decision-making processes, which are highly structured and framework dependent, designed to favor reliability and speed over accuracy or environmental fit. This helps construct a certain mental script where insurgencies are interpreted as small versions of big wars, encouraging adherence to the notion that the military defeat of the enemy will pave the way for the emergence of desired political outcomes. When it becomes apparent that this is not the case and that conflict dynamics on the ground contradict such assumptions, powerful forms of organizational self-interest dictate the need to persist with the military-centric approach lest subordination to a more nuanced political approach negatively impact operational autonomy and resourcing.

Hidden Hands

Military practitioners can benefit from a more theoretical discussion of COIN’s application in Afghanistan. Not only would they gain a better understanding of the complex and varied dimensions of political rebellion on the ground, but they would grasp more fully how these factors were supplemented by a number of “hidden hands” imposed by counterinsurgents themselves: the technocratic assumptions underpinning the state-building process; the theoretical dimensions of doctrine; and the role of military actors by and large conditioned to reject ambiguity in favor of simplicity and certainty. The interplay between these and various dimensions of the civil war in Afghanistan revealed critical weaknesses in the ability of counterinsurgents to navigate the real-world complexities of conflict in that country.

Some will continue to argue that failure in Afghanistan was primarily a consequence of poor strategy, or of failing to properly arrange and deploy the levers of national power. Such arguments are overly self-referential. They risk neglecting the agency of those subject to such measures and fail to acknowledge the way in which Afghanistan’s sociopolitical condition actively prevented core concepts from functioning as designed. Maybe the ultimate lesson was not a confirmation of Afghanistan’s status as the graveyard of empires, but proof yet again of the difficulties encountered when acting as mediators and balancers in someone else’s war. It also makes clear that external intervention in internal conflict, perhaps more than any other form of warfare, exacerbates war’s inherent tendency toward unpredictability, lack of control, and counterintuitive outcomes.

Dr. Christian Tripodi is a MWI adjunct scholar, Reader in Irregular Warfare at the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London’s School of Security Studies, and an instructor at the Joint Services Command and Staff College at the UK Defence Academy, Shrivenham. He is the author of The Unknown Enemy: Counterinsurgency and the Illusion of Control.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense, or that of any organization the authors are affiliated with, including King’s College London and the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom.