'Counterinsurgency in Crisis': An objective assessment of the British experiences in Helmand and Basra

By Emile Simpson


Best Defense
office of counterinsurgency doctrine

Counterinsurgency
in Crisis concerns
specifically the British experience of conflict over the last 10 years. The
timing of this book matters, given that the British combat mission in
Afghanistan is now in its twilight, at least on current plans: By publishing in
2013, the authors -- the estimable David H. Ucko and Robert Egnell -- free themselves from the temptations of a
polemical approach to influence events on the ground; they rather deploy a
dispassionate, analytical style that will serve to influence the debate over
the longer term, as this admirable book deserves to do.

The central
conceptual argument is that counterinsurgency in the abstract offers guidance
and principles based on past experience that may be helpful in the design and
execution of an effective campaign plan, but that it is an operational
approach, not a strategy: "the focus on military operations can easily obscure
the fact that they require a political strategy to be meaningful".

This argument is
presented in four thematic strands: how the British understood and applied
their own past experience of counterinsurgency, two main case studies in Basra
and Helmand, and an extensive analysis of the British Army's internal institutional
adaption over this period.

In terms of the
British understanding of their own doctrine, the authors argue that the
examples of Malaya and Northern Ireland in particular were overly privileged,
selectively understood, and superficially applied. This resulted in operational
approaches driven by principles that did not necessarily translate across to
substantially different political and military contexts.

For example, the
promotion of a legitimate government makes sense in the abstract as a generic
counterinsurgency principle, but "who were the established authorities in Basra
in 2003 or 2006, and who were the established authorities in Helmand of 2006 or
2009?"

The authors propose
that both historical case studies and contemporary conflicts need to be
understood on their own terms, not regurgitated as templates. Of course there
would be few writers on COIN who would disagree with that. The real power of
this argument concerns how, given the experience of Basra and Helmand, the
British Army's own historical experience of counterinsurgency operations did
not make the impact it should have done.

The reasons
presented for this are complicated, but this important chapter goes a long way
to explain the difference between assumed corporate knowledge, which the
British Army did have in places, both in terms of people in and out of uniform,
and actual operational practice. For example, the book mentions the successful
British Dhofar campaign in the 1960s and ‘70s as one example of a lacuna in the
British Army's understanding of its own history: It was only "remembered" at an
institutional level long after Basra and Helmand had started.

The Basra chapter
is calm, objective, and ruthless. There is no escaping that the British made a
secret deal with Shiite militias in Basra in 2007 that, however spun, remains a
deep humiliation. What about Charge of the Knights in 2008 that re-took the city?
Ucko and Egnell are fair: While recognising that this was "salvation" for the
British, who played a relatively minor part, so too is there acknowledgement
that the British Army in Basra made important reforms that enabled aspects of
the operation, such as an evolution in the partnering and mentorship structures
with the Iraqi Army.

However, these
eleventh hour successes are analysed as being in spite of London, which does
not speak to a coherent strategic process: "Operation Charge of the Knights
unfolded so quickly and so unexpectedly that there was less chance for the
British Government and MoD back in London to interfere". Indeed, a strength of
the book is the analysis of the conflicting demands that British field armies
in Basra, and to a lesser extent in Helmand, have experienced in reporting both
to London and in-theatre chains of command.

The authors
acknowledge the basic resource and political constraints that put in a kinder
context the operational problems of the British field forces on the ground in
Basra. But London does not come off well. The presentation of Basra as a strategic
success by senior political and military apologists is forensically dismantled:
"if this strategy was ever sincere, it failed".

Turning to the
Helmand chapter, I would take a different view of the dynamics of the conflict,
specifically the claim that Helmand was a hornet's nest of Taliban before 2006.
In my view, there was not a specifically Taliban insurgency in Helmand before
the 2006 British deployment, and the insurgency that emerged initially was of a
local and fragmented nature, not a coherent Taliban enemy. To be fair to the
authors on this point, my view is currently in the minority in terms of the
wider debate. Leaving that to one side, I agree with the chapter's main
assertion that despite operational progress in Helmand later on, the early
campaign lacked clear focus, and replicated the problems of Basra at the
strategic level.

The analysis by Ucko
and Egnell of the problems of the Helmand campaign is convincing, and points
out inter alia that the substantially
different approaches taken by successive brigade rotations did not make sense
in terms of an overall campaign, which raises real question-marks over the
coherence of the British strategic process (although this was by no means a
uniquely British problem).

From a personal
point of view, having served in Helmand, there were many British officers who
were familiar with COIN in the early phase, but we lacked the manpower before
the surge in 2009 to hold cleared ground, the intelligence resources to
understand the political complexity, and tight enough operational aims. Since
2009, I think the British Army has performed effectively in Helmand.

I also think that
from an internal, institutional perspective, the single biggest practical
difference to the British Afghan campaign, beyond resources and political
goals, was the personality and drive of General Stanley McChrystal in 2008 and
2009. The fact that it ultimately took a U.S. general to tone down what was
plainly an overly kinetic approach before 2009, which was antagonising too many
people in Helmand, says something about British claims to be the guardians of
the minimum force tradition of COIN.

The book's conclusion does not advance either the retention or
jettisoning of counterinsurgency, as other works in this area have done. Rather,
a nuanced position is established: There may well be operations possibly
involving British forces in the near future that require an understanding of
counterinsurgency, but COIN should be properly understood as a pool of
operational practice that needs to be applied to the particular context, and
accompanied by a political strategy, which COIN is not in itself.

More specifically
for a British audience, this book may trigger a more public discussion of what
happened to the British in Basra. That debate has been on hold due to Helmand,
and will be coloured by the extent to which Helmand is received as an exorcism
for the British Army's experience of Basra.

Given that it is
naturally hard for British soldiers, many of whom have lost friends in Basra,
to look at the subject objectively, the authors ultimately do the British Army
a service by prefiguring a moment in the near future, when most of its troops
are off the ground, when the British Army and its masters in the government and
the electorate may come to take a dispassionate, and probably painful look, at
this most emotively charged of subjects.

Emile Simpson served in the British Army as an infantry officer in the Gurkhas from 2006 to 2012. He deployed to southern Afghanistan three
times and is the author of War From the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century
Combat as Politics (Columbia,
2012).