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Success and Failure in Counterinsurgency Campaigns Lessons from the Cold War

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Success and Failure in Counterinsurgency Campaigns Lessons from the Cold War Success and Failure in Counterinsurgency Campaigns Lessons from the Cold War ✣ Ethan B. Kapstein Our foreign and national security policy has become too militarized, the use of force too easy for presidents. Robert Gates1 Why did the U.S.-assisted counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign succeed in the Philippines during the 1950s yet struggle in Vietnam a decade later? Why were counterinsurgency forces able to score a quick victory in Venezuela in the early 1960s but later became embroiled in long and bloody conflicts in Guatemala and El Salvador? These questions that emerge from the Cold War era take on renewed relevance as the United States contemplates how to manage security threats emanating from fragile and conflict-prone regions around the world without putting thousands of “boots on the ground.”2 To be sure, military campaigns succeed or fail for myriad reasons. For example, the troubled U.S. effort in Vietnam has been explained by numerous writers over the years as the result of, inter alia, flawed U.S. strategy and tactics, poor leadership, the absence of a clear “objective function” or definition of what constitutes success, and a dysfunctional bureaucratic response.3 Similar criticisms have been leveled more recently at Washington’s handling of the 1. Robert Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York: Knopf, 2014), p. 592. 2. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, January 2012). 3. The relevant literature is voluminous, but critical studies of U.S. policy and strategy include Harry Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1981); Andrew Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Gregory A. Daddis, No Sure Victory: Measuring US Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and David Halberstam, TheBestandtheBrightest(New York: Ballantine Books, 1969). Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 2017, pp. 125–159, doi:10.1162/JCWS_a_00720 C 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 125 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00720 by guest on 23 September 2021 Kapstein wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.4 What these critiques tend to have in common is that the roots of failure are located within the U.S. government. Largely overlooked in many such accounts are the underlying structural conditions within a country that the counterinsurgents face and to which they must ultimately adapt. The political, economic, and social conditions that have given rise or at least sustenance to civil conflict are bound to shape the U.S. government’s response to it.5 From a levels-of-analysis perspective, these structural conditions set the “macro” parameters for a campaign, defining the political limits of what is possible or even achievable. As a consequence, the actual organization and tactics of the counterinsurgents may be somewhat less determinative than analysts often suppose. How, then, might we explain the success and failure of U.S. COIN op- erations during the Cold War? Examining four cases from that period—the Philippines, Vietnam, Venezuela, and El Salvador—I provide theoretical mo- tivation for the oft-made claim that U.S. counterinsurgency strategy has been most effective in countries whose government engaged in meaningful reforms to address a population’s grievances in the face of a determined rebellion.6 (Even “greed-” or kleptocratic-based insurgencies must feed off local grievances to some extent if they are to sustain themselves.7) Indeed, in separate ac- counts of U.S. counterinsurgency operations during the Cold War, both John 4. Critiques include Andrew Krepinevich, “How to Win in Iraq,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 5 (September/October 2005); Bing West, The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan (New York: Random House, 2011); Steven Metz, Learning from Iraq: Counterinsurgency in American Strategy (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2007); and Seth Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (New York: Norton, 2010). 5. The late Douglass North and colleagues described societies in which “insiders” prevent “outsiders” from full participation in political and economic life. They argue that such societies, which remain prevalent in the developing world, are especially prone to violent conflict. See Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Inter- preting Recorded Human History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For an argument that emphasizes the contingent nature of revolutions and rebellions, see S. N. Eisenstadt, Revolu- tion and the Transformation of Societies: A Comparative Study of Civilizations (New York: Free Press, 1978). 6. For arguments that link counterinsurgency to domestic reform, see Douglas Blaufarb, The Coun- terinsurgency Era: US Doctrine and Performance (New York: Free Press, 1977); D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of US Counterinsurgency Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); John David Orme, Political Instability and American Foreign Policy (New York: St. Mar- tin’s Press, 1989); Douglas J. Macdonald, Adventures in Chaos: American Intervention for Reform in the Third World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Daniel Byman, Going to War with the Allies You Have: Allies, Counterinsurgency, and the War on Terrorism (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies In- stitute, November 2005); and Ben Connable and Marin Libicki, How Insurgencies End (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010). 7. See Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” Oxford Economic Papers, Vol. 56, No. 4 (2004), pp. 563–595. 126 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00720 by guest on 23 September 2021 Success and Failure in Counterinsurgency Campaigns Orme and Douglas MacDonald define U.S. strategy in terms of “reformist intervention.”8 Daniel Byman has put the problem of reformist intervention succinctly: “The ally’s structural problems and distinct interests have daunting implica- tions for successful U.S. counterinsurgency efforts. ...U.S. COIN doctrine, no matter how well thought out, cannot succeed without the appropriate po- litical and other reforms from the host nation, but these regimes are likely to subvert the reforms that threaten the existing power structure.”9 Similarly, Ben Connable and Martin Libicki find in their study of numerous COIN cases that, “with a few exceptions, lasting insurgency endings are shaped not by military action but by social, economic, and political change.”10 This purported relationship between counterinsurgency and domestic reform, however, raises a deeper theoretical question: What determines whether a government is likely to engage in a reform process? I hypothesize that reform is a function of a country’s elite structure, in particular the concentration and diversity of assets controlled by elites. When assets are immobile and highly concentrated in the hands of the local elite, as in Vietnam (where the elite earned most of their incomes from growing and selling rice) or El Salvador (which had a coffee-based economy), redistributive reforms will prove difficult to enact, and counterinsurgency efforts will struggle as a result.11 William Colby, a career Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official who served as director of the agency in the mid-1970s, put the reform problem in these 8. Orme, Political Instability and American Foreign Policy; and MacDonald, Adventures in Chaos. 9. Byman, Going to War,p.4. 10. Connable and Libicki, How Insurgencies End, p. 154. 11. See Fabrice Pothier, “Opium in Afghanistan: A Reality Check,” in Afghanistan: Now You See Me? IDEAS Strategic Updates, LSE Ideas, London, 2010, which states that opium is responsible for 50 percent of the country’s export earnings. On Vietnam, see Robert Sansom, The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970). On El Salvador, see Benjamin Schwartz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and El Salvador: The Illusions of Reform and Frustrations of Nation-Building (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1991). On the natural resources curse argument that posits a relationship between economic structure and governance outcomes, see Michael Ross, “The Political Economy of the Resource Curse,” World Politics, Vol. 51, No. 2 (January 1999), pp. 297–321. For a contrasting view, see Gavin Wright and Jesse Czelusta, “The Myth of the Resource Curse,” Challenge, Vol. 47, No. 2 (March/April 2004), pp. 6–38. On the consequences of elites and economic structure for domestic conflict, see North, Wallis, and Weingast, Violence and Social Orders. Foreign aid itself can become an elite resource. If elites are or become dependent on aid flows as a major source of their rents (as occurred in Vietnam and more recently in Afghanistan), they will fight hard against reforms that would dilute this income stream. One might suppose that in such countries the United States could simply turn off the spigot, but the problem in corrupt authoritarian societies often is that any compelling alternatives have been sidelined (or imprisoned
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