‘Shock and Awe' to ‘Hearts and Minds': Civilians in Counterinsurgency

Cultural Warfare's Re-birth:

In 2006, five years into the War on Terror, the U.S Army updated its Counterinsurgency Field Manual for the first time in 20 years. Counterinsurgency (or COIN) is a military strategy concentrated on draining an insurgency of its civilian support. It is grounded in the idea that civilians who are agreeable to Coalition forces (and the host nation government they support) are less likely to directly or indirectly assist insurgent groups. This is often referred to as “winning hearts and minds” in comparison to the use of violence in kinetic operations. Winning hearts and minds, however, isn't easy for foreign militaries who lack substantive understanding of local populations: their histories, politics, religions, modes of communication, grievances, etc. Counterinsurgency strategy therefore stresses the importance of acquiring cultural knowledge.

To understand the significance of cultural warfare’s re-birth, it’s important to briefly consider the United States' approach in the early “War on Terror” years. Initially, the U.S government and its military didn’t seem to either possess, or value, cultural knowledge. To the contrary, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Collin Powell devised a “Shock and Awe” campaign of mass aerial bombardments in Baghdad, Mosul and Kirkuk. 

Aerial bombing of Baghdad, 2003.

This involved using five hundred pound bombs to target critical infrastructure – often shared between insurgents and civilians – in an attempt to destroy the insurgency’s resources and paralyse its morale. As Jonathan Gilmore argues, Shock and Awe ‘embodies a distinctive dimension of U.S military culture preoccupied with the importance of projecting images of power and invulnerability’. In the 6 week Shock and Awe phase, Iraq Body Count recorded 7400 civilian casualties: an average of 317 per day. Furthermore, key cultural sites were left unprotected during the invasion, including the Iraq National Museum and National Library and Archive. These sites were looted and burned: destroying ‘7000 years of Iraqi civilisation’ and history in a matter of days. Iraqi lives and historical infrastructure were shown complete disregard by the U.S, to the extent that some have questioned whether this was a deliberate attempt to cripple Iraq's cultural longevity. 

Realising their “iron fist” approach was counterproductive to preventing insurgency, the U.S military released its new Counterinsurgency Field Manual to be implemented immediately. One might expect this shift from Shock and Awe to Hearts and Minds to correspond with a significant change in how civilians’ lives and livelihoods are valued. As Judith Butler argues, the lives of people in the Global South are not recognised by "us" as fully human: "we" do not bother to learn their ‘names and faces, personal histories, family, favourite hobbies [and] slogans by which they live’. They lack access to the public obituary; their lives do ‘not qualify as grievable’. Surely, then, acquiring cultural knowledge involves learning about civilians – thereby humanising them in the process?

Civilians in Counterinsurgency Discourse:

A civilised "population-centric" approach to war – based upon cultural knowledge rather than destruction – is certainly the image the U.S military tried to project with the change in strategy. However, does the material circulated internally corroborate with their public rhetoric? In other words, if you picked up a counterinsurgency manual to read, would you find evidence of humanisation?          

Having spent my summer reading 18 of such manuals, I can attest that humanising language is either non-existent, minimal, or massively contradicted by other passages, in COIN material. Most of the language objectifies civilians; they are seen primarily as sources of human intelligence, not as humans whose lives are intrinsically valuable. Civilian deaths are framed either in terms of cost-benefit analysis [see figure 1] or as strategic setbacks that could undermine U.S' efforts to curb insurgency [see figure 2]. As part of this strategic discourse, mathematical language – or “insurgent math” – is often used [see figure 3]. This language posits civilians as an unfixed or volatile quantity in the equation of Coalition success. In this mathematical framework, the military’s goal is not to genuinely understand civilians or provide them opportunities to enact their political agency. Instead, it is to decrease the volatility that they represent as direct or indirect supporters of insurgents. This is at once a de-humanising a de-politicising move as it forecloses the possibility for local political solutions and implements the United States' vision of security and control. As Jonathan Gilmore argues, ‘crucially the legitimacy of this vision is not open for debate’ by Iraqi and Afghan civilians.

Figure 1: Cost benefit analysis in Civilian Casualty Mitigation 2012

Figure 2: Civilian deaths as strategic setbacks in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual 2006

Figure 3: "Insurgent math" - mathematical language used in Joint Civilian Casualty Study 2010

Omissions and Contradictions: 

1.     Mistaking human intelligence for cultural knowledge:

Protests against Qu'ran burning in Laghman Province, Afghanistan.

De-humanisation and de-politicisation is further evidenced by the information that’s missing. What do civilians do? Who are they? What are their backgrounds, beliefs, cultures, grievances? What kind of society would they like to build for their children? In other words, where is the cultural knowledge that’s supposed to form the basis of counterinsurgency efforts? Human Terrain Teams were allegedly designed to obtain this kind of cultural information. However, HTT members are instructed to collect only ‘operationally relevant’ data and they’re given just ‘thirty minutes to a couple of days’ to do so. This stands in contrast to counterinsurgency's image as a form of "slow" warfare based upon rigorous research. Tellingly, it is left to the military to judge what counts as "relevant" and to establish the pace with which such information is gathered.

The result is not an enlightened armed forces but a failed attempt to acquire cultural knowledge. With the focus on the bureaucratic goal of "collecting human intelligence" (or "HUMINT" for short), it is unsurprising that cultural insensitivity continues in the U.S military. Civilians in counterinsurgency discourse are an easily-objectified, de-personalised category –  their value is instrumental. 

2.      Continued kinetic operations:  

Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan.

Another red flag is that counterinsurgency's purported goals are contradicted by the equal weight given to kinetic operations. As the 2006 Counterinsurgency Field Manual elegantly puts it: “Kindness and compassion can often be as important as killing and capturing insurgents”. The goals of these two strategies are antithetical, however, so this relationship is one of conflict not harmony. For example, how does the U.S reconcile its (antagonistic and destructive) large-scale drone programme with its (supposedly rehabilitative and constructive) Provincial Reconstruction Teams? Contradictions like these support Catherine Lutz’s argument that counterinsurgency is used as a cover to ‘replace the broken bodies at war’s centre’ with a sanitising and legitimising discourse.

Damage after a U.S drone strike in Afghanistan.

Conclusion

What does the omission of cultural knowledge, and the contradiction of continued kinetic operations, tell us about counterinsurgency's re-birth? For one it acts as an important reminder that this is still a U.S' war fought to secure U.S' interests. It's a cautionary tale against believing the military's public rhetoric. For what's externally justified as humanitarian missions to instil democracy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been neither humanising nor democratic. Iraqi and Afghan civilians aren't provided with opportunities to enact their political agency; instead, they ‘are objects of the violence of war, but never subjects’. Opportunities for local political solutions are thus foreclosed and replaced with a political vision ‘conducive to U.S security interests’. Civilians in counterinsurgency discourse matter to the U.S military for their instrumental value. Not fully human, civilian deaths are not grieved but merely regretted as strategic setbacks. 

By Alex Edney-Browne