Feb 12, 2012
The Cult of Counterinsurgency?
We like counterpoint for counterpoint's sake, so this piece on the cult of counterinsurgency caught our eye. Whether you're a COIN specialist looking to bolster your own arguments, or a curmudgeon who's just suspicious of things that everyone seems to agree with, Tara McKelvey has a few good thoughts to ponder.
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Okay, so the underlying
Okay, so the underlying causality argument for “counterinsurgency doctrine”->neocolonialism is basically when you have a hammer everything starts to look like a nail, right? Or put differently that if we build a capacity for counter-insurgency we’re more likely think we can handle long term occupations and thus more likely to intervene.
This strikes me as a falsifiable proposition.
The McKlevey hypothesis might be:
X= Counter-insurgency resources vs. Y=Number of interventions initiated.
Compare that to:
X= Military resources vs. Y=Number of interventions initiated.
There are definitely some confounds. Perhaps one would want to control for the global count of interventions/occupations to get a feel for whether you’ve got Cold War manipulations or great power games going on at the time. Similarly you’ve got to control for the number of ongoing interventions to get a feel for available resources. Also could look at the number of ongoing conflicts in the world. I think that data is pretty easily available from the human security report. Although number of interventions might be the wrong unit of analysis, might want something that includes scope.
If the variable definitions make sense, toughest part is probably figuring out the counter-insurgency resources; military resources is pretty easy. Know if anyone has done that before?
Anyways, think there’s a good title here. Perhaps “If we had a hammer, would we build an empire?” or “If you have COIN, does everything start looking like a colony?” I’m guessing the answer will be no.