Cohen makes Brooks look stupid

Michael Cohen does a fairly good job of destroying David Brooks’s laudatory column on counterinsurgency:

…there is no perhaps no place in the world worse to do counter-insurgency than Afghanistan. Perhaps instead of writing love letters to David Petraeus, Brooks could buy the Army’s Counter-Insurgency Manual, FM 3-24 and try to figure out how to square this statement from pg. 199 “Success in counterinsurgency (COIN) operations requires establishing a legitimate government supported by the people and able to address the fundamental causes that insurgents use to gain support,” [with] the current corrupt and illegitimate regime that is our “ally” in Afghanistan.

The point here is that the education process Brooks thinks is so wonderful has some fairly significant intellectual holes…but that hasn’t stopped Army thinking from becoming fixated on the platitudes of population-centric COIN.  And because the of that “blinkered thinking” we continue to try and stick the square peg of counter-insurgency into the round hole of Afghanistan. I ask this question all the time and I’d love for a COIN advocate to give me an answer: If not for the fact that COIN is the “new black” in the US military; and if not for the supposed success of COIN in stabilizing Afghanistan; and if not for the publication of FM 3-24 and the veneration of COIN by Petraeus et all, would anyone think that doing counter-insurgency in Afghanistan is a good idea?

Brooks is right that there has been a transformation in the US military toward counter-insurgency. Where he’s wrong is in believing that this is something to be celebrated.

This is a two-fer for me. David Brooks drives me nuts and I think US policy in Afghanistan makes no sense.