Book Review - Conducting Counterinsurgency: Reconstruction Task Force 4 in Afghanistan

Written by: David Connery, David Cran and David Evered

Big Sky Publishing, Newport, 2012, I

SBN 9781921941771, 159pp, $19.99

Reviewed by: Lieutenant Colonel Chris Smith, Australian Army

Conducting Counterinsurgency: Reconstruction Task Force 4 in Afghanistan is the second book in the Australian Military History Series. The Army History Unit sponsors the series, which is written for ‘members of the Australian Army with a focus on issues and deployments that the Australian Army has participated in’. The series is intended to provide context to general doctrinal principles and is based on two important premises. The first is that Australian soldiers are keen to learn and often learn best from the experience of others. The second is that the modern operational environment dictates that some learning must be rapid and accomplished in what the Army calls ‘short and medium learning loops’.

Conducting Counterinsurgency uses the experiences of members of Reconstruction Task Force 4 (RTF4), which deployed to Afghanistan in 2008, as the basis to illustrate the counterinsurgency principles described in Australian Army doctrine. The authors’ aim is to assist members of the Australian Army come to terms with the complex concepts that underwrite the counterinsurgency principles.

The first two chapters of Conducting Counterinsurgency provide context while the remaining chapters seek to illustrate the ten counterinsurgency principles. Associated principles are grouped together under three chapter headings: ‘Insurgency is Political’, ‘Insurgency is not Primarily a Military Activity’ and ‘Insurgents Exist Among the People’. The final chapter asks: How does the RTF4 experience relate to the principles of counterinsurgency operations? The book is well illustrated and, as is the habit of Army History Unit publications, seeded with interesting technical asides describing the equipment, vehicles and weapons used by the soldiers of the Task Force.

The strength of the book is that it provides an excellent understanding of the character of the operations of RTF4. It provides great insight into the thoughts and the actions of the officers and soldiers of the Task Force. It is, in essence, a distillation of the various oral histories provided by the members of the Task Force. The principles provide a convenient and coherent structure for the synthesis of the oral histories. To this extent the book works very well.

The other strength of the book is the manner with which it uses a very diverse range of anecdotes from oral histories to illustrate the counterinsurgency principles for a reconstruction task force in Afghanistan in 2008. The illustrations provide students of counterinsurgency a very good feel for the principles in practice at that place and at that time. The authors acknowledge though, that Conducting Counterinsurgency ‘does not provide “the last word” [on the application of the counterinsurgency principles], nor does it represent an ideal textbook application of those principles’. Importantly, the authors acknowledge that ‘further work involving a range of different units [in different contexts] would be required for a more ambitious task such as validating the principles’.

Conducting Counterinsurgency is not a critical evaluation of the counterinsurgency principles. The authors address the doctrinal counterinsurgency principles without questioning their validity or correctness. The principles are similar to those developed by US General David Petreaus and the team that produced the United States counterinsurgency doctrine published in 2006: FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency. They are in line with what might be described as the contemporary counterinsurgency orthodoxy within the English-speaking armies of the Western world, which is commonly referred to as COIN. This doctrine, and the principles on which it is based, have come in for considerable criticism in recent years.

The primary criticism of the contemporary counterinsurgency doctrine of Western English-speaking nations is that, rather than being a generalised and broadly applicable doctrine for countering insurgencies, the doctrine applies to very specific circumstances. Some contemporary critics have provided highly plausible arguments asserting that contemporary COIN theory and related doctrine are largely a recipe for winning the Iraq War.

For example, the Australian Army counterinsurgency principle of Host Nation Primacy assumes the existence of a very specific context for its relevance. The context for the principle’s relevance is the conduct of a war against an insurgent group in which the Australian policy objective is best achieved by using military force in support of the incumbent government of some other country. This assumption is quite specific and limits the utility of the doctrine to a very limited set of geopolitical circumstances.

Similarly, the principle of Reinforce the Rule of Law assumes that the policy objective requires either the maintenance or establishment of a rule of law in the host nation. It is highly plausible, for example, that a policy objective of denying international terrorists a safe-haven in Afghanistan does not necessarily require establishing the rule of law.

It is worthwhile referring back to the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz here. Clausewitz argued that:

Given the nature of the subject [war], we must remind ourselves that it is simply not possible to construct a model for the art of war that can serve as scaffolding on which the commander can rely for support at any time.

Conducting Counterinsurgency’s main flaw, therefore, is that it might serve to reinforce a very specific and limited paradigm for how military force might be applied to achieve the objectives of government policy in circumstances that resemble those encountered in Iraq. The danger is that some less-reflective or less-critical officers might see the principles as a template strategy for some future contingency that might resemble (perhaps only superficially) RTF4’s circumstances.

As a synthesis of the collection of oral histories from the Fourth Reconstruction Task Force, Conducting Counterinsurgency is a success. This synthesis of the oral histories is not an insignificant achievement. The book is, therefore, a good account of the nature of the operations of RTF4 and provides a good sense of the rationale for the various operations of the Task Force. However, the use of personal anecdotes as illustrations of principles is less successful. This work risks reinforcing highly flawed and contextually specific principles and lessons that if generally applied might prove to be irrelevant, dangerous and decisively flawed.

Conducting Counterinsurgency highlights the inherent risk in the Army’s short and medium learning loops. The risk is that good ideas that seem to have worked in one specific context might be rapidly circulated through the Army’s learning systems when the ideas themselves may not be generally applicable. If the lessons process is too uncritical and has no inbuilt scepticism, the same systems designed to rapidly transfer good ideas to the Army can just as rapidly transfer flawed ideas.