Jim Henley enters the WP pundit contest (via Ezra Klein):
There’s been much discussion lately about whether to pursue a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan, or a more limited counterterrorism strategy. It’s important for the ordinary American to have an understanding of the difference, and to understand why it takes more troops and costs more money to pursue counterinsurgency.
In a counterinsurgency strategy, America hangs around a foreign country for years and years, occasionally killing people who live there, while pretending it’s for their own good. This takes a lot of people because the military, and the civilian parts of the government that control the military, are very specialized. You need people to do the hanging around, people to do the occasional killing of people that live there, and even more people to do the pretending. As you might imagine, pretending to foreigners that killing them is for their own good is hard! Not just anyone can pull that off with a straight face, and you need a lot of people who can. Remember how upset people got at those town halls over the summer? That was for "death panels" that didn’t even exist. Now imagine that you actually are occasionally killing people’s neighbors! Basically, you have to hold an awful lot of town halls.
In a counterterrorism strategy, America hangs around a foreign country for years and years, occasionally killing people who live there, but doesn’t bother to pretend it’s for the sake of the foreigners themselves. So you need people for hanging around and occasionally killing people, but you don’t need nearly as many people "in theater" for pretending. You need a few to pretend that you know so much about the foreign country that all the people you occasionally kill had it coming. But that’s it.
Under counterterrorism, most of the pretending happens right here at home, and consists of pretending that your counterterrorism strategy is awesome! Also that having to engage in counterterrorism for years on end is perfectly ordinary and isn’t a sign that something went really wrong back there somewhere.
Here’s the thing, though. Even under a counterinsurgency strategy, you have to do at least as much pretending at home. (The counterinsurgency strategy is awesome! etc.) So the pretending at home part of counterterrorism doesn’t constitute what policy experts call an "incremental impact." And we have plenty of people to do it anyway, including politicians and major newspapers.
Which strategy should America pursue in Afghanistan? Unfortunately I’m out of
