COIN is a CON

--Out of Vietnam, Rainer Hachfeld

Nothing is over until we decide it is!
Was it over when the Germans
bombed Pearl Harbor?
--Animal House (1978)

There's no there there
--Gertrude Stein
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Counterinsurgency is a dupe's game; the players wrap themselves around the HOW's, but never the WHY's, and it is the latter realm in which COIN is lost before it's out of the gate.

U.S. COIN efforts always violate the concepts of legitimacy and sovereignty, making it a fail. So why do we fight COIN? Let's take the largest pre-PWOT (©) example, Vietnam.

We fought in the Republic of Vietnam as a bulwark against the Domino Theory of Communism. If so, the Vietnamese had no relevance save as proxy, which always struck Ranger as a chickenshit concept -- why hide behind proxies?

The Vietnamese people, both North and South, largely lived in abject poverty and neither side cared; the people were stuck in a conflict not of their making. One could say the U.S. still exploits the cheap labor pool of Southeast Asia today.

During the Second Indochina War neither side had legitimacy, but the North Vietnamese had the better claim than did the South. The U.S. efforts were seen as an extension of French colonialism, correctly or not. How could COIN policy have changed this perception?

The U.S. would have had to have emulated the Communist's prime agenda of the elimination of the hegemony of the South's corrupt absentee land owners and Francophile Catholic ruling class. Why did the U.S. ignore this overriding impulse?

There was simply no way for the U.S. to go from that reality to a democratic, capitalist nation. That postulated goal could not be carved with either the tools or the stone at hand, and this fact remains true in today's COIN policy. You can't get there from here; you've got to go somewhere else, first.

None of the entities we call countries possess the prerequisites for a democratic society, first and foremost being an educated middle class entity. We have installed Karzai, he of the silk cape and yak hat, but under that cape is a fine western suit, and that is not the uniform of his people.

We can chew our cud, but we don't seem able to digest it.