That seems to be a widespread belief, and a terrifying one. The essence of 4th generation warfare since brought to maturity by Mao is a relentless focus on the political factors for victory. Victory on the “battlefield” — conventional or unconventional — is irrelevant, except to the extent it advances us to achieve our political goals. Of course, this is nothing new — it was Clausewitz’s starting point.

Failure to understand this means defeat, as it was for almost all western forces fighting 4GW.

I strongly believe that the U.S. has set the pretext for the tribal awakening, and without kinetic operations to set enemy fighters on their heels, the tribes could not have had the breathing room necessary for the awakening to occur.

So when I speak of winning in Anbar, that’s what I mean. I mean that there have been COIN victories in Anbar. Relative peace, security and stability have been brought to this region. I recall discussing the same subject you raise above with an officer in Anbar several month ago, in which he said approximately the same things that you have: until we see the broader strokes of the strategy, we won’t know if we have been successful.

To me, this is a macroscopic view, and my take in this post is a little more microscopic - or if you will, macroscopic for a region rather than the nation holistically. It is the same position I take regarding the insurgency in Vietnam. It (U.S. efforts) was a victory. The fact that the corrupt S.V. government could not stand up, and the U.S. congress cut funding, doesn’t change the fact that the actual COIN operations in S.V. were remarkably successful.

The same is true of Iraq. All we are capable of doing is setting the pretext in place for national stability. We cannot force Iraqis to reconcile. Our strategy is the best it can be given the circumstances.

Another way of saying it would be this. The argument makes no sense to me that goes thusly: “Since our strategy cannot assure national success and is therefore imperfect, we should not pursue it.” Under this argument, no strategy could ever be pursued under any circumstances. We live in an imperfect world, so our COIN strategy will be imperfect.

Or another way of saying it would be this. Before we had indigenous Sunnis allied with foreigners, all fighting ISF and the U.S. Now we have the foreigners having been essentially defeated, with the Sunnis providing their own security and allied with the U.S. I cannot see any circumstances where we would want to return to the former conditions in lieu of the latter.

The U.S. hasn’t ‘armed’ the Sunnis so that they can now be a destabilizing force for the nation-state any more than they were previously. They were armed before, they are now. They were a destabilizing force to the nation-state before, they are less so now.

I still advocate payment to concerned citizens, neighborhood watch groups, and integration of the Sunnis into the national forces. I am casting my lot with Petraeus and Odierno. Whether the Iraqis will stand up on their own remains to be seen. But at least we have done our part.

Finally, I agree with you on COIN literature and strategy. I don’t know, but suspect that Petraeus’ PhD is worthless to him now. We are dealing with an insurgency combined with foreign terrorists combined with a factious country combined with at least some religious anomosity combined with sectarianism, and so on the story goes. The book is being rewritten for a completely new warfare. The U.S. is doing is as we speak. To the extent that we opine and people listen, we are contributing.

“… the literature on counter-insurgency is so enormous that, had it been put aboard the Titanic, it would have sunk that ship without any help from the iceberg. However, the outstanding fact is that almost all of it has been written by the losers.”
- Martin van Creveld, in The Changing Face Of War (2006)

Until some nation achieves a win — acomplishes its political objectives against a large, estabilished enemy of local insurgents in a foreign land — this is a largely theoretical debate. We’re debating what might work, on the basis of theory and a LARGE body of experience.

As for the “US won in Anbar”, it is not clear what that means (and stated reason given is a guess). The locals turned against their foreign “shock troops”. We have assisted, then put large numbers on our payroll. How this helps us accomplish our political objects (as defined by the President), or the more limited “benchmarks” set by Congress, remains uncertain at this time. We’ve providing substantial aid to a wide range of Iraq’s factions, at the cost of undermining (perhaps terminally) the central government — the establishment of which was our primary goal.