Provocations - Lorenzo Zambernardi
Counterinsurgency’s Impossible Trilemma
While at present there is general agreement on how to carry out counterinsurgency, a clear analysis of the tradeoffs that all counterinsurgents have to deal with is still lacking. While challenges within the field remain, counterinsurgency still faces numerous challenges in theory. Neither scholars nor practitioners have developed a theoretical framework that has been able to explicitly specify the existing tradeoffs among the three typical goals involved in this doctrine.
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Ever since the conventional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan turned into irregular conflicts, both students of war and practitioners have furiously debated counterinsurgency’s logic, goals, and chances of success. Counterinsurgency doctrine, however, has experienced no radical change since its original development. It was originally, though not systematically, formulated in the twentieth century by none other than the British officer, T.E. Lawrence, and later extended, on the basis of the writings of Mao, by a variety of counterrevolutionary strategists such as the French theorists of la guerre revolutionnaire
