1/lots: A long thread about France's war in the #Sahel, and why I don't like the NYT piece.
2/n First of all, instead of deriding everything a "forever war," let's instead drop the absurd expectation that wars should be quick, or the assumption that can be won quickly are worth doing.
3/ Second, let's talk about "French counter-terrorism."
4/ I'm not sure what that means. But I can tell you about French COIN doctrine and what #Barkhane is doing. Mainly, I need to explain the difference between colonial-era French COIN and the contemporary vintage.
5/ Colonial-era French COIN is all about the "global approach" and the idea that victory requires complementing mil action (violence) with "political" action, i.e. a whole bunch of stuff from economic development and governance to propaganda and ideological programming.
6/ colonial troops come to stay; which means minimizing destruction and focusing on reconstruction. In the Cold War, it also means combating Maoist-inspired ideology. Hearts and minds. Fighting is considered least important, though necessary.
7/ But the troops fight AND govern AND build. They do this alongside civilians, and along side LOTS of locally raised troops. Can't do it without the locally raised troops, who are French led. This means everything from recruiting locals into regular units to militias.
8/ Post-colonial doctrine, retains the global approach idea, but the context is totally changed. Now France is intervening in sovereign states. FR must and does defer to the host nation, no matter how frustrating that might be.
9/ Also, post-colonial FR no longer raises local troops; it has to rely on local security forces, who are not under French control. It has to help them but won't take over.
10/ So while the global approach means doing a whole panoply of things in addition to mil action, FR largely is limiting itself to supporting the locals' military action while encouraging the sovereign host nations to do the rest, i.e. the governance, ideological, political bits.
11/ Of course FR is also investing heavily in development projects and does some information ops. But still, what FR is doing is a cut-down version of COIN, with the FR role much reduced in favor of that of the sovereign host nations.
12/ All of this means that success WILL TAKE A LONG TIME. The campaign is going at the pace of the host nations and their political will/ability to step up. But that is by design; French commanders know this.
13/ The alternatives to this long game are a) FR walks away, with potentially calamitous results, or b) FR drops its post-colonial scruples and assumes more control over the host nations and their forces. It's easy to imagine how that might go over in public opinion.
14/ It's ironic that critics of FR often, w/o realizing it, are criticizing FR for not being sufficiently colonial. FR is electing to fight w/ 1 hand behind the back to avoid being colonial, but that's also a major factor for why this war feels like it will never end.
15/ Going colonial would also require a much larger effort than what FR currently is investing. Much more than a brigade, for example. FR's military wouldn't be able to do much of anything else. And it would cost far more than the current €900 million or so Barkhane costs.
16/ My biggest criticism of Barkhane is that FR has delegated far too much to the EU and MINUSMA. Esp. training and accompanying locals in combat. I think FR does this both to spread costs and to avoid replicating its colonial practices more than it would like.
17/ The French mil has all sorts of complexes having to do with colonial-era ops. But I think FR needs to take more ownership over training.
18/ Back to that NYT piece. It basically derides the local forces. The missing point is that FR is deliberately banking on them because FR can't/won't assume a colonial role and form colonial regiments. The only answer is patience. This is a war for tortoises, not hares.
19/ There are two weaknesses in FR strategy that could sink everything.
20/ The patience of the French public, which is paying for this; and the will of local leaders, like Mali's president, to do what needs to be done.
21/ Comparing French strategy to 15-yr old US CT is silly. The implication is that current US doctrine--correct doctrine--is not to do it, and that the best move now is to leave.
22/ I'd argue that French doctrine is more realistic than 15-yr old US doctrine, because it's less ambitious about what one can achieve, and more realistic about how much everything depends on the host nation.
23/ As to the idea that one should never do this sort of thing, and that one should leave, that rules out the possibility that maybe walking away is more dangerous than staying. Not all cases are the same.
24/ I've got an 8k word expanded version of this in the works, hopefully to be published soon.
...that *only wars* that can be won quickly are worth doing.
