Human Security Warfare? Strategic and Ethical Paradoxes of the New Counterinsurgency
Associate Professor Anthony Burke

The so-called ‘surge’ in Iraq in 2007 obscured a profound and quiet revolution in strategic thinking and military tactics in the United States. US operations there shifted from a highly ‘kinetic’ approach aimed at killing and capturing insurgents and militiamen - even as their ability to utilise, intimidate or kill civilians with impunity remained untouched – to an approach which focused on controlling and securing populations through broadly focused counterinsurgency operations. This approach, which focuses on responding to local grievances and enabling communities to provide for their own needs, on isolating insurgents from communities rather than killing them, and on the minimization of military violence, turns both key Clausewitzian strategic tenets and dominant operational doctrines on their head. It also merges key ethical arguments and tactical approaches to war into a common strategic imperative. This paper explores both the conceptual revolution, and the ethical complexities, of the new counterinsurgency doctrine – one that has been incorporated into new military manuals, successfully implemented in Iraq, and may form the basis of a new strategy in Afghanistan. Given the author’s interests in bringing critical security studies into the study of strategy and war, the paper considers the benefits (and problems) associated with either seeing, or attempting to shape, the strategic objectives and operational practices of counterinsurgency in terms of human security. Its working theory is that doing so could more effectively focus strategic objectives, from the global to the most local levels, but might also do some ethical violence to how we have understood human security as a framework to date.