"Know Yourself and Seek Self Improvement"

There are two schools among the opposition to the COINdinistas.  The first is that counterinsurgency as a strategy does not work.  The strongest evidence for this is the 75% failure rate of post-1950 counterinsurgency campaigns.  

The other school of thought is that even if there is a hypothetically successful counterinsurgency strategy, the United States is not capable of executing it.  The evidence for this is the lack of U.S. capability in non-military areas.  As any counterinsurgency theorist knows, a counterinsurgency is 90% political and 10% military.  The U.S. strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan, conversely, is 10% political and 90% military.  This is due to a combination of factors, but perhaps most prominent is the American culture of national security.  The American "Way of War" is biased toward the style of warfare that succeeded in World War II.

Eight years after the invasion of Afghanistan, the military is still making only incremental shifts toward a counterinsurgency capability.  The political portion of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus (Department of State, USAID, etc.) has not visibly adapted.  

To construct an effective foreign policy, we must know ourselves.  If our institutions cannot adapt to fight counterinsurgencies, then perhaps we should not be engaged in counterinsurgency.