Catagories are important (or "In which I jump up and down on Michel Cohen")

The COIN community has gotten a bit insulare for its own good, and Michel Cohen as played a useful role as a precictent naysayer (though I think these pieces by Rory Steward and Andrew Bacevich are more compelling in general). However, he frequently seems to have issues understanding current catagorizations in way that make him talk past many of the other serious people writing on the issue.

One of Cohen's recent posts points to why the question of classification is actually very very important, even when it seems like an internal, circular point of utter nonsense (which dont get me wrong, it is sometimes). Over the course of the post Cohen points to both the US involvement in the Philippines and the American Civil war as instances of successful counterinsurgencies campaigns that did not utilize modern pop-centric COIN models. Problem is, neither is.

While both conflict would probably class as Irregular Warfare under modern conventions, the Philippines were a war of colonization, and the American Civil War was... well, a civil war. in both cases America was committed to long term projects of governance, either through pseudo-colonialism (at levels that are just nowhere in the current reasonable discussion about the futures of Iraq or Afghanistan), or through the direct manipulation of the political and economic system of the South that was achieve but Reconstruction Legislation. But these aren't COIN related political strategies, any more then the fairly brutal suppression of the population through events like Sherman's March to the Sea are in line with COIN related military tactics. By miscatagorizing the conflicts, really false analogies are being drawn that just don't serve to advance a very legitimate debate about how we should proceed.