Counterinsurgency as a concept is nothing new since there have been numerous conflicts over the last century where a greater power is fighting an enemy that is using irregular tactics. But there is an ongoing debate on whether the supposed population-centric approach, as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan is the right way to go. During 2010 the US and NATO changed their strategy into focusing more on winning legitimacy among the Afghan people. The purpose of this study is to find out if population-centric counterinsurgency even was implemented on a tactical level during operation Moshtarak, the biggest operation since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. This study uses two counterinsurgency theories with different premises on how to win over insurgents in a qualitative case study to determine if there was a population or enemy centric method being used.
The results contribute to the existing research where there is a criticism of the new strategy in Afghanistan for being neither population nor enemy-centric in its approach on a strategical level. The results reveal that the operation did not fully follow the guidelines for either of the acknowledged theories used in this study. Therefore, the conclusions of the study are that the operation that were supposed to be a grand model for how to conduct counterinsurgency operations during the rest of the conflict did not have a distinct emphasis on a tactical level either.