Counterinsurgency (COIN) has made a comeback during the early 21-century since the majority of western countries have been involved in peace enforcement in the middle-east. Since its comeback the concept of COIN have been wildly debated but also undergone some chances since its early days, today the majority of COIN theories claims that the local population is the key to winning a COIN campaign. If you gain their trust the insurgency will lose their support and recruiting base, this is the reason why collateral damage resulting in in civilian deaths are contra-productive, it creates more insurgents. This is the incitement to further examine how civilian deaths occur and can be avoided during COIN campaigns. This essay studies the American COIN campaign in Iraq between 2004 and 2009 and aims to investigate whether there is a trilemma-like relationship between the key goals of COIN: protecting civilians, protecting one’s own forces and neutralizing the enemy. Each different goal has been operationalized to something measurable – death statistics. The yearly death toll for coalition troops, Iraqi civilians and insurgents provide the empirical material necessary to answer the question if the main goals can be achieved at the same time or if it’s impossible. The essay is broken down into two parts, the first examines whether an actual people-centric COIN strategy saves civilian lives or if it’s all just in theory. The second part examines the relationship between the key goals. The result in this essay shows that a people-centric COIN strategy, as the one employed by General Petraeus in Iraq during operation Iraqi freedom, actually saves civilian lives. But it also establishes that the key goals can’t be achieved at the same time and that each strategy will come with a consequence.

In recent years, experience from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has led to considerable debate regarding counterinsurgency theories and their application in reality. Therefore, it could appear strange that both International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and American forces applied strategies in Afghanistan that contradict fundamental knowledge of counterinsurgency theory. One example is the use of indiscriminate force when combating insurgents, resulting in the loss of civilian lives, even though civilian casualties risk alienating the local population from the counterinsurgent. This thesis aims to examine if the three objectives of force protection, destruction of the insurgent, and protection of civilians can be achieved at the same time in counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare, or if a trilemma-like relationship exists between the three, whereby only two of the three objectives can be achieved simultaneously. By examining statistics such as death tolls within the categories of civilians, insurgents and own forces – and comparing the results over two time periods – some conclusions can be drawn with regard to what happens when the strategic focus changes. This thesis focuses on two time periods, 2006-2009 and 2009-2012, and investigates the strategic focus in COIN operations in each period, and whether or not the outcome in terms of death toll can be explained accordingly. The result of the thesis reveals that the statistics point toward the fact that a trilemma like relationship indeed does occur between the three objectives of counterinsurgency. From these results the thesis suggests that this theoretical framework could prove useful in future conflicts by helping to foresee what will happen when working towards the three different objectives.