Both al-Suri and Naji have some great things to say about what global jihad’s strategy should be. Their conclusions, while related, diverge on some very serious issues (centralization of movement, control of territory, etc.)

A couple of observations:
I’m only half-way through the book right now, but it’s obvious from listening to him speak that Dr. Kilcullen poured the whole of his knowledge into it. What that we could all create some distillation of what we know in our lives. (Or have something as interesting to write about).

On Iraq:
He pointed out one glaring, but not often stated fact: the true intelligence failure was not anticipating or detecting the Hussein regime’s preparations for guerilla warfare. The preparations failed the Husseins because we captured or killed them, but left a lot of that infrastructure in place (after all where is Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri?). It’s a blindingly obvious fact, but it is rarely aired; either by those who supported the war, like yours truly, or those who were against it, like Kilcullen, who normallly focus on WMD and who called the failure to find WMD a policy failure.

In the pre-speach soiree, Dr, Kilcullen said that many of the insurgents he had interviewed expressed embarrassment at what they had done and were reluctant to talk about it. They explained it as a kind of temporary madness.

On Afghanistan:
He pointed out that a lot of the original anti-Soviet feelings stemmed by the Russian attempt to give women more rights. This was part of his answer to a question in which he highlighted the problems of fighting against and allying with people who have extremely different worldviews.

Although he didn’t address it in the speach, in the book he says that he originally though that Counter Narcotic operations were a sideshow at best and counter-productive at worse. However, he says that he has changed his opinion to that because a) the majority of Afghans are actually against Opium production and b) the actual areas of maximum production are small and in the heart of Taliban support areas (and thus CN work isn’t affecting anyone ‘on the fence’). He also thinks CN efforts are a good way of pointing out the hypocrisy of the current Taliban who were once anti-drugs.

This leads me into a question that came to me afterward. At the event and in his book Dr. Kilcullen said that extremest almost always eventually wear out their welcome. I wonder if the Dr. has any suggestions of how to speed up that process, to get inside that loop. I think exploiting the Taliban’s hypocrisy on Opium would be one of his suggestions, but I’d love to hear what else he’d suggest.

In general the crowd at the event was a mixture of older regulars and some younger folks who’d obviously come for this particular event. There were also active and recently active members of the armed forces there. It was a privilege to be in the presence of a real intellectual guru.

It was also a pleasure to meet Lex. He came in looking like he’d walked through a waterfall, but didn’t lose any time in joining a conversation with Dr. Kilcullen and asking him questions.

I listened to the podcast: it was interesting and the question and answer session was good, I’m glad to learn about the pritzker website, I’m catching up on older podcasts.