Terrorism

Kilcullen on COIN “Persistent-Presence” vs. “Repetitive Raiding”

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The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One by David Kilcullen

I purchased a copy of The Accidental Guerrilla, intending to read it last summer but, being buried under my own academic course work, I was forced to put it aside until recently. I am not finished yet but I can say that Col. Kilcullen has written a seminal, if idiosyncratic, work on the theory and practice of counterinsurgency – no doubt why some reviewers found The Accidental Guerrilla be difficult book to read, one that “…could be like a junior high school student’s attempting “Ulysses.” Or were aggravated by Kilcullen’s format through which he enunciated a more nuanced understanding of the war and COIN than they found politically tolerable. Most readers in this corner of the blogosphere will find The Accidental Guerrilla an intellectually stimulating book from an author well grounded in the realities of Iraq and Afghanistan, who is the leading theorist of counterinsurgency today.

I would like to take a look at one section where Dr. Kilcullen discusses the merits of “presence” vs. “raiding” in the context of road-building operations in the Kunar and Korengal vallies of Afghanistan by American troops under, successively, LTC. Chris Cavoli and LTC. Bill Ostlund [p. 96]:

Cavoli contrasts this “permanent-presence” methodology with the “repetitive raiding” that has characterized operations at some other times and places. He argues that persistent presence is essentially a “counterpunching” strategy that relies on a cycle of defense and counterattack, in which the presence of the road and Coalition forces protecting and interacting with the population draws the enemy into attacking defended areas, causing him to come to the population and the government – the opposite of the “search and destroy” approach in which security forces “sweep” the countryside looking for the enemy within the population, as if for a needle in a haystack, and often destroy the haystack to find the needle. More particularly, search and destroy operations tend to create a popular backlash and contribute to the “antibody response” that generates large numbers of accidental guerrillas and pushes the population and the enemy together. The persistent-presence method avoids this.

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I Am Shocked

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Apparently the man who tried to blow up Times Square is a Pakistani immigrant, rather than one of those violent Tea Party activists as so many of us initially suspected. Who could have known?

Wait. Do we know for a fact that he isn’t also a Tea Party activist? All responsible journalists must look into this possibility at once.

Mini-Book Review — Jones – The Human Factor

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Jones, Ishmael, The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, Encounter Books, 2008, 383 pp.

This book is the career memoir of a former Marine and stock broker who entered the “non-State Department” clandestine service of the CIA and was a deep cover case officer from the ’90s through the late ’00s. It covers the story of his training, deployment, and activities overseas focusing on radiological and biological weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the course of tours in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Russia, and finally a “combat tour” in Iraq. Serving overseas with his wife and children under the cover of a “software solutions expert,” he contacted disaffected or bribe-able scientists and business-people from rogue nations. By casting his inquiries as commercial and academic opportunities, he was able to gather a steady stream of intelligence on WMD programs in the Third World.

The central theme of the book, however, is how staff at the home office (from top to bottom) either intentionally or inadvertently got in the way of his doing an effective job. Most authors are the hero of their memoirs but Jones does an admirable job of giving his pride in his accomplishments a reasonable airing without masking the real value of his book. The CIA is a large modern business with a primary mandate to stay out of the newspapers and off TV. How it does so is a tale both depressing and all too familiar.

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Overlooked

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The latest flap concerning Muslim extremists getting bent out of shape over a South Park episode, and how the network censored images of the prophet, is a case of history repeating itself.

A previous ep from 2006 supposedly depicted Mohammad, until the network excised all images of that particular worthy. They even went so far as to bleep out every utterance of his name. All done in the fear that, unless appeased, intolerant practitioners of the Religion of Peace would indulge in an orgy of bloodshed and fire.

I wrote Comedy Central at the time, taking them to task for their shameless act of cowardice. I received a well spoken, thoughtfully composed reply that explained the concerns of the network.

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