Abstract
Counter-insurgency is again in vogue, and Australian academic and ex-army officer David Kilcullen has a good claim to be the Frank Kitson or Robert Thompson of today. In a series of books, lectures, and articles since 2003, Kilcullen has done more than probably anybody else to revive thinking about counter-insurgency and place it within a modern globalized context. This publication gathers together six of his articles and lectures in a simple field-handbook-friendly format. Given the influence Kilcullen has had on General David Petraeus in particular and on both the British and American military establishments in the ‘war on terror’ in general, his writing is eminently worth reading, if only to understand the cutting edge of current western thinking towards COIN.
Kilcullen earned his spurs as a public intellectual on counter-insurgency by researching a PhD on the little-studied (in the west) Indonesian campaign against the Darul Islam separatist movement in West Java. His attempt to weld together ethnographic field research with the perspective of a military historian is embodied by one chapter in this book summarizing his thesis research. His conclusions were that the indigenous Indonesian doctrine of P4K (Planning Guidance for Perfecting Peace and Security) broadly mirrored contemporary British and French ‘systems thinking’ regarding insurgency, employing local militias and cordon-and-search operations to reduce insurgent freedom of movement. This doctrine delivered dramatic results in West Java in 1959–62, but proved less effective in East Timor between 1974 and 1999, largely owing to differences in terrain, insurgent organization, greater media attention in an era of globalizing communications, and local culture. The comparison serves both to illustrate one of Kilcullen’s maxims, the danger for any military of allowing COIN doctrine to become an overly rigid template, and also to introduce a further significant aspect of his thinking, the impact of globalization upon the modern insurgent ‘ecosystem’. Kilcullen explicitly compares Al Qaeda to the Comintern, and advocates a strategic form of COIN comparable to the Cold War strategy of containment, agitating for a policy aimed at ‘disaggregating’ local insurgencies from Al Qaeda’s global brand of Islamist extremism (pp. 212–27). Kilcullen, in short, seeks to elevate COIN from an operational approach into becoming little less than a global strategy.
There remain distinct tensions within Kilcullen’s work common to most studies of war in general, but also deeper tensions endemic within western thinking about the ‘war on terror’ in particular. A critic of overly rigid ‘Cartesian analysis’ of counter-insurgency, or systems thinking, Kilcullen, as an analyst, is also of necessity a systematizer of what effective counter-insurgency campaigns typically do – a problem not dissimilar to the challenge that faced Clausewitz in seeking to balance military principles such as ‘attack’ or ‘defence’ against an understanding of war as above all a human activity rather than an exact science. Counter-insurgency, Kilcullen emphasizes, ‘mirrors the state’ conducting it (pp. 5–12); stabilization is often most effective when carried out from the bottom up rather than from the top down (pp. 155–7); but Kilcullen nonetheless also remains a staunch advocate for American leadership in the ‘war on terror’, embodied for example by a ‘global CORDS program’ (p. 217) aimed at ‘a revival of free trade and industrial interdependence within a given region’ (p. 228).
The message here is decidedly mixed – global COIN, to be effective, must carry within it a distinctly decentralized, culturally sensitive component, but at the same time the ‘quantifiable outputs’ for success in western eyes have already been decided in advance. ‘Useful’ metrics of success in Afghanistan include the ‘rate of new business formation’ and the security of private property rights (p. 62), making clear that for all the talk of local solutions, there is still a trend towards universal prescriptions within even the most intellectually rigorous thinking about COIN warfare. Finally, there is a darker undertow to COIN practice, which is simply the actual act of violence itself – Kilcullen concurs with Kalyvas that populations trapped between warring sides generally side with strength rather than moral virtue (p. 151), and commends the policy of ‘Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Assess’ (F3EA) as a way to finish off insurgent networks by a continuous high-tempo cycle of targeted ‘decapitating’ assassinations and enhanced interrogation techniques (pp. 4–5, 221). One of the most disturbing aspects of this book therefore is the ease with which both reader and writer alike, while flagging impeccable credentials of cultural sensitivity and thoughtfulness, can unconsciously slide back into the moral certainties of the Cold War in general, and the horrors of the French doctrine of guerre révolutionnaire in particular. This is an essential read for all those interested in western actions in the ‘war on terror’, but from the perspective that one is supposed to actually learn from history rather than repeat it, it remains a far from comforting one.