The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
by David Kilcullen
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Book Summary Information
Author: David KilcullenEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2009-03-16
ISBN: 0195368347
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
Book Review: An expert worth listening to
Summary: 4 Stars
The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
David Kilcullen is an Australian expert on guerrilla warfare who has recently served as a senior advisor to U.S. military and State Department officials, including General David Petraeus and Condoleezza Rice. He describes his accounts in this book as "conflict ethnography," a kind of anthropology that here attempts a "close reading" of what is going on within Afghanistan, Iraq, and other similar conflict settings. Kilcullen has been a participant-observer, both a military advisor and a student of the situations he describes first-hand. Much of the material in The Accidental Guerrilla comes from his own field notes and from his interviews or discussions with local or military key informants.
His accounts are both detailed and credible; he knows a great deal about his subjects. The book begins with an overview of what Kilcullen calls the "accidental guerrilla" syndrome and then moves to chapters that discuss its application to Afghanistan, Iraq, and certain other settings. He concludes with various recommendations on how to proceed "beyond the war on terrorism."
"Accidental guerrillas" according to Kilcullen are "people who fight us not because they hate the West and seek our overthrow but because we have invaded their space to deal with a small extremist element that has manipulated and exploited local grievances to gain power in their societies." The accidental guerrilla syndrome as he outlines it has four phases: infection (the opponent establishes a presence), contagion (violence spreads from safe havens), intervention (outside forces come in to deal with the threat), and rejection (the local population reacts against outside intervention and allies with the opponent, which intensifies the infection and leads around the same cycle again). The terrorists and guerrillas become two loosely cooperating classes of non-state opponents.
Kilcullen proposes that conflicts involving accidental guerrillas are "hybrid wars." They involve four problems: terrorism, insurgency, communal conflict, and a weak state in need of capacity building. The solutions to the different problems sometimes conflict; for example, building indigenous security forces to combat insurgents can also exacerbate the communal conflicts, since the security force may take sectarian sides.
The difficulty of fighting hybrid wars is painfully illustrated by the Iraq war where, Kilcullen notes, the insurgency component "may resemble the Vietnam War to a limited extent, but insurgency is only one part of a much bigger problem.... If we were to draw historical analogies, we might say that operations in Iraq are like trying to defeat the Viet Cong (insurgency) while simultaneously rebuilding Germany (nation-building following war and dictatorship), keeping peace in the Balkans (communal and sectarian conflict), and defeating the IRA (domestic terrorism)."
The author stresses the difference between counterterrorism activities, which focus on the enemy and seek to destroy his network, and counterinsurgency actions, which are population-centric and seek to protect the local people and isolate them from interactions with the insurgents. If the emphasis is on counterinsurgency, killing or capturing terrorists is a secondary activity (keeping terrorists at bay); it can be helpful defensively but it is not decisive in preventing future terrorism.
Kilcullen describes how terrorists and insurgents typically seek to produce backlash among the local populations by prodding counterinsurgents into actions which alienate them from the indigenous residents. He says that Al Qaeda, in particular, draws strength not so much from the appeal of its identity as from the backlash. In Iraq, for example, to protect themselves the Coalition forces operated from fortified bases and ventured out primarily only in heavily armored vehicles - Kilcullen calls one version of these exotic machines "urban submarines." The chief consequence was to isolate Coalition troops from the local population and to stir-up anti-Coalition resentments.
One of Kilcullen's case studies involves the Kumar region of Afghanistan, where he believes a Coalition road-building project was a success. It was the process that was critical, he thinks, not just the actual construction of the road. In his view, the factors contributing to the success included the Coalition approaches of maintaining a "persistent presence" in the region (not just raiding and then moving on), working with local partners, linking the local people to their government, and denying the enemy access to the local population.
He also judges the Surge in Iraq to have been a tactical success, although he says it was an effort to save us from a situation we should not have been in to begin with. He points out that the heart of the strategy was a shift to a population-centric approach where Coalition forces remained in the areas that they cleared and sought to establish viable local police forces. These efforts were considerably abetted by certain tribes turning against Al Qaeda Iraq and other terrorists, "arguably the most significant change in the Iraqi operating environment in several years," Kilcullen writes.
Kilcullen's intent is to show how the lessons we should have learned from both mistakes and successes can enhance the possibilities for success in avoiding or conducting "accidental guerrilla" conflicts in the future. If you read this book, however, you may find that its net effect is more to induce despair than to raise hopes.
Consider the key elements of the Surge, where the future conditions seem uncertain, at best. Having tribal groups on the government's side but outside of its control presents risks; these groups could commit atrocities that would be blamed on the government or the Coalition forces. And once withdrawal begins, "tribal allegiances could go either way" Kilcullen fears. Nor can we sustain a "persistent presence" on any broad geographic scale; it would simply require too many troops. Iraq remains a "wicked problem," one that "has no single solution and no 'stopping rule' that indicates when it is solved," since the very act of trying to solve it changes the nature of the problem.
Kilcullen is not one of those critics who thinks that if we had just committed more troops from the outset, not disbanded the Iraqi army, and avoided other such blunders everything in Iraq would have come out OK. He believes it was a gross strategic error to go in as we did in the first place. For him the strategic lesson of Iraq is that "for us to invade foreign countries with large-scale unilateral military intervention forces simply plays into the Al Qaeda strategy."
In Kilcullen's opinion, the Afghan campaign is now at a "strategic crossroads," as well. It remains winnable, but he sees the trend as extremely negative and suggests that a concerted effort of at least five to ten years will be needed. State weakness is the fundamental problem in Afghanistan, and the "human capital" of competent indigenous civilian district administrators is almost impossible for our side to compensate for it if it is absent.
Perhaps most disturbing, Kilcullen has little hope for improvement on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in the foreseeable future. The intervention of the Pakistani army has only made things worse, he concludes.
Kilcullen proclaims that we are in for a protracted conflict in the war of terror (or whatever we now choose to call it), lasting perhaps 50-100 years. He has numerous recommendations on where we should go from here, various "best practices," "deductions and implications," "practical steps," and so on. Few of his suggestions are new, he admits, but implementing them is not easy. Bureaucratic politics within the military and foreign policy establishments present one kind of daunting barrier, and the quickly shifting conditions on the ground in various "hot spots" another.
Thus "The Accidental Guerrilla" hardly inspires confidence that we will do any better in the future. There are no fixed laws of counterinsurgency, Kilcullen asserts, except "the difficult requirement to first understand the environment, then diagnose the problem, in detail and on its own terms, and then build a tailored set of situation-specific techniques to deal with it."
Those like me who read about these conflicts from our comfortable armchairs at home are not in the best position to question experts such as Kilcullen who have endured the risks of front-line observation. Nevertheless, there is one factor which the author did not emphasize enough, in my opinion: what kinds of soldiers are needed to carry-out the population-centric tactics that he recommends? Can we really develop sufficient forces with the ability to understand the diverse cultures into which they are likely to be deployed? Is the recruitment and training challenge surmountable? At a minimum, it seems to me, it will take a lot more language training, for instance, and that is just a start. As cautious as Kilcullen is about the prospects ahead, he still may have set too high an expectation that our military can effectively adapt.
One other quibble: reading this you will have to put up with quite a bit of military-speak, perhaps inevitable in a book of this sort. The editors have tried to soften the effect by including a list of abbreviations at the outset, but I found myself sometimes searching for the meaning of certain specialized words, acronyms, and phrases.
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