Excellent book describing what is happening in the world from a terrorism and counterinsurgency perspective. His recommendations and conclusions should be examined by policy makers on all levels.

Book was hard to digest at times but the insights that he has from a variety of conflicts allows Kilcullen to fully analyze the strategic and tactical issues impacting the the global environment. His case study on Afghanistan should be examined further in light of current military operations in that country.

The book was recieved in new condition. The book brought incite into what caused a guerrilla movement to work and what is needed to overcome that movement.

A terrorist explodes a bomb and runs to hide in the nearest house. The Coalition blows up the house and kills the terrorist and 3 of its 10 residents. Now the Coalition has multiplied its enemies to include the surviving inhabitants and their neighbors and friends. Among this group any number of non-ideological bystanders can become accidental guerrillas. Other accidentals include those who join in the fray out of boredom, or pay or others who are dragged in by the local power structure.

Each element of making an accidental guerrilla is examined as are some counter strategies. Also examined are the terrorists' tools such as anonymity, globalized communication systems, conventional propaganda, "armed propaganda", marriage and the use of Islam. The author, David Kilcullen, contrasts them with the tools available to and used by a military super power.

The author says this book doesn't look back to the mistakes, and it doesn't. It looks forward to new strategies that focus on protecting the population (winning hearts and minds) and give less focus to pursuing individual terrorists at all costs. According to this author, an advisor to General Petreaus, the US military has begun changing strategies that recognize local power structures and the needs of the local population. Examples are given for both Afghanistan and Iraq that show the difficulty of putting these strategies to work.

Kilcullen had experience in quelling East Timor and Thailand uprisings. He cites them to show his theories, and their simplicity compared to the current situations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I couldn't help look backwards. I had the nagging sense while reading this: "Why has this taken so long to figure out?" It is common sense, if someone destroys your home or kills a family member you seek revenge. Hopefully the course is being corrected and the number of guerrillas is reducing rather than multiplying. The author cites the cold war as being 85 years and it may take that long to see the end of this threat as well.

For people who are interested in understanding just a bit more of the methodology our critical national security decisions, reading books such as Kilcullen's helps frame the debate and cut through the punditocracy on TV. Actually, I really didn't read this entire book but just wanted to write a review -- I hear enough of this stuff on the news to be relatively well informed and I suppose this guy has kids who need new school clothes. I recommend picking this up along with a number of other texts to understand how the Cold War mentality envelops but no longer dictates American military strategy, and thankfully under Secretary Gates has been diminished exponentially. As Kilcullen points out, that kind of outmoded thinking is not only nonproductive but potentially disastrous, as we saw in Iraq.

David Kilcullen is imminently qualified to write an important and incisive piece on the war on terror, being one of Petraeus' top advisors in crafting the surge on the ground and a former Australian Army officer and scholar who fought in Timor and studied CI extensively. In the Accidental Guerilla he attempts to draw together lessons from his experiences ranging from studying in rural Indonesia (where he encounters likely Al-Qaeda affiliates who are definitely ethnic Arab and not local) to long tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq. His book is an attempt to understand the global phenomenon of radical takfiri extremism/terrorism, explain what has worked in Afghanistan and Iraq in contrast to what hasn't, discern general principles for counter-insurgency and "imposing" effective governance on essentially tribal societies, and at least proffer examples of what not to do in the strategic context of the war on terror. As a pre-cautionary note the book is very uneven in tone, ranging from polished text to pages on pages of raw field notes, to rough thoughts, to attempts to write Tom Clancy action sequences. It is poorly edited and feels extremely rushed, but given the timeliness of the information I concur with its current publishing as it is far more important to get this information out today than to make it a little more easy to read tomorrow.

The phenomenon at the heart of Kilcullen's book is something he has witnessed throughout his travels in the muslim world at war. It is a trend centered on an ideological cadre of hardcore radical Islamic fighters that he identifies as "takfiri" to try to paint them, accurately it would seem, in a term that non extremist muslims can understand, dislike, and distinguish themselves from rather than a more amorphous and ambiguous "Islamic terrorist," of which Al-Qaeda would be a core group but not the only one. These vanguards enter poorly governed, socially rent apart areas and start a cycle of violence to try to achieve their aims of local control, eventually to piece together a caliphate bit by bit throughout Islam and beyond. Their tactic is to cause chaos, invite foreign (whatever is perceived locally as foreign, be it Americans in Afghanistan or non-Pashtun Pakistani troops in the NWFP) response, and get the locals to unite with them against the new "common enemy." Thus the locals, most of whom just want to be left alone but share an ethnic tie (particularly amongst Pashtun) or religious tie with the extremists, and usually live in tribal societies with a distinct code of honor, become "accidental guerillas" fighting the foreigners locally and inadvertently in support of the extremist's global cause. He does a particularly good job explaining the mechanics of how this phenomenon works in Afghanistan and how the Taliban uses it to gain control of regions. Combine the global terrorists, with the local guerillas, and add narco-criminal financing (i.e. poppies in Afghanistan, corruption/protection money in many countries, etc.) and you have what he calls "Hybrid War" something that goes beyond mere stovepipes of counter-terror, counter-insurgency, and counter-narcotics. Al-Qaeda believes it can use this strategy to morally, physically and financially exhaust the US and West by bogging it down in interventions that only sap them on strength while creating more accidental guerillas who wouldn't exist outside of those interventions.

Kilcullen is at his best in the roughly first third of his book where he uses the case study of a road construction project in Afghanistan to show an example of how allied forces can use processes to partner with locals and cause their rejection of the takfiris. Although the Romans used road building in conquered lands to logistically and practically be able to introduce governance and to bring new subject peoples into the empire, Kilcullen's focus is on finding a local dynamic that the Allies can exploit that will benefit the locals demonstrably and decisively more than allying with the takfiris. This does not always mean road building per se, nor does it mean not fighting as ultimately routing out the takfiris and protecting the population will be step one. It's the process of once you've cleared an area, developing the local civil society to a point where, although they will not likely become a flowering democracy, they will reject further takfiri intervention and withstand some form of government security (which lacks in many parts of the world, be it Pakistani frontiers, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, etc.)

His second third of the book focuses on the surge in Iraq and what was done to turn the situation there around. If you haven't read much about the surge this is obviously a good place to go for a decent synopsis of what happened and why. If you want to know more about the surge though I found "The Strongest Tribe" by Bing West to contain much the same information, with more detail, and with a more readable format.

The book ends with the author's experiences in Timor showing that the Accidental Guerilla syndrome is a tactic that has been used outside the Islamic world and which can be dealt with successfully, although the example falls a little flat as Timor appears far less virulent than the problems the world now faces in Afghanistan, Yemen and other places. It also ends with his main strategic advice, which is mostly negative rather than positive. He has great rules and guidelines on what to do once in a place like Afghanistan or Iraq, but his end advice basically says to avoid more Iraqs rather than what to do.

Although not perfect, this is extremely important and insightful information from a man who has a track record that speaks for him absolutely. A must read for anyone interested in what is going on in the War on Terror.

It is hard to imagine a better book for understanding what Petraeus and his team have done in Iraq and are trying to do in Afghanistan. Kilcullen is both an insider (a very close advisor to Petraeus) and outsider (an Australian) and the combination allows him to give a very close account without appearing to take sides or settle scores. If you are debating anybody interested in the US military and/or counterinsurgency, they will have read this book. Read it yourself. You won't regret it.

This is a good book that helps explain some of the theory behind why men take up arms in an insurgency. I highly recommend the first 3 chapters, which get to exactly that and also what you can do if you're trying to prevent such insurgents. Beyond the first three chapters (which is about half the book) it gets repetitive and a touch trite. Basically it reads like a book written by a man with 200 pages of really good stuff to say who had to fill out the rest of a manuscript in order to sell it. But it's still worth reading for the first half.

I'm a military history buff with a long fascination for guerrilla war which had me opening Kilcullen's book rather expectedly. After all, Kilcullen's a counterinsurgency advisor to the man behind the successful turnaround in Iraq. I was very disappointed upon completing this book.

My issue is simply this: an insurgency is unsustainable without outside support. Kilcullen doesn't come to grips to any satisfactory degree with this fact and seems content to set up the Afghanistan situation as a Kobayashi Maru scenario for the American military, to what purpose I have no idea.

We've a long history of waging counterinsurgency warfare in America, however. We fought for centuries against American Indian tribes supported by European powers. We fought in the Philippines----very successfully. The Pacific Theater of WWII saw its share of CI. And of course we were knee-deep in it in Vietnam and had managed a surge-like turnaround post-Tet, especially after the Cambodian invasion in 1970.

I think the lessons are rather clear---to win a counterinsurgency, you need to defeat not just the insurgents in country, but their sponsors.

Consider the case of Napoleon's "Spanish ulcer". Even so great a strategist as Bonaparte could not triumph so long as Britain could keep the Spanish and Portuguese insurgents supplied, armed, led, and fighting. He threw no shortage of troops at the problem either. The trouble was he couldn't defeat Britain and the insurgency dragged on and on.

In Iraq, we faced an insurgency initiated, supported, and led by Iran. For whatever reason, Petraeus and company simply wouldn't take the fight to the Iranians fanning the fires of the insurgency. I had presumed that this was due to the rules of engagement set by the Bush administration but Kilcullen's book makes me think it simply never occurred to him.

It is true that success can still be had if the population is separated from the insurgents---the "hearts and minds" approach with a heavy emphasis on basic security. But in Iraq we must consider that there also exists a lingering hatred for Iran which limited the effectiveness of the insurgency in the first place.

I think Kilcullen's claims of Muslim brotherhood are vastly overstated. Muslims fight Muslims all the time and do not as a rule abandon the fight to gang up on non-Muslims. In the Gulf War, a coalition of non-Muslims and Muslims annihilated the Iraqi armed forces. According to Kilcullen's model, that should have created "accidental guerrillas" all over the place and yet didn't.

I agree with Kilcullen that the current path in Afghanistan is likely to fail but disagree strongly with the reason why it is so. Until the terror masters of Tehran are eliminated from the field, they will continue to feed insurgencies in their neighboring countries.

It doesn't take a novel form of warfare to address the problem---it takes political will. Irania delenda est.

This book belongs on the shelve of anyone who is interested in the study of counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare. The author is a deep thinker and does a good job of describing what is right and what is wrong about modern day approaches to these types of wars. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is because at times the author seems to over-simplify, perhaps for dramatic effect or editorial reasons, as an example he writes about the Taliban with great reverence, constantly harping on thier sophistication and battlefield prowess, which for those that have been there, is a statement that completely lacks substance. But thats a small thing as well as a common misperception, if you are interested in the art of war, this belongs on your reading list.

It's so interesting that the vast majority of books that have been written, pertaining to what may be labelled as a successful counterinsurgencies have been written by operators and countries who have not been very successful conducting counterinsurgencies or counterterrorism strategies. The current strategic and subsequent operational and tactical approach the USA has taken in Iraq and is taking in Afghanistan lacks serious and genuine strategic insight and foresight to the existing problems our nation is actually facing. Our Super-power mentality is hindering how we go about successfully conducting counterinsurgencies/counter-terrioris. It is my observation and assessment of having thoroughly inspected this book, this manual explains our limits and our actual abilities for understanding present day insurgencies, and how we might actually conduct an appropriate counter-insurgency/counter-terrorism strategy. The book certainly comes at a much needed time in our nation's existence.

Objectively written with strong pragmatic experience and academic expertise, David Kilcullen has done his home-work, applied his experience wisely and approach writing this book with detailed research and analysis. He truly does understand both sides of the struggle--fully. He sees the perspective of the insurgencies and the counterinsurgencies, yet arrives at viable alternative conclusions that do not necessarily exist within the tradition insurgency/counter-insurgency boxes.

He does a superior job in explicating what is needed, what is not need, and what are the limits to a super-power's influence and abilities over the type of Fourth Generation Warfare effecting the world, and its key operative: 'The Accidental Guerrilla.'

This book clarifies correctly, what balances are demanded in diplomacy, political reform, military force, social order and the essential considerations for the diverse peoples engaged in insurgencies, counterinsurgencies and terrorism/counter-terrorism. In order for the top-heavy, super-state (i.e., the USA) to establish any semblence of harmonious survival in this new global struggle with nonstate fundamentalists and nonstate warriors threatening the gates of the existing operational-state-empire, we really better understand the problems this book so adeptly defines and attempts to break down into their simplest expressions for resolve.

This has been one of the most insightfully brilliant and common-sensically forethoughtful books I have ever read on insurgency/counterinsurgency since I began studying these events in 1967.

Let's see if the ole traditional military leadership 'sticks-in-the-mudd' own enough humility between all of them for at least one to read it and heed it, and wisely pass it on to someone in the capacity to put these lessons into a functional strategy. We certainly need it badly and quickly.

Rev. A. Bodhi Chenevey, RM, DD
Hikaze Learning Corner
Wooster, Ohio

Having spent the last 35 years fighting, and learning from insurgents and counterinsurgents, Kilcullun puts it all together in what I would characterize as a PhD on the subject. I have, to a much lesser extent, field experience and have read all the earlier classics on the subject.

It's not light reading and without an appropriate background, may be difficult to get the full value from, but if this is an area you know, but want the best, most detailed and well thought out explanation, this is your book.

Kilcullen gives us a new way of understanding the wars we are fighting by separating the small percentage of "the enemy" from the broader population. He provides a nuanced and likely more cost-effective and appropriate manner in which to engage in modern conflict.

The previous reviewers have extensively explained what this book is about so I won't repeat their efforts. Suffice it to say that if you read this book with an open mind you will understand not only the misnamed and vastly misunderstood "War on Terror" but counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism both in general and as applied to specific environments past and present, and the best way to combat violent extremism; which is our true enemy.

I agree with Fareed Zakaria that everyone who has anything to do with combating violent extremism should read this book. The author's analysis is insightful, thorough and honest. While not avoiding analysis of past mistakes he is very tactful and non-accusatory in his wording. I suppose that is due, at least in part, to his ongoing relationship with and employment by our government in counter-insurgency study and advice. Or perhaps just good manners. But while he is careful not to point fingers he pulls no punches about what has been and is being done wrong.

This book ranks with David Galula's "Counterinsurgency Warfare" and extends his principles into today's world. I cannot more strongly recommend this book.

Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, Ph.D., has been on loan from the Australian government to the U.S. government for several years now. He is a key member of General Petraeus' much-vaunted brain trust, the band of thinkers who were instrumental in beginning the turnaround in Iraq.

Col. Kilcullen has seen service and done research for over 22 years in the Middle East, Timor, Bougainville, Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Thailand. He speaks both Arabic and Indonesian. This is a true warrior/scholar. We have not seen his depth of insight into conflict since Bernard Fall.

His chief thesis in this critically important work is that more often than not, forces encountering Islamic irregular fighters have themselves initiated the conflict unnecessarily, or exacerbated it, usually from a failure to accurately characterize the cultural relationships involved in a local situation. A highly cohesive identity set, the Pashtun tribe, was artificially divided over a century ago between "Afghanistan" and "Pakistan" (before it was Pakistan) for British convenience. No one has ever asked the Pashtuns their opinion on the matter, but they freely express it, by simply ignoring the "border." In Southern Thailand, the Malay/Islamics have had their culture, language and self-identification set thwarted repeatedly by several generations of central Thai governments, and the lack there of significant international Takfir (Islamic world domination, essentially) organizational ties, Kilcullen suggests, strongly, is only because no Western power has intervened and set up an "Us Islamics against those heathen Westerners" syndrome, as has happened elsewhere.

One of the most important contributions of //The Accidental Guerilla// may be the thorough job it does in showing how complexly different some other cultures are from our own, and how naively and parochially ignorant have been much of our military and diplomatic efforts to thwart an international set of incitement specialists. Al Q'aida has succeeded in waving the cape at the bull, and precipitating him into the china shop. The Bull must learn to tiptoe.

Understanding is paramount. Nuanced detail is not trivial, but essential. The author offers several models, none of which, he admits, is sufficient in and of itself, but which together offer perspective lenses for examining current conflicts.

Knowledge means victory. Societal dynamics, local economics, tribal relationships, marriage patterns, warlike tendencies--all are essential information tools for the modern warrior trying to maintain or bring about world peace, harmonious international relations, and safety for our complex civilization. The author gives proven examples.

United States military forces to diplomatic and development capabilities are at a ratio of about 210 to 1, as opposed to Australia, which runs that ratio at about 8 or 10 to 1. Not only does our realistically unopposable conventional capability mean that any sane opponent will elect indirect and irregular warfare to oppose us, it probably means that even our peers among the democracies of the world will drag heels, rather than meekly accompany the Bull. Freedom of Won't is not a uniquely American trait!

Col. Kilcullen suggests that indirect support, behind-the scenes "subversion," and subtle economic nudging is both more effective and less expensive than direct military intervention, which should be used sparingly and with great precision. He decries the large unit maneuver and insulated base approach to counterinsurgency warfare. He makes his case both convincingly, and, because of his background and learning, with great authority.

Anyone trying to understand the true nature of the widespread "Islamic Insurrection" must read this book immediately. It is smoothly integrated, eminently readable, and impeccably researched.

Reviewed by
David Lloyd Sutton

In Australian David Kilcullen's 301-page book "The Accidental Guerrilla" he outlines the differences in conventional warfare and what is needed to win the "hearts and minds" in conflicts where we are active. Kilcullen is a heavy hitter, being assigned to General Petraeus's General Staff.

Be forewarned, this book can be heavy lifting for some readers looking for a quick outline of a world problem....this is more like a technical paper dealing with technical problems involved in your work which has to be studied to obtain value.

He also tends to have a sentence style all his own, and caught myself going back over material I'd already read to make sure I got is right. He also tends to pull heavily on acronyms that I was unfamiliar with.

But will all that said, Kilcullen is well versed on the subject matter and obviously very experienced.

I rate it a strong 4-star effort.

This book describes in fascinating detail much of the complexity in various contemporary situations including Iraq and Afghanistan through the eyes of the author who has become the leading expert in dealing with them. This explains why black and white strategies did not work and why thoughtful planned responses to the situations and interaction with the local people is the best and perhaps the only way for progress to be made. And this is happening.

David Kilcullen is a species of soldier I did not know existed. Despite officially being in the Australian military, he spent most of his time between 9/11 and 2005 on special assignments for the US. Since 2005, he has served in a variety of special advisory roles for different parts of the US government. His new book organizes his experiences from those years and a few preceding and sets a new strategy for the US and its allies to deal with the so called "War on Terror."

Despite his association with "the Surge" and the "War on Terror," Kilcullen's views seem closer to John Kerry's than George W. Bush's, as he discusses near the end of his book. To Kilcullen, battling terrorism is just part of a much broader set of national security challenges facing the US and its allies. The reason terrorism has become the central organizing principle of the US is actually self-inflicted. Under Kilcullen's theory, it is US overreaction and over involvement as a result of terror threats and attacks that leads to further attacks and protracted involvement. By overreacted and overinvolving, we radicalize many people who either have localized grievances, or no grievances, and make them a part of the "War on Terror."

Kilcullen's solution is to broaden and deepen US and allied strategy to exercise other elements of national power. He has come to these conclusions based on field experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and East Timor, as well as studying conflicts in other places such as Thailand. The major thrust of Kilcullen's new strategy is deeper engagement with locals when pursuing a threat. According to Kilcullen, this is the real secret to "the Surge," which seems to have actually involved quite a bit of luck with timing because it came just as Iraqis were beginning to rebel against Al Qaida.

Of course, Kilcullen's strategies can have a lot of downside. It requires long term commitments, lots of resources, and it could cost many lives.

These short reviews and summaries cannot begin to give Kilcullen's work justice. To learn about how the US and its allies should be dealing with threats, I recommend giving Kilcullen a read.

The author is an accidental American given access to top secret information and inner circles much more appropriate to Ralph Peters, Steven Metz, Max Manwaring, Gunny Poole, and many others who knew all this--and have sought to teach all this in speaking truth to power--for decades. Someone liked him, he was given temporal admission to the closed circle, and this book is what he knows and what they hear.

While the author provides a commendable view for one man in isolation, he is wrong on multiple points, e.g. ethnographic studies are not about ethnic studies, but rather about deep local studies that contribute to a mosaic of global understanding that is more nuanced than top-down generics; CIA did not coin the term Irregular Warfare, the French study in 1999 was long preceded by Policing the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and Public Security, etc.) This author joins the crop of new-bees who rediscover old knowledge. Sadly, this book is probably a measure of where the Secretary of Defense is going to take the Quadrennial Defense Review in 2008, and that makes me want to gag.

The author's facile explanation of "the accidental guerrilla" is that we are intruding in our Global War on Terror (GWOT), the locals are resisting our intrusion rather than being "insurgents," and they are fighting to be left alone. I have a note: "weak on history, weak on internal sources of disorder [see the image on predicting revolution], completely ignorant of the larger picture of unilateral militarism, virtual colonialism, and predatory immoral capitalism."

What I got out of this book:

+ Distinguishes between human and national security, implies correctly that USA and most still focused on state on state security and oblivious to the ten high level threats to mankind [which, I might add for the author's edification, are outlined in A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility--Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.]

+ Four models for thinking:
- Backlash against globalization
- Globalized insurgency
- Civil war within Islam
- Asymmetric warfare

On the latter, while the author has two insights: that cost asymmetry matters and that US will not develop because the military-industrial complex cannot profit from low-cost capabilities development, it infuriates me to find no reference to any of 20 or more pioneers of the asymmetric challenge from General Al Gray in 1988 to all of the speakers at the Army Strategy Conference in 1998. See my articles, "The Asymmetric Threat: Listening to the Debate", and it's 10-year reprise, "Perhaps We Should Have Shouted: A 20-Year Retrospective".

I am especially annoyed by the failure to acknowledge and integrate anything at all by Max Manwaring or Ralph Peters, thus confirming my own view that this book is an immaculate conception of what passes for thinking at the high table, and totally disconnected from larger reality. Cf.
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
Uncomfortable Wars Revisited (International and Security Affairs Series)

On the first, I am totally amazed that anyone could earn a PhD and observe that globalization has created haves and have-nots, without any reference to solid literature such as:
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)

There are many other books the author has not had an opportunity to explore, in the comment I provide URLs for Gray, the two articles mentioned above, and an annotated bibliography leading to 500+ non-fiction books about reality organized into 20 or so categories.

The author has a diagram of the four phases of Al Qaeda operations: infection, contagion, intervention by others, and rejection by locals of foreign intervention.

There are some false notes, e.g. one explanation mounted for villagers joining the Taliban to pin down a US force, "Do you have any idea how boring it is to be a teen-ager in Afghanistan?"

I agree with the point on page 44, that insurgent successes seem as much due to inattention and inadequate resourcing on our part as to talent on theirs. Of course Charlie Wilson and Steve Metz said this first. Cf.
Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy

The author's assessment of the Taliban as the most competent tactical enemy faced by the US anywhere is interesting, along with his ground observations on use of snipers, prepared positions, and scouting-intelligence.

He largely ignores the Pakistani support for the Taliban, taking it as a given, and the involvement of Karzai and his brother in the drug trade. He does agree with the author of Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia with respect to Karzai compromising himself and his government.

For anyone who has actually studied real-world conflict and especially revolutionary conflicts, this is a very annoying book that can be summed up with "Focus on the population, not the enemy; good governance works." Duh.

The author appears unwitting of the fact that SOF went into Afghanistan in the first place with a tribal map from the Royal Academy in Sweden that was color-coded and backed up by current research, or that SOF is really beginning to excel at social network analysis and that company commanders are creating intelligence cells out of hide to do more of that.

I would recommend the book for its description of the "dialog of the deaf" where US officers speaking fast English show powerpoint slides to Afghan leaders, who then respond with a range of questions and complaints and observations that must be translated, neither side "getting" what the other was seeking to communicate.

The author is still a command and control loyalist: he says on page 150 that the fundamental problem is one of control--of people, terrain, and information. Sorry, but wrong. Sun Tzu today would say that "to gain control one must give up control," and he would refer the aspiring commander to the concept of Epoch B leadership (see image posted above).

He itemizes the mistakes in Pakistan without mention of their British training:
01-Focus on enemy vice population
02-Large-scale-operations
03-Statis-garrison-posts
04-Overextended-active, reserve-deficiency
05-Inetic-overall
06-Discounting of local-assets
07-Lack-of-helicopters
08-Lack-of-mine-protected vehicles
09-Desire to copy US (?)

Five classes of threat facing Europe:
01-terrorist-cells
02-subversive-networks
03-extremist-political-movements
04-insurgent-sympathizer-networks
05-crime/terrorism overlap

Nothing on corruption, incompetence, failure to assimilate, waste, even organized crime and rotten education.

I have no argument with the author's basic premise, spelled out on page 263:

"...concepts such as hybrid warfare and unrestricted warfare make a lot more sense than traditional state-on-state, force-on-force concepts of conventional war."

I agree with the author when he says counterterrorism is not a strategy, proposed an ARCADIA Conference, salutes the limits of our influence, and describes the emergence of an anti-Powell doctrine.

He makes eight recommendations:
01-political-strategy
02-comprehensive-approach
03-continuity of key personnel and policies
04-Population-centric
05-cueing and synchronization
06-close-genuine-partnerships
07-emphasis on building local security forces
08-region-wide approach

He says that ambiguity arises because the conflict [GWOT] breaks existing paradigms. Quite so, but for 20 years no one in Washington has been willing to listen to thousands saying this over and over.

His conclusion:
01-develop-new-lexicon
02-get-grand-strategy-right
03-rebalance-instruments-of-national-power
04-identify-the-new "strategic services" [not mentioned: Civil Affairs, Air Peace, Open Source Agency, Multinational Decision Support Centre]
05-develop-strategic-information-warfare

I put this book down with great sadness. Those who provided jacket blurbs did so with good intentions, but the conclusion that I come to is that this "closed circle" neither reads nor learns. The author is an accidental guru as well as an accidental American.

I regret Amazon limits me to 10 links, see the comment for URL to 500+ relevant works including The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State.

Thank goodness the American Department of Defense can call on members of the international community like David Kilcullen, to bring alternative viewpoints to our self-proclaimed War on Terror. That's not to say that common sense Americans don't exist within our own agencies, but their voices tend to be pigeon-holed along political partisan lines.
Kilcullen reveals the theoretical fine print that separates the ideologue international terrorist from the localized freedom-seeking revolutionary from the economically deprived native insurgent.
This book reads on a level consistent with an all too small sector of American society, who have been called to hopefully lead us to a conclusive end to this worldwide crisis. The rest will undoubtedly fail to heed the would-be lessons learned and taught by it.
As ominous as it is revealing. If this is your field, I encourage you to give it a look.

It's tough to imagine a better resume for an author of a book on counter-insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan than the guy who was tasked with evaluating those programs. It is helpful that he also writes clearly about what he saw both at the micro and macro levels. He is careful to make the book accessible to the layperson without talking down to them and this makes the book most rewarding. In addition, he really puts into perspective what the issues are and how difficult they truly are to solve.

I've read this book, as have my dad, brother, and several friends. All of us felt that we learned a lot about the subject without getting glazed eyes from the text (sadly rare in many of these types of books). The USMC and USN friends I have who have participated in siliar types of actions over there have said they believe the author is making great points and they think he's evaluated the situation accurately. That did seem to bleed over into occasionally profantiy laden comments wondering why it took so long for people like him and his boss to get involved in the situation in the first place. . .

As a professional military officer,I found Kilcullen's work refreshing and pertinent to the modern theatres of operations.I think his focus on the people as the 'centre of gravity' including the various ethnic,cultural and religious factors as exceptional comon sense.

Kilkullen provides an excellent analysis of several contemporary guerrilla conflicts including Iraq, Afganistan and Asia.

Written more like a college thesis, he sprinkles extracts from his personal diary throughout. His conclusions are logical but executing them would require a complete realignment of the military-industrial complex. Based on past history, that is not likely to happen unless some existential crisis forces us to change.

Definitely worth the time to read, but don't expect the experience to be light and casual.

Kilcullen seems to have done at least 2 things here:

On one plane he has summarised the current state of counter-insurgency doctrine, with an emphasis on recent developments, including his own contributions (accidental guerrillas).

On another plane he gives us a partial version of the story of his own journey to acquiring these important tactical and societal insights, and then attempts to synthesise the current state of his thinking with some tentative yet commanding strategic conclusions.

It is a fascinating and enriching mixture. In the end he may have fallen prey to a shortcoming that he himself identifies: he seems to elevate the tactical to the strategic. However his self awareness and the intellectual courage he displays in so truly grappling with the intractable but crucial geo-political dangers we face, is an inspiration.

He insightfully observes that so much of the way these geo-politcal issues are defined is now in the negative, by what things are not rather than what they are: COUNTER Insurgency, NON state combatants, etc. He suggests that we now need better lingistic tools to navigate in this area. I agree, but also notice that many of the words we need for this may already exist, even though rampant post-modernism has seen us discard many of them. We now need to reclaim these words, and use them again with confidence in our dialogues; words like: "civilization", "freedom", and " principle".

If this is to be a battle for minds let us not abandon the names of the things we are fighting for from mere intellectual preciousness, irony or our self regard in seeing a meta-context.

Kilcullen's book takes us to the places we need to go intellectually and culturally to help ensure our civilization, our hard won values and freedoms, survive for future generations. This book needs to be read to inform our debates with the rigour and complexity that the ideas we stand for deserve.

He's sitting in a hut with mysterious men and I wonder if his throat is about to be slit. One rainy night in West Java, counterinsurgency specialist Dave Kilcullen meets a pair of possible Al-Qaida agents. As he writes, "I never discovered who the two Arabs were... Perhaps they were just students--students who travel by night, with long knives, dropping in uninvited on foreign researchers to quiz them on Arab-Israeli politics..."

So opens Kilcullen's *The Accidental Guerilla*. Fresh from his stint as "the Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General Petraues in Iraq", the Australia veteran gives us his theory of counterinsurgency.

You're not-so-humble narrator is a military veteran too. I served four years on an amphibious warfare ship, occasionally supporting counterterror ops. In the aftermath of 9/11, I served Navy Security Force, assisting various people in counterinsurgency training, when I wasn't protecting assets bound for Afghanistan.

So Kilcullen's arguments appeal to me--and probably a lot of other people. Both Afghanistan and Iraq started out so swell--so swift and certain--like a Sir Ridley Scott or William Wallace movie. But by 2004 it became apparent that America had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Neither the Taliban, Al-Qaida, nor the Baathists had been defeated--they simply stepped out of the path of our juggernaut, then punched it in the side of the head. With this embarrassment, Westerners seem interested in other approaches.

Kilcullen's approach is not a field manual for soldiers. My job was to shoot people, arrest people, or direct other people in the shooting or arresting. But you can only do that so much--something armchair generals still don't understand. *The Accidental Guerilla* is about policies and strategies beyond my bullets.

But there's plenty of English-speaking people who like Sheriff Bush, Deputy Rumsfeld, and their hang-`em-high approach to counterinsurgency. Kilcullen's solutions aren't sexy. They don't offer lucrative arms deals or reconstruction contracts. You can't make an exciting video game out of this book. Then there are the crusaders among us, who think that the best way to battle terrorists is to become them.

Ya gotta talk in their terms, to their needs. Kilcullen fails this in three ways.

First, the audience for this book is not clear. Too dense for lay readers, too light for academic readers, and too short overall. As other reviewers have pointed out, *The Accidental Guerilla* reads more like an abstract for executives who don't want to plow through a phone book report--such as a Commander-in-Chief, or a Secretary of Defense, or even a combat commander. So why bother to publish it outside of government or university channels? I suspect this book is intended to be the summary for a whole body of philosophy (including future books?) but it needs to pinpoint that philosophy a little more simply and clearly.

I think this book is far better sourced, and includes far more believable anecdotes, than the last couple of military science books I've reviewed. But it lacks the graphs, charts, transcripts, and references to unclassified or redacted sources of a serious G-man report. Likewise, it contains way more jargon and assumptions of familiarity than a pop military reader will need or want.

That last bit was the killer for me. Like Darwin's *On the Origins of Species*, this is a concise and beautifully written work. And like Darwin, few people will be able to actually read through it. Kilcullen writes in a dry and semi-complex grammatical structure; chock full of ACRONYMS, abbv, and institutional terminology; meandering along conceptual asides dotted with footnotes (and often ending or interrupted by parenthetical elaborations). Hulk no like!

I understand every word he's saying, but I gotta be honest, I can't get past his four models of the modern threat environment without falling asleep in the bathtub. And that stuff is just in the first 26 pages. Equally disturbing is that Kilcullen clearly has a personal language for his subject, but he doesn't define his own terms. I had to go all the way to the endnotes just to figure out what he meant by "takfiri" movement. Takfiri is a core concept to be discussed in body text--not notes.

So Kilcullen's second failure is paucity of engaging prose.

Once the book breaks past the blocks of thesis, it moves swiftly in the anecdotes. One of the big things I hammered Dave Grossman's *On Killing* about was that he kept regurgitating other people's work. Kilcullen actually provides excerpts of his own after-action diary. He rode and worked alongside heavyweights in Iraq, and his own adventures carry weight with me.

To carry other readers, however, Kilcullen needs to address their concerns. Most of his readers already know that traditional counter-insurgency failed, alongside big field military ops. The readers he needs to persuade the most are the John McClanes and John Waynes who almost put John McCain in the White House (oh, and don't forget that classic asymmetrical warrior, John Rambo). These voters still treat our enemies as a homogenous horde of robots, who need to be bombed into pieces for peace.

Some Westerners are happy to charge a red flag--especially when the matador is Osama bin Laden. Writers have to include these bulls; despite their beastly impulse, the bulls are organized enough to sway elections, lobby politicians, and knock over nations. If you don't address this, you lose before you begin. His third failure is preaching to the choir.

The simplest solution to all three problems is simply to make the entire book read like his prologue and field notes. Tense, exciting, and yet smart and educated. If Kilcullen gets the chance, I recommend he write a whole new version down the line, making it read like a novel. You can give us the facts, sir, but not just the facts.

Kilcullen has a written a solid book that those who follow his works will want to read. I havn't read the other reviews before mine because I didn't want to sully my own review by absorbing their comments. My background is I'm a company grade officer w/multiple deployments like everyone else in the military and having seen some of the areas mentioned and probably headed to others described I found his comments thought provoking on both OIF/OEF. I did feel alot of the same points were constantly reiterated and about 50 pages probably could have been cut to make the book read better or put in more examples/war stories that illustrate his points of view on the GWOT. Overall I'm glad I read it and I feel its good professional development however I did have to focus as its not light reading.

This book provides the reader with an incredibly detailed and well-organized view of the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. Kilcullen's description and insights into the war against the Taliban I found particularly interesting and informative. I personally enjoyed reading the book and following up on several of the references. I highly recommend keeping a laptop nearby opened to wikipedia while you read this book. And definitely don't miss a chance to dig into some of the references or take some time and explore some tangential topics; especially the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. I found this helped me get quite a bit more out of the book since I knew very little about that conflict.
The rest of this review is really more of a criticism of one of Kilcullen's more significant opinions regarding the solution in Afghanistan/Pakistan: Counter Narcotics.
For all the book's positive qualities, I found one of Kilcullen's arguments about counter narcotics efforts to ring a bit too "high level" in contrast to the "in the trenches" style throughout most of the book. For all the failed counter-narcotics efforts conducted right here in the United States, Kilcullen misses the mark regarding the Opium problem in Afghanistan. Americans LOVE to get high. And I mean even you alcohol chugging, chain-smoking folks out there, so get off your high horse when it comes to opium or any other drug we've arbitrarily decided to consider "illegal".
According to Kilcullen's own reference material, Americans are consuming the vast majority of the drugs grown/produced in foreign countries. You want to pull the plug on the Taliban's grip on the drug trade? Legalize them, grow them only in US-friendly countries (or in the US itself) and the price will be driven so low that black-market sources will simply not be able to compete (and the violence surrounding the issue will evaporate overnight).
Ask yourself this simple question: How many truck loads of laundry soap are smuggled into the united states and sold on the black market? How many headlines to you hear about rival laundry-soap gangs shooting it out with assault rifles? None that I'm aware of! It's not that laundry soap isn't a necessity; it clearly is, and virtually everyone uses it. It's because the manufacturing processes for Tide and Gain are so finely tuned and optimized that there is simply no market for "black-market soap". There's no money in it. No room for all the middle-men, bribes and smuggling costs which Kilcullen himself points out constitute $3.2B of the $4.0B annual Afghan Opium trade!
You want to pull the rug out from under the Taliban's opium trade? Attack the product's profit margins. Forget this drug enforcement nonsense and let us American's roll back the clock a few decades and eat whatever we want! People who are going to use drugs are going to use drugs; illegal or not. period. fact. I use them regularly and I don't care one bit that they may "fund terrorism"; and neither do any of my friends (I'm no punk either. I'm 39, married with kids, pull in over $200k US, pay taxes -and how-! I'm a productive member of society as are most drug users. You just only hear about the ones that get in trouble! Do the math if you don't believe me. The number of arrests don't come anywhere *near* to accounting for the overall value of the drug trade in america!) If you take the position that buying drugs supports the "evil doers" and "terrorists" (that was a miserable failure of a campaign here in the US for a while...) then by that logic all drug offenders should be charged with aiding terrorists or perhaps even treason. What nonsense...
So my criticism of Kilcullen on this point is that he ignored the *REASON* the Taliban can add "The Opium Flower is Our Friend" to their rallying cries: Americans want to use drugs regardless of where they come from or to whom the money is paid. If you accept this fact it changes the CN strategy in Afghanistan dramatically and thus Kilcullen should have studied this point more deeply. Sorry Mr. Kilcullen, you're missing a big piece of the puzzle regarding your counter-narcotics recommendations...
Regardless, I still positively loved the book!

I am giving this a five star rating because the content is superb, even though I found the writing style a little difficult for a novice to chug through. The writer has an excellent command of the subject, and the thesis that the problems experienced by a people in a region contemplated for military operations should be understood better is strongly supported. The author's background also gives that thesis a gravitas that might allow someone else to be dismissed as just a "dove" or peacenik. I don't agree with everything in the book, but it is still an excellent offering. Highly recomended.

I would recommend this book to anyone that is interested in the evolving nature of counterinsurgency today or is interested in better understanding the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and against Al-Qaeda worldwide.

Based on years of experiences with asymmetric warfare as an Australian army officer, Kilcullen builds upon classical counterinsurgency theory to develop a new model that takes into account the unique local and global dynamic of the current insurgencies facing the United States and its allies today. He identifies the "accidental guerrilla" - those who are not ideologically opposed to the West but have taken up arms through manipulation by global extremists or in reaction to Western presence in their homeland - as roughly 95% of the combatants in the Iraqi and Afghan theatres. This provides a much clearer lens through which to examine the ongoing conflicts and contributes to a new counterinsurgency theory that seeks to use this dynamic to isolate the hard-core extremists from the "accidental guerrillas" they have co-opted.

Kilcullen takes a logical, well thought out, and well researched approach to a very complicated and controversial topic. Based on his extensive experience on the ground fighting insurgencies around the world, he brings a level of credibility to the debate that few else could.

Kilcullan is clearly cashing in on his association with the famous Gen Patraeus to propel this book. Lucky for us, since he has something useful to say. He puts our so called "war on terrorism" into a global context and takes apart the many complex factors which affect our ability to confront terrorists and the effects upon us of those confrontations and actions. While not an academic tome, this book requires an appreciation for the subject matter for the reader to remain interested. Target audience is military and civilian governmant participants and leaders thrust into this complex intersection between big wars, small wars/counterinsurgencies. For me, this book begs further "big picture" questions, i.e., when and how do we determine our national interests must be supported by application of the instruments of our national power. I see us nickel and diming ourselves to the point of national exhaustion engaging non-existential "perceived terrorist threats". Highly recommended read for a better understanding of a very complex subject.

I enjoyed this book greatly. It really covered the current counterinsurgency operations happening overseas. Not only did he discuss the fundementals needed to counter terrorism, but he illustrated them with two key case studies, Iraq and Afhganistan. Mr. Kilcullen was insightful and knowledgable in his analysis. It is a must read book for anyone who seeks knowledge on this critical subject.

My full review will appear in the summer edition of "The Canadian Army Journal." Briefly, this book is a must-read for those seeking to understand the War on Terrorism.

"The Accidental Guerrilla"lays out what Kilcullen thinks America must do to redeem itself in Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention the wider Muslim world). Kilcullen says that the US had done a poor job of applying different tactics to very different situations, continually misidentifying insurgents with limited aims and legitimate grievances (whom he calls "accidental guerrillas") as part of a coordinated worldwide terror network. The current GWOT presents stateless insurgents and terrorists operating across large number of countries and only loosely affiliated with each other. Each region, each village, needs a different counter-terrorist tactic. The Kilcullen Doctrine on winning "hearts and minds" is based not on making local people feel affection for you, but on persuading them that you can protect them better than the enemy. The risk is that when outsiders intervene to deal with the global terrorists hiding out, it turns out people get upset, and the local community coalesces around rejecting outside interference, and closes ranks to support the terrorists. Al-Qaida, on the other hand, cannot be co-opted, and realizes that it's the American response in lives, money and political capital, is what really hurts us. (The U.S. also needs to work on eliminating underlying sources of global irritation, such as Israel/Palestine, to undercut Al-Qaida credibility.)

Kilcullen uses a road project in Afghanistan as an example of what to do. The road employed Afghan workers supervised by local leaders, giving them a stake in the project and a goal shared with the Western troops charged to protect them. By concentrating on guarding the project and its workers, rather than chasing after the Taliban fighters who tried to sabotage it, the Westerners were able to cast themselves as the party with something constructive to offer the Afghans. The Taliban, meanwhile, could only offer threats and disruption.

The Taliban have excelled in providing Afghans in isolated regions a source of dispute resolution. The Taliban first gained power in the 1990s by offering just this sort of adjudication, and they haven't forgotten how well it worked. Unless the West also helps the Afghans set up better civil institutions using the established local institutions, they'll use it again. Obviously, this indirect approach is also heavily dependent on the political viability and integrity of the partners we choose to support. The "bad news" is that a concerted long-term effort is needed, over ten years at least, if we are to have any chance of building a resilient Afghan state across its 40,020 villages.

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.

Dense and nuanced, this is sure to become one of the go-to books for understanding the insurgency in Iraq -- both on the theoretical level and from the perspective of a man who helped put that theory into practice with David Petraeus during the troop surge in 2007. More than that, however, THE ACCIDENTAL GUERRILLA offers new insights into counterinsurgency in general and easily holds its ground with such classics as Nagl's LEARNING TO EAT SOUP WITH A KNIFE and Galula's COUNTERINSURGENCY WARFARE.

Kilcullen -- something of a celebrity in the counterinsurgency world; see George Packer's "Knowing the Enemy" article in the December 18, 2006, issue of THE NEW YORKER -- begins by outlining how insurgencies, particularly the current Islamist insurgency, take shape in the modern globalized world. He then explores specific cases in Afghanistan and Iraq before examining events in East Timor, Thailand, Pakistan, and Europe and offering some advice for the future. The book sometimes drifts into the jargon of academia -- this was published by Oxford, after all -- but it is consistently insightful. Highly recommended.

David Kilcullen's "The Accidental Guerilla" can be dry reading. It is not meant for anyone but the seriously interested and is aimed at military professionals and diplomatic personnel. The lessons within can seem like nothing new. But especially for soldiers and civilians currently serving in Mesopotamia or Afghanistan, the author's insights and conclusions into fighting and succeeding in today's wars will be of significant value.

Kilcullen's thesis is that the people who fight us do so not for who we are, but for what we do. The author agrees that there are radical Islamists but the majority of the insurgents we fight today fight us not because we are decadent Westerners but because we are foreigners interfering in their culture, their politics and even invading their homelands. This group of "Accidental Guerillas," who would not fight us if we were not in their cities and villages, are then exploited by al-Qaeda for their own cynical purposes.

These accidental guerillas can be defused through several channels. The author makes it a point to address al-Qaeda as "takfiris," heretics against Islam, in order to begin separating them from mainstream Muslims. He also stresses local projects that heavily involve local people, such as the road project in Afghanistan's Kunar Province. Bringing lasting security to local civilian populations is critical to getting them to turn away from insurgents and terrorists. Addressing grievances and seeking to split the multi-faceted insurgency is also critical, as we have seen with the Sons of Iraq movement in that theatre.

The strongest lesson Kilcullen offered in regards to fighting counterinsurgencies is that they should be avoided. Stating his opinion that the US should never have involved itself in Iraq, he recognizes that something must be done to right things as best as possible. As a former military man and sometime US government employee however, he refrains from blasting the former administration directly. "The Accidental Guerilla" will be another important tool in the warrior's toolkit--be they soldier or civilian.

If you have not read The Accidental Guerrilla, by David Kilcullen, you do not know the facts concerning the War in Iraq or the War on Terror. I have read several books on the War in Iraq, including: Fiasco, Cobra II, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, among others. None of these books come close to explaining what was going on as well as this book. Accidental Guerrilla alone describes what was happening on ground in both a tactical and strategic fashion. David Kilcullen has in country, on the ground, and strategic decision making panels experience that few others have. In addition, he brings an outstanding intelligence to the problems of analyzing the War in Iraq and the wider War on Terror.

The key to understanding the War in Iraq and the War on Terror is recognizing the massively complex nature of these wars and the numerous problems they bring to warfare. David Kilcullen clearly understands these numerous problems and the difficulty the average American has understanding them. The Accidental Guerrilla shows the author's ability to communicate the necessary facts to the reader and to instill how strategic thinking is transferred to action on the ground. Poor strategic thinking, present at the start of the war in Iraq, was transferred to action on the ground and had bad results. New strategic thinking was implemented and the tactical changes on the ground were profound and very positive.

One quote will sum up a major part of the book - a lot of which is focused on facts that prove the book's point - but here is a quote about the strategic factors: " ... in essence, enemy-centric approaches that focus on the enemy, assuming that killing insurgents is the key task, rarely succeed. Population-centric approaches, that center on protecting local people and gaining their support, succeed more often." In Vietnam, Gen. Westmoreland focused on an enemy-centric strategy and it was failing. After Gen. Westmoreland left and Gen Abrams took over, the strategy changed to population centric and was achieving good results, but it was much too late and the US pulled out before the good results could be translated into victory.

In Iraq the US military responded at the 11th hour to achieve magnificent results, as documented in The Accidental Guerrilla, and it is these results and the philosophy they are based on that must be used in the days going forward to win the War on Terror and the War in Iraq. If properly applied to Afghanistan the result will be victory there as well; however, most Americans do not understand the issues and the necessity for the approach set forth by David Kilcullen in order to continue to win.

This is a MUST READ book in order to understand the headlines streaming across the TV screen and the newspapers. It is a must read for those who want to pose the correct questions to our leaders, and for anyone who wants to understand the causes of our problems in the War on Terror and the War in Iraq. All the other books I have read do not disclose the main problems with what is going on in the modern world. This book does the job.

AD2

David Kilcullen has written a very interesting book about the terriorist movements. The Accidental Guerrila is a terrorist who wasn't planning on fighting agains the United States but got involved because the West invaded his territory. I do agree in some ways with the author's arguement that the US created an elephant from a mouse, but still think that Al Qaida became an elephant on their own with the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and even bigger in 2001. This is a great book to read to understand the complexities of the War on Terror and how the US is failing to be guided by past experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq and what mistakes they have made. I read half of the book and then reread it from the beginning to truly understand what the author was writing about. I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand in the 90s so the discussion of the insurgencies in Thailand and discussion of politics in Indonesia were very interesting to me also. I highly recommend this book.

This book may not seem an inspiring read to those who are not interested in public policy, international conflicts, or the study/practice of war. Yet, I found this book to have some indirect relevancies to thoughts I've been having often these days.

I'm talking about the strange interconnectedness of our modern world, indeed the very universe we inhabit, and the multidimensional, highly novel series of coincidences that seems to manifest itself time and time again into the course of events that shape human history and even our day to day lives. Real life and the real world is hardly simplistic. It is often counter-intuitive, paradoxical, and requires a sophisticated, nuanced approach to understand and cope with its complexities.

No example better illustrates this than the messy web of related issues, controversies, and problems that define the political and military struggles in Iraq and similar international conflicts. Kilcullen presents a picture of conflict that does away with our traditional conceptualization of warfare itself as an organized, distinct, and largely monolithic "thing". Rather, as we see, the larger conflict we identify and think we are fighting is made up of and accompanied by many smaller ones that ultimately come down to individuals with their own grievances. Even wars between nations are really wars between human beings.

The dimensions of conflict can be far more complex than our traditional paradigms allow for. Not only does nationality, but religion, ethnicity, and even family identities play roles in shaping conflict. So, while we might refer casually to the "war" in Iraq, the notion of a single, unitary struggle is hardly representative of what's happening on the ground. Instead, we find a host of different groups, with many distinct interests and goals, which can themselves either fight or work together. This was displayed most recently in so-called "Sunni Awakening" in Anbar, as the U.S. accommodated Sunni militias, who were largely nationalistic insurgents fighting what they saw as a pro-Shi'ite U.S. occupation, and brought them on to the U.S. side, whereas prior the U.S. had simply regarded all insurgents across the board as "terrorists" in the most simple terms. Kilcullen was, in fact, one of the architects behind General David Patraeus' counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq.

In that spirit, the Author's thesis lays out the framework for his theory of "conflict ethnography" that is meant to better cope with the "true micro-details of war zone social behavior". We are introduced to the books' quintessential archetype: the so-called 'accidental guerilla'. The basic notion, and point, is that not all the people fighting on the side of 'the enemy' are necessarily committed to the cause of the enemy. In fact, people often fight for much more practical reasons, and much more complex sociological and cultural forces come in determining whether a population will side with you, or decide to take up arms against you. Thus, those you might easily mistake as jihadists may actually be acting out of patriotism, ethnic pride, practical necessity, or complex socio-cultural calculus. It's actually quite common sense if one thinks about it in more down-to-earth terms: people may take up arms for many reasons or grievances, and one in no legitimizes their methods simply by validating their motives. As such, these "accidental guerrillas" can be dealt with in ways that dedicated jihadists cannot. There are the Bin Ladens of the world, but then there are the far more numerous accidental guerrillas whose goals are not the destruction of America or Western Civilization, but simply a better share of their national pie, regional autonomy, or the withdrawl of western forces from their land. Accommodations, political settlements, and addressing the specific concerns and sensitivities of these parties with the necessary historical, cultural, and political awareness can mean the difference between a small group of suicidal fanatics, and a large-scale insurgency that spreads like wildfire. In many respects , it harkens back to the idea of fighting for 'hearts and minds', but in a much more modern and sophisticated, and much less naïve or idealistic fashion.

The book does not just look at Iraq, but instances of civil unrest and revolts from around the world to glean conclusions and generalizations on a broader theory and prescription wherever possible. The result is a much more powerful argument that draws from a large number of different case studies. In this way, Kilcullen produces something that is more theoretically sound and focuses on a more detailed appreciation of the complexities of human behavior. While religious and political fanaticism may be strong impulses and might prompt many to take up a cause, Kilcullen underscores that a much larger majority of people make decisions based on biographical factors. The notion of all terrorists being the same or even of all Islamic terrorist being the same, negates what we know about human behavior: that for most people behaviors are influenced by many things, not just the "isms". Personal relationships, financial matters, political and historical grievances, history, perceptions, and culture all come into play, and thus all counterinsurgencies seem to require detailed analyses of the various groups involved and their differences, in order formulate full-spectrum strategies for dealing with them and help shape circumstances most beneficial to minimizing the power and impact of insurgents. In short, attack terrorism and insurgency not just by killing the individuals, but by killing the processes and circumstances that are fueling it.

One may not agree with all of what the author presents, and one may, as I have, draw their own wider interpretations from the book's thesis. But this book gives a much needed dose of reality to an American public that often tends to think ideologically and emotionally at worst, and dogmatically at best. Untying the knot we've made for ourselves in Iraq and those that exist for other reasons elsewhere involves being able to adopt a more systemic view of the world that appreciates that insurgencies and terrorism are not phenomena that can be quelled by brute military force alone, but must be accompanied and even guided by, much larger and more forward looking socio-politically-derived strategies and tactics. This is not "total war", it is a new hybrid form of warfare in Kilcullen's eyes, and one that requires a new hybrid approach if it is to be effectively dealt with.

As far as reading goes, it's fairly technical and scholarly in its approach, yet readable enough thanks to an accessible prose and an engaging style. Still, it's not quite what I would call "light" reading or popular reading, I would recommend this most to those who wish to seriously think about warfare, U.S. policy, and the social and cultural dimensions of human conflict.

Many years ago as a college student, I actually had a class which dealt with terrorism. Now in 1984, terrorism was something isolated to Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The texts we had in those days were academic in their presentation, but really very superficial when it came to an in-depth analysis of the factors which contribute to terrorism, etc.

Not so with Kilcullen's outstanding text. For a book of less than 300 pages, I am still struck by both the quantity and quality of the analysis. Kilcullen covers a wide range of small wars from West Java to Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, and Europe. He does not skimp on the detail and gives exhaustive voice to the factions, the issues and the basic human conditions that contribute to violent conflict.

I found the title very appropriate. As lay people we often take for granted that those who initiate insurgencies and terrorist activities actually planned to do so far in advance. This text shows how certain factors become catalysts that quite literally impel a population into the very sorts of violent actions that have played across our TV and computer screens since 9/11.

Kilcullen doesn't just give us the backdrop and story, but takes his analysis further to show how nations such as the US can achieve success in these types of conflicts, which we can only expect to be more the norm as our modern world evolves.

This is not reading for the faint of heart. This book compels your attention and your focus. But the reader who applies himself will be rewarded with a far greater understanding of these conflicts and how nations such as the US can find workable solutions to combating and preventing them in the future.

Fantastic. A primer on understanding the military and political challenges the world will face and is facing. Yes, finally, there is military intelligence.

Author David Kilcullen is a seasoned military professional (including 20+ years with the Australian Army) and counterinsurgency expert. His descriptions of the challenges in winning the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other spots are first rate - and based in many cases on having been there and personally observed what was happening.

The basic theme is that counterinsurgency must be directed to securing the population rather than destroying the enemy, because "search and destroy" tactics are ineffective at best (the enemy melts away to resurface elsewhere or return when the occupying forces move on) and often counterproductive (facilitating the efforts of the hard core enemy forces to recruit part-time help, the so-called "accidental guerrillas").

Action on this principle was essential to success of "the surge" in Iraq; a temporary increase in U.S. troop strength would have accomplished little in and of itself. Our troops also benefitted from the cultural tone deafness of the Al Qaida in Iraq forces, which fueled a serendipitous backlash in the Sunni tribal areas. Although the war is a long way from won, the Iraqi government is on the cusp of being able to take it over.

There have also been successes in Afghanistan, such as the construction of roads that benefit the locals and military security alike. And Kilcullen argues that it should be possible to work on eradicating drug production if the U.S. and allied forces go about it the right way, an issue that has struck me as particularly difficult.

The situation in Pakistan has been deteriorating, however, due to the poorly planned and executed efforts of the Pakistan Army (under pressure from the U.S.) in taking control of the tribal areas adjoining Afghanistan. American troops are not the only ones, it seems, who can be perceived as "foreigners" in these parts, and if Pakistan spins out of control it is hard to imagine how the war in Afghanistan will have a successful ending.

Overlaying these regional conflicts, there is the global "war on terrorism" context, and Kilcullen covers this part of the equation very well too - who the hard-core terrorists are, what strategies they are following, and why they will be very hard to defeat. For all his focus on finding the right strategies to win in Iraq and Afghanistan, he states repeatedly that the invasion of Iraq was a big mistake and perhaps the invasion of Afghanistan (dubbed by some "the good war") as well.

The author's suggestions for how the U.S. should approach future wars boil down to playing as low key a role as possible - diplomacy first, action through surrogates, consultation with allies on goals as well as means, and above all the sparing use of conventional military force.

Here is a rejection of the "shock and awe" approach (win a quick victory, hopefully on the cheap), but also of the Powell doctrine (overwhelming force, limited objectives, with a quick exit strategy) that was used in the first Gulf War based on what were taken to be "the lessons of Vietnam."

In my view, some of the author's suggestions go beyond his expertise, defy common sense (assuming that it will take 100 years to defeat the terrorists may inhibit the development of breakthrough strategies), and could place so many restrictions on the use of American military power as to negate the benefit of having this power in the first place (and ensure its erosion over time).

Future conflicts may look like the current ones, but they could also be quite different. So rather than view the counterinsurgency model as the wave of the future, I would suggest that the United States remain prepared for a broad range of potential challenges.

David Kilcullen, perhaps America's leading counterinsurgency theorist, has produced the definitive strategic guide for understanding the misnamed Global War on Terror.

In 2004-2005, Kilcullen was one of the first scholars to suggest that the "War on Terror" is best understood as a global insurgency committed by and interconnected web of takfiri terrorists groups spanning nearly half the globe (see his paper Countering Global Insurgency). By viewing the enemy in such a light, we can understand that a heavily militaristic approach to defeating it (as the US employed for the past 8 years) will ultimately backfire and create only more waves of terrorists all to willing to attack innocent Americans. Instead, a far more effective strategy involves isolating these insurgent groups from the regular people amongst whom they hide and whose allegiance they seek. This will inevitably require the use of military force, but it must be done in a far more precise manner, and in support of a coherent political strategy.

With The Accidental Guerrilla, Kilcullen brings forth a far more thorough analysis of this threat and the steps the US and its allies must take to meet it effectively. Rather than delivering dry academic abstractions, Kilcullen draws on examples from several case studies (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Southeast Asia) to illustrate the manner in which he arrived at his conclusions and how the recommendations he makes have been shown to deliver the results we need. His writing is clear and crisp, and though it is of a higher intellectual caliber than most books on the war, his regular use of examples and anecdotes ensures that it is never a boring read.

If one is to pick any single book on the "War on Terror" in order to better understand the fight we are in and what we need to do to win it, this is it.

This book by a chief counterinsurgency adviser to the US government for the last several years is a great read for those wondering about the direction of US military policy over the last two years. Kilcullen, a former Australian army officer, was a senior adviser to the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, a major Pentagon policy review, the State Department Counterterrorism adviser, and for GEN Petraeus in Iraq during 2007.

This book is well worth the read, especially since it immediately moved to the top of the Small Wars Journal reading list. I highly recommend it.

This is the best analysis I have read to date detailing the new paradigm we face in the 21st century. This book does an excellent job breaking down who our enemies are, and how best to go about combating these enemies. What I especially enjoyed seeing was the author's bottom up approach in this book. Instead of talking about the leadership of these global terror networks, this author has spent the majority of this work on the grassroots level fighters, and instead of taking a limited tactical military approach to analyzing these fighters he has taken a broader socio/anthropological tact to try to understand these people and to create a strategy based on this understanding.

For me the prologue and opening chapter were the most important because it is here that the author introduces his readers to the concept of the "Accidental Guerrilla". Here the author employs his very unique expertise and understanding to introduce readers to the people we are fighting, and far from what many in the US have come to accept as orthodoxy it is not radical Islamists bent on the destruction of the West, but is instead a remote people with a very set and defined culture who feel they have been invaded. Oddly enough many of these people are fighting for similar reasons to our own; namely they feel their civilization and way of life are being threatened by foreign actors.

The vast majority of these people are not fanatics, but are instead people who have been forced into picking between the lesser of two evils either the Taliban and its allies or the Western powers. The problem for the West is that we are the much more foreign body. While the Taliban is very disruptive and damaging to the indigenous culture, these people can more closely self-identify with the Taliban because they share common heritage, religion and in some cases are related to these people, whereas the Western powers resemble an alien culture attempting to subjugate them much like the Soviets in the 80s. This is the challenge for Western forces. How to divorce the terrorist leaders and fighters from the people whom we have no problems with? How to legitimize our forces in their eyes while delegitimizing our enemies? The author discusses areas where we have succeeded and where we have failed in the task, and then builds on the information gleaned from those successes and failures to suggest tactics to achieve the overall strategy of pacifying these regions.

The author's discussion of Iraq and the surge was also highly enlightening. Here I would suggest reading The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual with this book. It details much more comprehensively on a tactical level what Mr. Kilcullen discusses on the strategic level. I did have one major problem with the author's conclusion to the chapter on Iraq, and that was where the author suggests the "surge" has worked. While I agree the "surge" has worked on the tactical level, the overall strategic rational behind the "surge" was to create space for political reconciliation, and that, unfortunately, has been an abysmal failure on the state level. Also I assume the author had probably already finished much of the work on this book before the Maliki government began cracking down on the Sunni militias that were on the US payroll. For me it is way to early to suggest that the "surge" has worked.

This book is such an important read because it details the enemies approach tactically and strategically, and in so doing shows where we have fallen into our enemies traps and committed ourselves to engaging the enemy on his terms. The author does an excellent job in describing the people who become "Accidental Guerrillas" and how and why they do so. He also uses his expertise to suggest ways we should proceed in the future to minimize the risk of protracted engagements that bleed our resources, and maximizes the tactics used by our enemies.

If you want the best analysis of the type of conflict we face in the 21st century then this book is the one have to have. This book is well organized, and the content is highly elucidating. I highly recommend this book.

David Kilcullen has written a very important book on terrorism. I imagine it will become essential reading; yet I do not agree with all of his conclusions. He is an Australian with an unusual background, a "warrior sociologist", a combat soldier who brings to the "war against terror" (a term he doesn't like) the insights of a trained PhD sociologist. In this respect he draws a modern parallel to the great 19th century military historians whose combat experience influenced their writings of history.

The basic argument of his book is that we must distinguish between the local Moslem guerillas, who while anti-Western are basically xenophobic and local in focus, and do not pose a threat to us and the globally active terrorists who use these areas as a base and seek to tie us down in exhausting conflicts in these regions while they send out "expeditionary forces" to attack us. Our strategy should be one of "divide and conquer", or rather "separate and restore normalcy". We must separate the "accidental guerrilla", the local disaffected tribesman defending his turf against outside encroachment; from the Al Qa'ida terrorist who exploits the local for his own political ends. To this end our policy should be "population centric" rather than "terrorist centric", and avoid policies and tactics that simply help the terrorists be more deeply ensconced in a region. Although the accidental guerillas at times commit "gruesome atrocities" they are only a problem for us if we allow our response to be so heavy-handed that this helps the terrorists to gain influence in the area.

We must regain control of these tribal areas. To do this you must have a policy that shows that the government is here to stay, and that you are cognizant of local conditions and can protect people from the force that the terrorists and their supporters would seek to use. Development projects are good, not so much in themselves, but as a means of enabling the government to show its ability to run an area, involve and co-opt local leaders and get things done.

Kilkullen feels that the "grievances" of Moslems in Europe should be addressed (he ignores the fact that they are willing immigrants to these lands, and receive health care and education far beyond what they could ever hope for in the lands they left) and that they are a "disenfranchised social minority." Perhaps the author's most controversial views are that America has over-reacted to 9/11. Our response has been heavy-handed to what is basically a "law and order" rather than a military problem. He makes several references to our leaders with the exception of General Petreus as being World War I "Chateau Generals". Kilkullen feels that we are in for a very protracted conflict: we must use a reasoned approach in terms of our financial and resource response; that we must distinguish between the terrorists and the "accidental guerrillas" and tailor our strategy accordingly; use the `indirect approach" with minimal military force; and give a greater role to non-governmental agencies. The author however, never deals with the fact that many of these local tribal-based Moslem entities such as the Taliban (for his discussion is almost exclusively about Moslem countries) are oppressive societies that exploit, oppress and virtually enslave women and religious minorities.

Kilkullen sees the struggle as one that is a sociological rather than a religious one; yet his examples beg the issue. The question is, will our consciences and the media allow us to simply ignore these backwards tribal areas, or will public pressure in the Western democracies force us to become involved in these regions? Perhaps we should draft more sociologists not to change these societies but to better work with them?

Mr. Kilcullen defines "Accidental Guerillas" as locals (e.g. Sunni insurgents in Iraq) who fight alongside foreign extremist forces (e.g. Al Qaeda), to expel foreign military invaders (e.g. the U.S. military). They fight us not because of any particular disdain for our foreign ideology, but rather because we are an invading force in pursuit of a small extremist group in their midst. In Afghanistan, of the 40,000 estimated insurgents as of mid 2008, only 10% or 4,000 are "hardcore fanatics who are not reconcilable under any circumstances." The remaining 90% can be won over, and Mr. Kilcullen discusses various strategies to accomplish just that. Classical counter-insurgency and traditional counter-terrorism methods are ill suited to deal with an illusive, borderless, propaganda driven enemy. The crux of Mr. Kilcullen's "hybrid war" is less direct military intervention, and more political capital accumulation and utilization.

Mr. Kilcullen discusses methods to prevent the cultivation of "the next crop of enemies" but his remedies do not dig deep enough. Mr. Kilcullen almost completely ignored the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the explicit and seemingly unconditional U.S. support of Israel's ill conceived and aggressive actions towards its neighbors. This conflict alone is responsible for most of the rift between the West and Muslims. Iran, another key player in the region was also largely overlooked. Last but not least, America's industrial interests in the Middle East and meddling in the internal politics of various countries in the region over many decades were also disregarded.

Despite these shortcomings, "The Accidental Guerilla", which reads like a Ph.D. dissertation, provides an excellent "best practice" blueprint for counterinsurgency and the effort required to marginalize extremists, whether in direct battle in Afghanistan and Iraq, or indirectly in Europe and elsewhere. The war on terror is no longer about chewing bubble gum and kicking a$$.

A comprehensive analysis on fighting terrorism. It shows the need for a comprehensive and long term multi-dimensional policy to adequately address the problem. Something that Americans have been unwilling to do. Until we are we will be unsuccessful.

Dry, scholarly reading.

David Kilcullen has written a book that will educate all who read it. I hope Western leaders all over the world pick up a copy, read it, understand it, and start to apply it's lessons. This is almost literally a how-to model to deal with the ongoing culture war between takfiri Islam and the rest of the world.

Mr. Kilcullen's book is likely to question many of your assumptions about this war. I know he did mine. In describing the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Kilcullen ably, and interestly, describes what has worked and what has gone wrong. He's arguing for a true multi-front approach to the war that involves using military, industry, communication and diplomacy as a mixed set, not favoring one over the other. The main thrust of the book is that because, while we're engaged in this global war with the takfiri, the battles are all tactical in scale and the required responses are different in each one. What worked during the Iraq "surge" can't work in the same way in Afghanistan. What is working in Afghanistan, and according to Mr. Kilcullen some of it is working, won't work in other locations. The mistake many of our leaders have made is to apply a "one-size-fits-all" approach and by it's nature, creates what Mr. Kilcullen terms the "accidental guerrilla". And no, he's not suggesting that any resistance to the takfiri breeds more terrorists. He's arguing that poorly executed resistance breeds more terrorists, which makes a lot of sense.

For those who think that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, Mr. Klcullen agrees. But, instead of simply withdrawing, he's proposing that America and the West stay in place and solve the problems, the ones we created and the ones that were there to begin with.

The book is a great read. It flows very well and Mr. Kilcullen's thesis is built logically, and carefully and in a way a non-expert, such as myself, can understand. It's extremely informative and changed my view of the world in some ways and reinforced other beliefs. It's probably one of the more important books to come out in quite a while and certainly one of the most important books I've read in quite some time.

In our war on terror it seems as though partisan politics have permeated, if not saturated, what should be military decisions on how we engage terrorism. Granted, in today's world of globalism fighting terrorism is a political struggle as well as ground troops, but it seems as though the real decisions get caught up in the political game that seems to ruin everything.

As a graduate student in history, this notion is amplified since most of my professors prefer to utilize history texts that greatly contrast each other due to political bias whether it's Walter Lafeber or John Lewis Gaddis. Enter Killcullen's Accidental Guerilla (TAG).

Going to almost great lengths to avoid any political bias or implications, Killcullen examines civilization's struggle against two factions of Islamic terrorism; those who want any influence out of their nation (please don't make me recall the Arabic names) and those who want to impose Islamic rule on all even outside their borders. Killcullen argues that the latter are more dangerous and then goes into detail explaining how to combat them.

He also goes to great lengths to have a detailed bibliography, however, he also covers up identities due to their activity in the field. Kilcullen acknowledges that it is somewhat unacceptable in an academic field to do so, however, he does triangulate his sources with other public ones.

All in all, Kilcullen does an excellent job depicting guerilla warfare and countering it in a modern context without straying off the paper and into the realm of political disillusion.

As other reviewers have pointed out, this is a detailed discussion of the world of counterinsurgency. It is not all about Iraq and Afghanistan as Kilcullen has had experience in East Timor and Indonesia during his service in the Australian Army. It opens with a Prologue describing his time in Java, in 1996, when he first encountered young men who were opposed to the government and who were accompanied by other young men who did not speak the local language well and who began to question him about Palestine. He believes that these were Arabs already infiltrating local groups with the intent of engaging them in transnational Muslim radicalism, what he calls global takfiri insurgency.

He poses four possible models for 21st century security issues. One is a backlash against globalization. The second is a globalized insurgency. His third model is a civil war within Islam. Fourth is asymmetric warfare, a functional model rather than an explanation of causes. All four probably apply to varying degrees, depending on the area. He even has a section on Europe and the Muslim "no-go zones," which may pose a serious insurgency problem soon.

He then goes on to describe his central thesis of the "accidental guerilla" in which local insurgencies are stirred up and, to some extent, directed by outside forces, the global insurgency. The tactics of the takfiris, which are provocation and response to outside actors like the US, are described in four general stages. First is Provocation, 9/11 being an extreme example. Next is Intimidation, the prevention of cooperation between the local population and the local government by the insurgents who may kill "collaborators." Third is Protraction, an effort to prolong the conflict and exhaust the government's political will. Exhaustion is the final goal.

The actual steps of "accidental guerilla syndrome" go from "Infection," the introduction of transnational insurgents into local disputes, to "Contagion," where the outside groups extend their influence to the country at large. Pakistan is now in this phase. The third, "Intervention" phase involves the government's response to provocation. If it is clumsy or involves outside forces like the US, it may stimulate a local "Rejection," which he describes elsewhere as an "autoimmune" response. His Pakistan case study is an example.

He then goes on in most of the book to describe case studies, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan but in less well understood cases such as southern Thailand where the Buddhist central government has clumsily handled a local Muslim insurgency,in the former Sultanate of Patani. The Patani provinces are Malay and Muslim and were ruled independently until 1902 when the Sultanate was annexed to the Kingdom of Siam. He provides a thorough study of the East Timor emergency in which Australia intervened and in which the "accidental guerilla syndrome" was avoided. He notes that, unlike most of the other insurgencies he describes, East Timor is Catholic. He also points out that many of these southern Asian religious movements, both Islamic and Catholic, incorporate pre-existing animist and magical beliefs. For this reason, the outside takfiri Muslim radicals may alienate locals the way they have alienated the Sunnis of Anbar Province in Iraq. This is a view into the civil war in Islam that may be driving a lot of the insurgency, at least the transnational movement.

His insight into Afghanistan is sobering. Chapter 2, titled "The Crazies Will Kill Them," discusses the role of the outside terrorist forces that infiltrate Afghan villages from Pakistan's tribal areas. Afghanistan is divided into narrow valleys with a central river and one entrance and exit. This makes ambushes a major factor and the village families have passed ambush sites down since Alexander the Great just as American rural families may pass down local knowledge of favorite fishing spots. Afghan villages are constructed as forts with observation towers and rifle slits instead of windows in the houses. He refers to Winston Churchill's The Story of The Malakand Field Force, still in print 110 years after it was published, and notes that the same village described in the book is still a center of insurgency with an al Qeada leader killed there by a predator strike last year.

Afghanistan is a primitive society and we must be realistic about the prospects for a viable nation state there. He has a lengthy analysis of Pakistan and the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas), which was a major source of conflict for the British in 1897. Little has changed although the major difference now is that we are trying to keep traffic from Pakistan to Afghanistan controlled rather than the opposite, which was the case in 1897.

One major failure in Iraq was the inability to recognize the tribal nature of almost all of the country. When Paul Bremer took over as CPA chief, the focus was on building a western-style democracy and suppressing the tribes. The reason the Surge succeeded was the recognition of the importance of the tribes, even among most of the urban population of Baghdad, and the ability to work with them. A second major failure in Iraq was the delayed recognition of the importance of the 2006 Samarra Mosque bombing, which did ignite a civil war between Shia and Sunni. He notes that it took four months before the change in the nature of the conflict was recognized by the Army and CPA.

He has a number of recommendations that have been described in other reviews. The best, I think, is that an OSS-like organization should be founded and a reserve corps of civil affairs officers is needed. In Iraq by 2004, we needed a lot of police experts to train Iraqis in local policing and crime control. Most of these experts in the US Army are reservists and are police officers when not on active duty. It was a terrible burden on these reservists and more need to be recruited with a better way to handle deployment.

Chapter 5, "Turning an Elephant Into a Mouse" is the only disappointing part of the book. On page 233, he writes that, "the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was an extremely serious strategic mistake." There are certainly many people who agree with him. The problem with this statement, and the discussion that follows, is a failure to consider the strategic situation when that decision was made. I have found this to be an extremely common omission. He writes, on page 235, that "we should avoid any future large-scale, unilateral military intervention in the Islamic world." This is a fair point but the decision to intervene was NOT IN 2003 ! He never refers to the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait or the aftermath of the Gulf War, including the discovery of an advanced WMD program in Iraq. A program that was far more advanced than any intelligence estimate before that war and subsequent occupation.

A strategist as talented as Colonel Kilcullen should have discussed the strategic situation at the time of 9/11. The reason given by Osama bin laden for the attack was our presence in Saudi Arabia as a consequence of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991. Lesser commentators have ignored the complicated circumstances with the "no-fly" zones and low level conflict that was under way from 1992 to 2001. It is disappointing to see Colonel Kilcullen do so. Other than that complaint, I found the book riveting and impressive in its detailed discussion of the world-wide insurgency we face. A student of this protracted conflict would do well to read a few other books. I would recommend War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, by Douglas Feith, for discussion of the strategic situation that faced the Bush Administration in 2003. Among Colonel Kilcullen's recommendations in his final chapter, is a "strategic information campaign" (page 263) but Douglas Feith tried to start such a program in the Defense Department twice only to be derailed by Iraq War opponents (See my review of that book). The other book I would recommend is Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military, from Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond, by Robert D Kaplan, which goes into some detail about small unit actions going on all over the world. It fills in some detail on the recommendations of Colonel Kilcullen although it covers events a few years ago. The strategic aims of the authors agree.

This book is extremely detailed and, as another reviewer wrote, takes time and a high interest level, to complete. The "War on Terror," probably by another name, will be with us for a generation. Those who want to know the facts will find many of them here.