John Nagl reviews 'The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One' by David Kilcullen
John Nagl reviews
The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
By David Kilcullen
Oxford University Press, 2009
It was five years ago this month that I met the Australian anthropologist and counter-insurgent David Kilcullen. We were introduced by Jim Thomas, the Pentagon official later responsible for writing the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review that attempted to reshape American thinking on the nature of warfare. I was so taken by Kilcullen’s fresh and compelling insights that I immediately, and without any right to do so, invited him to speak at the Army War College’s annual strategy conference, and only then called the conference’s director, Steve Metz, to beg for more time on the panel. It is fair to say that nobody noticed I was also on the stage.
Since then, Kilcullen has been at the centre of American efforts to adapt to the demands of twenty-first century warfare, leaving the Pentagon to serve successively as the State Department’s chief strategist for counterterrorism, as General David Petraeus’s counter-insurgency advisor in Baghdad, and finally as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s COIN troubleshooter in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Accidental Guerrilla is Kilcullen’s travelogue-cum-memoir, interspersed with the extraordinarily perceptive insights on warfare that first led me to yield my time to him on a panel at Carlisle Barracks. He is concerned that it is ‘too academic to be popular and too populist to be purely academic’; I am convinced that it is the most important book yet written on the wars with which we are struggling today.
The central conceit of the book is told in its title; Kilcullen argues that
[M]ost of the adversaries Western powers have been fighting since 9/11 are in fact accidental guerrillas: 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. They fight us not because they seek our destruction but because they believe we seek theirs.
This insight turns the thinking behind the ‘global War on Terror’ moniker on its head. We do not face a monolithic horde of jihadis motivated by a rabid desire to destroy us and our way of life (there are some of these, although Kilcullen prefers to call them takfiris); instead, many of those who fight us do so for conventional reasons like nationalism and honour. Kilcullen illustrates the point with the tale of a special forces A-Team that had the fight of its life one May afternoon in 2006. One American was killed and seven more wounded in a fight that drew local fighters from villages five kilometres away who marched to the sound of the guns – not for any ideological reason, but simply because they wanted to be a part of the excitement. ‘It would have shamed them to stand by and wait it out’, Kilcullen reports, based on interviews with some of those involved ten days after the firefight.
There is much first-hand reporting in this book, based on Kilcullen’s Kaplan-esque habit of visiting places where people want to kill him. After chapters detailing his personal experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, he returns to his doctoral fieldwork in Indonesia, discusses the insurgencies in Thailand and Pakistan and evaluates the complicated plight of radical Islam in Europe. While all of these conflicts are related to each other, they are not the same, and cannot be won based on a simplistic conception like the global War on Terror; instead, the enemy in each small war must be disaggregated from the whole, strategy in each based on local conditions, motivations, and desires. One size does not fit all, and there are many grey areas. A ‘with us or against us’ approach is likely to result in far more people than otherwise being ‘against us’ in these conflicts.
Kilcullen notes that the United Kingdom’s counter-terrorism strategy, known as CONTEST, did not include Iraq or Afghanistan in 2006, because the Brits viewed those conflicts as alliance commitments rather than as part of a broader war against Al-Qa’ida. The current American administration seems more disposed to this point of view than its predecessor, perhaps making it more likely that Kilcullen’s prescriptions will be heard. In direct opposition to the ideas that drove American intervention policy two decades ago, Kilcullen suggests ‘the anti-Powell doctrine’ for counter-insurgency campaigns.
First, planners should select the lightest, most indirect and least intrusive form of intervention that will achieve the necessary effect.
Second, policy-makers should work by, with, and through partnerships with local government administrators, civil society leaders, and local security forces whenever possible.
Third, whenever possible, civilian agencies are preferable to military intervention forces, local nationals to international forces, and long-term, low-profile engagement to short-term, high-profile intervention.
These sensible prescriptions show that over the past several years, a more sophisticated understanding of insurgency and techniques designed to counter it has crept into American policy and strategy, much of it drawn from Britain’s colonial history. Many of those responsible for this learning process have benefited from extensive study of international relations, history and anthropology, tempered by the personal experience of having the people they are working to understand occasionally try to kill them. This is smart power, implemented by smart people who have climbed out of the ivory tower and into the foxhole.
Many of these smart people, Kilcullen included, have been involved in several reviews of Afghan counter-insurgency strategy that have been ongoing since the election of President Obama; it is therefore worth paying close attention to The Accidental Guerrilla’s prescriptions for that conflict. Although in general the Kilcullen Doctrine recommends a light footprint and heavy reliance on local security forces, muddled strategy and the inadvertent creation of accidental guerrillas has allowed a security situation to develop in Iraq in 2006 and in Afghanistan today that is beyond the ability of local forces to control. It is therefore essential to deploy more international forces to Afghanistan to check the momentum of the Taliban while simultaneously dramatically increasing the size of the Afghan National Army – the most respected and effective institution in that country, and the best path to an Afghanistan that in time will be able to defend itself.
This author has previously argued that David Kilcullen has done greater wartime service to the United States than any foreign adviser since Polish Colonel Thaddeus Kosciusko helped the fledgling Colonial Army defeat an occupying power that shall remain nameless here. As a friend of Kilcullen and president of the centre where he is a senior fellow, my objectivity on this matter may fairly be called suspect. Nevertheless, that caveat made clear, The Accidental Guerilla offers incredibly valuable insights on the small wars that scar the face of the planet today and present such difficult challenges to the foreign policy and military establishments of the Western world. If it is read as widely as it deserves to be, this book may be the most important service Kilcullen has yet rendered to his adopted country, and to the world.
Dr John Nagl is the President for the Center for A New American Security
This book review was first published in the RUSI Journal (Vol. 154, No. 2, April 2009).