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

"Kilcullen writes from both a theoretical and an experiential point of view. His background is in anthropology and he’s interested in ‘full spectrum strategies’, that is, taking everything into account from social situation and tribal dynamics up to what the US calls kinetic operations. He is interested in why we’ve had guerrilla warfare and insurgencies in the middle of what seemed to be a regular fight, a conventional war. Why did it happen in Afghanistan after the Taliban seemed to be defeated? He writes about the War on Terror writ large, looking specifically at Iraq, Afghanistan and Indonesia on which he is an expert. Kilcullen also has a continuing relationship with the military, which allows him access to the battlefield. One argument is that the US continually misidentifies the insurgents with legitimate and local aims with the wider network of al Qaeda – we treat them all the same instead of trying to peel off those with local issues and grievances. So we can blame the US. If we had dealt with the local grievances we wouldn’t have this insurgency problem. The US had a ‘one size fits all’ attitude to jihadist groups for a while. Many groups had no intention of carrying out attacks on us. Kilcullen provides a good look at counter-insurgency tactics too – he was one of a group who advised General Petraeus in Iraq and helped developed the current counter-insurgency theory. So what’s going on now are attempts to peel off insurgents from the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, following their ability to peel off some insurgents from the al Qaeda guys in Iraq. The trouble is that in Afghanistan the people who are willing to have conversations with the US and are willing to do deals are those who have lost influence and power. So if you make an agreement with them they may only have 200 in their tribe rather than thousands handing over their arms. It was the same thing in Iraq, where the US was having conversations with leaders who were only willing to talk because they had already lost out to al Qaeda. The al Qaeda people seem to have made a more successful appeal to the younger generation than the US did. I’m not saying that offering amnesty doesn’t work, but in Iraq it was more that al Qaeda was so awful, committed so many terrible atrocities, that people turned against them because of that – not because of US efforts. Kilcullen talks about the need to Clear, Hold and Build. You provide security first and you have to be there persistently. You can’t clear out the bad guys and then leave, because they will be back. This is something that can take years. You also train the locals to hold, to take over when you do leave. Kilcullen is big on population-centric warfare rather than enemy-centric warfare. So you secure and protect the population rather than going after the enemy. After you have held, then reconstruction and development, the build, can begin. This gives people a reason to support you and to support local governance that will take your place when you leave. But where insurgency is succeeding it is very difficult to make an appeal over that success. You have to make the argument that you are going to win and that you will win and stay around and not just leave soon, like in 2011 for example! Yes. The average time for a counter-insurgency to take effect is eight to ten years. You might get the wrong idea in Iraq because you might count from 2003, but, in fact, the counter-insurgency didn’t start until 2006-7, so the US should have a full presence until 2013 or so. Let alone Afghanistan, where they’ve only just started."

"He is an Australian counter-insurgency expert and a key adviser to General Petraeus, Commander of US Central Command, previously Commanding General, Multi-National Force – Iraq. Kilcullen was really the thinking behind the “surges” in Iraq and now in Afghanistan. He thinks we face a global insurgency of Takfir terrorists, basically Al-Qaida, who are trying to attack the West. They infiltrate areas like Iraq, Afghanistan , Pakistan, Indonesia, marry locals and both intimidate and bribe people in order to mobilise them to fight on their side. These are the accidental guerrillas of the book’s title. Counter-insurgency, according to Kilcullen, is about protecting people and about separating the accidental guerrillas from the real Al-Qaida people. You hear Petraeus talking about separating the reconcilables from the irreconcilables. They say they are shifting from counter-terror (killing enemies) to counter-insurgency (protecting people). Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It has worked really well in Iraq. There was the Petraeus injunction to “live amongst the people” – by stopping shooting they did create the space for local deals to be made. Instead of shooting from afar they set up joint security stations with the Iraqis and found that actually the Sunnis were sick of Al-Qaida and their brutality anyway and had been keen to make a deal with the Americans for some time, but the Americans hadn’t noticed. What was important was that the Americans stopped shooting from afar and started to provide basic services including law and order. It’s a huge improvement. The Americans are learning that the traditional ways of fighting and shooting don’t work. Well, Petraeus surrounded himself with a lot of bright military people, people with PhDs, and Kilcullen was just one of them, but I think this book is the best example of the kind of thing a lot of people were saying at the time. It would be great if they did! It does involve a huge shift in the way armies think. But, for example, the war in Congo has taken four million lives and nobody knows what to do. Nobody was sent to Darfur, nobody is trained for this. What is true is that new concepts of security are beginning to be learned and applied. Well, everyone likes to quote Churchill who said: “The Americans always do the right thing in the end – after they’ve tried everything else.” I think they realised that what they’d been doing in Iraq was a disaster. For those of us who are on the left and against war it is awful to have to admit that America is changing things in a positive way! But they are trying this new approach in Afghanistan and I don’t know if it will work. It will be much more difficult. Afghanistan is more spread out, bigger, their forces are untrained, the police is full of criminals and there is a terrible mess being made in Pakistan which I think will become a recruiting ground for Al-Qaida. But it is amazing to hear General McCrystal, Nato’s Commander in Afghanistan, say: “We are protecting people rather than trying to defeat Al-Qaida.”"

"I chose this book because the last 10 to 15 years of my life, particularly my time when I was here in Oxford, was shaped by the Iraq and Afghan wars. I came here to finish writing my history of the First World War and I got not a word of it written. There were many reasons for that, but probably the most important was that the chair here has a responsibility for strategic studies as well. And while Britain was facing considerable challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a desire on the part of the UK armed forces in particular to engage, intellectually, with what was going on. I tried to think which was the book that best captured some of that engagement. There are a number. A former student of mine, Emile Simpson, wrote a book called War from the Ground Up . He read history here at Oxford, and became a Gurkha officer. That book has achieved something of a cult following. Another Oxford graduate, Carter Malkasian, wrote an excellent book called War Comes to Garmser , about an Afghan village that is caught up in war over a 30-year period. These books all capture something of the flavour of Iraq and Afghanistan. But the significance of David Kilcullen’s book is that, first of all, he came at it from a different disciplinary approach. His own account of what happened is that, as an Australian army officer, he’d been in East Timor and elsewhere and realised how little armies understand about the societies in which they are trying to operate—when they’re dealing with insurgencies, small wars and so on. Anthropology became his way into understanding war, rather than strategic studies or history. It’s not that those other disciplines don’t matter, but anthropology was the way in to understand the cultural context within which we’re operating and the differences between the army that’s doing the intervening and the society with which it is engaging. He brought a different approach. Secondly David—and I first met him before this book came out and last saw him about six months ago—is constantly asking himself fresh questions. He’s written a very successful book in The Accidental Guerrilla , but he isn’t going around selling it. He has moved on: his interest remains vital and immediate and engaged with what’s happening now. When I first heard him speak here in Oxford, before The Accidental Guerrilla came out, he was beginning to formulate the ideas. It was at a point in the wars after 9/11 where we were all grappling with what was going on. How do you understand it? What’s the framework? And he stood up and spoke in ways that immediately engaged you because he was involving in the questions and the search for answers. You were part of his quest as he was looking for solutions. I think that comes through in the book, too. Thirdly, it’s important that practitioners read books like this. Army friends of mine will often say, ‘There are those practitioners who are absolutely convinced of the importance of military history, who love reading and will therefore read military history. There are others who are good soldiers but they never read. They do it practically and sensibly and they don’t need to read.’ The challenge is, how do you bridge that divide? David Kilcullen’s book tells stories. The book begins, and many of its chapters begin, with an incident from his own experience. Now, these may be embellished. One or two people, who were there on the same day, have said, ‘That’s not quite how I remember it.’ But, in a way, that doesn’t matter because he’s using the story to illustrate a more profound point about what he thinks is going on in relation to warfare. And the story takes his readers along with him and it makes his points very clear. I remember when Emile Simpson was writing War from the Ground Up . The Accidental Guerrilla was already out by then, and he, Emile, was thinking about how to find a way to frame that book. I said, ‘You’ve been on two Afghan operational tours. You’ve got stories you can tell. You can do the same thing [as David].” And it works. It does. Because his own experience—as it was for Dave Kilcullen and for many people—was central to what they were seeing about war and what they were commenting on within war. The normal reaction of an academic would be to suppress the individual in the story. But it’s about the interaction. It brings us back full-circle to Clausewitz, where the discussion between personal experience on the one hand and theory and history on the other is central to the mix. It’s the experience that helps enliven and illuminate understanding, and, equally, that understanding depends on context, which you get from reading and going beyond your own experience. So what The Accidental Guerrilla is doing, in a very different way from Clausewitz—and people might mock me for making a comparison between David Kilcullen and Carl von Clausewitz, though I’m sure Dave himself would be delighted by it—is showing the value of using that interaction, in a 21st century form. Some of the things that The Accidental Guerrilla is arguing are now old hat because he’s reflecting on experiences that are now more than ten years ago. That’s why Dave has moved on. In some respects it is very specific to time and place. But what he’s saying, and why it still has appeal, is that to do this well you need to understand the context in which you’re fighting. Understanding it in narrowly military terms won’t get you very far, because it can be quite hard to identify who your opponent is, when your opponent draws on the wider society of which he or she is a member. And the capacity to change and adapt may be greater on the side of the insurgent than it is on the side of the disciplined and organised army, which has certain ways of operating. Much of this is war in microcosm. That’s partly Emile Simpson’s point too. We’ve come to see war in state terms, run by unified societies with clearly defined governments. In societies with low levels of literacy and low governmental reach, the local is far more important than the national. If you’re in Afghanistan—and this reflects personal observation more than, necessarily, the book—there is a story that people tell themselves which has an antiquity and longevity which is almost beyond our comprehension, because it’s an oral tradition. I remember having a conversation in Afghanistan—when I first went there in 1971—with a guy close to Kandahar. He started talking about the first and second Afghan wars of the 19th century as though he’d taken part in them personally. And then I’ve had a subsequent conversation where exactly the same has been applied to the invasion by Alexander the Great. In an oral tradition, time is collapsed and history has an immediacy. Whereas, for us, all that belongs in the past. It’s nothing to do with the present. We don’t think of Britain’s record in Iraq or Britain’s record in Afghanistan when British forces go to Iraq and Afghanistan because it’s so long ago. It doesn’t matter, we’ve obliterated it. It is, if you like, a longitudinal issue. The latitude is that you think you’re going to Iraq and Afghanistan—but for many members of these impoverished societies, although both Afghanistan or Iraq may have an identity, their world is actually bound, particularly in Afghanistan, by their valley and their community. Most of them will never go beyond it. And the politics are local politics, deeply local politics; not least because of the question of survival or not. I don’t mean survival because the other side has got weapons, although that might be the case, but simply economic survival. Your economy is a subsistence economy. How are you keeping going? Who owns land? That is the theme of Carter Malkasian’s War Comes to Garmser . The real issue is there still isn’t a proper land registry in Afghanistan. And yet, if agriculture is the basis for the economy, who exactly is the proprietor of this and what can you grow on it? There’s plenty of scope for war just within that."