The accidental guerrilla
From the Publisher: David Kilcullen is one of the world's most influential experts on counterinsurgency and modern warfare. A Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq, his vision of war dramatically influenced America's decision to rethink its military strategy in Iraq and implement "the surge." Now, in The Accidental Guerrilla, Kilcullen provides a remarkably fresh perspective on the War on Terror. Kilcullen takes us "on the ground" to uncover the face of modern warfare, illuminating both the big global war (the "War on Terrorism") and its relation to the associated "small wars" across the globe: Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Chechnya, Pakistan and North Africa. Kilcullen sees today's conflicts as a complex pairing of contrasting trends: local social networks and worldwide movements; traditional and postmodern culture; local insurgencies seeking autonomy and a broader pan-Islamic campaign. He warns that America's actions in the war on terrorism have tended to conflate these trends, blurring the distinction between local and global struggles and thus enormously complicating our challenges. Indeed, the US had done a poor job of applying different tactics to these 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.
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2recommend
3mentions
3people
2015–2021years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Highly recommend Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 and the sequel Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are long but very detailed and really lays out the complex relationships between the CIA, Pakistani ISI, and the various groups that came and went leading up to 9/11 in the first book, and post 9/11 in the second.
Descent into Chaos: The United States & the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan & Central Asia and In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan are also great reads about Afghanistan.
Not as on topic, but still good would include The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth about how the CIA shifted towards more targeting operations and the military shifted to more intelligence gathering and how that has blurred the lines between the two. And The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One about how insurgencies work, how local people are recruited and coopted by globally minded jihadists using local problems, and how a counter insurgency operation requires understanding and addressing local dynamics and issues, and breaking the connection between locally focused fighters and global jihadists.
- I'm a big fan of The Accidental Guerrilla. I went through a big counter insurgency phase about seven years ago. That book and The Gamble by Ricks were my favorites.
- Currently reading a few, including:
- The Good Spy - Kai Bird (Robert Ames bio)
- Becoming Steve Jobs - Brent Schlender (after reading Isaacson's Jobs' bio I figured another perspective wouldn't be horrible)
- Countdown to Zero Day - Kim Zetter (RE: Stuxnet and cyber-espionage)
And finally, I'm re-reading The Accidental Guerrilla by David Kilcullen (something of a social science approach to "Why do rebels/guerrillas/terrorists exist?")
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