Center for a New American Security

David Ucko is a friend of the blog and the author of a new book on the efforts made by the U.S. military to transform itself to meet the operational challenges of Iraq and Afghanistan. The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the U.S. Military for Modern Wars is really the first of what I imagine will be many academic studies of the U.S. military efforts to come to grips with counterinsurgency in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. I enjoyed the book and asked David to answer a few of my questions for the benefit of the readership. Enjoy the following catachism.

1. First off, David, congratulations on the publication of your new book, which I believe is the first serious history of the U.S. military's attempt to adapt to the operational challenges of Iraq and Afghanistan. We are both products of the War Studies Department at King's College London, and I apologize for missing the book launch hosted by CNAS, but I was in Israel trying to finish my own dissertation! Let me start off by asking a question. You say the U.S. military is "learning" counterinsurgency. To what degree do you think it has thus far been successful doing so?

Thank you. I believe that the U.S. military has been remarkably successful in gaining a better understanding of counterinsurgency, given the size and hierarchical nature of the organisation, as well as its prior stance toward these missions. Through an open discussion, and a genuine willingness to learn, those with an interest in counterinsurgency have arrived at a clear-eyed understanding of what these missions require, in terms of time, resources and personnel. The U.S. military has in this regard come a very long way: it is impressive.

At the same time, developing doctrine and publishing concept papers is not a particularly good metric for institutional change: the U.S. military must also prioritises counterinsurgency as a mission that it will conduct, and support that prioritisation by developing the required capabilities. Here, progress has been slower. On the prioritisation, there is an understandable desire to avoid counterinsurgency, and this, along with sheer inertia, has sapped some of the efforts to institutionalise lessons learned in the field. As to the development of capabilities, U.S. troops are clearly learning about the nature of these missions through gruelling, repeated tours. I do not, however, see a corresponding change of priorities within the U.S. defence budget or its force structure. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ influence over the last year is extremely promising but I believe more needs to be done to resource and equip the force for the types of wars it is fighting today and, most likely, tomorrow. Similarly, the great changes over the last few years in Army force structure do not reflect the operational learning of troops on the ground, or are insufficiently targeted to meet the requirements of these very challenging operations.

One big reason for the continuity in these foundational areas is the difficulty of adding without removing: the capabilities and skill sets necessary for counterinsurgency have been brought in from the margins, to be incorporated within the main text without changing its flow or meaning. This is a very problematic means of achieving change. More helpful, yet very unlikely, is a veritable bottom-up review to build a capability that truly reflects current and prospective needs.

2. Do you think the U.S. military's understanding of the challenges and realities of counterinsurgency has continued to evolve? Or has it more or less calcified with the publication of the new counterinsurgency field manual? Along the same lines, what do you see as the major weaknesses of the existing doctrine?

Continued operational experience means continued conceptual learning and refinement. I remember when FM 3-24 came out in late 2006, some people were already saying that we needed a new manual on intervening in civil wars, to reflect the situation in Iraq at the time. So maybe we need another manual today to reflect the particular features of the campaign in Afghanistan? I don’t think so. Of course FM 3-24 will not anticipate the complexity of counterinsurgencies across time and space. It is also necessarily limited. At the same time, none of this invalidates its great contributions: it served as a counter-point to the dominant conceptualisation of counterinsurgency that preceded it and has helped familiarise the military with the counterintuitive logic of counterinsurgency, with the ways in which these endeavours differ from conventional combat. Most importantly, FM 3-24 was never intended to be the definitive guide to counterinsurgency or a silver-bullet solution for such missions. Instead, the manual itself emphasises the need for adaptation, and the need to arrive at a carefully tailored response rather than fall back on templates.

Now, a major weakness in existing doctrine, one that is also becoming increasingly apparent, relates to the transition from military authority at the end of a counterinsurgency campaign. Here, detail is woefully lacking. The doctrine states that authority is passed to civilian agencies or to local institutions, but there is hardly any criteria or guidance for a brigade commander to know when his area of operations is ready for such a shift and what to consider when it happens. Perhaps we will again learn by doing, in Iraq, but it is very serious problem, as a failed transition strategy risks snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, so to say.

3. Your study seems to support Barry Posen's school of thought on military innovation theory. Outsiders joined up with mavericks within the military -- like Petraeus -- and forced through the adoption of counterinsurgency doctrine over the objection of vested interests. But I noticed that you did not interview any military officers below the rank of lieutenant colonel. To what degree do you think the adoption of counterinsurgency doctrine might have also been driven from the ground up by units in the field demanding new paradigms through which they could understand and fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Is there any evidence for that kind of bottom-up innovation? How about the role that websites like Small Wars Journal and Platoon Leader played in pushing through operational and cultural changes at the tactical and operational levels?

Because Western militaries typically fail to anticipate and prepare for counterinsurgency, it has often fallen to the soldiers on the ground to devise a more or less improvised approach to an unfamiliar challenge. Today, fora like Platoon Leader and Small Wars Journal (not to mention your own excellent blog, of course) have helped accelerate bottom-up adaptation. This is very promising, yet I think that the consent, if not active lobbying, of mid- to senior-level officers is required for such bottom-up innovation to affect institutional priorities and resource allocation, and it is that process that I trace in the book.

It takes us back to FM 3-24: many soldiers and Marines already ‘got it’ before reading the manual, because of their experiences in theatre. The point is that until informally arrived-at and informally shared knowledge is picked up and institutionalised, it is dangerously vulnerable to fragmentation and eventual erosion. Indeed, it is the critical failure to institutionalise best practices following each counterinsurgency campaign that has produced what I term the U.S. military’s ‘counterinsurgency syndrome’, a cyclical pattern of failing to anticipate the challenges of these operations, of adapting more or less successfully while engaged, but of then rejecting whatever was learnt at the close of the operation, forcing a renewed process of hurried adaptation once troops are again committed to a similar mission. My book can be considered a call not to let the same happen today.

4. But you only mention critics of the military's new focus on counterinsurgency in passing. You quote Gian Gentile, for example, as saying that "the U.S. Army has become a counterinsurgency-only force." I agree this is surely one of the more ridiculous (and demonstrably false) things Gian has said. But Gian is a gifted historian and has made more cogent criticisms of the focus on counterinsurgency (which is why this blog continues our love-hate relationship with him). Not only Gian but also Celeste Ward and Andrew Bacevich have offered criticisms of the focus on counterinsurgency at every level at which war is fought. The backlash, as you describe it, is real. Which criticisms do you find the most consequential -- and which do you find unconvincing?

The trouble is that almost all of the criticism of counterinsurgency are instinctively appealing: yes, counterinsurgency is difficult, it is costly (in time, resources and blood), and produces results that are often ambiguous and easily reversible. Who in their right mind would like to conduct counterinsurgency? The problem, of course, is that these operations are seldom optional. It is for that reason that the notion of simply ‘avoiding’ counterinsurgency is both unconvincing and dangerous. If I remember correctly, this was the approach favoured by the George W. Bush administration as it invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Therein lies a lesson in caution: the operating environment is dynamic and unpredictable, and there is still a strong possibility that U.S. forces will be called upon to help stabilise a foreign territory, build government capability, or conduct operations against irregular adversaries.

The ‘avoidance’ argument also misses the point that ‘learning counterinsurgency’ is much more than a responding to Iraq or Afghanistan. As I argue in my book, the global trend toward urbanisation; the West’s superiority in conventional combat; the attractiveness and effectiveness of asymmetric tactics to militarily inferior adversaries; the increased frequency of state-building; and the ‘securitisation’ of state failure following 9/11 all point to a future of operations conducted among the people and, most often, with the objective of building governmental capacity. So while it may be some time before the U.S. military embarks on another ‘counterinsurgency operation’ per se, the operations it will conduct will nonetheless involve a similar range of tasks. If territory is to be seized, stabilisation of that territory will be an unavoidable requirement. Also, most future operations will be conducted in urban environments where the local population cannot be ignored but, more often, must be co-opted and even protected against attack. It is for this reason that the sub-title of my book talks about transforming the military for ‘modern wars’, the complexity of which simply cannot be wished away.

In contrast, one of the more consequential arguments against counterinsurgency concerns balance and the need for the U.S. military to master the full spectrum of operations. Counterinsurgency places specific and extremely challenging demands on the force: not only to provide civil control and civil security, but to restore essential services, provide support to governance, as well as aid economic and infrastructural development. Can the capability to do this be developed within the force without seriously undermining its ability to conduct combined arms manoeuvre and other aspect of conventional war-fighting? The Army wants its soldiers to be adaptive, but can we expect a soldier to be both a war-fighter as well as the jack-of-all-trades called for in stability operations? Is it a fair requirement and, as important, can it at all be avoided?

I do not think that this issue of balance has been sufficiently thought through, perhaps because the discussion tends to be inflamed by parochial interests, from both sides. It is also very difficult to get a sense of where the balance between capabilities currently resides. So far the Army’s response has been to aim toward a ‘full-spectrum operations’ capability. This is a step in the right direction, but offers no clear indication of prioritisation. Furthermore, the Army has peddled the notion of a full-spectrum or full-dimensional force for some time, to no great effect. To do better, the Army must think hard about where the balance should be struck to respond most effectively to the likely demands of disparate sets of missions. In the absence of consensus on these questions, the Army’s efforts have typically lacked focus and produced continuity rather than change.

5. Where do you see the debate in five years time? How many of these changes you describe will be institutionalized over the long term? You get at this in the very last chapter of your book, but I was wondering if you would be so kind as to summarize your answer.

It will come down to two issues: will Iraq and Afghanistan be seen as representative of the complexity of modern conflict or as aberrations. In that debate, I hope that the exact circumstances and causes of current campaigns, which one may hope will never be repeated, will not be confused with the skill-sets and capabilities that they have called for, which I believe will be in high demand in future contingencies as well, whatever form they take.

The second fundamental indicator of where we go from here relates to the outcome in Iraq and Afghanistan, or rather the interpretation of that outcome. Counterinsurgency proponents gained influence due to the security gains achieved in ‘the surge’. If DoD was to move farther in this direction, the learning of counterinsurgency would be aided by the fact that the majority of low- to middle-ranking soldiers and Marines have conducted several tours and gained a hard-won familiarity with counterinsurgency.

The problem is that sustaining a “good-news story” in Iraq, never mind Afghanistan, will be costly, requiring a sustained effort for which there appears to be no real appetite. Should the gains in Iraq be reversed, this will likely tarnish the whole idea of counterinsurgency – ‘is it worth it’? Of course, such a conclusion would be unfair, as the adoption of a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq was not only extremely limited in breadth, depth and duration, but also tardy. Still, this level of nuance may be lost in the search to apportion blame. In Afghanistan, meanwhile, if Obama does decide to attempt a counterinsurgency strategy there, the result is likely to be very painful and protracted. Again, this will make it difficult to attract support for greater institutional investment in counterinsurgency capabilities. Yet to me, Afghanistan does not prove the bankruptcy of counterinsurgency as much as the dangers of failing to apply some of its core principles, and of then trying to do it on the cheap. It is somewhat unfair to expect the adoption of counterinsurgency, if and when that happens, to reverse eight years of entropy. Nonetheless, poor implementation may in this instance be confused with poor theory, resulting in the baby being thrown out with the bathwater, much as it was after Vietnam.

Informing all of these decisions will be the squeeze on the U.S. defence budget. So far, the limited investment in counterinsurgency-relevant capabilities has been enabled through supplemental budget requests. As these are reduced and increasingly integrated within the core budget, which it too will shrink, the Pentagon will be presented with some difficult choices. If counterinsurgency is in any way tarnished, as described above, its future as a U.S. military priority appears, at best, uncertain. The point to remember is that these complexity of these operations cannot be avoided as it is representational of modern war, and that failing to prepare will only make the eventual engagement more likely and even more challenging.

6. Yes, I like one of the quotes you employed from Sir Michael Howard: "The military may protest that this is not the kind of war that they joined up to fight. [Yet] this is the only war we are likely to get: it is also the only kind of peace. So let us have no illusions about it." Moving on to far more important things, you recently completed a fellowship in Washington and now are in Berlin. We all know the real estate is cheaper in Berlin, but how about the drinking? Thomas Rid heretically swears the beers in America – not Bud Light, obviously, but the microbrews -- are better than in his native Germany. Is that true? What are your three favorite haunts in Washington, and what are the three best bars in Berlin?

It strikes me as faintly ironic that I moved from the land of Bud Light and Miller to Germany, arguably ‘beer heaven’, and find that one of the things I miss the most is the beer. If you want a crisp, clean and strong lager, German beers are as good as they get. But one of the great things about beer in the U.S. is, as you say, the microbrews and the great variety in what you can get. Personally, what I miss the most are the IPAs: I’ve found it almost impossible to find an equivalent to Dogfish, Stone or even something comparably conventional such as a Sierra Nevada IPA around here. So I would agree with Thomas.

As to where to drink these aforementioned beers, Berlin clearly has a few advantages over DC: every nook and cranny in this town hosts a bar, and each has something special to offer, without being gimmicky. If I had to name a few favourite haunts, I’d point to Madam Claude, a former brothel turned basement bar/concert venue where everything is literally upside down; Konrad Tönz, on my own street and a throwback to the late 1970s, and finally, why not, the Badeschiff: an artificial beach on the Spree, complete with sand, deckchairs and pier, which hosts live music and also offers a heated pool that floats on the river, along with a floating sauna in the winter (!). In the somewhat less extensive bar scene of DC, I always enjoyed the atmosphere (and martinis) of Eighteenth Street Lounge, the live music of Bossa (shout-out to the Oscillators, who sometimes play there) and, for its sheer unpretentiousness, Solly’s on U Street. But there are probably other gems that I’ve missed out on – maybe something for next visit…

That sounds like a good couple of bars to me, David. Solly's, I'll remind readers, is the off-pitch home of the Washington Irish RFC and one of my favorite places to drink a can of PBR and watch some rugby. You, meanwhile, should stay at home this weekend and read David's book, which you can order here.

Greg Jaffe is one the nation's leading defense correspondents, has won the Pulitzer Prize, and had the good sense to marry a girl from East Tennessee. Greg's latest book -- co-authored with David Cloud -- is The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army. Gian Gentile described the book as "coin-porn" in surely one of the most lamentable turns of phrase in the history of the English language. But I really liked it, as have reviewers. Writing in the New York Times, Dexter Filkins called it "a very good book, readable, detailed and rich. The profiles of Abizaid, Casey, Chiarelli and Petraeus are nuanced and well drawn; the generals really come to life, as does the Army itself."

I sat down with Greg to harrass him. As in my wont.

1. First off, congratulations on writing a very good book – one praised last weekend and one I enjoyed tremendously. I saw you, though, while you were writing the book, and you were almost at your wit’s end. How many weekends did I see you at CNAS glued to your monitor with an open word document? Which one is more difficult – writing daily dispatches from a war zone or writing a book from within the confines of an office?

A book is much harder.. Writing from Afghanistan or Iraq is physically exhausting, but there is usually dramatic stuff happening all around you. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan tend to be unflinchingly honest and frank. They are in life or death situations. The challenge is to find the right narrative thread and then just absorb it all. Writing about generals – particularly serving generals – is the toughest thing you can do as a military reporter. No one wants to irritate the boss. There is also a certain amout of theater to being a general. Petraeus is a master of it (in a good way). But David (my coauthor) and I didn’t want to be theater critics. It is really hard to cut through the theater and find the real person. I wonder if some of these four-stars spend so much time in character as “the four star” that they sometimes lose touch with the real person. I think they do.

2. They say that George W. Bush learned the hard way that not all generals are created equal, but it seemed as if you went out of your way to describe all four of the generals you profiled in a way that was sympathetic to their struggles in command. History, meanwhile, will almost certainly judge Gen. Casey in a harsher light than Gen. Petraeus. Knowing both men, do you think this is fair?

Petraeus is a very effective strategic leader. What bugs me is the narrative that he was somehow birthed atop Mount Olympus as the brilliant four star who saved the Army. In reality, his career is a bizarre departure from the norm. He does four tours at the elbow of top generals – Galvin (twice), Vuono and Shelton. He spends relatively little time in the field actually leading soldiers (especially compared to Casey). Petraeus’ career path doesn’t win him a lot of admirers among his peers, who whisper that he’s a palace general or a bit of a suck-up. But it makes Petraeus a much better general and probably a less adept battalion and brigade commander. This is a guy who starts preparing for a strategic leadership role as a captain. I don’t think Casey was as effective. But it is a huge mistake to write him off as not bright, intransigent, lazy or stuck in the Cold War as many in the COIN crowd tend to do. He is a smart person. He works incredibly hard. He was a great soldier and quite possibly a better battalion and brigade commander than Petraeus. So David and I tried really hard to understand why Casey makes the decisions that he makes. He is a product of these experiences that he has growing up in the Army. I think we all have dismissed him far too quickly in our rush to celebrate Petraeus. Casey’s struggles in Iraq need to be dissected and understood. If you call him as a failure or “no Petraeus” you miss important lessons.

3. This is a blog which started out focusing almost exclusively on counterinsurgency doctrine and strategy. As one of the keener observers of U.S. Army officer culture I know, what have your impressions been as the Army has struggled to balance conventional operations and doctrine with the more “irregular” challenges of Iraq and Afghanistan.

This whole conventional vs. irregular debate is stupid. War is war. And we waste far too much energy trying to categorize it. I think most lieutenants, captains and majors are beyond this false conventional vs. irregular frame that we try to impose on war. I wish I could say the same for the more senior people in the Pentagon. My worry isn’t that we’ll skew too much towards irregular. My worry is that the surge in Iraq made it all look too easy and that deep down we think that if we just add 44,000 more troops to Afghanistan we can have the same result. I know McChrystal doesn’t believe it. I know you don’t believe it.

4. No, it ain't just the numbers. Fighting a counterinsurgency campaign as a third party is mighty difficult -- and best avoided. You obviously thought telling the stories of four key generals would make for a good read – and it did. But if you had to write another book-length treatment of the U.S. military and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, what would you write about?

I think a hard look at the last eight years in eastern Afghanistan would be really interesting. There have been some great commanders there, like Nicholson, Cavoli, Kolenda, and all kinds of fascinating experiments, successes and failures. Too often we media cretins boil all of eastern Afghanistan down to the Korengal Valley or Wanat or Kamdesh. All are fascinating. But a hard look at what the US has wrought in the east with the Afghan government would be interesting.

5. You wrote a short piece in the Washington Post’s Outlook section on the challenges facing Gen. McChrystal and an administration that could not be more different than the one that preceded it. What are your impressions of Gen. McChrystal and his challenges? Are there any lessons he can draw from the successes and failures of Gens. Abizaid, Chiarrelli, Casey and Petraeus?

We should ask McChrystal that question! I feel a bit dumb answering it. I guess the biggest mistake would be to define his mission too narrowly. He has to understand Kabul and Washington as well as the Helmand River Valley, Konar Province and the Korengal. It feels tougher in Afghanistan than Iraq because the fight is so radically different. All four generals that David and I chronicled got into trouble in Iraq by defining some critical task or failing as not in their lane or beyond their ability to fix. One of Casey’s key aides – COL Bill Hix – once said to Casey that: “This is your war.” At the time, Casey was hesitant to try to wrest control of the faltering and pathetic reconstruction effort from the State Department. Hix’s counsel seems like good advice. And McChrsytal definitely seems to be thinking big.

6. Your wife is from my hometown. Does she ever speak of how lucky she was to have avoided my mother as her English teacher in high school? And what is it like being a nice guy like you and wed to an East Tennessean? Do your in-laws teach you how to fight with knives or make moonshine? Has visiting your in-laws prepared you for spending so much time in the tribal areas of Afghanistan?

This question seems designed to get me into trouble with my wife and my in-laws who own more guns than I do and also understand how to use the Internets and the Google. Go Vols! See Rock City! Rocky Top!

More guns? Greg, you own a gun? Look out, everybody, Jaffe's armed! No, just kidding: we'll make you an East Tennessean yet...

BUY THE BOOK HERE!

Congratulations, you've been selected as a combat advisor.

So, what to do next? Kip is hoping you have a bit of time for some professional development. The US military, you see, has learned some lessons along the way on advising. Alas, it has forgotten as much as it has learned...but whether you're a professional soldier or just interested in the most important military mission in Afghanistan and Iraq, here are some selections for you to look at.

Lieutenant Colonel John L. Cook's The Advisor: the Phoenix Program in Vietnam is perhaps the best book Kip has encountered on being a combat advisor. It explains the dynamics of a team, the training received, and gaps in the understanding and knowledge of the advisors. And it offers some true gems as first lieutenant and then captain Cook works with his South Vietnamese counterparts to defeat the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong.

From Cook's Vietnamese counterpart Quy, a lesson for every advisor:

"But you insist on doing it as if my people were not Vietnamese but Americans. All the things that are good for you are not good for them," he explained. "You talk of marketplaces and economy and income. It is all difficult to understand. Why must a rice farmer make much money? Why must people have houses with wooden floors and running water? Why should he make more than he can use? We can only eat so much and sleep in one bed. A good life here is not the same as the good life in America. You must first ask yourself what the Vietnamese need and want. We must answer these questions. If you offer them much in the beginning, they do not understand."

The book shares the close tie that successful advisors develop with their interpreters, the men who serve as cultural advisors to the military advisor:

I had grown to know Chi quite well during the time I'd been in Di An. We had walked through the long, hot days and the endless rice paddies together. We had shared the same canteen, the same box of C-rations, the same risks. When we suffered losses, they had been mutual losses, a phenomenon Chi was not able to understand at first ("How can an American care about the death of a Vietnamese or pretend to be sorry when a Vietnamese dies?"), but was forced to accept as being true ("why else would an American risk his life to save a Vietnamese unless he cared?"). All of these things had been vital in building a relationship that was free of deception and dishonesty. We had reached the point where Chi no longer told me only the things he thought I wanted to hear--a common condition that plagues most advisor-interpreter relationships--but everything he thought I should hear.

In the book, you can feel the same frustrations that advisors in Afghanistan and Iraq feel today:

Being at the bottom gave me an advantage those above me did not have; I could see the difference between what was supposed to happen and what was actually happening, and the two had very little in common.

In its totality the book offers not only a practical view of what effective advising looks like but also offers glimpses into other aspects of the effort ought look like, from the type of training received by advisors to the work done at Combined training centers in which South Vietnamese and US counterparts trained together (and which seem to have been far above what is offered today at Afghanistan's and Iraq's in-theater training centers).

Kip originally found this diamond on advising hidden in another jewel from the Combat Studies Institute, a compilation of articles on advising entitled Advice for Advisors: Suggestions and Observations from Lawrence to the Present. The compilation by Robert Ramsey includes some spectacular observations on what is required to be an effective advisor, not just of the individual, but also of the institution.

From Gregory T. Banner, where Kip found the recommendation on Cook's The Advisor, there is this observation:

It appears to me that our effort in El Salvador was likewise conducted without a serious study of Vietnam or an effort to learn what we could from that or other conflicts....For all the difficulty of conventional operations, they are not even in the same ball-park as far as the need to be innovative, creative, and juggle a host of political, military, social and economic requirements. The fact is that nobody is adequately trained for the work and that makes a complex job extremely difficult. Nevertheless, I feel that the difficulty of the challenge does not excuse poor performance. We get paid to tackle such problems, analyze what is going on and find solutions. I am embarrassed at how little I have accomplished here and only through hearing similar feelings from other advisors have I been able to keep some measure of professional self-respect. I have no doubt that the job could be done better. My one great hope is that we can do it better and take the time to really study the problem and develop workable solutions. We are not there yet and we owe it to our country and those we want to help, to get our act together and figure out how to do this type of mission.

Surely to the chagrin of the original author, the observation could easily have been pulled from Kip's After Action Report of his time in Afghanistan.

Lawrence's Twenty-Seven Articles, timeless as ever, are included in the work. Captain James F. Ray, a Rhodes scholar and infantry captain killed in action, reminds us that military personnel learned lessons on political advising during a counterinsurgency from which the members of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) might still learn. Later, Major General John H. Cushman writes that "insight" is the most important quality for any advisor. It is a compilation that ought to be read by both maneuver commanders who employ advisors and the advisors themselves.

This it shares in common with Robert Ramsey's preceding Long War Paper, entitled Advising Indigenous Forces: American Advisors in Korea, Vietnam, and El Salvador and the Commander's Handbook for Security Force Assistance.

Colonel Timothy R. Reese summarizes Ramsey's findings on what we ought to have learned from previous advisory efforts in the introduction:

Among the key points Mr. Ramsey makes are the need for US advisors to have extensive language and cultural training, the lesser importance for them of technical and tactical skills training, and the need to adapt US organizational concepts, training techniques, and tactics to local conditions. Accordingly, he also notes the great importance of the host nation’s leadership buying into and actively supporting the development of a performance-based selection, training, and promotion system. To its credit, the institutional Army learned these hard lessons, from successes and failures, during and after each of the cases examined in this study. However, they were often forgotten as the Army prepared for the next major conventional conflict.

The Joint Center for International Security Force Assistance's Commander's Handbook is perhaps more stunning. In writing that mirrors what a doctrinal publication on advising ought look like it offers in view of our advisory efforts to date some spectacular criticism:

2.33. Not everyone is suited for SFA, and not everyone understands SFA. SFA operations usually involve a steep learning curve and extensive experiential learning events. It is important that the goals, objectives, frustrations, and typical phases of SFA operations be laid out for all leaders and their forces setting appropriate expectations up front. This will mitigate misperceptions and unproductive friction between coalition and HN forces.

2.34. Planners and senior commanders must identify and select leaders who have an affinity for austere environments, are quick to learn, communicate well up and down the chain, and are flexible and adaptive. These individuals, in turn, must instill these same qualities in their subordinates and those they advise. The opposition and threat will evolve when faced by improved security forces. The SFA forces and FSF must evolve faster and more effectively than the threat. This places a burden on the lessons learned sources to accurately capture, analyze, disseminate, and integrate the evolving tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) and character of the threats as they develop. Commanders should consider the following qualities when selecting advisor teams: maturity, professionalism, competence, patience, knowledge, flexibility, innovativeness, motivation, confidence, cultural effectiveness, and situational awareness.

2.35. Effective SFA requires senior political and military leaders who view SFA as critical to U.S. foreign policy and deserving of their fullest support.

Beyond that the handbook is an excellent tool by which advisors can articulate their roles and responsibilities to Coalition maneuver force commanders--a key friction point discussed poignantly in Greg Jaffe's "Camp Divided," which merits inclusion on reading lists for both commanders and advisors.

Some good tactical articles on advising unfortunately remain behind firewalls in US Army tactical journals such as Infantry and Armor. A number of others, however, are available both in the media and in Military Review. Recently, Candace Rondeaux's "Ragtag Pursuit of the Taliban" covers the challenges of one team in Afghanistan's northern province of Kunduz and gives a good, brief view of the skills of an advisor.

In Transition Teams: Adapt and Win, Captain William C. Taylor offers advice on organizing an ad hoc advisor team for success in the field and then successfully advising with it. Major Mark M. Weber offers in U.S. Military Advisors: a Need for Guiding Principles some thoughts on the bedrock principles by which advisors must abide and which they must also convince their foreign and Coalition counterparts to follow. In Twelve Urgent Steps for the Advisor Mission in Afghanistan, Captain Dan Helmer argues that continued under-resourcing of the advisor mission in Afghanistan will lead to failure of the counterinsurgency effort in that country. Finally, in this month's Military Review (and CAC, Kip is so mad at your re-designed and far less usable website right now after trying to find articles that he would like to launch a new discussion on electronic warfare--sorry, readers, there will be no link this time), both Dr. John Nagl and Major Michael D. Jason offer in seperate articles two close but different views on how the Army should permanently insitutionalize an advisor capability.

Kip would also be remiss in failing to mention the Special Forces Advisor Guide and the emerging ALSA MTTP on advising; the former is available on USAPA and the latter is only in draft. The Center for Army Lessons Learned also offers an advisor guide constructed by transition team members. These documents are only available to our military readers as they are behind firewalls, but they are worth seeking out. For everyone, Kip would be remiss if he failed to mention Chapter 6 of FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, which covers advising foreign security forces in some detail.

Despite the articles, some of our readers would rather spend their time buried in a book. They could not go wrong by reading carefully Bing West's The Village. West covers the attempt by one US Marine squad to advise Popular Forces in the village of Binh Nghia. Far under the rank of advisors currently undertaking these types of tasks (more akin to what you might find at a compat outpost in Iraq, but not really), this handpicked squad of Marine advisors offers lessons for today. For instance, West talks about what political primacy really looks like:

Trao had complained to McGowan that, although the captain had good motives, his handouts had disrupted the assistance projects of the village council, undercut the authority of the hamlet chiefs and eroded the discipline of parents. Those who lounged around the market drinking and who gathered the scraps others dropped had organized into gangs. They were the ones who clung to the captain's jeep and smiled and pawed at hime while pusing other villagers aside.

The Village offers thoughts on how a successful team protects the populace:

Although the Americans were gradually becoming involved in nonmilitary matters in the village, their primary effort and the focus of their attentions remained tactical. But after nine months of some of the hardest village fighting in Vietnam, Binh Nghia was still intact. There was never an air strike called in the war for that village. It was a battle fought with rifles and grenades at such close quarters that both sides used their senses of smell and hearing as much as their eyesight. The villagers did not stroll around at night, and in the firing at sounds, flashes, and shadows, it was usually the participants on both sides, not the villagers, who died. There were exceptions, but they were exceptions.

Then there are lessons on why your counterparts might at times might not be as eager for you for non-stop action, or about their need for tactical level advising:

Regular military units--American, Viet Cong, or North Vietnamese--have periods of rest and stand-downs between engagements. For Suong as a village militiaman, there was no rotation, no surcease. Suong completed roughly two thousand patrols. An American soldier with one hundred patrols would be highly respected among his peers. Suong had engaged in the close-in combat of the hamlets for twelve years. In comparison, over a thirty-year career, an American soldier may be in a "combat environment"--near enough to hear shooting--for two or three years. At no time in our history has an American soldier been asked to endure twelve years on the line.

It is a book that takes you right into the action and where Bing West weaves the lessons of fighting and advising the tactical level counterinsurgency without you realizing immediately your indoctrination.

Of course, some of our readers may wish to take their lessons from more recent experience. Books by the very nature of the publishing industry are never current, but Marine Captain Eric Navarro offers in God Willing: My Wild Ride with the New Iraqi Army the first long-form account of advising in Iraq (there is no equivalent for Afghanistan).

With no training and an unclear mission, Navarro is thrown into an advisor team. Navarro, who initially suffers acute culture shock that seems to morph into an unhealthy multi-page fascination with where Iraqi soldiers defecate, does the best he can with what he has available to him, and occasionally learns the kind of things that Kip hopes advisors who peruse this reading list can learn before they get to theater, not after:

Once the Iraqis were crowded into the small house, Staff Sergeant Sullivan and I made contact with India's company commander to figure out when we were going out on patrol. Tomorrow was the short answer, which came quickly after making our introductions. The timing was not up for discussion with the Iraqis. Major Ali had no input in how his troops would be used. I had not anticipated the mission going this way. I thought we were supposed to be helping the Iraqis stand up their army so that they could go and fight. As an adviser I was told I was not in charge of the Iraqis. Apparently, the Marines of India Company were under no such restrictions. This put me in a difficult position. I was the bridge between the Americans and the Iraqis, but I had no real power with either side. I could only influence events. My negotiation skills would be tested.

Reading these difficult lessons learned from an articulate, hard-charging Marine does still make Kip wonder what we could do if we identified men like him with the ability to figure it out, gave them targeted training as advisors, resourced them for the mission, and adjusted our force structure to support ongoing commitments and future contingencies. Regardless, we will be supporting advisor missions in Afghanistan and Iraq for some time to come, and Kip hopes that readers might discuss further and offer additional suggestions in the comments section.

As Kip was once making an enthusiastic presentation to a general officer, an aide to the general said, toward the end of the presentation, "I like his [Kip's] enthusiasm."

The general quipped, "I have learned never to mistake enthusiasm with capability."

Greg Mortenson is one of those rare men whose brash enthusiasm is matched by tremendous capability. And if, as Dr. Dave Kilcullen would have it, counterinsurgency is armed social work, then Mr. Mortenson and his co-author David Olivier Relin have offered in Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time an abject lesson on gaining influence in the world's most difficult and dangerous places.

For the counterinsurgent to read the book is a reminder of the challenges not only of seeking to influence an alien culture but also the patience and tenacity required to succeed in fostering social change. For any reader, it is a wonderful tale of adventure and turning tragedy into triumph as Mortenson is inspired by the death of his sister and his failed attempt to climb K2 to bring schools to left-behind villages of the Himalayas and Hindu Kush.

Perhaps the most important lesson that Mortenson learns is the patience and relationship-building required to effect change, from which the book takes its title:

"That day, Haji Ali taught me the most important lesson I've ever learned in my life," Mortenson says. "We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly. We're the country of thirty-minute power lunches and two-minute football drills. Our leaders thought their 'shock and awe' campaign would end the war in Iraq before it ever started. Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects. He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them."

Mortenson offers some abject lessons throughout on how we can win the war against takfiri extremists, with guns, yes (Mortenson, a former Army officer, shares with Sarah Chayes an appreciation for the mutually generative properties of security, development, and governance) , but also with a large focus on development and education in particular. Aid, conditioned importantly on the assistance of the locals in providing for themselves, goes a long way:

That's why, despite how much talking about her ordeal has taken from her, Fatima Batool brushes aside her shawl and sits up straight at her desk, to tell her visitors one thing more. "I've heard some people say Americans are bad," she says softly. "But we love Americans. They are the most kind people for us. They are the only ones who cared to help us."

Mortenson offers other valuable insights to our contemporary challenges in central Asia. Kilcullen tells us in his Twenty-Eight Articles to engage the women in our efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Reading Mortenson provides insight into that on-the-ground, oft-ignored suggestion by Kilcullen and another one of the principles of counterinsurgency outlined in Field Manual 3-24: counterinsurgents should prepare for a long-term commitment.

"Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities," Moretenson explains. "But the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they've learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls."

From a counterinsurgent's perspective then, getting the girls into school becomes not just a matter of Western taste but also a matter of changing opinions and actions for the long-term, even if there may be resistance in the short-term. Of course, it helps to go about building local support among key leaders to gain such opportunities:

With due ceremony, Syed Abbas tilted back the lid of the box, withdrew a scroll of parchment wrapped in red ribbon, unfurled it, and revealed Mortenson's future. "Dear Compassionate of the Poor," he translated from the elegant Farsi calligraphy, "our Holy Koran tells us all children should receive education, including our daughters and sisters. Your noble work follows the highest principles of Islam, to tend to the poor and sick. In the Holy Koran there is no law to prohibit an infidel from providing assistance to our Muslim brothers and sisters. Therefore," the decree concluded, "we direct all clerics in Pakistan to not interfere with your noble intentions. You have our permission, blessings, and prayers."

That, dear readers, is decisive information operations.

Kip encourages all practitioners of COIN, particularly those on their way to Afghanistan or Pakistan to read Three Cups of Tea. For a book that never mentions counterinsurgency, it is a masterpiece on gaining influence to effect social change, the essence of winning the long war.

UPDATE: (thanks AM's mom for pointing out that this is about more than COIN. To read more about Mortenson's institute, click the link.)

Antonio Giustozzi, Koran, Kalashnikov, and the Laptop: The Neo Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan is a must read for any soldier, sailor, airman, marine, or government official headed to Afghanistan. It is a good starting point for anyone else with a passing interest in the current conflict in Afghanistan.

Most important to the work are Giustozzi's first three chapters in which he differentiates the neo-Taliban from the Taliban that the United States dispersed in the final two months of 2001. This is vital as until recently it was quite common to view the new Taliban insurgency through the prism of the previous Taliban movement (the best book on which is Ahmed Rashid's Taliban). It was on this basis that writers such as Thomas Johnson argued that the Taliban insurgency was essentially a tribal movement of Ghilzai Pashtuns (and specifically the Hotak sub-tribe) against the Durrani Pashtun (and specifically Popalzai sub-tribe) dominated Afghan government.

The neo-Taliban as described by Giustozzi are a more-or-less unitary insurgency. The senior leadership operate as a franchising operation that maintains the Taliban brand name through the Laheya, a set of rules regulating behavior.

Because there are few outlets for grievances against the Afghan government, the Taliban offer their franchise coverage to various groups with local grievances in return for occasional obedience to orders directed from the Quetta Shura. The result of this franchising is a relatively flat, non-hierarchical network that allows individual branches to carry out jihad against the government while receiving resources and some direction from the central Taliban command. In Guistozzi's words:

By 2006, the Taliban had formed a complex opposition alliance comprising:

• At the centre their purely ideologically driven madrasa students (including a significant number from the NWFP)
• A second ring of genuine jihadist recruits provided by village mullahs mainly driven by xenophobia
• A third, and by 2006 the largest, ring of local allies (communities and opportunists)
• An outer ring of mercenary elements

It is an excellent, well-articulated, and well-supported breakdown of the Neo-Taliban insurgency.

In other areas, Giustozzi gets it right but is not particularly original (nothing wrong with being right but unoriginal). Giustozzi's description of the grievances upon which the neo-Taliban developed the movement have previously been discussed in Sarah Chayes' excellent The Punishment of Virtue. The breakdown of post-jihad Afghanistan into competing power bases of traditional leaders, commanders (including criminal barons), and mullahs has been discussed by several others including Larry Goodson. An excellent account of the military and political breakdown of the neo-Taliban can be found in this month's Military Review.

Originality excepted, nowhere other than in Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop, can be found in one place such a detailed description of the organization of the Neo-Taliban nor their region-by-region emergence in post-2001 Afghanistan. It is this that makes it a must read.

It is a shame then that Giustozzi did not simply stop at his third chapter (and bits of his fourth) with a major contribution to the study of the Taliban in Afghanistan. In subsequent chapters, he marks himself as a commentator on insurgency and counterinsurgency who has little practical or theoretical understanding of the subject.

In the fourth chapter he pontificates on whether the Taliban have adopted a Maoist strategy or a "war of the flea," citing Robert Taber's description of the latter. A quick read of Taber would have informed Giustozzi that the term "war of the flea" was derived from the translation of Mao rather than presenting an alternate paradigm. His study of counterinsurgency has apparently included a reading of TX Hammes' The Sling and the Stone but has not included the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, even as he discusses the supposed new approach of the US in the country. His discussion of ISAF and Coalition Forces in Chapter 6 is exceedingly ill-informed, especially when compared to that of Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian's chapter on Afghanistan in Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare.

His discussion of Taliban tactics describes a rag-tag bunch of insurgents incapable of posing a serious threat to ISAF forces while poorly describing the effects of weapons such as the RPG-7 and DShK. Complex Taliban ambushes and long-range engagements, including accurate mortar fire, are not featured in his account despite their prevalence in the country.

Such shortcomings are for Giustozzi the result not of deliberate acts of omission but of a failure to consult with those who could have provided insight into the military side of the insurgency and counterinsurgency that he attempts to describe. While Kip knows and has tremendous respect for (among others cited and thanked by Giustozzi) Massoud Karokhail, Eckart Schiewek, Michael Semple , and Barbara Stapleton, none would qualify as knowing much about insurgency per se or the specific design of ISAF's counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Neither would any, besides Karokhail perhaps, be able to describe with much sophistication detailed tactics of either the Taliban, Afghan, or Coalition forces. Had Giustozzi sought this expertise, he could most definitely have found it, particularly from Lieutenant General David Barno at the NESA center.

That he didn't leaves us with the best half-book to date on the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.

PS Happy Mother's Day to all mothers, particularly to Lady Kip, Mother Kip, and Grandmother Kip.

"War no longer exists. Confrontation, conflict and combat undoubtedly exist all around the world...Nonetheless, war as battle in a field between men and machinery, ar as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs: such war no longer exists."--Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force

Rupert Smith has written a masterpiece on violent conflict.

I am both shattered and revitalized, for to read The Utility of Force is to understand for the first time what you have looked at as you have fought and studied the conflicts of the Nuclear and Information Age. Simply, it is the most profound work I have read since Clausewitz.

Smith shows that war as we conceive it was an international confrontation between states decided by the trial of arms on the battlefield. This kind of war was the natural heritage of Napoleon, although it took almost a century for leaders to begin to understand the implications of national, industrial war. The trinity of government, people, and army united until the full resources of all were dedicated to decisive victory or defeat in the clash of armies. This unification of the trinity toward a singular purpose--decisive victory--was a social construct. In cases where all sides did not engage in national mobilization into massed armies--as Napoleon discovered in Spain--emerged the antithesis of "industrial warfare," which, after the dropping of the atomic bombs became the paradigm of modern war.

Smith's reasoning is complex. He walks us from Napoleon to the 2006 War in Lebanon, detailing not only theoretically but also from his one-time seat as the chief of UNPROFOR in Bosnia the challenges at the heart of modern conflict. It would not do justice to summarize the full argument--nor the philosophy of violence and the history of warfare that he expounds--but a brief summary of Smith's conclusion is in order.

Smith argues that the modern world is beset by long-term confrontations of interests. At times, these confrontations result in armed conflict. Yet unlike the World Wars or the Franco Prussian War, these armed conflicts rarely have the desired effect on the outcome of the confrontation, i.e., the decision of the confrontation in favor of the winner on the field of battle. While violent conflict does not solve the confrontation, states continue to maintain armies designed to inflict decisive, industrial victories by destroying an opponents armed forces.

Wars of this new paradigm follow several important patterns that separate them from industrial war.

• The ends for which we fight are changing from the hard objectives that decide a political outcome to those of establishing conditions in which the outcome may be decided
• We fight amongst the people, not on the battlefield
• Our conflicts tend to be timeless, even unending
• We fight also so as to preserve the force rather than risking all to gain the objective
• On each occasion new uses are found for old weapons and organizations which are the products of industrial war
• The sides are mostly non-state, comprising some form of multinational grouping against some non-state party or parties.

This new paradigm of warfare Smith calls war among the people. The people themselves, rather than their army, have become the necessary object to win--either through their eradication (which is morally abhorrent not to mention physically difficult to do--look at the Soviet attempts to "drain the sea" in Afghanistan) or through their commitment to the desired solution to the ongoing confrontation. In these wars, force directed solely at destroying the opponent's military has limited utility as destruction of the army will not necessarily yield the end of the confrontation.

For those such as myself who feel that the term insurgency does not adequately describe the multi-faceted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan while feeling also that the 1990s (even though not characterized by anti-Western insurgency) offered much from which we might have learned had we chosen to, Smith offers a unifying vision of conflict that focuses on the nature of modern conflict itself rather than its specific manifestation whether that be "peacekeeping," "peace enforcement," or "counterinsurgency." For those now stressing the need for US Armed forces to maintain a full spectrum capability, Smith answers the obvious underlying question, "A full spectrum capability to accomplish what?"

The answer is the ability to engage in wars among the people. Yet, as Smith points out, 50 years from the death of the Industrial War paradigm we still remain far from organizing our government, let alone our Armed Forces, for modern confrontations. Smith's greatest weakness is in only offering some general hints at what this organization would look like. Yet that weakness can be overlooked in a work that is quite simply an intellectual tour de force and should be well-thumbed on the bookshelves of every policy maker, politician, and military professional.

For our 7th Book Club, guest contributor Tom Ricks has graciously permitted his fans at Abu Muqawama to reprint his review of Piers Mackesy's "The War of American 1775-1783," which originally ran in the Washington Post's Book World on 16 March 2008. Our thanks to him for drawing our attention to this rare feat of strategic history.

Five years into their war to retain control of America, the British thought they were winning.

As Piers Mackesy relates in his brilliant, classic history of the American Revolution, The War for America, 1775-1783,the British cabinet believed the rebel cause was disintegrating by 1780. One of the best American generals, Benedict Arnold, had changed sides. Rebel finances were weak. Morale in George Washington's army appeared to be plummeting, and there was talk of mutiny in the rebel camp. The British army had landed in the South and was chewing up American forces there. The intervention of the French on behalf of the rebels, so worrisome at first, had made surprisingly little difference in the course of the war. More Americans were fighting on the side of King George III, one British official noted, than had joined Washington's army.

Yet a year later Gen. Charles Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, and the war was all but lost. And thereby lie some cautionary thoughts for the U.S. military, government and public as we end our fifth year of war in Iraq. The two conflicts are very different. But in one area -- the seemingly more powerful side's inability to understand the nature of the war it is fighting -- there are some illuminating parallels.

At the outset, the British allowed unjustifiable optimism to undercut their planning. There were only a few serious rebels, it was thought, leading a motley army disproportionately filled out by Irishmen and other recent immigrants. Nor did British leaders understand the intensity and vitality of the rebel cause. "I may safely assert that the insurgents are very few, in comparison with the whole of the people," Gen. Sir William Howe wrote in 1775, about the time he became the British commander-in-chief of the war. His brother, the naval commander in the area, wrote feelingly of achieving "reconciliation" with the Americans, presumably after a swift victory.

In another phrase that rings familiar to anyone who tracked U.S. strategy in Iraq from 2003 to early 2007, a senior British officer, Gen. James Robertson, explained that his mission in the "war for America" was to help local security forces put down the rebellion. "I never had an idea of subduing the Americans," he said later. "I meant to assist the good Americans to subdue the bad."

Mackesy, a longtime Oxford University military historian, emphasizes the decisive role that French maritime power played in the war. When le Comte de Grasse, the French admiral, abandoned caution and moved all his ships north from the Caribbean, he argues, the French swiftly achieved command of the sea. British garrisons that had been able to move freely up and down the coast from New York to Charleston instead became "marooned detachments," little more than isolated liabilities. Until 2007, American commanders in Iraq showed a caution similar to that of the British, rather than the audacity of Grasse.

An even more striking parallel is that the British consistently neglected their American loyalists. They would move into an area, identify local allies and then move out, abandoning their supporters to the enemy. For several years in Iraq, U.S. forces made the same mistake, putting allies in highly visible positions as mayors, police chiefs and governors, then failing to protect them adequately from the bullets and bombs of waiting insurgents. This failing really was addressed only when Generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno instituted a new strategy early in 2007 that made protecting the people the top priority of their soldiers. It remains to be seen whether that change came too late.

By the final years of the Revolutionary War, the British more or less came to understand what they should have been doing. Their generals needed to take more risks, they realized. More important, they needed to hold land that was cleared of rebel influence. Lord George Germain, the secretary of state for the American colonies, recommended early in 1781 a policy of securing gains "not by desultory enterprises, taking possession of places at one time, and abandoning them at another, which can never bring the war to a conclusion, or encourage the people to avow their loyalty."

Cornwallis's shocking surrender at Yorktown five months later, in October 1781, brought down the British government; it was replaced by the fiercely antiwar opposition. Lest any of today's antiwar Democrats take too much hope from that, they should also remember that the eventual peace settlement toppled the successor government.

I've covered the military for nearly two decades, so if I haven't read a classic in military history, I've usually heard of it. For example, I knew of Gen. William Slim's Defeat Into Victory (about Burma in World War II) and Sir Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace (about the French colonial war in Algeria) long before I picked them up. But I hadn't known about The War for America until earlier this year, when it was recommended by friends steeped in strategic thinking. I started reading it a few weeks ago on a flight to Baghdad.

Mackesy's book was first published in 1964 and is still in print in paperback. He calls it a "strategic history," which he describes as the no-man's-land between a diplomatic history of a war and a narrative history of its battles. It is the single best such work that I ever have encountered.

Back by popular demand, the long-awaited Book Club has returned.

Wars are by their nature dialectical struggles in addition to being physical ones. Clashes of human interest are stemmed as much by clashes in belief as they are by clashes in human interest. Indeed, at times it becomes impossible to define the boundary between interest and belief.

Today's struggle against extremist Muslim takfiris is very much a war of ideas in the same way that the Cold War was a struggle not just of the Warsaw Pact against NATO but of ideologies based on state control versus those premised on individual liberty.

While US doctrine through the Cold War and particularly with AirLand Battle doctrine, ignored the primacy of ideas for the calculus of steel, our small warriors of the Cold War who wrote, for instance, the counter-guerrilla manual recognized that one had not only to counter the guerrillas but also their ideology and "narrative." In the wake of Communist insurgencies, these warriors knew where to look to understand the ideas they were fighting. The Communist pantheon included Mao, Lenin, and Marx and, depending on the particular country various local, contemporary ideologues.

In our new struggle, however, very few of the warriors who fight, even while understanding the importance of defeating extremism and terrorism not only militarily but also in the realm of ideas, are well-versed in the canon of our enemies nor the internal logic upon which it operates. Very few of them even know this canon exists (or worse believe that the Koran is sufficient to explain the ideology of Osama bin Laden), and so today's book club focuses on the ultimate work of arguably the "Karl Marx" of al-Qaeda, Seyyid Qutb's Milestones.

Qutb himself received a secular higher education in Egypt and served both as a teacher and administrator within Egypt's secular public education system. He undertook graduate studies in the United States, and the experience radicalized him as an opponent of what he thought was the West's immorality. After joining the Muslim Brotherhood, he supported the Free Officers Movement and Nasser's 1952 coup only to eventually come to oppose Nasser for failing to implement Islamic law (Shari'ah). Nasser eventually had him thrown in prison, where Milestones was composed, and the text of Milestone's was used as the main evidence to send Qutb to the gallows. He was executed by Nasser in 1966.

Milestones' basic argument is that the world, after the death of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) reverted back to a pre-Islamic state called Jahiliyyah in Arabic. This Jahiliyyah, According to Qutb:

takes the form of claiming that the right to create values, to legislate rules of collective behavior, and to choose any way of life rests with men, without regard to what God has prescribed…

The most extreme form of Jahiliyyah in the eyes of Qutb was the claim of sovereignty by the state.

Any system in which the final decisions are referred to human beings, and in which the sources of all authority are human, deifies human beings by designating others than God as lords over men. This declaration means that the usurped authority of God be returned to Him and the usurpers be thrown out—those who by themselves devise laws for others to follow, thus elevating themselves to the status of lords and reducing others to the status of slaves. In short, to proclaim the authority and sovereignty of God, means to eliminate all human kingship and to announce the rule of the Sustainer of the universe over the entire earth.

Qutb believed that the state claim of sovereignty over the individual was a fundamental usurpation of their freedom to choose or reject the path of Islam. The rule of Islam was needed, he believed, not to force Islam upon unbelievers but rather to give them a choice:

It should leave every individual free to accept or reject it, and if someone wants to accept it, it should not prevent him or fight against him.

At first, this seems like less than a radical thought which could be accommodated by allowing Muslims to worship freely. Yet Qutb made clear that such accommodation within existing societies was not enough:

Sometimes it appears in the form of a society in which God’s existence is not denied, but His domain is restricted to the heavens and His rule on earth is suspended…In this society, people are permitted to go to mosques, churches and synagogues; yet it does not tolerate people’s demanding that the Shari’ah of God be applied in their daily affairs. Thus, such a society denies or suspends God’s sovereignty on earth…

In fact, Qutb said:

Other societies do not give it any opportunity to organize its followers according to its own method, and hence it is the duty of Islam to annihilate all such systems, as they are obstacles in the way of universal freedom.

It was here that Qutb marked his major departure from mainstream Islamic thought. Qutb rejected the idea of "defensive jihad," that is that violent jihad was only permissible in response to an external invasion of a Muslim homeland.

To begin with, Qutb rejected the very idea of a homeland as un-Islamic. The Land of Islam (Dar al-Islam) was not the traditional lands held by Muslims or the lands with Muslim leaders but was exclusively the areas held by true believers implementing God's law, Shari'ah. The rest of the word was the Land of War (Dar al-Harb--translated more eloquently as the "home of hostility" in Dar al-Ilm's very readable English translation). Because "all societies existing in the world today are jahili," all of the world was essentially the battleground where jihad must be waged, not just some traditional homeland, which was as jahili as the rest.

"Indeed," said Qutb, "people are not Muslims, as they proclaim to be, as long as they live the life of Jahilliyah."

This act of takfir, that is declaring other Muslims to be kafirs or unbelievers, has remained at the heart of continued Islamic debate even within extremist circles and continues to separate the extremists of Al Qaeda from fundamentalist Islamists elsewhere in the Muslim world.

Qutb argued in Milestones that the path to freedom under Islam is establishing Islam in one of the predominantly Muslim countries. In this country, the true believers must establish the "vanguard which sets out with this determination and then keeps walking on the path, marching through the vast ocean of Jahiliyyah..." This path admits no compromise:

In the world there is only one party of God; all others are parties of Satan and rebellion.

The believer must seek to break the chains of Jahiliyyah and succeed or be rewarded with martyrdom in the attempt. Talk is simply not enough. Violent jihad must first break the bonds of humanity's usurped authority over God and only then can those living within an Islamic society be convinced by words of the true believers to pursue the path of Islam.

While Qutb sought return to a world dominated by Islamic precepts, it would be wrong to call the ideology anti-modern as many have done. Qutb saw no issue in the study of the natural sciences, of war, public administration, and other fields and believed that Islam's Golden Age at the forefront of science had been the result of society's relative nearness to the time of the Prophet (PBUH) rather than a departure from Islamic law. In fact, it was permissible, Qutb wrote, to study these disciplines from a non-Muslim until such time as Muslims were capable of leading in these fields.

Perhaps what is most disturbing about Qutb's Milestones is his appeal to widely accepted human values as the basis for his rationale. Qutb rails against sexual immorality in a way that could be mistaken for a stolen line from a Jerry Falwell speech:

On the other hand, if in a society immoral teachings and poisonous suggestions are rampant, and sexual activity is considered outside the sphere of morality, then in that society the humanity of man can hardly find a place to develop.

Nor is his writing on racism so far off from the sayings of Dr. Martin Luther King:

The "grouping" of men which Islam proclaims is based on this faith alone, the faith in which all peoples of any race or color—Arabs, Romans or Persians—are equal under the banner of God.

Yet the end to which Qutb took this thought in Milestones is deeply disturbing--worldwide war until the ascendancy and dominance of Islam over all. His writing has been profoundly influential in shaping the thinking not only of the adherents of al Qaeda but even of thinkers as far afield as the Shiite Khomeini. Moreover, Qutb's status as a layman writing on Islam rather than a traditional Islamic scholar laid the foundation for other laymen such as Osama Bin Laden to issue fatwas, rulings on Islamic law, that seek to realize Qutb's vision.

Qutb remains central to the war of ideas as he remains central to the ideology of Al Qaeda's global insurgency. For instance Al Qaeda in Yemen's January publication of a pamphlet entitled "Echo of the Epic Battles" contains excerpts from Qutb's writings. A December call to violent jihad on the website Ana al-Muslim sites Qutb as part of the justification. The December issue of the "Vanguards of Khorasan" magazine, a propaganda piece dedicated to the insurgents in Afghanistan, discusses Qutb's writings.

In listing the martyrology of the Al Qaeda movement after the successful assassination of Abu al-Layth al-Libi, commander of Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, al-Sahab (al-Qaeda's media wing) included Seyyid Qutb in their list of martyrs.

Understanding our enemies in the conflict of the 21st Century is necessary although insufficient to defeat them. Seyyid Qutb's Milestones is a good place to start.

Hey, folks, Abu Muqawama wants to bring a few things to your attention:

1. Abu Muqawama will be traveling for the next week, so his posting will be light. Charlie, meanwhile, will still be posting when not busily preparing to defend her PhD dissertation in a few days. Actually, Abu Muqawama is going to see Charlie in about 48 hours, and the two of us are going to attend an event on Afghanistan together. So you, dear readers, might get a rare treat: a joint blog posting from the two of us.

2. Speaking of Afghanistan, if you have not already done so, please visit the Afghanistan COIN Library. This project is a joint initiative between Small Wars Journal and Abu Muqawama aimed at building up the resources of the plucky little counterinsurgency school run by our friend Capt. Dan Helmer in Kabul.

3. And while we're on the subject of books, be sure to check out COIN Book Club #5, written by Charlie and highlighting that great Graham Greene classic, The Quiet American. A few nights ago, Abu Muqawama attended a lecture by Peter Katzenstein, who called The Quiet American one of the best books ever written on U.S. foreign policy. Those are strong words coming from America's top political scientist. Even stronger when you consider the book is a novel. (And a damn good read too.)

4. Getting back to this blog's bread-and-butter issue (counterinsurgency; not the Red Sox), there is an article in the New York Times this morning worth reading on the reasons behind Iraq's fragile calm. The analysis is dead on, Abu Muqawama believes, when it notes how transitory this calm might be. Abu Muqawama has been screaming for months now for some kind of big political push to turn temporary military gains into concrete political concessions. The article also highlights the analysis of Joost Hilterman, International Crisis Group's lead analyst in the Middle East. Abu Muqawama has been consistently impressed by ICG's reports on the three countries in which he takes a serious interest: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon. Solid, nuanced work worth checking out if you have the time.

This week's edition of the COIN Book Club is another work of fiction: The Quiet American, by Graham Greene. Charlie will admit to this being one of her favorite books of all time. (To complete her commentary on the the duality of man, her other favorite is TH White's, The Once and Future King). But unlike The Centurions, our only previously reviewed novel, this is not a story of soldiers. At times, it barely feels like it's about an insurgency at all. That is, until one of Greene's famous scenes settles around you like a thick fog. Ultimately, his story is one of foreign policy, intrigue, and the perils of good intentions.

The Quiet American is set in Vietnam before Dien Bien Phu while the French are still fighting the Vietminh, long before the Americans arrive to fight the Viet Cong. And the story is told through the eyes of Thomas Fowler, a British reporter largely modeled after Greene himself: a cynical ex-pat who understands the locals in a nuanced but imperial sort of way. He's juxtaposed with the titular quiet American, Alden Pyle: a Boston native who arrives in Vietnam with his dog-eared copy of York Harding's treatise on democracy in Asia to work in the Economic Legation. They argue over both Fowler's mistress and the future of Vietnam.

Neither fight is really fair. Pyle is, for the most part, a caricature of an American, with his broad face and crew cut. Two scenes provide the backdrop for their most intense arguments; those same two scenes are also why this book is on the reading list. The first takes place when Fowler goes north and essentially embeds with a French unit after an attack by the Vietminh.

So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else....Doing what they had done so often before, the sentries moved out. Anything that stirred ahead of us now was the enemy. The lieutenant marked his map and reported our position over the radio. A noonday hush fell: even the mortars were quiet and the air was empty of planes. One man doodled with a twig in the dirt of the farmyard. After a while it was as if we had been forgotten by war....

Two shots were fired to our front, and I though, "This is it. Now it comes." It was all the warning I wanted. I awaited, with a sense of exhilaration, the permanent thing.

But nothing happened....I caught the phrase, "Deux civils."

The civilians were mistakenly shot by the French patrol, which is then recalled in preparation for the evening's air raids. Amidst all this, Pyle tracks down Folwer in Phat Diem and asks declares his love for Fowler's mistress Phoung. Pyle's clumsy but genuine pursuit of Phoung becomes Greene's allegory for American intentions in Vietnam more broadly.

But not all of the argument is so subtle. As this is a Graham Greene novel, there is more than enough intrigue to go around (Charlie promises not to ruin it here). The next time Fowler and Pyle are stranded together outside the wire is both more tense and more dangerous. Having run out of gas on their way back to Saigon, they are forced to take refuge in one of the many watch towers that line the road. But while the French control the roads, the Vietminh control the night. "Their" watch tower is secured by two young Vietnamese soldiers. Pyle asks,

"Don't you trust them?"

"No French officer," I said, "would care to spend the night alone with two scared guards in one of these towers. Why even an platoon have been known to hand over their officers. Sometimes the Viets have better success with a megaphone than with a bazooka. I don't blame them....You and you like are just trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested."

"The don't want Communism."

"They want enough rice," I said. They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what to do."

"If Indo-China goes..."

"I know the record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does "go" mean? If I believed in your God and another life, I'd bet my future harp against your golden crown than in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields...."

The argument continues until the Vietminh patrol arrives, upon which Fowler and Pyle flee leaving the Vietnamese guards to die in the ambush. The intrigue grows after their return to Saigon as Fowler learns that Pyle has more than an academic interest in promoting a "third way" (communism and colonialism being the other two) for Vietnam.

What's telling about the novel is that Pyle is not evil. He's not corrupt. He's not power hungry. And, as seen by Fowler, he's still incredibly dangerous. Perhaps all the more so, given his good intentions. (It was this aspect of the book that often made Charlie think that it should be required reading for all of her undergraduate students who wanted to save the world.) Again, Pyle is a caricature. And Fowler's insistent detachment is both disingenuous and, at times, equally indefensible. But, to Charlie's mind, it is this ongoing debate between imperfect cynicism and deluded but genuine idealism that animates the novel, and makes it required reading for those who find themselves frequently torn between the two.