Center for a New American Security

Abu Muqawama attended a book launch tonight honoring this man's latest work. Some of you Afghanistan-watchers may recognize Antonio Giustozzi's name from earlier books and journalism, but his latest book -- Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan-- looks particularly promising.

Giustozzi was, on the whole, pessimistic toward the possibility that Afghanistan's central government might get their act together, saying it might take an ultimatum from NATO before they move on key reforms. But Abu Muqawama was, as always, more interested in what he had to say about the battlefield behavior of the Taliban insurgents. On the one hand, they have a strong motivating ideology that binds them together. On the other hand, though, they are comfortable in decentralized operations and push decision-making authority down to small unit leaders, encouraging initiative and independence on the battlefield. In short, they behave more like the U.S. Marine Corps than the traditional state armies of the Middle East and Central Asia.

This ties into some of the research Abu Muqawama is doing at the moment, studying the way in which decentralized operations reduce the length of the insurgent small unit leader's OODA Loop on the battlefield -- thus allowing him to make rapid decisions in the same manner that small unit leaders in advanced western militaries make tactical decisions. Specifically, Abu Muqawama is trying to figure out how this makes Hizbollah more effective opponent against the IDF than, say, the PLO or the Egyptian Army.

Now you know what Abu Muqawama thinks about all day in the library (aside from the Red Sox).

Just in case you a) already own all the books on our reading list, or b) can't read about COIN all the time, the NYT has published its list of 100 Notable Books.

Catching Charlie's eye: new Murakami, In the Country of Men, The Indian Clerk, biographies of Alice Roosevelt, Denys Finch Hatton, and Picasso, The Day of Battle, American Creation, and Soldier's Heart.

What other books should she add to her holiday list?

A few weeks ago, one of Abu Muqawama's old university English professors sent him a copy of Elizabeth D. Samet's Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point.After finally getting around to reading it this weekend, Abu Muqawama can heartily recommend this book to all of you. It deserves all the praise it has received thus far. Even if you could care less about the U.S. Army or West Point, you'll find a lot to admire about Samet and the story she tells. It is a wonderful meditation on war, honor, and service written by a woman who rejects the spoon-fed answers and encourages her students to do the same. Everyone who reads the English language and admires its literature -- from the passionate "support our troops" Red State American to the caustic skeptic of American hegemony -- can find something worthy in this book.

Last week, Charlie linked to this moving tribute to Bernard Fall and the new book that's been penned by his widow.This week, the Counterinsurgency Book Club is going to spend a little more time on Fall because, well, he deserves it, and what's more, his books deserve to be read by any would-be counterinsurgents out there.

The first book Abu Muqawama read by Bernard Fall was Hell in a Very Small Place,Fall's exhaustive and enthralling history of the battle between the French and Viet Minh for that muddy little fort at Dien Bien Phu. Abu Muqawama read this book his first year on active duty and swore he would never make fun of the French Army ever again. No one who reads this book can ever slur the bravery and hardness of the French paratroop officers who hung tough, despite it all, and fought until the bloody end -- when they had so many dead and dying lining the tunnels they couldn't fight any longer. The way Fall relates the super-heroic deeds of this man in particular were enough to give Abu Muqawama a role model to take with him from Afghanistan to Iraq. Abu Muqawama once gave this 568-page book to one of his NCOs who was leaving the unit. Once he started reading it, he finished it in a matter of days. Folks, it is a brilliant and beautiful combat narrative.

But Hell in a Very Small Place doesn't tell the real story of the French in Indochina. Dien Bien Phu was, after all, a pitched battle -- one they lost through poor engineering works and even poorer planning as much as anything else. Indochina writ large was the French's first post-war experience fighting an insurgency, and that story is told by Fall in much richer form in another great book, The Street Without Joy.Fall died along the very same road years later, but this book -- published before Fall was killed traveling with an American unit in Vietnam -- was his account of the French mishaps that led to their defeat. Abu Muqawama read this book a year after he finished Hell in a Very Small Place and carried it with him in his duffel bag to Afghanistan.

In the early days of that war, Abu Muqawama always carried with him a pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes to share with the boys. It just seemed right to be smoking that great patriotic brand of cigarette while fighting the great patriotic war of his generation. But in his tent at Bagram Air Base -- and this was in the early days of that base, just a few months after we seized it -- Abu Muqawama would lay on his cot and read The Street Without Joy in between missions. (We would go out for a few days, then back in for a few days. This must have been in March and April of 2002, during Operation Anaconda.) Sometimes the Chinooks, taking off and landing on the nearby runway, would blow all kinds of dust into the tent and Abu Muqawama would read in his sleeping bag with a head lamp until the dust settled.

And Abu Muqawama remembers reading about those French officers, fighting their dirty little war in Indochina and smoking their Gauloises and Gitanes and just getting on with it, slogging through the muck and mire that is counterinsurgency warfare. Merde, Abu Muqawama thought. If I ever have to fight that kind of war, I guess I'll have to change my brand of cigarettes to something more appropriate.

18 months later, Abu Muqawama was in Iraq. On the pocket of his sleeve was an American flag. Inside that pocket was, always, a pack of Gauloises.

Liberté Toujours.

There will be another installment of the wildly popular Counterinsurgency Book Club this weekend, but until then, Abu Muqawama wanted to draw your attention to two things:

1. Now that it's Thanksgiving*, the Christmas shopping season is upon us. You can support the reading habits of Abu Muqawama and Charlie by buying books from the Counterinsurgency Reading List. (We get Amazon gift certificates whenever you buy something. Which, so far, has included Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs in addition to "less unexpected" works by T.X. Hammes and David Galula. Although we hear Hammes is a huge Buffy fan.) Charlie and I have decided there are at least three books we left off the original list -- see if you can guess which ones we added.

2. Speaking of reading lists, did everyone see this? A lot of good books here. Yeah ... now Abu Muqawama knows some of what he wants for Christmas.

*Abu Muqawama just cooked his Thanksgiving meal: One whole chicken, boiled in beer along with carrots, potatoes, and onions. All of it is served over couscous. He swears, it's really tasty. Now he's off to eat it.

This looks great, though. Seriously. afghanistanica has more...

Charlie is a sucker for good profile writing, but this profile of Bernard Fall got to her worse than most. Maybe it's just the subtitle:

Bernard Fall loved his wife, but his heart belonged to Vietnam.

Perhaps it's the description of the recording of his literal last words, spoken from the street in Hue for which his most famous book is named:

"Shadows are lengthening," he says quietly near the tape's abrupt end. "We've reached one of our phase lines after the firefight, and it smells bad, meaning it's a little bit suspicious. Could be an amb -- "

Or his Fall's wife's reaction to Robert McNamara's autobiography:

In 1995, Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of defense during much of the Vietnam War, published a memoir in which he lamented the lack of Vietnam experts who might have helped the U.S. avoid its mistakes there.

Dorothy Fall was incensed: She knew that one of the most renowned Vietnam experts had lived less than 10 miles from the Pentagon, and McNamara had never called.

But Charlie is pretty sure that what really struck her heart on a cold night in Washington was the title of Dorothy's ode to her husband: Bernard Fall, Memories of a Soldier-Scholar.

Soldier-Scholar. She's known manywhocouldlay claim to that title. And she knows there are countless more. Some have already outlived Fall (who died at what seems the tender age of 40); others have barely seen 30. But much as she loves them, she has no interest in writing their memoirs. She'd much prefer they write their own.

Those who were interested in counter-insurgency prior to, say, 2003 or 2004 often found used books to be a topic of conversation. Anyone have a copy of A Savage War of Peace? You found Galulafor how much? And, has anyone see a copy of The Centurionsfor less than $200?

Charlie's first foray into the used COIN book market was Robert Thompson's Defeating Communist Insurgency.Fortunately it, and many other titles, have been made newly available in the last few years (though, as AM mentioned, The Centurions remains oddly elusive). Robert Thompson was a senior civilian advisor in Malaya during The Emergency, and subsequently advised the US effort in Vietnam. That tour was sadly short lived. What's most striking about his book is not so much the details of the Malaya campaign (Clutterbuck's, The Long Long Waris probably better on that front), but the idea that counter-insurgency as requiring a detailed understanding of the insurgent organization itself to have any chance of being successful.

Unlike Galula, Thompson does make that point explicitly. In some ways, though Galula and Thompson are often paired (Charlie has G/T written throughout her dissertation notes), the more accurate pairing is really Thompson and Mao, who shares his organizational concerns. He lays out in clear detail (with wire diagrams!) how insurgent groups are organized, and how that organization dictates their relationship with local civilians. It is only once that relationship is understood, that the counter-insurgent can begin designing the hearts-and-minds campaign that Thompson made famous.

Some books are straightforwardly revealing; others are remarkable more for what they bring into relief. Today, Defeating Communist Insurgency is decidedly the latter. In following his detailed logic from insurgent organizational structure to counter-insurgency campaign, the reader is almost implored to ponder how insurgencies today differ from those Thompson fought. He provides the best starting point for all COIN campaigns: the insurgent organization. Whether his responses are well-suited today depends on the degree to which modern insurgent groups share the same political objectives and dependence on the local population as did Thompson's communists.

Dave Kilcullen argues that, in many ways, they do not. Counterinsurgency Redux highlights differences in modern insurgencies at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. These are not academic nitpickings: Kilcullen convincingly argues that modern conditions dramatically affect how counter-insurgents should go about fighting their campaigns. There are essentially two broad axes along which modern insurgents diverge from their classical ancestors:

1) War aims. As Kilcullen succinctly states,

[modern] Insurgents favor strategies of provocation (to undermine support for the coalition) and exhaustion (to convince the coalition to leave Iraq) rather than displacement of the government. This is a “resistance” insurgency rather than a “revolutionary” insurgency.

If insurgents aren't interested in governance, they are also uninterested in genuine popular support. This makes coercive strategies more expedient and less politically troublesome. As a result, they are even less encumbered than usual in engaging government forces. They can do so without regard to civilian casualties and without diverting resources toward establishing parallel governance structures.

2) Operating environment. As students of counter-insurgency well know, most colonial-era insurgencies were rural. Insurgents took cover in the jungles, mountains, and elsewhere in the periphery. But no longer:

Cover and concealment are far greater in the urban jungle of Baghdad with its no-go areas and sectarian slums than in the open desert outside the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys. Incidents in Iraq cluster in urban centers or areas of suburban sprawl around Iraq’s major cities.83 The insurgent, as in classical theory, continues to hide amongst the population. But in urbanized societies (like Iraq) or countries with under-populated mountains, deserts and forests (like Afghanistan), the cover is in the cites.

This change in venue has serious tactical implications. Cities offer the best media and cellphone coverage, allowing insurgents key IO victories. It also renders many traditional COIN population control techniques obsolete, making it ever harder to separate the insurgents from their civilia support base. (Kilcullen also notes that in many cases, insurgents are now rather wealthier than the civilians they live amongst, changing the logistical relationship between the two.)

Ultimately, Kilcullen's observations are stronger than his solutions. Perhaps that is not surprising only a few years into this new, long war. And while frustrating, it leaves the door wide open for witty, young counter-insurgency scholars to begin to parse the differences between the classical and modern campaigns. And hopefully avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

We still persist in studying a type of warfare that no longer exists and that we shall never fight again, while we pay only passing attention to the war we lost in Indochina and the one we are about to lose in Algeria.

Last week's first installment of the Counterinsurgency Book Club introduced David Galula, arguably the most important counterinsurgency theorist of the 20th Century. This week, Abu Muqawama wants to spend a little bit more time on the French experience in Algeria by highlighting not just one but two books -- and even a film -- that you should check out from the local library if you have not already.

The first book is Roger Trinquier's Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency. This is the other great French "how-to" manual on counterinsurgency, and it's a gem. Now, the minute some readers of this blog read the name "Roger Trinquier," no doubt the first word that pops into their heads is ... torture. Trinquier writes, at one point:

No lawyer is present for ... an interrogation. If the prisoner gives the information requested, the examination is quickly terminated; if not, specialists must force his secret from him. Then, as a soldier, he must face the suffering, and perhaps the death, he has heretofore managed to avoid. The terrorist must accept this as a condition inherent in his trade and in the methods of warfare that, with full knowledge, his superiors and he himself have chosen.

Indeed, throughout Trinquier's work, there is a kind of a la guerre, comme la guerre attitude toward the dark side of counterinsurgency. Abu Muqawama, as you all know, does not endorse such tactics. But he likes the fact that just as Trinquier sees little wrong with torturing insurgents, he is also not shocked by the enemy's use of terror. There is a delightful French cynicism at work in the writings of both Galula and Trinquier. As we Americans are shocked -- shocked -- that insurgents would do despicable things like blow themselves up in crowded markets, you can almost hear Galula and Trinquier calling down from heaven and up from the inner rings of hell, respectively: "Est-ce que vous êtes ivres? Of course they're going to use terror. As a tactic, it works. So get over it already and figure out how you're going to stop it."

For Trinquier, stopping the insurgent meant getting troops out of large forts and into small patrol bases close to the population, something the U.S. Army and Marine Corps have been doing more and more these past two years in Iraq.

Trinquier, for all his faults, was a smart counterinsurgent -- full of lessons hard-won on the confused battlefields of Indochina and Algeria. He was, as Bernard Fall calls him in his introduction to Modern Warfare, a true "centurion." Fall was referring, of course, to the famous Jean Larteguy novel, The Centurions, which follows a cadre of French paratroopers in Indochina and Algeria ... and just happens to be the next stop on this week's Book Club.


When a former commander of Abu Muqawama took over an airborne infantry battalion in Italy, he went to the post library and checked out Jean Larteguy's The Centurions.* He noticed, to his dismay, that he was the first person to have checked the book out in over a decade. What the hell, he wondered, are paratroop officers reading these days?

The Centurions is, in many ways, the book they should all be reading, given the experiences of a whole new generation of paratroop officers on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. Following a group of French paratroop officers from Dien Bien Phu to the Battle of Algiers, the hero of Larteguy's novel, Colonel Raspeguy, is a fictionalized version of Marcel Bigeard, who readers of Fall's Hell in a Very Small Place will recognize as pretty much the hardest man who has ever lived. (He's still living, actually, in France.) Incredibly, Bigeard was also (allegedly, along with Trinquier himself) the model for another fictionalized counterinsurgent -- one Abu Muqawama thinks you all know quite well:


If, on the other hand, you have no clue who the above man is and have not yet seen this classic movie, then what in the hell are you doing wasting your time, reading this blog? Hurry: run to the movie rental before they close. Now! (Jeez... these are the same people Abu Muqawama has to remind to read this book.)

*This book is damn hard to find in English, so you're going to want to either read it in French or check out a copy of the English translation from the library. Larteguy, who is still living, is holding out on publishers eager to re-print this novel in English.

The insurgent is fluid because he has neither responsibility nor concrete assets; the counterinsurgent is rigid because he has both, and no amount of wailing can alter this fact for either side. Each much accept the situation as it is and make the best of it.

Since last week's publication of the Counterinsurgency Reading List, Abu Muqawama and Charlie have decided to post, every week or so, a "book club" entry introducing one or several of the books and articles on the list that have influenced our thinking on counterinsurgency.

Today's book club selection is one of the three "bare bones essentials" we picked out: David Galula's Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice.

This slim volume has probably had more effect on the way in which Abu Muqawama views counterinsurgency warfare than any other book or article. FM 3-24 is great doctrine, but Galula gives his reader a feel for counterinsurgency warfare in a way the field manual does not. It is also very short, and to-the-point. Which is why, over the past few years, Abu Muqawama has taken to mailing photocopies of this book to friends in the field. One friend, an infantry company commander outside of Baghdad, read the book a little over a year ago while deployed to Iraq and had this to say:

Just finished reading Galula's book. What a great read! It's so common sense, so right, so easy to understand, it begs the questions: Why haven't I heard of it before, and Why aren't they teaching this stuff at the Advanced Course?

Great questions, both of them. This book, honestly, should be required reading of every infantry officer in the U.S. Army. Here are just a few of the nuggets of wisdom you'll find in this book:

"counterinsurgency cannot be defined except by reference to its cause"

"the less sophisticated the counterinsurgent forces, the better they are"

"The essential problem for the counterinsurgent stems from the fact that the actual danger will always appear to the nation as out of proportion to the demands made by an adequate response."

"All wars are cruel, the revolutionary war perhaps most of all because every citizen, whatever his wish, is or will be directly and actively involved in it by the insurgent who needs him and cannot afford to let him remain neutral."

"Clearly, more than any other kind of warfare, counterinsurgency must respect the principle of a single direction. A single boss must direct the operations from beginning to end."

"The soldier must then be prepared to become a propagandist, a social worker, a civil engineer, a schoolteacher, a nurse, a boy scout."

"The counterinsurgent's armed forces have to fulfill two different missions: to break the military power of the insurgent and to ensure the safety of the territory in each area ... For his ground forces, he needs infantry and more infantry."

"...a mimeograph machine may turn out to be more useful than a machine gun, a soldier trained as a pediatrician more important than a mortar expert, cement more wanted than barbed wire, clerks more in demand than riflemen."

Folks, Abu Muqawama could go on for pages with quotes like this. Best just to read the damn book yourself. Oh, imagine if just half the officer corps had read this book prior to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan! Imagine if Don Rumsfeld had read it! What might have been...

And if you're too cheap to buy your own copy of this book to dog-ear, underline, and highlight in the same way as Abu Muqawama? Read David Galula's other classic, which you can, incredibly, download from RAND, here, for free. But Charlie prefers the Praeger edition of the original classic. There's something about the introduction she finds funny...

Update from Charlie: Charlie would like point out that Galula is, in fact, required reading at the Marine Infantry Officers Course (IOC). She doesn't know what the Army's problem is, but suggests they snap to in good order. It ain't rocket science; it's all in there. And pay particular attention to the intro. Nagl's preface is sheer brilliance.