http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/016/805exjkw.asp
The Accidental Guerrilla
Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
by David Kilcullen
Oxford, 384 pp., $27.95
In the dim red glow of the crowded C130 transport aircraft, my soldiers’ faces were guarded and withdrawn. We were minutes away from landing, and all expected a serious firefight before the day was out. Some retched from turbulence or checked their rifles.
And so on, for a few hundred words. Is David Kilcullen about to assault Falluja? No–Connecticut-sized East Timor, which was down to about 200,000 wretched inhabitants at the time the Australian army faced the fearsome challenge of “invading” it. Kilcullen, “one of the few Indonesian linguists in the force,” took the “gamble” of walking over to the Indonesian airfield commander and asking for his handover of control. Looking up at the “continuous stream of aircraft stretching all the way to Australia,” the commander sagely agreed.
There are too many silly, pretentious, self-regarding moments like this in The Accidental Guerrilla, and they nearly overwhelm Kilcullen’s often sensible observations, and undermine our confidence in his mainstream if not particularly original views of best-practice, population-centric counterinsurgency.
Even my eight weeks of embeds with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan make me wonder about writers who spend hundreds of words telling you about their flights on military aircraft–a trope in Kilcullen’s account. On an Apache helicopter flight in Iraq, he loosens his safety harness and takes off his helmet and eye protection “to see better” after an IED explodes on the ground below–an example the reader might want to avoid, even when an IED hasn’t gone off. But then, Kilcullen thinks body armor is “cowardly.”
Another suspect device is his use of transliterated phrases from foreign languages–incredibly unimportant phrases from incredibly unimportant foreign languages such as Tetun: “Mai ho ha’u (“Come with me”), the boy said urgently.” That was in 1999. Is Kilcullen really sure this is exactly how the boy phrased it? Why is it important that we know?
Then there’s the interlarding of anthro jargon (“a common apical ancestor”) and little ticks like “Usama” bin Laden and the inconsistent acknowledgment of the Arabic-Farsi ain (Sa’udi but Arab) which show more interest in giving the impression of erudition than in transliterating sensibly. I won’t linger on the photographs, which either depict the attractive author or were taken by him (reminding us why professional photographers are important).
In fairness, when I interviewed David Kilcullen off the record in February 2007 he did not seem as self-regarding and mannered as he comes across in print. But the falseness that leaps off the page here isn’t superficial.
He pays lip service to the importance of cultural knowledge, but one of his key arguments–that Iraq represented a “hybrid conflict” and “cannot be fully understood through a classical counterinsurgency lens”–is itself highly ahistorical. Kilcullen seems bent on aggrandizing the (admittedly formidable) difficulties of Iraq compared with prior conflicts, and his vanity makes one suspect that the reason is to point up just how much smarter he is than anyone who previously conducted counterinsurgency campaigns.
But that is not the way to learn from the past. Wasn’t Vietnam also several wars in one, featuring “accidental guerrillas . . . foreign fighters . . . and regional nation-state rivalry”? On a simpler level, Algeria also qualifies as a hybrid conflict, with main force, foreign, and guerrilla fighters. In both conflicts, sophisticated counterinsurgency strategies were used.
The French in Algeria may take the prize for bold experimentalism–even walling off the border with Tunisia at great expense, an idea whose parallel iteration was proposed but rejected by American advisers in Vietnam. But the CAPS (Combined Action Platoon) Marines in Vietnam may have practiced the best counterinsurgency of any force in a postwar insurgency. The problem was that there were just 5,000 of them. Neither Kilcullen, nor for that matter General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-24, give them their due.
This is part of a broader tendency of contemporary writers on counterinsurgency to suggest that, until late 2006, there was little knowledge of it in the U.S. Army. But it just ain’t so. And oddly enough, when Kilcullen does pay his respects to his predecessors, he chooses a mediocrity: the French journalist Bernard Fall, whose work is badly dated.
Kilcullen’s very title–The Accidental Guerrilla–embodies a bien-pensant falsehood, that “we” create terrorists through our stupidity, naïveté, or cultural ignorance. (Learn how to say Mai ho ha’u and they won’t want to kill us.) Kilcullen even argues that jihadi terrorism is partly explained as a backlash to globalization, which “most acknowledge” has “created a class of global haves and have-nots.” This would be news to the millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, who have ridden the globalization wave out of poverty in India, China, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
It is absurd to say that these places have benefited far less than “core regions of western Europe and North America.” They have certainly benefited far more in percentage increases in GDP and standard of living. Going from a bicycle to a car is a much bigger leap than going from a sedan to an SUV. And this theory fails to explain why so many terrorists come not from desperately poor countries but from the middle classes of places like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Egypt.
“They fight us not because they seek our destruction but because they believe we seek theirs,” Kilcullen says. Well, in May 2002, when Western troops had scarcely set foot in most of Afghanistan, I visited Shiberghan Prison in northern Afghanistan and spoke with some of the Taliban being held there. Not one of them came from anywhere around northern Afghanistan, where they had been captured in November 2001.
Nor would any of these young men have had any experience with Americans, much less been on the wrong side of an American gun. They were Pashtu speakers from southern Afghanistan or Pakistan. They had traveled quite some distance to fight fellow Muslims, though that description unduly dignifies the cruelties they inflicted on innocent civilians.
The “accidental terrorist” theory is wrong, but it will also be baleful if it comes to affect American policy. Kilcullen cowrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times this May arguing that U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have been ineffectual, killing just 14 al Qaeda leaders but 700 civilians–”according to Pakistani sources.” I would dearly love to know the precise source and methodology used in counting those 700 deaths, as well as Kilcullen’s evidence for stating that “the drone war has created a siege mentality among Pakistani civilians.”
My own experience tracking down statistics on civilian casualties from airstrikes in Afghanistan leads me to suspect that the real number of deaths is a fraction of 700, and that the Pakistani civilians feeling a state of siege are those fleeing the Taliban in Swat. I’ve written elsewhere in detail on the civilian casualties myth but suffice it to say that, in the first 300 days of 2008, in the 14 provinces of RC-E (regional command east) in Afghanistan, between 77 and 87 Afghans were slain accidentally by Coalition forces. Of these, only 22 were unequivocally innocent civilians; the other deaths occurred in two airstrikes in complicated circumstances.
Of course, any innocent deaths are a tragedy, but to put this in perspective, around 700 Afghan civilians were murdered by the Taliban between June 2007 and July 2008.
If Kilcullen’s theory is correct, there ought to be “accidental pro-Americans” created by these Taliban slayings, which doesn’t seem to be the case. Neither our relatively tiny number of accidental killings, nor the insurgents’ much higher number of deliberate killings, have much to do with it. Some people just become jihadists for a variety of bad reasons, mainly having to do with the dysfunctional cultures that nourish them.
Near the end Kilcullen advises that “we should avoid any future large-scale, unilateral military intervention in the Islamic world.” That sounds like a politician, not a strategist, talking, fighting the last war in the most predictable fashion. As Philip Bobbitt has pointed out, Islamism might not be our main enemy a few decades from now. The issue isn’t “the Islamic world.” It’s countries–many of which are not Islamic–with undeveloped civil societies and no rule of law which tend to find themselves fighting insurgencies.
In the Accidental Guerrilla worldview, it’s always Americans who fail to understand other cultures–never people from other cultures who need to grow up morally, taking responsibility for their actions, standing up to peer pressure, and acting according to an internalized ethical code. The Afghans of the Pashtun belt aren’t going to progress very far, no matter how much money we spend in Afghanistan, unless they change their culture. Otherwise, in 20 years, they will still be a poor, illiterate people, living among the ruins of U.S.-built highways, military bases, and power plants they don’t know how to maintain or repair.