The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One,   ISBN:9780195368345

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Excellent book describing what is happening in the world from a terrorism and counterinsurgency perspective. His recommendations and conclusions should be examined by policy makers on all levels.

Book was hard to digest at times but the insights that he has from a variety of conflicts allows Kilcullen to fully analyze the strategic and tactical issues impacting the the global environment. His case study on Afghanistan should be examined further in light of current military operations in that country.

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The book was recieved in new condition. The book brought incite into what caused a guerrilla movement to work and what is needed to overcome that movement.

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A terrorist explodes a bomb and runs to hide in the nearest house. The Coalition blows up the house and kills the terrorist and 3 of its 10 residents. Now the Coalition has multiplied its enemies to include the surviving inhabitants and their neighbors and friends. Among this group any number of non-ideological bystanders can become accidental guerrillas. Other accidentals include those who join in the fray out of boredom, or pay or others who are dragged in by the local power structure.

Each element of making an accidental guerrilla is examined as are some counter strategies. Also examined are the terrorists' tools such as anonymity, globalized communication systems, conventional propaganda, "armed propaganda", marriage and the use of Islam. The author, David Kilcullen, contrasts them with the tools available to and used by a military super power.

The author says this book doesn't look back to the mistakes, and it doesn't. It looks forward to new strategies that focus on protecting the population (winning hearts and minds) and give less focus to pursuing individual terrorists at all costs. According to this author, an advisor to General Petreaus, the US military has begun changing strategies that recognize local power structures and the needs of the local population. Examples are given for both Afghanistan and Iraq that show the difficulty of putting these strategies to work.

Kilcullen had experience in quelling East Timor and Thailand uprisings. He cites them to show his theories, and their simplicity compared to the current situations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I couldn't help look backwards. I had the nagging sense while reading this: "Why has this taken so long to figure out?" It is common sense, if someone destroys your home or kills a family member you seek revenge. Hopefully the course is being corrected and the number of guerrillas is reducing rather than multiplying. The author cites the cold war as being 85 years and it may take that long to see the end of this threat as well.

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For people who are interested in understanding just a bit more of the methodology our critical national security decisions, reading books such as Kilcullen's helps frame the debate and cut through the punditocracy on TV. Actually, I really didn't read this entire book but just wanted to write a review -- I hear enough of this stuff on the news to be relatively well informed and I suppose this guy has kids who need new school clothes. I recommend picking this up along with a number of other texts to understand how the Cold War mentality envelops but no longer dictates American military strategy, and thankfully under Secretary Gates has been diminished exponentially. As Kilcullen points out, that kind of outmoded thinking is not only nonproductive but potentially disastrous, as we saw in Iraq.

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David Kilcullen is imminently qualified to write an important and incisive piece on the war on terror, being one of Petraeus' top advisors in crafting the surge on the ground and a former Australian Army officer and scholar who fought in Timor and studied CI extensively. In the Accidental Guerilla he attempts to draw together lessons from his experiences ranging from studying in rural Indonesia (where he encounters likely Al-Qaeda affiliates who are definitely ethnic Arab and not local) to long tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq. His book is an attempt to understand the global phenomenon of radical takfiri extremism/terrorism, explain what has worked in Afghanistan and Iraq in contrast to what hasn't, discern general principles for counter-insurgency and "imposing" effective governance on essentially tribal societies, and at least proffer examples of what not to do in the strategic context of the war on terror. As a pre-cautionary note the book is very uneven in tone, ranging from polished text to pages on pages of raw field notes, to rough thoughts, to attempts to write Tom Clancy action sequences. It is poorly edited and feels extremely rushed, but given the timeliness of the information I concur with its current publishing as it is far more important to get this information out today than to make it a little more easy to read tomorrow.

The phenomenon at the heart of Kilcullen's book is something he has witnessed throughout his travels in the muslim world at war. It is a trend centered on an ideological cadre of hardcore radical Islamic fighters that he identifies as "takfiri" to try to paint them, accurately it would seem, in a term that non extremist muslims can understand, dislike, and distinguish themselves from rather than a more amorphous and ambiguous "Islamic terrorist," of which Al-Qaeda would be a core group but not the only one. These vanguards enter poorly governed, socially rent apart areas and start a cycle of violence to try to achieve their aims of local control, eventually to piece together a caliphate bit by bit throughout Islam and beyond. Their tactic is to cause chaos, invite foreign (whatever is perceived locally as foreign, be it Americans in Afghanistan or non-Pashtun Pakistani troops in the NWFP) response, and get the locals to unite with them against the new "common enemy." Thus the locals, most of whom just want to be left alone but share an ethnic tie (particularly amongst Pashtun) or religious tie with the extremists, and usually live in tribal societies with a distinct code of honor, become "accidental guerillas" fighting the foreigners locally and inadvertently in support of the extremist's global cause. He does a particularly good job explaining the mechanics of how this phenomenon works in Afghanistan and how the Taliban uses it to gain control of regions. Combine the global terrorists, with the local guerillas, and add narco-criminal financing (i.e. poppies in Afghanistan, corruption/protection money in many countries, etc.) and you have what he calls "Hybrid War" something that goes beyond mere stovepipes of counter-terror, counter-insurgency, and counter-narcotics. Al-Qaeda believes it can use this strategy to morally, physically and financially exhaust the US and West by bogging it down in interventions that only sap them on strength while creating more accidental guerillas who wouldn't exist outside of those interventions.

Kilcullen is at his best in the roughly first third of his book where he uses the case study of a road construction project in Afghanistan to show an example of how allied forces can use processes to partner with locals and cause their rejection of the takfiris. Although the Romans used road building in conquered lands to logistically and practically be able to introduce governance and to bring new subject peoples into the empire, Kilcullen's focus is on finding a local dynamic that the Allies can exploit that will benefit the locals demonstrably and decisively more than allying with the takfiris. This does not always mean road building per se, nor does it mean not fighting as ultimately routing out the takfiris and protecting the population will be step one. It's the process of once you've cleared an area, developing the local civil society to a point where, although they will not likely become a flowering democracy, they will reject further takfiri intervention and withstand some form of government security (which lacks in many parts of the world, be it Pakistani frontiers, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, etc.)

His second third of the book focuses on the surge in Iraq and what was done to turn the situation there around. If you haven't read much about the surge this is obviously a good place to go for a decent synopsis of what happened and why. If you want to know more about the surge though I found "The Strongest Tribe" by Bing West to contain much the same information, with more detail, and with a more readable format.

The book ends with the author's experiences in Timor showing that the Accidental Guerilla syndrome is a tactic that has been used outside the Islamic world and which can be dealt with successfully, although the example falls a little flat as Timor appears far less virulent than the problems the world now faces in Afghanistan, Yemen and other places. It also ends with his main strategic advice, which is mostly negative rather than positive. He has great rules and guidelines on what to do once in a place like Afghanistan or Iraq, but his end advice basically says to avoid more Iraqs rather than what to do.

Although not perfect, this is extremely important and insightful information from a man who has a track record that speaks for him absolutely. A must read for anyone interested in what is going on in the War on Terror.