Just to finish off this gruelling series, I wanted to flag Kilcullen’s take on Afghanistan and opium. In short, his argument is that counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics in Afghanistan are identical; the poppy mostly grows where the Taliban are, it provides something up to 50% of the movement’s income, and it is anyway impossible to do…
Read More Accidental Guerrilla, Part 4: Kilcullen on DrugsA lot of The Accidental Guerrilla concerns ideas of terrain, space, and time. In fact, quite a bit of it could be considered an architectural approach to counter-insurgency. This is not surprising; a major theme is the idea that the conflict environment – the state of being at war or potentially at war, the disrupted…
Read More Accidental Guerrilla, Part 3: SpaceDavid Kilcullen describes the cycle of violence at the end of the last post in biological terms; we are apparently faced with “infection”, “contagion”, “intervention”, and “rejection”. Usually it’s wise to be really suspicious of anyone who talks biology in politics, unless they are talking about actual bacteria. However, this metaphor covers a very important…
Read More Accidental Guerrilla; Part 2, StrategyReading the literature on the insurgencies and counterinsurgencies of the 1950s and 1960s, one thing that stands out is that – as you’d expect from practitioners of what the Chinese used to call bandit extermination – there is very little agency attributed to the people. Yes, it is necessary to – here we go with…
Read More Accidental Guerrilla: Part 1, Theoretical FrameworkResistance – The Essence of the Islamist Revolution is Alistair Crooke’s survey of modern Islamist thought. It would be clearer to say it is a couple of books occupying the same space; one would be a history of Islamist thought since the origins of the Iranian Revolution, with a polemic for greater understanding of such…
Read More Review: Alistair Crooke, “Resistance: the essence of the Islamist revolution”Is tragic diva SNLI cracking up, ask friends? “Creepy obsession” with blogger raises old rumours about starlet; Max Clifford is holding on line one. “He’s very good with colours”, says Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security. “Everyone around here relies on him for style tips before their TV appearances. I’d never…
Read More I am troll, hear me roar!Laura Rozen reports that the US government is talking about Pakistan’s “existential crisis”. (They do not mean, apparently, brooding about lobsters and smoking too much.) It’s currently being manifested by the Pakistani army fighting its way back into the Malakand Division; basic details here. Fans of Winston Churchill’s My Early Life will of course remember…
Read More support your local marplotA data point from Germany. You may recall the debate regarding whether or not it was possible for the 7th July bombers to have concentrated their own hydrogen peroxide without needing special equipment; Dsquared took it to the point of carrying out dubious experiments in his freezer. It seems that the so-called Sauerland group of…
Read More …but there’s lots of girls with peroxide curls and the black & tan flows freeYou thought Abu Muqawama was cool? You’re behind the curve. I’ve only been reading the new French multiblog, Alliance Geostrategique for a few weeks, and they come out with a series of posts like these: Living in the city at war, or how the difference between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian centre of Sarajevo (narrow streets,…
Read More French blogs considered harmful, in a good wayTelling. 29 (Commando) Light Regiment RA haul a 105mm gun by hand up a rock pinnacle in Afghanistan, to a feature called Roshan Tower. Yes, Roshan as in the mobile phone operator. We can offer you 900MHz GSM service, and some things that go with it, but far from all of them, or we can…
Read More onwards and upwards