the conversation saying you know tell me about American foreign policy Vis A Sunni Insurgency rather what they say to me because they know that I'm you know Jewish and from Los Angeles and lived inIsrael for a year the Arab entrepreneurs that I met in the neighboring states in the West Bank and Gaza and Lebanon in
counterproductive tactics that his tactics were brutal and helped inflame the Insurgency well it so happened that Emma Sky uh had just read Fiasco when odierno called her up one day and offered herthe job of being his political adviser and I wouldn't advise trying this in your own job interviews she said to him
occupation it then became a slow growing but durable Insurgency then it became an American oh then then it actually became a smallCivil War followed by a pretty competent American counterinsurgency campaign now
Maybe this volatility ultimately leads to a better place. That insurgency becomes more and more radical, becomes more of an al-Qaeda insurgency .
So, you think the United States is going to put ground troops in, Iran are going to resist, and then chaos is going to break out in the United have a history of insurgency against the government, okay?
At that moment, and I'll come back to this in a few minutes, there was a highly political debate about what to call the conflict in Iraq at that point, whether it was an insurgency or terrorism, or indeed, civil war, and I was listening to that debate on TV and radio at that point. At the same moment that I was reading some papers in the Huntington Library from the 19th century in the middle
In one case, two commentators, including the very eminent British military historian, Sir John Keegan, worked out that since the middle of the 17th century, So calling it an insurgency or terrorism ramped it down, turned any attempts to fight it into police actions, and threw the responsibility
And I think with things going their way, with maybe other countries supporting the Taliban less, or the insurgency in a way that a foreigner wouldn't often.
Maybe this volatility ultimately leads to a better place. They become an insurgency .
Maybe this volatility ultimately leads to a better place. So that seed of insurgency , which was always there, goes over and finds incredibly fertile ground in Syria and blossoms into ISIS.
Now, I would submit to you that even if an insurgent as legendary as Che Guevara could ultimately be hunted down, defeated, and killed, there is no insurgency so strong it could not be defeated. The question is, how?
And it's an illustration of the dangers of being overly heavy handed in your approach to counterinsurgency, because that can backfire, as it in fact did for the French in Algeria. of the insurgency . They even imported headhunters from Borneo to act as trackers.
since 2003. He's covered the Iraq War for the magazine and has also written about the atrocities committed in Sierra Leone, civil unrest in the Ivory Coast, the mega city of Lagos, and global counter insurgency . His book "The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq" was named one of the 10 best books of 2005 by "The New York Times" and
ethnic Malay Muslims so the critical question is okay this is supposedly an Islamic Jihad how many ethnic Thai Muslims are in the Insurgency and the answer is none okay they're all malayas so you may think of it or you may talk about it when you're a fighter in southern Thailand as a Jihad but actually it's primarily an ethnic thing
my job was taking stuff that's pretty obvious to people that study counter Insurgency and kind of reminding the big actual counter Insurgency their experiences of peacekeeping from Bosnia and places like that and it turns out there's a subtle difference between
my job was taking stuff that's pretty obvious to people that study counter Insurgency and kind of reminding the big peacekeeping and counter Insurgency in peacekeeping you're trying to keep the environment quiet in counter Insurgency you're trying to deal with a small
merited the name of civil war. Perhaps it was terrorism or insurgency , but not a civil war, they argued. For many inside and outside Iraq, there could, in fact, be no doubt what was happening at that point.
So a lot of these disenfranchised Ba'ath Party leaders and generals and officers and party leaders and all that eventually started the Sunni insurgency , partly to protect the Sunni population from the Shia who were beating up on them.
This guy, who was going to kill us. and he became the leader of the insurgency that went to Mitzi and asked for-- can you pay us?
Thank you for your service. David Kilcullen is a counter insurgency expert. He first, at least, came to my attention as part of the surge in Iraq in 2007, but his resume goes much deeper than that.
And it's an illustration of the dangers of being overly heavy handed in your approach to counterinsurgency, because that can backfire, as it in fact did for the French in Algeria. That's what drives an insurgency .
So if we fast forward in American history to the American Civil War, I cannot think of a single conflict commodity that mattered more in an armed rebellion than the role of cotton in actually perpetuating an insurgency . In fact, the Confederacy arguably would not have even had the chutzpah to actually try to go independent if they didn't think that King Cotton, as they called it, could help
publishing the thing and it showed that they knew that they couldn't win all along. They knew that the South Vietnamese government could not stand. they did not have popular consent that the insurgency in the south was not just based on support from the north but their own indigenous revolution against what they see you know as intolerable
Justin Trudeau was not going to win. Democratic party about um the left and the insurgency , but it
Maybe this volatility ultimately leads to a better place. And there's a line that goes right back to the insurgency in Iraq.
Maybe this volatility ultimately leads to a better place. And it coincided just with the rising peak of the Iraq insurgency .
He says you can apply the same idea to a city. It wasn't because we had this great new counter insurgency manual.
And it's an illustration of the dangers of being overly heavy handed in your approach to counterinsurgency, because that can backfire, as it in fact did for the French in Algeria. In fact, the average insurgency in my analysis in the post-1945 period takes about 10 years to defeat.
as well. In counter insurgency theory, the importance of hearts and minds as opposed to just beating people up, so-called kinetic methods.
examples from Southern Philippines and Southern Thailand where we didn't do that and something completely different happened in the south of Thailand we have this ongoing Insurgency uh by a bunch of groups that are calling themselves an Islamic Jihad but in fact
people uh that had been captured were motivated by economic means you also mentioned that uh one of the steps taken to uh stop this uh you know accidental Gill Insurgency was to uh create these uh alliances with these different groups can you explain what what you mean by that what what kind of alliances are being created and what kind of economic
yeah thanks for coming U between the British and the Americans over the past five decades there is plenty of examples of uh counter Insurgency operations that both have encountered do you think we've learned the lessons well shared them well or are we making the same mistakes well you know um the British
Afghans must perceive that Americans are defeating the insurgency .
Afghans must perceive their irrecoverable loss should they choose insurgency over democracy.
It's taught at the West Point Cyber Institute in their Digital Insurgency program, and at the Air Force Academy.
And I think with things going their way, with maybe other countries supporting the Taliban less, And it's still the funding source that drives a lot of the insurgency .
Maybe this volatility ultimately leads to a better place. More weaponry than you could really imagine is poured on to tamp down this insurgency .
And I think some of what you hear in the past about the counter-insurgency during war has been about being a lot more adaptable and listening more, so you can already see some
to get that knowledge that existed from the 60s or from the 20s and get it back into the mainstream uh so a lot of my job was taking stuff that's pretty obvious to people that study counter Insurgency and kind of reminding the big army of you know what needed to be done um British and I I come from a British Commonwealth background so I'm speaking
To Somalia now, it's been grappling with decades of instability and the ongoing violent insurgency by the militant
Maybe this volatility ultimately leads to a better place. And if you listen to ISIS statements, they talk about their founding members being the insurgency in Iraq that was fighting in Ramadi,
About 14 times the size of the total Afghan government budget is our aid programming in Afghanistan. And I began to write this book, trying to think beyond the paradigm of counter insurgency , and for those people that are in the military, that's like anathema. Like, what?
like anathema. Like, what? Dave Kilcullen? Didn't you write a book on counter insurgency ? Yes, but it's just a book, and we have this paradigm that we built, because it helped us to win a conflict in Iraq,
The French really exemplified the fire and sword, the heavy-handed mailed fist approach to counterinsurgency, whereas the British approach in Malaya was more emblematic of what came to be known as the Hearts and Minds school of counter insurgency . Now let me explain a little bit more about what that means.
And it's an illustration of the dangers of being overly heavy handed in your approach to counterinsurgency, because that can backfire, as it in fact did for the French in Algeria. for communist agitators. And so to take away the manpower base of the insurgency , the British moved large numbers of these squatters
And it's an illustration of the dangers of being overly heavy handed in your approach to counterinsurgency, because that can backfire, as it in fact did for the French in Algeria. of a single, actual, successful urban insurgency throughout history.
uh by a bunch of groups that are calling themselves an Islamic Jihad but in fact if you look at the ethnic makeup of Thailand this is actually an ethnic Malay separatist Insurgency so the the southern three provinces of Thailand Malay dominated the rest of Thailand is
my job was taking stuff that's pretty obvious to people that study counter Insurgency and kind of reminding the big colonial experience somehow we came to believe that that the the British are just innately good at counter Insurgency you know it's kind of in the blood we
people. They did these sweeps - in the early days of the insurgency when the US had no good intelligence on what was going on, they would just cordon off a neighborhood and smash -- break
ostensibly blocking imagery containing cartoons that was offensive, has now broadened to include independence and insurgency movements like the