The transcript of a Charlie Rose interview with David Kilcullen appeared in the International Herald Tribune. Kilcullen, a PhD and former Australian Army lieutenant colonel, is currently senior counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus. Kilcullen tries to explain the counterinsurgency strategy.
DAVID KILCULLEN: ...focusing the campaign on how to defeat one particular enemy is perhaps not the best way to approach it.
Conventional warfare is binary. Right? It has two sides. And its enemy- centric. What you're trying to do is figure out what the enemy is trying to do and defeat the enemy by, you know, outmaneuvering them or removing their war-making power, basically.
Counterinsurgency is not like that. It's not enemy-centric. It's actually population-centric. And I think we have found over the last three or four years of evolution of the conflict in Iraq that the more we focus on the population and protecting them, the easier it is to deal with the enemy. The more we focus on the enemy, the harder it is to actually get anything done with the population.
Would you like me to expand on that? Because you're frowning.
CHARLIE ROSE: No, no, I'm fascinated by it and I'm trying to -- I'm asking all questions, as you say, like, you know, is the surge about getting at the population?
DAVID KILCULLEN: Absolutely.
CHARLIE ROSE: Is that what the surge is about?
DAVID KILCULLEN: That's fundamentally what the surge is about. And I know you had General Petraeus on the program recently.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
DAVID KILCULLEN: So I don't think I need to go over what he said in detail, but the point is, we have 28,500 extra troops in country. That is a tool. That's not the strategy. Once getting them in, the strategy was to start protecting the population and focusing on marginalizing the enemy from the population.
CHARLIE ROSE: Because the population would eject the insurgents, the Islamists?
DAVID KILCULLEN: It's actually -- yes. It's actually a function of the nature of guerrilla warfare, and it's actually rather independent of whether you are talking about Islamists or communists or, you know, it's a functional thing. And the reason is that in counterinsurgency, the enemy is fluid, but the population is fixed, right? So when you fight a conventional enemy, you have to go in there and sort of attack something that he must defend. And then you use that as a fulcrum around which to maneuver. That's how we do conventional warfare, amongst other -- it's a caricature.
But in counterinsurgency, you can't do that, because there's nothing the enemy has to defend. They can just run away if you push them too hard. And if you get there and you're doing things that are just making it too hard for them, they can just go quiet and stay in the environment.
CHARLIE ROSE: You know that's one of the arguments made against the surge.
DAVID KILCULLEN: Absolutely.
CHARLIE ROSE: That's all you were going to do, is push them somewhere else. They'll go somewhere else and they'll wait.
DAVID KILCULLEN: Right. Making that argument against the surge, this speaks a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of what the surge is trying to do. And let me sort of expand on this issue.
The enemy is fluid, but the population is fixed. OK? That's the key point. The enemy can run away. The population can't. They have houses, relatives, businesses. They live there. They can't move. And so you can't defeat an insurgency by fighting the insurgents, because they'll just run away and you chase the guy around. And it's like looking for a needle in a haystack, but you're actually destroying the haystack to find the needle. So you do this damage to the population, which alienates the population, creates a recruitment base for the insurgents, and it just creates a cycle of destruction.
The way to do it -- and you know, we've been doing this for a long time and there's a very solid body of understanding on how to do it -- is, if you like, to comb the flees out of the dog. OK? So you get in there and you work with the population. You drive the enemy off, and then you focus on the population and you try to restructure the environment so that the insurgent can't come back when you leave.
Via Belmont Club.
Nice. Thanks for the link, I would have missed this one.
Posted by: Nylarthotep | October 13, 2007 at 04:43 PM