david kilcullen

One more thing about the New America Foundation’s drone-strike report, which found that the drones have “only” killed Pakistani civilians one-third of the time. (We’re talking about “250 to 320″ civilians killed, according to the report.) One of the reasons the report exists is to push back against criticism of the program, such as the [...]

Above all, Brennan emphasized that the U.S. was not locked in a struggle with the world’s billion Muslims.

I wondered yesterday whether and how Gen. Stanley McChrystal would incorporate private security companies into his population-protection mission in Afghanistan. A post from Nathan Hodge, who’s in Afghanistan right now for Danger Room, highlights an area where such coordination is particularly necessary: the roads.
Roads are everything in Afghanistan, precisely because there are so few of [...]

After initially promising to come up with benchmarks for judging the success or shortcomings of its Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy — the term preferred by the administration, I understand, is “metrics,” which I’m cool with — the Obama administration has yet to come up with any, and has resisted Congressional efforts to put them in the recent [...]

Take a look at this New York Times op-ed call for a moratorium on the Pakistan drone strikes by counterinsurgency luminaries Andrew Exum and Dave Kilcullen. (This, if I’m not mistaken, is the furthest Kilcullen has gone: in a recent discussion of his book, “The Accidental Guerrilla” at a Center for a New American Security [...]

Not many people were focused on increasing Pakistani police capacity, but here’s counterinsurgency expert Dave Kilcullen, testifying to the House Armed Services Committee on April 23:
The police are a critically important element in any counterinsurgency, and I am not aware of any successful campaign in which police reform, police capability building, police intelligence and [...]

Whatever you do, don’t miss The New York Times’ epic interview with a Pakistani Taliban tactician about what has become “a seamless conflict” on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The tactician is based out of Wana, in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but spends much of his time focused on Afghanistan. His superiors, for [...]

In February, I was told that Michael Vickers, the assistant secretary of defense for (deep breath) special operations, low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities, was a key player on Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ defense-budget review. Over at DOD Buzz, Greg Grant has an interesting look at Vickers’ whole deal:
Vickers is a big proponent of the “indirect [...]

Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen visited Pakistan this week for the their first trip to Islamabad since the release of the Obama administration’s Af-Pak strategy. It could have gone better. From The New York Times:
With the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, and the special [...]

Call me a kiss-up, particularly after this, but when was the last time you saw an author publicly admit to coming off like a jerk in his book?
Mr Nordlinger also criticizes me (again fairly, I think, on reflection) for portraying myself as more culturally adept than others I worked with in the field, writing “the [...]