The Hegemon's Dilemma.

• Author: Long, Austin

The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst af a Big One

David Kilcullen

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 384 pages.

Conducting wartime analysis is tantamount to blind men describing an elephant: each may touch a different part and discover a different animal. David Kilcullen's The Accidental Guerilla makes sensible strategic points and provides a wealth of detail on conflicts from Indonesia to Iraq, but in the case of the latter conflict at least, he and I clearly touched different parts of the proverbial elephant (Baghdad in his case, Anbar province in mine). Despite our differing understandings of the Iraq case, however, I am fundamentally in agreement with much of Kilcullen's strategic assessment.

The central concept of Kilcullen's book is the titular "accidental guerilla," the result of a four phase cycle of politics and violence. In the first phase (infection), Al Qaeda or a similar extremist movement establishes a base in a remote or ungoverned area where it has a haven but not necessarily a warm welcome from the locals. From this base, extremists spread their message by word and deed (contagion). The presence of these extremists, however, provokes an outside power to enter the region seeking to destroy the base (intervention). Finally, this intervention provokes the locals who, whatever their feelings about Al Qaeda, rise up against the intervention (rejection). This process of rejection means that intervention, far from destroying the extremists, can actually make them stronger as they fight shoulder to shoulder with these accidental guerillas, becoming increasingly intertwined with them over time.

The basic conceptual framework of the accidental guerilla is not new. In the 1960s, analysts from across the world recognized that efforts to repress extremism-in this case often nationalist and/or communist rather than Islamist--often provoked a backlash that actually empowered the extremists. Writers ranging from Constantin Melnik, the former special adviser on security to French premier Michel Debre, to Daniel Ellsberg, a hawkish RAND analyst who later turned against the war in Vietnam, described this as akin to judo, whereby the extraordinary power of the modern state is turned against itself. Violent repression of extremism would antagonize the local population, who would then lend more support to extremists, provoking more repression in an escalating spiral.

Kilcullen updates and recasts this framework in...