Counter-Insurgency Puzzles

This book contains some mysteries. How does a person starting as an Australian army counter-insurgency expert end up opposing Western strategy generally? And in a book on international insurgencies over the past two decades, why are key areas like President Obama’s foreign policy strategy, the 9/11 bombings, the Russian invasion of Crimea, and his own career in this area given little attention? I enjoyed David Kilcullen’s counter-terrorism articles in the Australian when he was in the Australian army. When he became part of US forces during Obama’s time, I found his articles puzzling. Some change I couldn’t fathom had come about, so I transferred to reading the Israeli expert Jonathan Spyer in the Australian. I hoped The Dragons and The Snakes would provide answers to these puzzles.

The dragons are state actors like Russia and China, plus second rankers like Iran and North Korea, which Western democracies have to contend with; the snakes are the smaller but multiplying terrorist and related outfits. Much of the book is a detailed analysis of Kilcullen’s chosen field, which involves countering the rapidly developing insurgency techniques, variously called asymmetrical, grey area, liminal or irregular warfare, developed by the dragons and the snakes. They have to keep their forces out of plain sight to avoid being pulverised by the overwhelming fire power of other dragons, and of the United States. New techniques devised to cope with this rapidly evolving military milieu include guerrilla activity, deception, cyberwarfare, lawfare, espionage, infiltration, media manipulation, disinformation and subversion. Originally used by the less powerful snakes, they are now increasingly employed in combination by the powerful state actor dragons as well. All utilise nimble, adaptive crossover strategies which blur the differences between them and cause some convergences to occur, as they imitate each other’s successful strategies.

All this Kilcullen clearly and professionally explains, but his grasp of the broader international strategic questions is less sure-footed. To give a minor example: in order to show the Chinese government’s outrage at the 1999 US bombing of their embassy in Belgrade was genuine, he quotes an “analysis which draws on hundreds of letters to the editor of a major Chinese daily newspaper as a way of distinguishing spontaneous sentiment from state sponsored protests”. Anyone who believes that under a totalitarian regime this amounts to genuine evidence reveals himself a little naive.

When an author radically changes his position, questions of chronology inevitably arise. When Kilcullen says he opposed the Second Gulf War of 2003, did he oppose it at the time as an Australian army officer, or later when working for the Americans, or later when he returned to civilian life around 2012? The whole book is bedevilled by obscurities of this kind. When a person becomes disillusioned with positions he has fought for, he can be tempted to make a 180-degree change of tack, and then to take his new adversary stance to extreme lengths to over-compensate for his past. Kilcullen would have been more convincing if he had confined himself to his area of genuine expertise, without feeling the need to bag NATO and call Putin a genius.

The United States twice invaded Iraq to disperse a despotic and terrorist-supporting regime which invaded a neighbouring state, Kuwait, but never intended to stay and didn’t. But is it acceptable for state actors to use grey-area tactics, such as Russia permanently snatching by subterfuge two parts of a neighbouring sovereign state, Ukraine? Kilcullen is very ready to make unfavourable, morally loaded slights against the US, and to make excuses for the dragons and snakes. Why does he put his moral compass into his pocket here? He refers for example to what he delicately calls China’s “real estate acquisitions”, which just happen to mean the Chinese-owned listening-post buildings in the middle of strategic locations: San Diego which contains the huge US naval base, Gare Loch next to Britain’s Clyde naval base, Piraeus, Greece’s largest naval base, Darwin Harbour, the port of Galle in Sri Lanka, among others. To those who have convincingly pointed out, like himself, this striking pattern Kilcullen disingenuously replies:

Some of these criticisms seemed somewhat overblown. China’s money is as good as anyone’s else’s, after all, and Darwin and San Diego have respected Chinese communities … Much more evidence would be therefore be needed before it could be argued that anything was going on beyond simple commercial activity by one of the world’s fastest growing economies.

Here is a person who rightly prides himself on being a gunshot analyst of military strategy, and often is, putting away his binoculars as well as his moral compass. His former self documents these alarming developments, but his present one doesn’t want to see what is in plain sight. This dual focus makes the book a disconcerting read.

The interpretation of the 1990s, when communism collapsed, is crucial. The obvious reason for the collapse was that communism’s inherent contradictions and inhumanity made it unworkable, but for Kilcullen, looking at the problems caused by communism is old hat. He wants to “consider the 1990s from the Russian point of view”, which is OK as an aid to getting inside Russia’s motivation, but you then have to step back and make your own judgment on it, which Kilcullen never does. Following the US academic John Mearsheimer’s analysis, it’s all the fault of aggressive US actions.

We know that Russia was defenceless in the 1990s, but the US took no military or territorial advantage of this when it could have, not even attempting to have German Konigsburg, which the Soviets seized in 1945, returned. That outpost, sitting well outside Russia itself, is now a threat to the Baltic states and Poland. In the 1990s the US sent economic missions to Russia to set up a new workable economic framework which the Yeltsin government welcomed, as both sides (Russia and the West) were at this stage worried about a post-Soviet Russian meltdown, and about random killer whales (Kilcullen’s snakes) taking bites of the stranded whale. After Russia was stabilised, the Russian government retrospectively, and now Kilcullen, describe this assistance as an attempted Western imperialist takeover.

The Russian economy was hijacked not by outsiders but by Russia’s own oligarchs, many of them Putin’s cronies, who stole the Russian economy as it was being “privatised”. In this connection Kilcullen refers to “canny bidders (including Westerners like the American investor Bill Browder)”. Kilcullen must be aware this is a highly irresponsible comment. The scores of Russian oligarchs aren’t named and shamed by him, but a victim of the new Russian mafia is. The Browder case is quite untypical. He got in, unlike others, because his grandfather was the general secretary of the US Communist Party who had worked in Stalin’s interest all his life. Kilcullen does not tell us that Browder had his investments illegally taken by the Putin regime, and his lawyer Magnitsky was imprisoned in conditions which led to his death, an international scandal about which Kilcullen says nothing. The moment Russia got to its feet again after 2000, its regime was up to its old tricks. The new false claim was that NATO had aggressively moved itself to Russia’s doorstep. Kilcullen writes that NATO “drew Russia’s former colonies into its orbit”. It didn’t need to, it worked the other way. The East European countries begged NATO to protect them, as they watched Putin claiming these places were still part of Russia’s historic patrimony, and threatening them. Estonia was paralysed by a Russian cyber-attack for no reason, except to warn it who now called the shots.

On page one of this book, in considering “the convergence of state and non-state adversaries” Kilcullen speculates that “something in the environment created by Western military dominance since the Cold War might be driving that convergent evolution”. It does not occur to him that others, not the US, might be initiating their own convergent and aggressive agendas. Since 2000 perhaps the biggest precipitating event in the international insurgency arena has been the Al Qaeda bombing of the World Trade Center, initiated by one of the snakes. It does seem a big gap in a book subtitled “How the Rest Learned to Fight the West” not to discuss it in detail, presumably because it contradicts the author’s preconceived conclusion that only the US initiates trouble. The US is always in his mind the aggressor with malign motives, in decline and with failing strategies—the standard anti-West assumptions of the academic class Kilcullen has recently joined.

The US displays, he tells us, “naive over-confidence”, NATO displays “self-righteous arrogance”, the West displays “near effortless confidence in their own self-righteous exceptionalism”, the US is “fractious”, he refers to “loss of US credibility and tunnel vision”, and so on. He is at pains to describe how “our own behaviour since 9/11 has brought the dragons back” (my italics). Hang on, I thought 9/11 itself showed they were already active. We are told “the eroding effectiveness of Western military methods emerges clearly in case studies of Al Qaeda” and so on. I thought Al Qaeda and many other terrorist outfits had been effectively diminished by Western military methods to bit-player status.

On the other hand there is a strange absence of moral indignation in Kilcullen’s account of the US’s adversaries, the snakes and dragons, who are always reacting defensively and always winning. Al Qaeda “repeatedly achieved spectacular victories”, Hezbollah had “a series of tactical successes”. North Korea’s action in leaving the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, even though the US had withdrawn nuclear weapons from South Korea, was “understandable”. Are any North Korean actions understandable? He writes of Russian military “successes in Crimea, Ukraine and Syria”, without noticing that he is here, by his own formulation, already taking Crimea out of Ukraine, the Russian position. Successes in Syria? Putin has been carpet-bombing innocent Syrian civilians (not terrorists as Russia claims) for two years. Kilcullen displays a strange absence of revulsion here. He praises the dragons and snakes as nimble actors adapting to an evolving tactical landscape, with no reflection on their tactics or motives.

Kilcullen lauds Putin as “a military genius playing a weak hand”. No, he is a world power, with immense military and oil and gas assets, an enormous land mass stretching from the Baltic to Japan, a Potemkin democracy, no proper opposition, multiple grey areas of operation, and no moral scruples, which immensely widens his opportunities, hardly a weak hand. Don’t blame the Russians, Kilcullen tells us, but rather “the things we in the West had inflicted on the Russians and that were storing up resentment which would later break into open confrontation”.

Kilcullen describes Russia invading Crimea as “little green men” annexing a region of Ukraine. He is slipping into using deceptive terms himself, as they were Russian soldiers and auxiliary forces, and they were more than annexing, which implies simply adding to what you already own. Kilcullen can’t analyse the Crimean takeover, as it denies his overall view that Russia always acts defensively. The Russian front regime in the Donetsk region in Ukraine is actually a perfect example of how the dragons, aided by snakes, use asymmetrical grey-area warfare so they will not get caught out. His whole book is supposed to be about such tactics, but amazingly this major episode doesn’t get a proper airing.

Kilcullen develops the ingenious theory that losing is winning. He says that when the West knocks off guerrilla leaders, this actually helps the guerrilla band as it is then forced to install a new leadership more up to scratch with the new strategies needed to survive: “The more effective a tactic is, the quicker it becomes obsolete, because the more pressure it puts on the guerrilla group to adapt.” In reality the opposite has happened: FARC, Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the IRA and ETA, and many other snakes have all been diminished to almost nothing because of sustained pressure on their leadership groups. In fact sophisticated terrorist strategies are so on the nose among terrorists themselves that they have recently been reduced to primitive tactics, like aiming motorised vehicles at pedestrians à la Nice, and lone wolf attacks.

Kilcullen also recommends the strategy known as “escalate to de-escalate”. This means you up the ante to get a better position from which to negotiate an end to a conflict. This sounds wonderful, but nobody has yet found an example of Putin or Xi Jinping reducing the heat. Kilcullen outdoes his previous efforts on the “Gerasimov doctrine”. Gerasimov, Russian Chief of General Staff and defence minister, argued that the new asymmetric, cyber deception tactics were an enhanced way of waging war, whereas in the West they were seen as ways of avoiding war. Kilcullen surprisingly says the Gerasimov plan “which looks on the surface like a clever and devious approach to fighting the United States … may be a defensive Russian attempt to understand the threat Moscow faces”. Or it may more likely be the “clever and devious” tactic Russian military doctrine says it is. Jonathan Swift referred to “the thing that is not”. As George Orwell once wrote, “there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them”.

Kilcullen provides no extended account of the crucial Obama years, or of his role in them. His CV seems to have slipped off the radar here. President Obama went to Moscow to press the reset button, which Putin rightly read as relaxing US pressure, a green light convincing him he could invade Georgia and Ukraine with little US pushback. Obama’s naive invocation of an Arab spring led to a widespread meltdown in the Middle East and North Africa, with dragons and snakes having a field day with their anti-freedom and anti-West agendas. Kilcullen lamely comments that this “was not necessarily the fault of the strategy itself”, and then immediately admits “though the precipitate withdrawal from Iraq, half measures in Afghanistan, failed intervention in Libya, and equally failed non-intervention in Syria did not help”. How much of the strategy was left after those episodes? The worst case was Obama warning Assad against gassing his own citizens and then doing nothing about it, a green light for further Assad atrocities. To cap it off Kilcullen then supports Obama blaming cabinet colleagues (Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden) and his administration for “sandbagging” (that is, continuing to support) traditional US foreign policy, in effect working against Obama’s policy. Obama’s overall strategy was disengagement, so in a perverse way his strategic failures meant it worked. I think it likely that Kilcullen favoured the overall Obama withdrawal strategy, though he never explicitly says so.

There is a gap in this book on Kilcullen’s position and attitudes during his time working for US agencies. He moved to the US State Department as a counter-insurgency adviser in 2005. He opposed the Second Gulf War in 2008, if not before. The Wikileaks entry on him, in which he emerges in a favourable light, is some help here:

From 2005 to 2006, he was Chief Strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the US State Department. Kilcullen was a senior counter-insurgency advisor to General David Petraeus in 2007 and 2008, where he helped design and monitor the Iraq War troop surge, He was then a special advisor for counter-insurgency to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

We further learn from Wikileaks that he had disagreements with US policy at this time. He then moved to advise NATO and the International Security Force in Afghanistan in 2009-10, but opposed the use of drones as combat weapons. He returned to civilian life at some stage after this. He may have left because in his opinion Obama’s policies were not being implemented. He is now a Professor at UNSW Canberra, with which the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) is connected. People working in intelligence areas know more than we do, which they don’t have to reveal and often aren’t allowed to. So when they become commentators after having been actors, it’s not a level playing field, as they can decide which cards they play. Kilcullen’s newly found worldview chimes in nicely with the current university mindset. I hope our prospective officer class is getting mainstream views at ADFA in addition to the countervailing arguments provided in his book.

A final puzzle is whether the US is included as a dragon in Kilcullen’s terms. I think it initially wasn’t but seems to have been added to the list at some later stage. In his discussion of convergence he shows how the other dragons and snakes have been adapting their strategies, successfully in his view, to cope with US military dominance, so that they end up looking like each other. But there is also a subtext that the US is similarly shaping itself, so that it seems in the end to be the nastiest dragon of them all, the Great Satan.

The book finishes with Kilcullen documenting the US’s alleged decline, and rather patronisingly advising it on how it might achieve a soft landing. All this seems to me highly dubious. The US is, unlike the dragons, a free, vibrant and transparent society, with much of its military activity conventional and visible, and its grey areas subject to scrutiny by both military and media inquiry (for example, our SAS activities in Afghanistan). This is not so of the real dragons and snakes, some of whom work 90 per cent on the dark side. The US is not in decline, being miles ahead in technology and innovation, which is why the Chinese government puts so much effort into trying to steal their designs. How many countries send experts to Russia to pick up hints on their urban and environmental renewal? Almost all the great changes in our lifetime, such shopping malls, internet, cable television, and now the unparalleled growth and wealth of the Facebook, Google, Paypal and Amazon systems, originated in the US. The future is being made in America, whether we like it or not. In contrast the Russian and Chinese governments remain regressively authoritarian, playing the oldest game in town, suppressing the aspirations of their own people.

The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West
by David Kilcullen
Scribe, 2020, 325 pages, $35

Patrick Morgan, a frequent contributor, has written previously on East European and Russian affairs.