Religion and War
This post over at Small Wars Journal is excellent, and even (whisper it) cautiously optimistic. Kilcullen discusses criticism of the US army’s COIN manual, and the Petraeus/Nagl surge more generally. Some writers have theorised that Iraq’s insurgency is uniquely and insanely religious, and as such traditional COIN is unsuitable, being too “soft”. Kilcullen notes that,
…there are three problems with this argument. First, there is solid field evidence that modern counterinsurgency methods, properly updated for the new environment, actually are effective against current insurgencies. Second, insurgents in both Afghanistan and Iraq are not actually particularly religious — certainly, they are no more religious than the societies they are attacking. Indeed, there is an empirical problem with the whole notion of a “religious” insurgency, since almost all historical insurgencies have included a strong religious dimension, so that it is not clear that discrete “religious insurgencies” actually exist as observable phenomena. And third, doctrinal publications are not templates, but generic expositions of principle; not cookbooks, but frameworks. Practitioners must populate these frameworks with current, locally accurate, deeply understood insights into the societies where they operate. There is simply no substitute for what we might call “conflict ethnography”: a deep, situation-specific understanding of the human, social and cultural dimensions of a conflict, understood not by analogy with some other conflict, but in its own terms.
