If failure is the best teacher, then the study of insurgent victories is obviously of benefit in enhancing counterinsurgent strate gies. While each insurgency has different dimensions, they all share varying points of commonality. These are the gems to be mined. In this book, Anthony James Joes analyzes the Maoist revolution in China, Ho Chi Minh’s victory in French Indochina, Fidel Castro in Cuba, and the Afghan victory over the Soviets. The Cuban case gets short shrift (somewhat ironic given that the book’s cover depicts Cuban revolutionaries); it is less than half the length of the other chapters, and Joes notes in his conclusion that he offers it as a "control case" against which to compare the other insurgencies. Given the subtitle of the book, though, the lesser emphasis on Cuba is understandable. It is the insurgency whose "global" impact can be most debated

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, Osama bin Laden, along with senior members of his al Qaeda terror group, decamped his safe haven in Afghanistan for a location believed to be in Waziristan, a remote, mountainous area of northwestern Pakistan. It is home to fiercely independent tribes that have refused to submit to outside governance for centuries and that today are part of Pakistan’s semiautonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). It is particularly well known by the British military as the home of the Fakir of Ipi, an early 20^th-century Islamic extremist who was the subject of intensive British manhunts of up to 40,000 troops scouring the countryside between 1936 and1947. The Fakir was never caught, and he lived out his days in the region, dying a natural death in 1960.

The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) elevated building partner capacity to one of six Department of Defense (DOD) core mission areas. More recently, the January 2012 DOD strategic guidance explicitly recognized building partner capacity as an enduring and integral part of our defense strategy. Defense planners did not always recognize the importance of building partner security capacity. The prevailing assumption that a military prepared for high-end combat could easily accommodate less demanding missions relegated partner building to the status of a lesser-included mission. Thus, this longstanding U.S. military mission did not always receive the sustained intellectual attention and resources that it merited