This is a somber and angry book. As previewed in his subtitle, David Kilcullen argues that, in all but one significant respect, 15 years of Western counterterrorism efforts have failed. He acknowledges that further attacks on the scale of September 11, 2001, have been prevented, both by enhancing domestic security measures and diminishing the capacity of al-Qaeda (AQ) and other groups to organize complex, expensive, and distant operations. “The disaggregated, atomized terrorist cells and radicalized individuals of today can mount a larger number of smaller, less sophisticated and far less damaging attacks than the centrally organized AQ of 2001,” he writes. “If that were the only outcome [of Western policies], you would have to call the past fifteen years a resounding success.”
Last summer, in response to a directive from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey, the Joint Staff issued a short summary of lessons learned from the past decade of military operations. The document, entitled Decade of War, Volume 1 frankly and cogently acknowledges mistakes made over this period, and particularly during the first half of the decade, that is to say between the invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 and the surge of troops into Iraq in early 2007.
Since the end of the Korean War, all of America’s conventional campaigns have ended in a matter of weeks, sometimes even days, with overwhelming victories and few if any friendly casualties. Nation-building, counterinsurgency, and postconflict reconstruction, on the other hand, have always proved much more time-consuming, expensive, and problematic.
