Do we know what we’re trying to achieve in Pakistan?
Applying Kilcullen’s ideas to urban regeneration
What do you do if you're fighting a counterinsurgency campaign and you run out of troops, western troops that is? According to David Kilcullen in The...
Kilcullen on Islamic radicalization in Europe
Last week Alex mentioned that Global Dashboard is a "hotbed of David Kilcullen fandom". Bravo! I'm a fan too, and I've been reading Kilcullen's The Accidental...
Miliband and Kilcullen
As regular readers will know, Global Dashboard is a hotbed of David Kilcullen fandom - so bravo to David Miliband for noting on his blog that Kilcullen's...
Kilcullen: Drone strikes make Af-Pak strategy harder, not easier.
Last week Demos hosted David Kilcullen, the counter-insurgency guru and former adviser to General Petraeus in Iraq. In his speech (audio available soon) he...
Kilcullen close to despair
In an email exchange with George Packer, David Kilcullen sounds a pessimistic note about prospects in Afghanistan. The situation is 'dire' but there's a...
ISIS and the moral level of warfare
With all the atrocities that ISIS has visited on the people living in the territories it's overrun in recent months, the humanitarian basis for military...
Britain’s place in the world? Drifting… obviously
Yesterday William Hague, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, gave a speech in London setting out what British foreign policy might look like under a Conservative...
Afghanistan: What the leaders think
184 service personnel have died in Afghanistan since 2001. The tragic deaths of eight men who died last week in a single 24-hour period has brought the...
Pakistan’s beleaguered police
As Charlie noted here last week, counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen was pretty damning on US drone attacks during his recent visit to London. But...
The accidental guerrilla
David Kilcullen on the central concept of his eponymous book: Interviewer: When did the concept of the "accidental guerrilla syndrome" really start to click?...
Generation Kill goes to Gaza
Chances are you'll already have seen media coverage of Generation Kill - HBO's outstanding new mini-series based on Evan Wright's book on his time as an...
Return of the Proxy War?
In 2006 the U.S national security establishment “re-discovered” counter-insurgency, as General David Petraeus fresh from having published the Army/Marine COIN...
The new public diplomacy and Afghanistan
Last week, I gave a talk at the Defence Academy on the new public diplomacy, focusing in particular on its implications for Afghanistan. The full text is...
Technology and the new public diplomacy
Yesterday, I gave a couple of talks at a Diplomatic Academy of London conference on ‘transformational public diplomacy’ (pdf – and read an earlier post here)....
Iraq the place and Iraq the abstraction
Over the past few years, the New Yorker's George Packer has provided some outstanding reporting from Iraq. (He was also the author of one of the best articles...
re: The bad boys of Blackwater
David Kilcullen on how to run a successful counter-insurgency: In counterinsurgency, the initiative is everything. If the enemy is reacting to you, you...
Our man in Kabul
It's like buses: you wait months for David Miliband to resume his blog, and then no less than six officially sanctioned FCO bloggers come along at once -...
Naming Bin Laden
In the past few days, a vicious spat has broken out in the US counter-insurgency community. On one side, the architect of a new lexicon, inspired by Koranic...
Security to partnering to overwatch (ugh)
Watching General Petraeus’s powerhouse testimony today (wasn't Crocker a crock in contrast?), I could think of two reasons for doubting the rosy message he...
Fourth generation warfare on the Jon Stewart Show. No, really…
Unreal. On Thursday night's Jon Stewart show in the US, one of the guests was Lt. Col. John Nagl - one of the leading US military experts on...
George Packer on Karl Rove’s departure
Over at the New Yorker's blog, George Packer (whose December 2006 piece played a big part in bringing counter-insurgency guru David Kilcullen to prominence)...
4GW arrives at Number 10
Included in Matthew d'Ancona's highly readable report back from Gordon Brown's trip to the US - the excellent news that GB has become a devotee of leading 4GW...
De-radicalisation? It’s the networks, stupid
Roula Khalaf has a great piece leading today's FT about a new rehabilitation program underway in Saudi Arabia for former jihadis. One beneficiary of the...
More from Global Dashboard
Let’s make climate a culture war!
If the politics of climate change end up polarised, is that so bad? No – it’s disastrous. Or so I’ve long thought. Look at the US – where climate is even more polarised than abortion. Result: decades of flip flopping. Ambition under Clinton; reversal...
Big Elephants and Small Islands: getting beyond the New Aid Orthodoxy
Official development assistance (ODA) – or aid – is a small but conspicuous pillar of the international order, and its frailties are being exposed by COVID as surely as those of the other foundations of this order. The assumptions underpinning aid and its management...
Uncertainty and Humanitarian Action: What Donald Rumsfeld can teach us
Since its onset, one striking feature of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has been the narrative power of its novelty. This global narrative depicts COVID-19 pushing humanity towards a ‘historical divide’ of BC and AC (before and after COVID-19), where unknown,...