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 theorist David Kilcullen (about whom we first posted in April):
[Brown] has been impressed by the work of David Kilcullen, a former Australian army officer and academic anthropologist who now works for the US State Department and is the senior counter-insurgency adviser to the multinational force in Iraq. Kilcullen’s core belief is that the war on terror is better described as a ‘global counter-insurgency’: he refers to the ‘information battlefield’ but insists that the West’s strategy must be radically localised; each region, each village, needs a different counter-terrorist tactic.
The Brown camp agrees that the propaganda campaigns adopted by Bush’s long-time ally Karen Hughes, the US under-secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, have been much too centralised and old-fashioned. The Kilcullen Doctrine on winning ‘hearts and minds’ is based not on making local people feel affection for you, but on persuading them that you can protect them better than the enemy. In Iraq, Kilcullen wrote in June, ‘protecting and controlling the population is do-able, but destroying the enemy is not’.
Meanwhile, young Muslims drawn to the flames of Islamism — in West Yorkshire as much as Basra — have to be targeted for ‘ideological conversion’, a process Kilcullen compares to the tactics used to keep young men out of street gangs. Easier said than done, of course. But this is the way Brown’s counter-terrorist thinking is heading: away from invasions, ‘crusades’, and ‘shock and awe’ and towards something that owes much more to a Cold War theorist such as George Kennan than it does to Donald Rumsfeld or, indeed, to Tony Blair.
