The literature about counterinsurgency has enjoyed a revival of late, stimulated, of course, by the Iraqi and Afghan campaigns, as well as by the larger “War on Terror.” Possibly, the single most influential analyst on the subject has been David Kilcullen, the Australian officer turned anthropologist, who closely advised U.S. General David Petraeus in Iraq and more recently has been advising the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. Kilcullen's book exposes his thinking on counterinsurgency up to 2008, with detailed case studies of his own experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as shorter discussions of a number of other cases such as East Timor and Indonesia. The Accidental Guerrilla was greatly welcomed by the press and the military, and its key arguments are often cited by American officers in Afghanistan today as they try to reshape their counterinsurgency strategy. The book is not strictly speaking an academic or scholarly text, as it is based to a great extent on the author's own experience. But it is sufficiently thoughtful and informed by the literature to be relevant to political scientists.

One of Kilcullen's key arguments is that the main lesson of classical counterinsurgency is that the effort has to be “population-centric,” focusing on protecting the population and “competing with the insurgents for influence and control at the grassroots level” (p. xv). Counterterrorism, by contrast, is “enemy-centric,” focusing on destroying enemy cells rather than on controlling the environment where they operate (p. 13). This distinction is at the core of the strategy shift that characterized U.S. policy in Iraq in 2006–8 and in Afghanistan from 2009 onward.

The author's other key argument is that contemporary global insurgencies have gained much of their traction by co-opting or allying themselves with local insurgencies (“infecting” them, says Kilcullen), which have local aims and reflect local interests. In the most notorious of all examples, Al Qaeda has been using its limited cadre of “professional jihadists” to co-opt and assist local or national insurgencies, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan or various Sunni groups in Iraq. The counterinsurgents' failure to distinguish between the global insurgencies and the local causes sponsored by it, argues Kilcullen, has been a critical mistake. This has allowed Al Qaeda to draw the United States and its allies into a series of drawn-out and extremely expensive wars, where every dollar spent by Al Qaeda costs the United States hundreds or thousands of dollars to match. In other words, American strategists have fallen in Al Qaeda's trap. The author, on the other hand, believes that Al Qaeda's strategy exposes it to vulnerabilities that can be exploited by the enlightened counterinsurgent: “[I]t lacks intrinsic appeal to the local community, and there is always a dispossessed section of the local elite that is eager to regain its lost authority” (p. 36).

Kilcullen illustrates how a strategy that seeks to exploit this fault line between global insurgents and “accidental guerrillas” can succeed in turning the latter against the former. His argument is most compelling in the case of Iraq. Since he completed the book, the marginalization of Al Qaeda in Iraq has been confirmed by events, even if that does not necessarily mean the end of conflict in Iraq. The Afghan case is more ambiguous. The author does not discuss his most recent experiences in that country, as the completion of the book predates them. He discusses instead his experience in Afghanistan in 2006–8, in particular in Kunar Province. In this case, the early signs of success described here have not been confirmed by later developments, although it is not clear to what extent Kilcullen's views have informed the work of the U.S. military in the area during his long periods of absence in 2007–9. His statement that 90% of the Taliban are potentially co-optable from a position of strength (p. 49) has been at the center of much political debate in Washington concerning reconciliation and reintegration in Afghanistan, but per se it does not mean much: It is like arguing that once an enemy army is defeated, most of the troops can be peacefully reintegrated. True, but not necessarily compelling. The problem, of course, is how to achieve that position of strength. Indeed, he himself acknowledges the relative sophistication of the Taliban, and criticizes the tendency to underrate them. Nonetheless, he identifies key weaknesses of the Taliban, such as their predominantly southern base. At the same time, this situation has somewhat changed since he completed the book and the Taliban have continued to evolve. As of spring 2010, the Taliban have not only avoided Al Qaeda's extremist drift in Iraq but have in fact taken the opposite course, trying to present a more moderate image of themselves.

Perhaps one weakness of the book is the lack of a discussion of how the vulnerable spots of the enemy can be exploited and by whom. In other words, how realistic is the counterinsurgency approach proposed, given what Western armies are today and what client regimes in conflict-ridden countries tend to look like? In the case of Iraq, Al Qaeda's mistakes greatly helped the counterinsurgents in driving a wedge between the global jihadists and the accidental guerrillas. The merit of Petraeus and Kilcullen has been to spot the gap in the enemy's ranks and exploit it. But what if a new enemy avoids committing the same mistake? Kilcullen recognizes the problem but does not deal with it directly. He identifies instead a number of best practices in counterinsurgency (p. 265). While practitioners will certainly appreciate the concise list, the risk is that a new template, even if superior to previous ones, remains formulaic to some degree. It is also significant that while some of the author's best practices have become buzz words in Kabul now (e.g., comprehensive approach, population-centric security), others seem to have been missed or forgotten (e.g., political strategy). Leaving aside a number of other problems faced by General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the ISAF in Kabul, in implementing the population-centric approach, this omission is already highly significant in that it shows how best practices may sometimes be beyond the reach of even the best counterinsurgents.

To be fair, it was not Kilcullen's aim to examine the viability of counterinsurgency in this book. But the problem of whether his counterinsurgency strategies can be effectively implemented remains. From a scholarly point of view, much of his theories still need more empirical evidence to be confirmed. The internal politics of counterinsurgency formulation and the dynamics of client regimes still need to be analyzed in their implications for the formulation of counterinsurgency strategies. At the same time, in this single volume Kilcullen has achieved a great deal by presenting a stimulating discussion of how counterinsurgency theory needs to be updated and improved. The widespread influence of his views and his thoughtful discussion of the literature and of his own personal experiences make The Accidental Guerrilla required reading for all of those interested in counterinsurgency history and theoretical development. His blend of anthropology and counterinsurgency will upset many academic anthropologists, but it nonetheless opens a new and promising path.