Interview with David Kilcullen*

Volume 93 Number 883 September 2011 Interview with David Kilcullen* David Kilcullen is a leading expert on counter-insurgency policy. He served twenty-four years as a soldier, diplomat, and policy advisor for the Australian and United States governments. He was Special Advisor to the US Secretary of State in 2007–2009 and Senior Advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq in 2007. He has provided advice at the highest levels of the Bush and Obama administrations, and has worked in peace and stability operations, humanitarian relief, and counter-insurgency environments in the Asia-Pacific region, Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. He is a well-known author, teacher, and consultant, advising the US and allied governments, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector. His best-selling books The Accidental Guerrilla and Counterinsurgency are used worldwide by civilian government officials, policy- makers, and military and development professionals working in unstable and insecure environments. Mr Kilcullen holds a PhD from the University of New South Wales. He is the founder and CEO of the consultancy firm Caerus Associates. How do today’s armed conflicts involving armed groups and insurgency differ from counter-insurgency wars in the past, and how have counter- insurgency (COIN) strategies evolved and adapted over the years? Classical counter-insurgency, designed in the 1950s and 1960s, was something that emerged from the Cold War period. And it was designed as a method of engaging a mass movement, a nationalist liberation movement, or a communist insurgency, in a colonial or post-colonial environment, against the background of superpower * This interview was conducted in Washington, DC on 7 June 2011 by Vincent Bernard, Editor-in-Chief of the International Review of the Red Cross, and Michael Siegrist, Editorial Assistant. doi:10.1017/S1816383111000397 587 Interview with David Kilcullen confrontation and nuclear threat. So it’s a form of Cold War limited warfare that’s associated with agrarian mass movements in what was then called the Third World. What we’ve dealt with, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not that. There, it is a situation that’s more akin to traditional resistance warfare because unlike, say, Vietnam, where the insurgency came about in the face of an existing government that was already established and already had control of the territory, in Iraq and Afghanistan the coalition went in there, overthrew the government, created chaos, and then tried to set up a new replacement state. And other forces that were already present on the ground started to fight after that. So this is more of a resistance warfare model. Modern counter-insurgency is affected by this, because in this case they were trying to create a government as well as to suppress an insurgency. They’re not just trying to support a government, they’re also trying to create one. So it’s much more difficult than the traditional counter-insurgency model. But also, there are some features of the modern environment that are very different. Globalized media makes a huge difference, where the insurgent can appeal to a diaspora in real time and generate effects that hamper or cancel out the effects you’re generating on the ground. And an environment where there’s a much higher degree of international scrutiny, not only media scrutiny but quite proper scrutiny from organizations like the ICRC and others, which along with changes in international norms means that some of the traditional methods of counter-insurgency just aren’t acceptable in today’s environment. You know, if you think about the British campaign in Malaya in 1948–1960,1 which has been suggested by some as a classical example of humane counter-insurgency, the techniques that were actually used would be completely unacceptable now. Collective punishments, twenty-two-hour-a-day curfews, trans- porting whole populations to completely different parts of the country, putting hundreds of thousands of people in jail or in ‘new villages’. You know, the methods that were used in the ’50 s and ’60 s are not open to us, nor should they be. So in some ways governments are more restrained than in the classical counter- insurgency era. In other ways the enemy’s freer, because they have the ability to leverage different international fora and diaspora populations and so on. So it’s a very different environment in that respect. A final difference is that there is a global or globalized threat from groups like Al Qaeda, so that a government might be fighting, let’s say, in the Philippines, or in Indonesia, or in Sri Lanka, or in southern Thailand, against a local group that has a local, specific agenda. Perhaps it’s a separatist group, or it’s an Islamic insurgency, or perhaps it’s really 1 Editor’s Note: The British counter-insurgency campaign in Malaya (also known as the ‘Malayan emergency’) took place during the period 1948–1960 between the British Commonwealth Forces and the Malayan communist guerrilla forces (the Malayan National Liberation Army), who aimed at putting an end to British colonial administration in Malaya. The British campaign in Malaya is better known for the ‘Briggs’ Plan, according to which the best way to defeat an insurgency was to drive a wedge between the insurgents and their supporters among the population. See e.g. Richard Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960, Oxford University Press, Singapore, 1989. 588 Volume 93 Number 883 September 2011 ethnic. But then, overlaid on the top of that, you have a more globalized group that cares more about global objectives and is willing to assist these guys, and to mani- pulate them in a lot of cases. And I think that does change the way that we operate. Building on that, how have armed groups evolved over time, in your view? Do you see common causes, common reasons for the existence of these insurgencies? I think that we do certainly see some common causes, and one of them is ethnic separatism. Another one is the reaction against international community involve- ment in certain parts of the world: for example, in Afghanistan or Iraq. We see traditional ethno-linguistic conflict between social groups within countries, which results in civil wars – Sudan is an example of that – and this can take the form of insurgency. I think we’re not seeing the mass-based Maoist-style people’s war of the ’50 s and ’60 s any more. We’re seeing more cell-based, family, or tribal-based groups, that aren’t necessarily trying to directly overthrow the government. They may be trying to make an environment ungovernable so that a government pulls back and then they have a free hand to do what they want to do. There is a growing impression that we have fewer and fewer armed conflicts, and more and more gang violence and urban violence, as in Latin America. Is this also a topic that you see close to your work? Yes. The methods and techniques used by illegal armed groups of all kinds are very similar, irrespective of their political objectives. So whether you’re talking about a gang in the drug business in Latin America, or organized crime in the gun-running or human smuggling business, or whether you’re talking about an insurgency or perhaps even a civil war involving tribes, you will see very similar approaches and techniques being used on the part of those illegal armed groups. That’s one of the reasons why I believe counter-insurgency isn’t a very good concept for the work that the international community is trying to do. I think that the idea of complex humanitarian emergencies is actually a lot closer to the reality on the ground. You almost never see just one insurgent group fighting an insurgency against the government anymore. What you typically see is a complex, overlapping series of problems, which includes one or more or dozens of armed groups. And the problem is one of stabilizing the environment and helping communities to generate peace at the grassroots level – a bottom-up peace-building process. And that’s not a concept that really fits very well with traditional counter-insurgency, which is about defeating an insurgent movement and is a top-down, state-based approach. What you have to do is create an environment where existing conflicts can be dealt with in a non-violent way. So it is traditional bottom-up peace-building; community-based peace- building. Most of the successes we have had in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been through top-down intervention by the government. They’ve been through bottom-up peace-building with local communities. And that, I think, is a very 589 Interview with David Kilcullen important lesson: not only does the government not always have the answer but, you know, white guys from the other side of the world coming in to fix your problem isn’t necessarily the right way to go. What we want to be doing is creating an environment whereby local communities can deal with their own issues, but do it in such a way that it doesn’t lead to mass violence. The expressions ‘counter-terrorism’ and ‘counter-insurgency’ are often difficult to distinguish. Can you quickly explain their differences, overlaps, and the relationship between the two? Insurgent movements typically use terrorism as a tactic, one among several tactics that they use. When we say ‘terrorist’, it has an important legal connotation that’s different from just membership in an insurgent group. I think that’s the primary real difference between terrorism and insurgency.

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