Royalist and republican, Khalqi and Parchami, Soviet Union and the West, communist and Islamist, mujahid and Talib, Hanafi and takfiri, al Qaeda and America, warlord and technocrat, Pashtun and non-Pashtun, Islamic Emirate and Islamic State, KGB, ISI, and CIA – all have for decades carried on an uninterrupted struggle in Afghanistan....
Join the Almost Diplomatic crew to discuss geopolitics, national security and nonsense over a couple beers. Episode Five has us discussing the implications and where we are as a country 16 years after the 9/11 attacks. Spoiler: We talk about Afghanistan, a lot.
A new study has been released by CSBA, “Doing What You Know: The United States and 250 Years of Irregular War,” which looks at the US’s history in confronting irregular adversaries over the last 250 years, with recommendations for the future. Because COIN is hard and messy, our natural temptation...
In counterinsurgency operations, tactical successes can often lead to strategic failure. Thus the oft-repeated admonishment to consider second and third order effects. And one of the reasons for this paradox is the prolonged time-horizons inherent in counterinsurgency, as is aptly demonstrated in an article published by West Point’s Modern...
A recent article by Nathaniel Moir in the Small Wars Journal is well worth the read. In it, he argues that “the legacy of the United States’ Counterinsurgency doctrine includes a contentious foundation” and that the work of Bernard Fall “provided a more circumspect corpus of work from which...