Word: kilcullen
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...them when every strike inflames Pakistani public opinion against a pro-U.S. government that is at the point of collapse. "If we wind up killing a whole bunch of al-Qaeda leaders and, at the same time, Pakistan implodes, that's not a victory for us," says David Kilcullen, a counterterrorism expert who played a key role in developing the surge strategy in Iraq. "It's possible the political cost of these attacks exceeds the tactical gains." And yet Pakistani leaders like army Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Kayani seem to have concluded that using drones to kill terrorists...
...accusation of cowardice is especially damaging in the tribal areas, where bravery is regarded as an essential quality in an ally. Kilcullen warns that if the U.S. hopes to eventually win over the tribesmen, as it did with Iraqi insurgents, "we can't afford to be seen as people who fight from afar, who don't even dare to put a pilot in our planes." The drones seem to be uniting militant groups against the U.S. and the Zardari government. Waziristan warlord Maulvi Nazir signed a nonaggression pact with the Pakistani military in 2007 and sent his fighters to battle...
...David Kilcullen, a counter-terrorism expert for both the Bush and the Obama administrations, warned that Pakistan is on the brink of collapse. "Afghanistan doesn't worry me," Kilcullen said in an April 12 interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. "Pakistan does. We have to face the fact that if Pakistan collapses it will dwarf anything we have seen so far in whatever we're calling the war on terror...
...British retreat has left slow-motion anarchy, a Shi'ite gang war? What will he do about Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army, the most powerful and popular force in Shi'ite Iraq? The general's own staff is divided on many of these questions. But David Kilcullen, Petraeus' leading counterinsurgency specialist, recently wrote a piece in Small Wars Journal that may reflect the general's current thinking, that the Anbar experiment can be replicated by the Shi'ites. "[R]ecently Shi'a tribes in the south have approached us, looking to cooperate with the government against...
...with Shi'ites' traditional underdog status," he said. Actually, Crocker seems constitutionally averse to grand strategies attempted by outside forces. "One thing I learned a long time ago is, you don't go into someone else's complicated society fully armed with your own preconceptions," he told me. And Kilcullen's bottom-up tribal assumptions don't fit very well into the top-down struggle between the Hakims and Sadrs and their respective militias. As I reported two weeks ago, when asked if there was a U.S. military role in Basra, Crocker said, "Under a different set of circumstances...