Grand strategy of top US military adviser to combat al-Qaeda: Stop invading Muslim lands

The big lesson out of all this stuff is: don’t do it again.” That is, don’t invade countries in pursuit of a few Islamic terrorists and turn the whole population against you.

That is the message from David Kilcullen, an Australian academic turned military strategist and one of the most influential advisers to General David Petraeus. Kilcullen, the author of a thoughtful new book on lessons from fighting radical Islamists, is blunt about the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan — and invasions in general.

“Al-Qaeda is already starting to burn itself out”, he says. “Provided we don’t do anything egregiously stupid like keeping invading countries, the trend lines are not good for it.” Iraq, which he calls “a disaster of our own making”, is “exactly the type of conflict we need to avoid”. He agrees that after the 9/11 attacks “there was no option but to do something”. But he holds that the US-led mission conflated “the Taleban with al-Qaeda and the Afghan state with the Taleban”...