COIN in the Colonies

Andrew Exum has an article, ‘1776 and all that‘ on Guardian Unlimited today. “Could Britain have won the American war of independence if it had used contemporary counterinsurgency techniques to crush George Washington?”
The premise:
The past few days have witnessed horrific fighting in Basra, where the British army turned over the province to the control of [...]

Jihad Fever Pitch

.
He’s hiding near Kabul
He loves the Arsenal
Osama
Oh oh oh oh!

So (allegedly) went the chant at the Highbury Library a few years back. Abu [...]

Insurgencies or no?

“The Taliban are increasingly using these insurgent-style tactics [IEDs] in Helmand” – so Radio 4’s Today programme reported this morning, regarding the deaths of two U.K. Marines in Afghanistan. Do the Taliban not already represent an insurgency? I think what they meant to say was “The Taliban are increasingly using Iraqi insurgent-style tactics in Helmand”, [...]

Blogroll: Ghosts of Alexander

I’ve added the Ghosts of Alexander blog to my links. It’s subtitled ‘The Afghan Campaign, 2001 to Whenever’, which is pretty self-explanatory, and the most recent post is a decent review of Antonio Giustozzi’s Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan. I’ve seen Giustozzi speak a couple of times and although not the [...]

Reading: Synchronizing Information, New Media in Conflict

I’ve already sent this the way of the new Insurgency Research Group blog, but I figured it belonged here too. Matt Armstrong (MountainRunner) wrote a good piece, Synchronizing Information: The Importance of New Media in Conflict, on the USC Center on Public Diplomacy website a couple of weeks ago.
In Armstrong’s own words:
The effectiveness of information [...]