Sunday23rd August 2009Q+A’s Paul Holmes interviews David Kilcullen, counter-terrorism expert and author of The Accidental Guerilla. :

Points of interest:
- SAS expect to be used for high value “time-sensitive” targets, and training and supporting Afghan police and military
- New Zealand PRT has “great reputation in Afghanistan” and is seen as an independent, visible contribution
- Expect to see increased violence in Afghanistan in the next two years
- Low voter turnout in Afghanistan, may be 40-45% or less, serious allegations of vote-rigging and corruption across candidates
- Expects Karzai to be elected with reduced majority

The interview has been transcribed below. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can be seen on tvnz.co.nz at,
http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

DAVID KILCULLEN interviewed by PAUL HOLMES

PAUL Well the SAS as we know is going back to Afghanistan, 70 of our elite troops for up to 18 months in three rotations, and the Prime Minister says we need to support international efforts to eradicate terrorism, that we need to play our part. David Kilcullen is someone who understands the risks more than most, he's Australian, he's a former senior Australian military man, and he's a counter terrorism and counter insurgency advisor to NATO and to several governments, including the United States, and is part of the elite team that designed the surge in Iraq in 07 and he's now become an advisor to the top US General in Afghanistan, General Stanley McCrystal, and he's the author of a new book called 'The Accidental Guerilla' which has been hailed already as a classic study of warfare. David Kilcullen is in Melbourne and he joins us live, welcome David to Q+A.

The Afghani elections, it looks like there's been something like a 50% turnout, do you consider that as a success, is it high or is it too low?

DAVID KILCULLEN – Counter Terrorism Expert
I think actually that’s a pretty optimistic assessment of 50%. The 2005 elections which was the second election in Afghanistan achieved a 50% turnout, I think we'll be lucky to get a 40 to 45% this time, and even that might be a bit unrealistic because we've seen pretty low turnout in some parts, particularly in the south where the Taliban have effectively intimidated people and prevented them from coming out.

PAUL Still it does look like millions of people have voted and given the Taliban have threatened to cut off any thumb with ink on it, it's not a bad turnout.

DAVID No I think people have defied the Taliban and you know that’s in some ways a good sign, however there's also been a pretty substantial series of allegations of corruption and vote rigging associated with the election on all sides, probably with the exception of one of the candidates Ashraf Ghani, so you know the likelihood is that we won't get a clear result out of the elections for at least a few days, and when the result does come out it's probably likely to be questioned in terms of its credibility by at least some people on the ground in Afghanistan.

PAUL And do you expect Karzai to be the winner?

DAVID Yeah I think the likelihood at this stage is that President Karzai will be re-elected, the danger is that he'll be re-elected with a substantially reduced level of legitimacy, either because he has to go to a run off, or because the votes could be questioned.

PAUL Who is winning the war in Afghanistan?

DAVID Well the trend lines are bad and have been bad for some time and I think across the south of the country, probably the bottom two thirds of the country the Taliban are on the rise, the level of violence is up about 500% since 2005, and the insurgency's covering about one and a half times the area that it was back then, so I think yeah we'd have to say the trend lines are bad particularly in the south, but I am very confident with the new command team on the ground in Afghanistan over the last few months that we're going to start seeing some pretty new strategy on the ground that may assist in turning that around.

PAUL Can I speak to you about what that new strategy might be because I know you're advising General McCrystal there. The SAS, the New Zealand SAS first of all is going back to Afghanistan at the request of the United States, what do you think they’ll be asked to do?

DAVID Well there are a number of different jobs that special forces are doing in Afghanistan, one of them is what we call time sensitive targeting which is about dealing with enemy what we call high value targets, that is Taliban leaders, Al Qaeda, and sort of other military type targets on the ground. The other big task that the special forces are doing is partnering and mentoring which involves training and supporting and advising Afghan forces, both Police and Military, so I would suspect it'll be a combination of both of those, and there's a few other tasks as well.

PAUL When you talk about time sensitive targets, that has quite a specific meaning of course, it means you find out someone is in some place and they rapidly move to apprehend or to I suppose liquidate that person. Leon Panetta, the Director of the CIA has ruled out official assassinations of Al Qaeda leaders and the Pentagon we understand has got some 50 opium barons on a kill or capture list. Might our men be expected to deal with some of those people?

DAVID I don’t think I really know enough about the operational targeting to answer that, I think that the pattern that we're likely to see is that we'll continue to do operations to protect the population, and to work with them on the ground, and a lot of that will be the same sort of work that the New Zealand PRT has been so good at doing in the last few years, but then when you do that the enemy does tend to come out of the woodwork and try to attack you and disrupt those efforts that you're making with the population, and that’s where the special forces come in, in terms of sort of keeping the enemy off your back to allow you to work with the population.

PAUL Still you have criticised in the past the American strategy or the general strategy in Afghanistan, I mean one thing you don’t like particularly is the drone bombing which of course completely antagonises communities – yes?

DAVID Ah yeah, I mean we have had some successes with the drones in terms of killing Al Qaeda and Taliban senior leadership. The problem with them is that they also contribute to a rise in radicalisation in parts of Pakistan, particularly in the eastern part of Pakistan, and that ultimately can undermine the bigger effort.

PAUL And this is where your book is very interesting, it's call The Accidental Guerilla, can you explain briefly what you mean by that, what is the accidental guerrilla.

DAVID Well let me give you an Afghan example. Middle of May 2006 big ambush in Oruzgan province, the Taliban pinned down a US special forces patrol that was stuck on the ground for six hours. One of the reasons they were stuck there was because a lot of the local farmers who were working in the fields went home got their weapons and came back and joined in, and after the fire fight we said to them look we didn’t think you supported the Taliban, why were you firing at us, and they said oh we don’t support the Taliban, but they said you’ve gotta understand this fire fight that just happened, this is the most interesting thing that’s happened in our valley for about ten years, we weren’t gonna sit it out, that would have been dishonourable, and if you're gonna take part in a fire fight you don’t take part on the side of the infidel foreigner, you take part on the side of the Afghan. So even though they might not like the Taliban, a lot of Afghans have found themselves drawn into the fighting on the side of the Afghan against the foreigner, and that’s a syndrome that we saw in Iraq, we've seen it obviously in Afghanistan and other parts of the so-called war on terrorism, where we go into an area looking for Al Qaeda and it creates a backlash where the population ends up pushing back against us and those are the people that I call accidental guerrillas, and the books is about how to deal with that problem, and one of the key recommendations is we should get out of the business of invading people's countries because Al Qaeda are there.

PAUL Well exactly but nevertheless we are there, and I think that you encourage at strategy, you in your book conclude a strategy of getting soldiers into the villages and communities, forming links, earning trust, cultivating the local leadership, such as the New Zealand Provincial Reconstruction Team has been doing in Bamyan, yes, has that worked?

DAVID Yeah I think - you know New Zealand has a great reputation in Afghanistan because of the work of the PRT and I'm conscious of what you guys were discussing before I was on the air. One of the other things about the New Zealand contribution is it's not under the wing of Australia or any other country, it's been an independent visible contribution where the New Zealanders in Bamyan have had their own programmes and have developed their own reputation, I think it's been a very positive contribution, but I do think that what's going to happen going forward, is we're gonna see a little bit more violence in Afghanistan in the next year or two, and so you know I think the addition of special forces troops is probably a timely thing to be doing.

PAUL But in the end is this war in Afghanistan, is our involvement like the western allies' involvement in the war in Afghanistan mad? What country, what outsider ever won a war in Afghanistan?

DAVID Well this is what we call the graveyard of empires argument you know which says well the Moguls never did it, the British never did it, the Russians never did it. That’s all true but those countries never had the level of popular support that the international community enjoyed in Afghanistan after 9/11, you have to remember that when the Taliban fell on the 7th of December 2001 down in Kandahar, there were only about 400 US forces working in the south of Afghanistan, but there were about 50,000 Afghans fighting the Taliban, and we had this very very close partnership with the Afghan people back in 2001, 2002, even as recently as March this year popular support for the International Community effort in Afghanistan was around the 60% mark which is that’s Barak Obama's approval rating in the United States. So these previous examples of countries coming in and trying to conquer Afghanistan don’t necessarily – you know it's kind of apples and oranges between those examples and what's happening now. The level of popular support for the effort is still pretty high.

PAUL You make very interesting remarks and you make very good arguments about whether we might be on the verge of a whole new kind of warfare. You say that in the past wars were decided by clashings of armies representing the warring states, this is not so now because we are giant states dealing with very unofficial radical people who can do very big things. It makes things very difficult doesn’t it?

DAVID Yeah absolutely, and I think one of the things that we've seen in the last seven or eight years since 9/11, is a pretty rapid learning curve on the part of all the countries that have been engaged in the fighting, to start dealing with a whole new way of doing business on the ground.

PAUL Yes, can I quote you, you say, 'it is crystal clear that our traditional paradigms of industrial interstate war, elite based diplomacy, and state focused intelligence, the paradigms that were so shaken by 9/11, and the campaigns that followed it can no longer provide the keys to overcoming today's hybrid warfare and a transnational enemy exploiting local accidental guerrillas, that makes things very difficult for us in Afghanistan and all round the world of course, in the war on terror.'

DAVID It does, although it's also pretty difficult for Al Qaeda, and I think we've seen a pretty significant collapse of support for Al Qaeda over the past seven or eight years around the Muslim world, so I think you know if we do get out of the egregious mistakes that we've got into in the past, and first and foremost amongst us I think was invading Iraq, and we get out of the business of invading people's countries just because there are terrorist cells there, I think that you know other parts of the war on terror outside of Afghanistan and Iraq, we've seen ways to do business that have resulted in much better results, particularly in Thailand and Indonesia, and it's kind of ironic that the countries where we haven't intervened directly with western military forces, but instead we've worked closely with local law enforcement to try and generate local solutions to local problems, that’s where we've seen a big collapse in Al Qaeda support, and an increase in security.

PAUL You also called the big military machines are now dinosaurs where Al Qaeda and other terror cells can react. What do you see happening in the next say five years in Afghanistan?

DAVID I think we've got about two years of pretty heavy fighting ahead of us, this year and next year, and if that goes well then I think we probably have about another three years of transitioning to viable Afghan institutions, gotta build those first.

PAUL David Kilcullen, thank you very much for your time from Melbourne this morning. David Kilcullen is the author of The Accidental Guerilla, a book which he says in the front of the book is probably too academic to be popular, and too popular to be academic.

ENDS

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