Traditional definitions of warfare need to be substantially rethought for modern conditions. Recent conflicts, particularly those in the Middle East, have shown that concepts such as hybrid warfare and unrestricted warfare make a lot more sense than traditional state-on-state, force-on-force concepts of conventional war.Most of the adversaries Western powers have been fighting since 9/11 are in fact accidental guerrillas:
People who fight the West not because they hate the West and seek to overthrow it, but because of the perception that we have invaded their space to deal with a small extremist element that has manipulated and exploited local grievances to gain power in their societies.
They fight the West not because they seek its destruction but because they believe it seeks theirs, a belief in which they are encouraged by a cynical, manipulative clique of takfiri terrorists who, though small in number, have been catapulted to great political influence and prestige because of our over-reaction to 9/11.
By treating terrorism as the number one national security concern and al-Qaeda its most important proponent, we have in effect elevated Usama bin Laden and his core leadership group, lending prestige and credibility to his claims of importance by treating him as worthy of our attention, resources, and blood. To paraphrase a Viet Cong leader interviewed by Jeffrey Race in his classic study of revolutionary conflict in a Vietnamese province, War Comes to Long An, we have turned a mouse into an elephant. How, then, should we seek to remedy this situation? Is it possible to turn the elephant back into a mouse?
Al-Qaeda's strategies rely on provoking the West into a series of protracted and exhausting interventions worldwide in order to bankrupt the political will and moral authority of the established international community.
Al-Qaeda's actions often aim to provoke an intervention (from the national government or the international community), which then alienates traditional societies, causing them to lash out in an immune rejection response that exacerbates violence, alienates social groups from the government and from each other, and further strengthens the hand of extremists.
Our too-willing and heavy-handed interventions in the so-called 'War on Terrorism' to date have largely played into the hands of this exhaustion strategy, while creating tens of thousands of accidental guerrillas and tying us down in a costly (and potentially unsustainable) series of interventions.
David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla. pp.263-4.
