Blood year : the unraveling of Western counterterrorism

307 Pages·2016·2.21 MB·English

by  Kilcullen

BLOOD YEAR

DAVID KILCULLEN
BLOOD YEAR
The Unraveling of
Western Counterterroism
1
1
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Published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by
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Copyright © David Kilcullen 2016
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is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978–0–19–060054–9
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Printed in the United States of America
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Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

CONTENTS
Preface ix
Note on Sources xi
Maps xii
1. Debacle 1
2. Disaggregation 7
3. Abyss 15
4. Waterfall 37
5. Crocodile 45
6. Tsunami 53
7. Rebirth 67
8. Collapse 83
9. Retribution 87
10. R ollback? 101
11. I nternationale 111
12. W ilayat 127
13. Khilafah 133
14. T ransformation 151
15. S pillover 167
16. M askirovka 185
17. Age of Conflict 197
Epilogue 219
Notes 233
Index 259
vii

PREFACE
In mid-2014 the Islamic State burst onto the global stage with a
string of spectacular victories in Iraq, and a series of gruesome
beheadings of journalists, aid workers and local civilians. For
many—smart, well-educated people, who’d been paying attention
but had no particular expertise or interest in the ins and outs of
transnational terrorism—the rise of ISIS1 was both baffling and
deeply disappointing.
For years, their governments had been telling them that things
were getting better. Western troops were out of Iraq, Osama bin
Laden was dead, withdrawal from Afghanistan was on track, drones
and special ops were handling the threat, militarized police and
state surveillance were necessary evils that were keeping us safe,
and—despite a few hiccups, like the fatal attack on a U.S. diplo-

matic compound in Benghazi in 2012—people were thinking and
speaking of the bad old days of President George W. Bush’s “Global

War on Terror” in the past tense. In President Obama’s soothing
phrase, the nation’s wars were ending.2
Now, seemingly overnight, we were back to square one, and people
wanted to know why. The crisis of 2014 thus prompted a string of
books, each more excellent than the last, by journalists and scholars
documenting the rise of ISIS, its ideology, eschatology, objectives,
motives and antecedents, and seeking to explain its attraction for
certain kinds of people in our own and other societies.
This is not one of those books.
That is, it’s not a book about ISIS: rather, it’s about what the emer-
gence of ISIS tells us about the broader War on Terrorism since
2001. This is linked to the rise of the Islamic State, to be sure, but it
also connects the Arab Spring, the resurgence of confrontation with
Russia, the Iranian nuclear deal, and the European refugee crisis.
These may seem loosely linked, but as I argue in the narrative that
follows, they’re symptoms of the same problem.
Neither is this book a comprehensive history. On the contrary, it’s
a personal account, by a mid-level player in some of the key events
of the past decade—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the develop-
ment and implementation of counterinsurgency and counterterror-
ism strategy in the United States and elsewhere—of how we came
to get things so wrong, and what that tells us about the future.
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