Pretty good and very interesting read. It talks about the the now deceased Jack Idema. A strange man indeed, a conman. But mainly it gets in-depth on Gen. Petraus and a group of senior US military men who brought back a long forgotten war strategy called "Counterinsurgency" and used it in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or as the article puts it:

What General Petraus and his team did was to go back into the past and exhume a theory of warfare that had been discredited by the US military who thought it was long buried and forgotten. It was called Counterinsurgency.

Here are a few excerpts:

At the beginning of this year one of the weirdest characters ever to become involved in the present Afghan war died. He was called Jack Idema and he was a brilliant con-man. For a moment, during the early part of the war, Idema persuaded all the major TV networks and scores of journalists that he was some kind of special forces super-hero who was using all kinds of "black ops" to track down and arrest the terrorists.

In reality, before 2001, Idema had been running a hotel for pets in North Carolina called The Ultimate Pet Resort. He had been in prison for fraud, and had tried to con journalists before about being some kind of super-spy. But September 11th gave him his chance - and he turned up in Kabul dressed like this.


And everyone believed him and his stories. In the process Idema brilliantly exposed the emptiness and fakery of much of the TV and newspaper reporting of the war on terror.
But then Jack Idema started to believe his own stories. He set up his own militia group that he called Task Force Sabre Seven - and he and his men went and arrested Afghans they were convinced were terrorists. And then he locked them up in his own private prison.

Things got out of hand in June 2004 when Idema arrested the Afghan Supreme Court judge, Maulawi Siddiqullah, because he believed he might be involved with terrorists.
I thought I would tell the history of how Counterinsurgency was invented, why it was discredited in America, and how it returned in 2007 to dominate and brutalise the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a fascinating and weird story that is far odder than anything Jack Idema could have dreamt up - it involves Mao Zedong, John F Kennedy, French fascists, the attempted assassination of Charles De Gaulle, and strange Potemkin-style villages in Vietnam where women get pregnant for no discernible reason.
But the Petraus team in 2006 thought differently. In the foreword to their study, called "FM 3-24 - Counterinsurgency" they point to an enigmatic and long-forgotten French military officer and thinker as their biggest inspiration. They say:

Of the many books that were influential in the writing of FM 3-24, perhaps none was as important as David Galula's 'Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice'.

David Galula is an absolutely fascinating figure.

He turns up everywhere in the second half of the 20th century in the wrong place at the right time - like revolutionary China and the Greek civil war in the 1940s, Indo-China in the early 50s, and above all in the French struggle in Algeria in the late 1950s.
The link to the article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurti...l_peasant.html

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