From 27 April - 1 May 2009, the United States Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center will present its next Counterinsurgency Leader Workshop at the Lewis and Clark Center in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. This event is a five-day program focused on understanding the fundamentals of insurgency and counterinsurgency. This is a version of the same extremely popular workshop offered to hundreds of military and civilian attendees over the past two years.

This workshop will feature presentations from prominent general officers and guest speakers from the interagency community on the COIN environment in addition to the instructional material.

We have expanded the number of slots available to compensate for the high demand of previous sessions. The proceedings are UNCLASSIFED and registration is open to all interested US government and allied personnel.

The COIN Leader Workshop Site is open for registration. Please head to the COIN Center website, click on "Events" and then click on the "27 April - 1 May 2009 COIN Leader Workshop" to view more detailed information and register.

The March issue contains the following articles:

Somalia's New Government and the Challenge of Al-Shabab by David H. Shinn

Inside Look at the Fighting Between Al-Shabab and Ahlu-Sunna wal-Jama by Abdulahi Hassan

Pakistan's Continued Failure to Adopt a Counterinsurgency Strategy by Ahmed Rashid

Al-Qa`ida's Involvement in Britain's 'Homegrown' Terrorist Plots by James Brandon

Lashkar-i-Tayyiba Remains Committed to Jihad by Farhana Ali and Mohammad Shehzad

Deconstructing Ibn Taymiyya's Views on Suicidal Missions by Rebecca Molloy

Muslim Brotherhood Faces Growing Challenges in Egypt by Steven Brooke

The Current State of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group by Carlos Echeverrí­a Jesíºs

Recent Highlights in Terrorist Activity

March 2009 issue of the CTC Sentinel.

Almost everyone, even if otherwise ignorant of military affairs, has heard of Karl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. Very few people, though, have heard of C.E. Callwell, David Galula or Robert Thompson. Yet they, too, wrote immortal works on military strategy -- but on unconventional, or guerrilla, conflicts.

For all their timeless wisdom, their books were also a product of their times -- Callwell of the imperial wars of the late 19th century, Galula and Thompson of the wars of "national liberation" in the mid-20th century. Because of the global jihadist insurgency, the early 21st century has produced a new epoch in the annals of low-intensity struggle. It is fitting, then, that to help us understand the current conflict another soldier-scholar has emerged in the tradition of Callwell, Galula and Thompson.

In "The Accidental Guerrilla," a combination of memoir and military analysis, David Kilcullen looks at the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, East Timor, Indonesia and southern Thailand, all of which, excepting the last, he has seen first-hand. He then draws lessons from his experiences and those of other soldiers...

More at The Wall Street Journal.

... The problem with American foreign policy goes beyond George Bush. It includes a Washington establishment that has gotten comfortable with the exercise of American hegemony and treats compromise as treason and negotiations as appeasement. Other countries can have no legitimate interests of their own—Russian demands are by definition unacceptable. The only way to deal with countries is by issuing a series of maximalist demands. This is not foreign policy; it's imperial policy. And it isn't likely to work in today's world.

More at Newsweek.

The protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are forcing the Obama administration to rethink what for more than two decades has been a central premise of American strategy: that the nation need only prepare to fight two major wars at a time.

For more than six years now, the United States has in fact been fighting two wars, with more than 170,000 troops now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The military has openly acknowledged that the wars have left troops and equipment severely strained, and has said that it would be difficult to carry out any kind of significant operation elsewhere.

To some extent, fears have faded that the United States may actually have to fight, say, Russia and North Korea, or China and Iran, at the same time. But if Iraq and Afghanistan were never formidable foes in conventional terms, they have already tied up the American military for a period longer than World War II.

More at The New York Times.

On the basis of my field experience in 2005--08 in Iraq, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, I assess the current generation of Taliban fighters, within the broader Taliban confederation (which loosely combines old Taliban cadres with Pashtun nationalists, tribal fighters, and religious extremists), as the most tactically competent enemy we currently face in any theater. This judgment draws on four factors: organizational structure, motivation, combat skills, and equipment.

Taliban organizational structure varies between districts, but most show some variation of the generic pattern of a local clandestine network structure, a main force of full-time guerrillas who travel from valley to valley, and a part-time network of villagers who cooperate with the main force when it is in their area. In districts close to the Pakistan border, young men graduating from Pakistani madrassas also swarm across the frontier to join the main force when it engages in major combat - as happened during the September 2006 fighting in Kandahar Province, and again in the 2007 and 2008 fighting seasons...

More at National Review.

General James Mattis, USMC, is NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Transformation and Commander, U.S. Joint Forces Command. This transcript is based on his keynote speech delivered at the February 12, 2009 Defense Showstoppers: National Security Challenges for the Obama Administration conference, sponsored by FPRI and the Reserve Officers Association, held in Washington, D.C.

In Joint Forces Command, we have about 1.2 million troops under us, and aircraft carriers, aircraft squadrons, Army brigades, and Marine air-ground task forces. When General Petraeus or Admiral Keating needs forces, we assign those forces out. That aspect of Joint Forces Command is very straightforward. We also train the Joint Forces Headquarters that go into Baghdad, to Bakhtaran, to Djibouti. But I spend most of my time on forward-looking concepts. That's the intellectually demanding part. That's where the two jobs, NATO and Joint Forces Command, come together. Think of the Roman God Janus, who looks both forward and backward. That's because history—especially very recent history—provides us some of our best signposts for the future.

I got the phone call that I was going to be the Allied Commander Transformation and Commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command when I was in Kabul, Afghanistan, so I called for a map of NATO. They didn't have one there, so they got me a map of the world. At that point I was a Marine from California who answered to John Abizaid and Admiral Fallon as the Marine Force's Central Command. There I was in Kabul, closer to Brussels than Brussels is to my current headquarters in Norfolk. And therein lies part of the problem. Right now, we are superior to our enemies in terms of nuclear warfare and conventional warfare (we've lost a little bit of that edge, but we'll get it back very quickly), but we are not superior in irregular warfare, and that is what we've got to do...

More at Foreign Policy Research Institute.