Afghan War Blog

Charles Barham, a retired U.S. Army Colonel and veteran of various programs and projects in Afghanistan, provides an excellent argume...

Paper - The Afghan National Army After ISAF. The Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) has published an 18-page paper (March ...

Afghan Nation-Building A Bust. Doug Bandow thinks its time for a departure from Afghanistan. "Afghanistan is a bust. The Taliban i...

Airpower and COIN . Much of the focus on combating the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has been the heavy use of airpower by the United St...

VSO, Gant, Water, Crops, and COIN. One writer, Doyle Quiggle, manages to combine a variety of topics (although related) into an essay on ...

Counter-IED Capabilities Need Investments.  Over the last few years the U.S. military has attempted, unsuccessfully, to put Afghanistan ...

This paper compares the ". . . accounts of different conflicts in India and South Asia, it delineates two ideal types of counterinsu...

The Small Wars Journal  has posted an informative paper by Jeff Goodson about the socioeconomic development part of the overall military ...

James F. Jeffrey explains in the March/April 2015 issue of  Foreign Policy   "Why Counterinsurgency Doesn't Work" . He says ...

In the aftermath of the counterinsurgency campaigns of Afghanistan and Iraq some observers are evaluating counterinsurgency as a strategy...

It is estimated that the Department of Defense (DoD), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Department of State (...

A paper recently published (Dec 2014) entitled "Russian Organizational Learning in the Context of Afghanistan and Chechnya Counterins...

We have seen the swift rise and fall of Western counterinsurgency (COIN) between 2004 and 2014 as practiced in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a fe...

Carter Malkasian - book author, advisor to COMISAF, and political advisor for DoS in Afghanistan - was recently interviewed by Octavian Mane...

"COIN is Population-Centric. The development of a proper COIN approach starts with the acceptance of the people as important to COIN op...

With the conclusion of Operation ENDURING FREEDOM, the end of U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, and a "responsible end to the Af...

Colonel Michael C. Griffin, a USMC officer, has wrote a paper entitled "Rethinking Victory in Counterinsurgency" . He suggests r...

In a recent interview in Afghanistan the outgoing Army Sergeant Major - Raymond Chandler - provided us with his insight on counterinsurgenc...

The Asia Foundation has published an article entitled "Modern Conflict is Not What You Think" (Dec 10, 2014) by Iain King. The ...

The topic of counterinsurgency is popular if you judge it by the number of books coming out. It is interesting to see so many perspectives ...