52 Weekend Fin | Lunch with The AFR 13-14 December 2014The Australian Financial Review | www.afr.com

There is a whiff of T.E.Lawrence about DavidKilcullen’scareer.

Like Lawrence, hewas a relatively juniorofficer plucked out to beone of the brains behinda successful military

campaign that swept across an Arab nation.Like Lawrence, he rewrote the book on theunconventional warfare of insurgency andcounter-insurgencyintheprocess.

Unlike Lawrence, Kilcullen worked fortheoccupiersratherthantherebels.Asatopstrategist to United States Iraq supremoGeneral David Petraeus, and NationalSecurity Advisor Condoleezza Rice, hehelped to salvage the George W. Bush-ledinvasionofIraqthatheoncedescribedinsol-dierlylanguageas“f---ingstupid”.

In civilian life, he runs two WashingtonDC-based companies, Caerus Associatesand First Mile Geo, which use big datacrunching and people on the ground to pro-vide detailed analyses of disaster-hit placestopotential investorsandaidgroups.

In keeping, the lunch is to be one ofmilitary precision. I have exactly one hourwith Kilcullen at the Westin, off Sydney’sMartin Place, before he heads for the airportat12.30pmsharp.

The Mosaic Restaurant has arranged toserve us half an hour before the usualopening; our orders placed the day beforefrom an emailed menu. The staff have beenbriefed and a discreet table kept at the backforaquietchatinthebusyatrium.

When Kilcullen appears, just a fewminutes late, he is compact, powerful – stillthe infantryman – but youthful behind thebeard. He also has a disarming, breezyfriendlinessIhadn’texpected.

Food arrives quickly. We have bothorderedMosaic’squicklunchplate,starters,veggies and a fillet of barramundi withasparagus,inneatmodularcontainers.Overthe prosciutto, I ask how he suddenly foundhimself inwithWashington’sstrategicelite.

“Back in 2004, I wrote a paper for theAustralian Army, critiquing the thenstrategyofthewaronterrorandsayingthereisadifferentwaytothinkaboutthis.”

US deputy secretary of defence underGeorgeW.Bush,PaulWolfowitz,readitandwrote to the Australian Government askingif they“couldborrowDave.AndtheAustral-ian Army actually said: ‘He’s only a colonel.We have generals. You can have one ofthose.’ And the Americans said, ‘No – wewanttheguythatwrotethepaper.’”

The paper’s big idea was that al-Qaeda’sjihadisaglobalnetworkofinsurgenciesthatisgreaterthanthesumofitsparts.

Attack the links between the parts –linkages of ideas, recruits, attacks, propa-ganda, and grievances – and you take thesteamoutofthenetworkveryquickly.

At a time when there was no organisingprinciple for the war on al-Qaeda, it made abig impact. So did Kilcullen’s observationthat much of the discontent in Sunni west-ernIraqwaseconomic,becomingabasisforthe successful 2007 US “surge” to tame theinsurgency, and for which he wrote theexecutive plan. His practical guide tocounter-insurgency is still carried around

by officers in armies worldwide (it is eventranslated into Russian) and became part ofthe United States Army’s official manual onthesubject.

“I didn’t really advise Petraeus. He didn’tneed my advice,” Kilcullen smiles.Instead, he uses the jargon of “change man-agement” for his work, leaving me with aslightly weird image of people trundlingthe battlefields of Iraq spouting McKinsey-ishbulletpoints.

He anticipates that thought: front-linesoliders react like everyone else to visiting management wonks, he says. “Put yourselfin the circumstance of somebody who’sbeen fighting in Iraq for a year. They havelost a lot of people killed and you parachuteinwithlotsofbrilliantideasandthey’re, like,hang on man, I want to get through my tourbefore I try anything new. So it was verydifficult to get them on board ... but once wedid,theychangeddramatically.”

Kilcullen thinks deeply on the nature ofwar and muses over its biggest dilemma:each war seems as bad as it can get; soterminally horrible that there is never anypolitical will to think about the next one –even to stop it sliding into something worse.“It’s the refuge of the scoundrel to mentionHitler,butwedealwiththingswhentheyaresmall, not when they are big and danger-ous.” The problem is that our “normalitybias” kicks in, he says. We think “what it islike now, is how it will always be,” so weneverfightthewarsweexpect.“It’smyjobtoimagine this stuff,” he says with suddenemphasis.

In May this year, President BarackObama was proclaiming the complete USdeparture from Iraq, and largely fromAfghanistan, as big political wins. Twoweekslater–threeyearsafterwhatKilcullenviews as a premature exit there – ISISexploded across the Iraqi desert to carve outits own jihadist state, shocking the world.“Wouldn’t it have been awesome if we hadstayed in Iraq and we would never have hadto deal with ISIS,” he says. Islamic State is adifferent beast from al-Qaeda, but Kilcullencan see more terrible things than either ofthem.

“The worst-case scenario is not that ISISand al-Qaeda continue to be rivals, it’s thatthey pal up. You end up with a precipitatewithdrawal from Afghanistan, creatingspace for the Taliban to come back, just likeISIS did in Iraq, then al-Qaeda comes in onthe back of that, and then you have ISIS andal-QaedaoneithersideofShiaIran,andthentheSunni-Shiaregionalcivilwarison”–andquitepossibly,hesays,“withnukes”.

I can see the big clock on the old PostOffice tower in Martin Place. It’s a littleafter noon and we are already on toArmageddon. Talking such catastropheover a piece of fish with this soldier-scholarseemsmatteroffact,neithersillynorscary.

He was always heading for the army,despite left-leaning academic parents,growing up on Sydney’s north shore, thenRoyal Military College, Duntroon at 17, theinfantry, then a PhD from the AustralianDefenceForceAcademy.

ChildhoodmemoriesoftheVietnamWaron TV had inspired him. Its lessons shapehow Kilcullen thinks terrorism should be

fought now. The previous night, giving theJohn Bonython lecture in Sydney for theCentre for Independent Studies, he warned,“We may destroy our free and open societyinordertosaveit:afullyprotectedstatelooksalot likeapolicestate.”

Hereallydoesthinkaterroristattackhereis 100 per cent likely but believes we need “abigpublicdebate”onhowmuchprivacyandfreedomweshouldtradeoff forprotection.

Spookish security bureaucrats cannottake that decision because they have vestedinterests,hesays,anditcannotbepoliticiansbecause they are too easy to blame if it goeswrong. “You end up spending lots of moneyand destroying things about your societythat you hold dear – and an attack happensanyway.” That’s a risk “the public at large”hastohelpdecidehowtomanage.

Kilcullen strongly believes Western lib-eralvaluesarealsothebestanswertopeoplewho leave here for the Middle East tobecomethoseterrorists.

A bad mistake after September 11, he says,was to deal with Muslim communitiesthrough intermediaries – usually olderauthoritarian men – which further segre-gatedcommunitiesandencouragedthemtoseek special favours. It strands their young-stersbetweendifferentworlds.

“WeneedtotreatAustralianMuslimslikeAustralian Catholics, Australian Hindus orany other Australian with all the rights,freedoms, expectations and responsibilitiesthat come from free membership of a freesociety,” he told his CIS audience: “Theanswer to domestic radicalistion is morefreedom,notless.”

The people flocking to join ISIS are notthat different from those going to Spain inthe 1930s,” he suggests. They are mostlyadventurers rather than zealots “who wantto be part of something of world historicalimportancethat’ssuccessful–andISISisthebiggest game in town. We have got to be say-

ing‘wehaveagreatsocietyhereinAustralia.You can makes something of yourself . . .which you can’t in Syria or Iraq. Don’t wasteyourlifeonjihad.’”

It’s 12.20pm. Still OK for the plane. Theplates have long been cleared and we ordercoffee and tea. He cheerfully says he is in theUSasa“warbride”:hiswifeJanineDavidsonwas a senior US Air Force pilot who went onto become the deputy assistant secretary ofdefenceforplansatthePentagon.

Women now command major US navaland air force units. But great generals andadmirals in history were also completebastards, I suggest, ruthless with their ownforcestoachievevictory.“Youmightget intotrouble answering this,” I say. “Do womenhavethe,er, insensitivityneeded?”

“Most women are not ruthless or physi-cally capable enough to be in combat,” he says. “And neither are most men. It’s not agender thing. There’s always going to be acertain minority in a population that is ableto do what it takes to suffer and inflict theviolencetokeepussafe.

“My wife was the first woman to fly C-130transport planes on operations in the US AirForce. She had a terrible time with basicallysexist decisions put in place in the 1950s andthat no one wanted to revisit . . . if we nowgenuinely think there is a climate to putwomen into the infantry or special forces,weshouldstructureitsothatwesetupthosepeopleforsuccess.”

I mention the famous study that foundthat most US soldiers in the Normandycampaign of World War II did not actuallyfiretheirrifles.“Eveninall-maleunitsunderfire, the majority of men don’t feel ready totake a life,” says Kilcullen, who has been infirefights in East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistanand Somalia, and fired back. “There is noth-ing like someone shooting at you to helpovercomeyourresistance.”

We do not give much help to those whoend up doing the shooting. “It’s one thing tohave been shot at on behalf of your country.It’s another thing entirely to shoot someoneelse. People come back, having been forcedto break a fundamental human taboo,and their society does not necessarilysupportthem.”

It is 12.40pm. We quickly make our good-byes, he onwards to the Middle East to meetIraqi and Syrian contacts, eager for morenewsthatmighthelptamemayhem.

THEMANFROMARMAGEDDON

The Australian army actuallysaid: ‘He’s only a colonel. Wehave generals. You can have oneof those.’ And the Americanssaid, ‘No – we want that guy.’

David Kilcullen is the high flying, plain spokenAustralian strategist who now thinks the unthinkableabout Islamist extremism, writes Kevin Chinnery.

MOSAICWestin Sydney,Martin Place

2 barramundilunch plates, $761 bottle of SanPellegrino, $181 double espresso, $91 English breakfasttea, $9Total: $112

Counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen says Western liberal values are the answer. PHOTO: LOUISE KENNERLEY

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