An Australian counter-terrorism expert

Awrite up about David Kilcullen: Fighting terror with brain power. Excerpts:
"The strategic mistake Kilcullen identifies at the heart of the immediate US-led response to September 11 was the weight given to counter-terrorism — an "enemy-centric" assumption that removing a terrorist network would remove the problem. Classical counter-insurgency, on the other hand, is "population-centric".

"It focuses on the population, seeking to protect it from harm by, or interaction with, the insurgents. It competes with the insurgents for influence and control at the grassroots level," he writes.
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The second fault is a layer of hypocrisy he sees in Washington's new show of good faith on Afghanistan and its hand-wringing on Pakistan — American lawmakers cannot help themselves when it comes to spending hugely on resources that are inappropriate for today's wars, he says.

In campaigning for costly defence industry facilities to win jobs and votes in their electorates, lawmakers continue to replenish defence inventories with more of the conventional, shock-and-awe capability — when the wars Washington confronts are the unconventional misfortune of accidental guerillas.

He writes: "It takes factories, jobs and industrial facilities to produce battleships and bombers. But aid workers, linguists and special forces operators are vastly cheaper and do not demand the same industrial base. (Yet) shifting spending priorities … would cost jobs and votes in the congressional districts of the very people who control that spending."
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Kilcullen proposes that new US troops bound for Afghanistan be tasked with securing population centres, allowing the people to get on with their lives and politics, while Afghan security forces, backed by small teams of US special forces, secure the areas between the centres.

"The conflict remains winnable, but the overall trend is extremely negative and a concerted long-term effort is needed — lasting 5-10 years at least — if we are to have any chance of building a resilient Afghan state and the kind of civil society that can defeat the threat.

"Extending an effective, legitimate government presence into 40,020 villages for the first time in modern Afghan history is the principal challenge, as government weakness, corruption, misrule and perceived lack of legitimacy at the village and district level allows militias, warlords and criminals to reassert themselves.""

There is also a discussion of some of Kilcullen's comments in the Chapati Mystery:
Will Pakistan Become A Theocracy? II. The first part has many interesting comments and links.