This morning David Kilcullen spoke at Demos. Dr Kilcullen is an expert on counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism and author of The Accidental Guerrilla, a book about modern military strategy.

His visit to Demos was timely - both in terms of the UK Government's recent publication of its Afghanistan & Pakistan Strategy and because, despite this, there is a growing sense of unease among the establishment that there is no obvious political strategy.

In a comment piece for the FT today, Max Hastings summed up this sense of foreboding by suggesting that 'The most important priority for Washington is to determine exactly what its soldiers hope to accomplish, rather than making it up as they go along.' The recent Af-Pak review by Bruce Reidel, as well as the British Government's own strategy published last week, suggests that finding a suitable and effective political strategy is still ongoing work.

The threats are complex and we must be careful not to conflate local conflicts with global trends.  Kilcullen stresses that we only ever have a partial view of the situation and there cannot be any single solutions. If anything, military strategy is a continuous learning experience.  In Kilcullen’s words, ‘finding new, breakthrough ideas to understand and defeat these threats may prove the most important challenge we face.

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