Kevin Drum points to a great piece in the New Yorker by George Packer (author of The Assassins’ Gate (on my “to read” list). The piece is called “Knowing the Enemy and it’s more or less about, well, not knowing the enemy.

The story is built around a series of interviews and conversations with Lt. Col. David Kilcullen and several social scientists and experts. Through the long piece, through Packer they argue convincingly that America needs a new approach to counterinsurgency that focuses less on a “global war on terror” and more on a global counterinsurgency that focuses on regional and local dynamics.

Crumpton, Kilcullen’s boss, told me that American foreign policy traditionally operates on two levels, the global and the national; today, however, the battlefields are also regional and local, where the U.S. government has less knowledge and where it is not institutionally organized to act. In half a dozen critical regions, Crumpton has organized meetings among American diplomats, intelligence officials, and combat commanders, so that information about cross-border terrorist threats is shared. “It’s really important that we define the enemy in narrow terms,” Crumpton said. “The thing we should not do is let our fears grow and then inflate the threat. The threat is big enough without us having to exaggerate it.”

By speaking of Saddam Hussein, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Taliban, the Iranian government, Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda in terms of one big war, Administration officials and ideologues have made Osama bin Laden’s job much easier. “You don’t play to the enemy’s global information strategy of making it all one fight,” Kilcullen said. He pointedly avoided describing this as the Administration’s approach. “You say, ‘Actually, there are sixty different groups in sixty different countries who all have different objectives. Let’s not talk about bin Laden’s objectives—let’s talk about your objectives. How do we solve that problem?’ ” In other words, the global ambitions of the enemy don’t automatically demand a monolithic response.

The article is filled with a lot of ideas about what a better course would look like in Iraq. They also seem like common sense. Of course, common sense is in short supply in this White House.

It’s quite long, but well worth reading the whole thing.

Here are some more excerpts from the article.
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