If you put enough pressure on an adversary group, or terris group to make it adapt, but not enough to destroy it, you actually improve that group. i use the example o sani taliban, where we have killed, at a distance of about four years apart, three successive leaders of the pagasani taliban. And each time that leader has been replaced by a better, more experienced, more respected, more capable, more ideologically extreme leader. So we're actually improving the terrorist as we do that. Another example is in a rack, where we almost completely destroyed arcida in a rack and all that was left were this very small remnant of highly experienced, extremely pissed off
This month will mark a year since the Taliban takeover of Kabul in August 2021 and the chaotic withdrawal of western forces from Afghanistan. In this archive discussion from 2020, we discuss the nature of past Western interventions and the guerrilla warfare resistance that has followed with David Kilcullen, former soldier, diplomat, and senior counterinsurgency adviser for the US during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He joined Carl Miller, Research Director at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos, to discuss his book: The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices