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Chapter 3

1 Interview with Colonel Gary Anderson, USMC, March 1999; Frank L. Jones, “Marine Corps Civil Affairs and the Three Block War,” Marine Corps Gazette 86, no. 3 (March 1, 2002). Derek Summerfield, “The Psychosocial Effects of Conflict in the Third World,” Development in Practice 1, no. 3 (autumn 1991): 159–173: 2.

2 CNA Corporation, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change (Alexandria, VA: CNA Corporation, 2007), 44. Emphasis added. That was Gen. Anthony Zini (Ret.) reflecting on the military implications of climate change, but Woolsey, Panetta, and the others all make similar statements.

3 Tactics in Counterinsurgency (FM 3–24.2). US Military Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 2009), p. viii.

4 John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Thomas Ricks, The Gamble: General David Patraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008 (New York: Penguin Press, 2009). For an excellent and critical history of counterinsurgency in Colombia see, Forrest Hylton, “Plan Colombia: The Measure of Success,” Brown Journal of World Affairs Vol. XVII, no. I (Fall/Winter 2010): 99115.

5 For the classic discussion of anomie, see Robert K. Merton, “Social Structure and Anomie,” American Sociological Review 3, no. 5 (October 1938): 672–682.

6 Jose Harris, “War and Social History: Britain and the Home Front During the Second World War,” Contemporary European History 1, no. 1 (March 1992): 17–35: 18.

7 Indeed, that is what unlucky “guests” of the Taliban, like Jerey van Dyke, describe. By his account, the Taliban give the impression that drone strikes build unity on the ground, even if they fray and wear upon the Taliban leadership networks. Jerey Van Dyke, Captive: My Time As a Prisoner of the Taliban (New York: Times Books, 2010).

8 Summerfield, “The Psychosocial Effects of Conflict,” 159–173: 2.

9 I am thinking here most specifically of political Islam. See Oliver Roy, The Failures of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), in which French scholar Roy argues that political Islam, once in power, necessarily tempers its radicalism, for there is no “Islamic” way to run a modern economy or state because Islam is not a social theory but a moral theory.

10 Robert J. Bunker, “Epochal Change: War over Social and Political Organization,” Parameters 27 (summer 1997): 15–25.

11 As often happens in colonial situations, there were both resistance and creative adaptation on the part of the colonized people. As explained in Theda Perdue and Michael Green’s excellent The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears, the Cherokees used the “civilizing” process, turning it to their own national ends. They adopted modern farming methods and tools, as well as created a Cherokee script, newspapers, a constitution, and a modern sovereign state. They engaged in long-distance trade and the cash economy, even buying and owning slaves, and brought in white indentured servants to work their lands. But they resisted efforts to privatize their land holdings and hung on to their language and customs and thereby, through partial acculturation, thwarted conquest. Interestingly, the Kikuyu of Kenya and the Chagga of Tanzania also both resisted and adapted to colonialism in a similar fashion to the Cherokee. On the Cherokee, see Theda Perdue and Michael Green, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (New York: Viking, 2007).

12 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor, 1961). General George Crook quoted in John A. Nagl, Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

13 If this sounds a lot like Judeo-Christian eschatology, that is because there