Kilcullen Blogger Call

Dr. David Kilcullen, who currently serves as senior counter-insurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus and Multi-National Force Iraq, participated in a conference call with bloggers and reporters this morning.

Kilcullen has a distinguished record, having served as chief counter-terrorism strategist for the U.S. State Department, senior analyst in Australia's Office of National Assessments, and special adviser to the Pentagon for counter-terrorism during the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review. He also blogs at the Small Wars Journal.

The call lasted nearly 45 minutes, so I won't try and cover everything that was discussed, but there will be a complete transcript and audio file posted here sometime today.

So, a few highlights:

A reporter from the San Antonio Express News asked Kilcullen "to elaborate one one of the accelerants--Iran. We understand the connection between the Iranian regime and the Shia extremist groups, but what's perplexing to many of us is the dynamics between Iran and the Sunni extremists."

KILCULLEN: "I think it's really important to understand as a sort of first thought that the groups that are fighting in Iraq, mostly are fighting for political advantage, and, in fact, if you look at the different groups that are fighting, some of them appear to be very different religiously--there are what look like far-right Sunni groups and what look like extremist Shia groups, but actually, you often find people that know each other in those groups and they sometimes cooperate on a tactical basis. If you think about it as a purely religious phenomenon, that's confusing: why would extreme Shia cooperate with extreme Sunni? But the thing is, you gotta remember that every Iraqi has at least two identities. They've got a pre-2003 identity, from when before we arrived, and then they've got their current identity, under the environment that we're in now. So a lot of these people know each other from Saddam days and they do tend to act like an old oligarchy that's trying to preserve their interests. And you often find Shia and Sunni groups sort of tactically cooperating in some ways, or leaders in different groups knowing each other. So, first of all, it's not quite as sharp a dichotomy between Sunni and Shia as you might think. The second point, Iran has a history of this and there's a current pattern of Iranian behavior, both in Afghanistan, where they're supporting the Taliban, who used to be their enemies, and in Iraq, where they're supporting both Sunni and Shia groups in different ways. Essentially, what they're trying to do is bog us down. Their strategy is to soak us up, make it hard for us to maneuver, get us, if you like, decisively committed here in Iraq and over in Afghanistan--to sort of achieve freedom of maneuver for themselves. So it's Iranian national self-interest that's involved here more than some kind of religious dynamic. If you see the Iranians as fundamentally Shia, you get the wrong answer. They are Shia, but what motivates their activity, I think a lot of the time, isn't Shia politics, it's Iranian influence, if you like, Persian interests. And so a lot of these guys who work with the Iranians may think that they are working on behalf of their faith, but they are actually essentially Persian stooges is how I would put it. And in the case of the Sunnis, it's more of a tactical alliance of convenience where the Iranians believe there's benefits, and various Sunni leaders who know them, or have contacts, will exploit that. And why wouldn't you, if you know that someone's offering to give you assistance?"

I got in the last question. I asked Kilcullen about how airpower fits into the Coalition's counterinsurgency operations--a topic that's been much discussed, particularly by the Air Force, which appears to feel a bit marginalized by the Petraeus Doctrine: