Over at The Danger Room, Noah Shachtman managed to score an interview with Dr. David Kilcullen, chief counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus. Kilcullen seems to have taken a special interest in the power of the blog, posting regular contributions to the blog run by the Small Wars Journal, the most recent of which can be found here, and participating in the OSD's series of blogger conference calls--excerpts of that conversation can be found here.

Kilcullen tells Shachtman that the walls that have been constructed throughout Baghdad to stem the flow of insurgents and militias from one neighborhood to the next have put the Coalition "in a position to move against the [insurgent] havens."

"The point of the walls was to structure the environment, to hold the city and keep it safe," he tells DANGER ROOM. "It's like [keeping] guard inside a concrete building, instead of in the middle of a field... You don't need vast maneuver forces to do it... It's the principle of economy of force."

Now that the eleven sets of walls across Baghdad have been built -- "controlling access, preventing attacks on the community, and preventing attacks from being launched on someone else," Kilcullen says -- "we're now in a position to move against the [insurgent] havens."

"Murders and sectarian killings have dropped 63%" in Baghdad's Adhamiya neighborhood, since the wall has been put in place, he claims. Residents are "thrilled."

Go read the whole thing.

A picture shows a wall made of concrete blocks, which separates Baghdad's
al-Adhamiyah district from a neighboring Shiite area in east Baghdad.
Wisam Sami/AFP