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You can't kill your way to success in a counter insurgency effort. You have to protect the people, get the civil military balance right, train the locals, and practice effective strategic communications.

Offensive operations and hunting down the enemy is an integral part of any counterinsurgency approach.

You know as well as I do that counterinsurgency is a very nuanced type of military operation.

Insurgencies are easy to make and hard to stop. Only a few ingredients need to combine to create an insurgency; like oxygen and fire, they're very common and mix all too often. The recipe is, simply, a legitimate grievance against a state, a state that refuses to compromise, a quorum of angry people, and access to weapons.

Counter-insurgency, as you know, is a roller-coaster affair.

In other words, for every 10 enemy you kill you bring on 20 new recruits to their anti-coalition cause then essentially you are working against yourself.

It is impossible to preserve my friendship with people who are allegedly leaders when they are attacking their own people, shooting at them, using tanks and other forms of heavy weaponry.

You can't talk about defeating insurgencies in the same way that you can with a conventional army.

I never call it an insurgency. I call it terrorism.

Guerrilla leaders win wars by being paranoid and ruthless. Once they take power, they are expected to abandon those qualities and embrace opposite ones: tolerance, compromise and humility. Almost none manages to do so.