When You’re Outnumbered: Lessons from Two British Masters of Irregular Warfare
Fascinating though this is, the negative long term impact of these guys tends to be much greater than their positive short-term impact.<p>You go in, you train a bunch of locals as guerrillas, you achieve the objective, and then you get out, leaving the local guerrillas behind.<p>These guys now have the knowledge, experience and organisation to make the place ungovernable. At least some of them will proceed to do so; either they will form a resistance movement to whoever is in charge and become a proxy force for some other power, or they will simply replace politics with profit and convert to organised crime. Either way, the new government is faced with an ungovernable mess.<p>Afganistan is probably the best example. It was never easy to govern, but after the US trained a guerilla resistance to the Soviet invasion it became impossible. Most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event.