KNOWING THE ENEMY.

In 1993, a young captain in the Australian Army named David Kilcullen was living among villagers in West Java, as part of an immersion program in the Indonesian language. One day, he visited a local military museum that contained a display about Indonesia's war, during the nineteen-fifties and sixties, against a separatist Muslim insurgency movement called Darul Islam. "I had never heard of this conflict," Kilcullen told me recently. "It's hardly known in the West. The Indonesian government won, hands down. And I was fascinated by how it managed to pull off such a successful counterinsurgency campaign."

Kilcullen, the son of two left-leaning academics, had studied counterinsurgency as a cadet at Duntroon, the Australian West Point, and he decided to pursue a doctorate in political anthropology at the University of New South Wales. He chose as his dissertation subject the Darul Islam conflict, conducting research over tea with former guerrillas while continuing to serve in the Australian Army. The rebel movement, he said, was bigger than the Malayan Emergency--the twelve-year Communist revolt against British rule, which was finally put down in 1960, and which has become a major point of reference in the military doctrine of counterinsurgency. During the years that Kilcullen worked on his dissertation, two events in Indonesia deeply affected his thinking. The first was the rise--in the same region that had given birth to Darul Islam, and among some of the same families--of a more extreme Islamist movement called Jemaah Islamiya, which became a Southeast Asian affiliate of Al Qaeda. The second was East Timor's successful struggle for independence from Indonesia. Kilcullen witnessed the former as he was carrying out his field work; he participated in the latter as an infantry-company commander in a United Nations intervention force. The experiences shaped the conclusions about counter-insurgency in his dissertation, which he finished in 2001, just as a new war was about to begin.

"I saw extremely similar behavior and extremely similar problems in an Islamic insurgency in West Java and a Christian-separatist insurgency in East Timor," he said. "After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, 'The problem is Islam,' I was thinking, It's something deeper than that. It's about human social networks and the way that they operate." In West Java, elements of the failed Darul Islam insurgency--a local separatist movement with mystical leanings--had resumed fighting as Jemaah Islamiya, whose outlook was Salafist and global. Kilcullen said, "What that told me about Jemaah Islamiya is that it's not about theology." He went on, "There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what's happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not 'Islamic behavior.' " Paraphrasing the American political scientist Roger D. Petersen, he said, "People don't get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks." He noted that all fifteen Saudi hijackers in the September 11th plot had trouble with their fathers. Although radical ideas prepare the way for disaffected young men to become violent jihadists, the reasons they convert, Kilcullen said, are more mundane and familiar: family, friends, associates.

Indonesia's failure to replicate in East Timor its victory in West Java later in-fluenced Kilcullen's views about what the Bush Administration calls the "global war on terror." In both instances, the Indonesian military used the same harsh techniques, including forced population movements, coercion of locals into security forces, stringent curfews, and even lethal pressure on civilians to take the government side. The reason that the effort in East Timor failed, Kilcullen concluded, was globalization. In the late nineties, a Timorese international propaganda campaign and ubiquitous media coverage prompted international intervention, thus ending the use of tactics that, in the obscure jungles of West Java in the fifties, outsiders had known nothing about. "The globalized information environment makes counterinsurgency even more difficult now," Kilcullen said.

Just before the 2004 American elections, Kilcullen was doing intelligence work for the Australian government, sifting through Osama bin Laden's public statements, including transcripts of a video that offered a list of grievances against America: Palestine, Saudi Ara-bia, Afghanistan, global warming. The last item brought Kilcullen up short. "I thought, Hang on! What kind of jihadist are you?" he recalled. The odd inclusion of environmentalist rhetoric, he said, made clear that "this wasn't a list of genuine grievances. This was an Al Qaeda information strategy." Ron Suskind, in his book "The One Percent Doctrine," claims that analysts at the C.I.A. watched a similar video, released in 2004, and concluded that "bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection." Bin Laden shrewdly created an implicit association between Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party, for he had come to feel that Bush's strategy in the war on terror was sustaining his own global importance. Indeed, in the years after September 11th Al Qaeda's core leadership had become a propaganda hub. "If bin Laden didn't have access to global media, satellite communications, and the Internet, he'd just be a cranky guy in a cave," Kilcullen said.

In 2004, Kilcullen's writings and lectures brought him to the attention of an official working for Paul Wolfowitz, then the Deputy Secretary of Defense. Wolf-owitz asked him to help write the section on "irregular warfare" in the Pentagon's "Quadrennial Defense Review," a statement of department policy and priorities, which was published earlier this year. Under the leadership of Donald Rumsfeld, who resigned in November, the Pentagon had embraced a narrow "shock-and-awe" approach to war-fighting, emphasizing technology, long-range firepower, and spectacular displays of force. The new document declared that activities such as "long-duration unconventional warfare, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and military support for stabilization and reconstruction efforts" needed to become a more important component of the war on terror. Kilcullen was partly responsible for the inclusion of the phrase "the long war," which has become the preferred term among many military officers to describe the current conflict. In the end, the Rumsfeld Pentagon was unwilling to make the cuts in expensive weapons systems that would have allowed it to create new combat units and other resources necessary for a proper counterinsurgency strategy.

In July, 2005, Kilcullen, as a result of his work on the Pentagon document, received an invitation to attend a conference on defense policy, in Vermont. There he met Henry Crumpton, a highly regarded official who had supervised the C.I.A.'s covert activities in Afghanistan during the 2001 military campaign that overthrew the Taliban. The two men spent much of the conference talking privately, and learned, among other things, that they saw the war on terror in the same way. Soon afterward, Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, hired Crumpton as the department's coordinator for counterterrorism, and Crumpton, in turn, offered Kilcullen a job. For the past year, Kilcullen has occupied an office on the State Department's second floor, as Crumpton's chief strategist. In some senses, Kilcullen has arrived too late: this year, the insurgency in Iraq has been transformed into a calamitous civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, and his ideas about counterinsurgency are unlikely to reverse the country's disintegration. Yet radical Islamist movements now extend across the globe, from Somalia to Afghanistan and Indonesia, and Kilcullen--an Austra-lian anthropologist and lieutenant colonel, who is "on loan" to the U.S. government--offers a new…