Introduction

The rise and fall of intellectual fashions is something that analysts sometimes ponder, attempting to discern the factors that inspired them and the manner in which they eventually fade into irrelevance. The past ten years witnessed the rise to ascendancy of counter-insurgency orthodoxy within military, political, and academic circles, notably in Washington and Westminster.1 The origins of this orthodoxy are not hard to trace. They date from 11 September 2001 when the al-Qaeda jihadist network hijacked four airliners, two of which were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the other striking the Pentagon in Alexandria, Virginia, while the fourth crashed into a Pennsylvania field. The loss of nearly 3,000 lives on that fateful day was the defining factor that eventually saw counter-insurgency as its logical response.