The United States Armed Forces and their allies are engaged in irregular warfare against terrorists, insurgents, and armed criminals around the world.  Currently, this war is most intense in Afghanistan. During the last year the US has sustained its greatest losses in Afghanistan since the war started in 2001. What is the strategy for Afghanistan? More importantly, what is the outcome we seek?

Knowing what success will look like is an essential prerequisite for developing strategy.  To do this, a comprehensive framework will be developed to understand the dynamics of war and politics in Afghanistan, in particular, and the region in general.

Since 9/11, the "global war on terror" has been pursued by the United States in a variety of locales using two fundamentally distinct military approaches to combat terrorism and insurgencies: kinetic and nonkinetic.  Kinetic strategies are those that emphasize destruction of an enemy’s capacity to fight by using kinetic means (the clash of arms) to “find, fix, and finish,” the enemy’s war-making machine (personnel, weapons, communications gear, supplies, etc).  Nonkinetic approaches emphasize the degrading of the enemy’s will to fight by focusing on the material, cultural, and spiritual needs of the relevant population, a population which serves as the fundamental support element for terrorists and insurgents.  In the battle against extremists in the Philippines (e.g., Abu Sayyaf Group, Jemaah Islamiah, Moro Islamic Liberation Front, Moro National Liberation Front, New Peoples Army, Raja Solaiman Movement), the Philippine government, strongly supported by the United States, has pursued a mix of both approaches, but to a much greater extent, the emphasis has been on nonkinetic, rather than kinetic, approaches.  

Unfortunately, these two approaches to have been subjected to limited empirical investigation.  To date, most research has been done using qualitative methods (narrative textual histories of specific insurgencies or groups). As such we have yet to establish whether certain approaches are more effective than others, or whether some work better in certain situations while other approaches work better in other types of situations.  Put differently, our theoretical musings exist in a virtual empirical vacuum.


The CORE Lab’s Philippine research project seeks to address this vacuum.  Building upon previous research that collected and analyzed Philippine insurgency data from 2001-2004,  we are currently recording and gleaning an additional 26 years of data from the Philippines, giving us a total of thirty years of temporal data (1978-2008).  In addition, we are collecting relational, geospatial and civil affairs data that will allow us to combine various types of analytic approaches.