Yes, and Bernard Fall too. Classic texts. Not laziness so much as looking for one’s car keys under the streetlamp because the light is better there.

However, I think there is an important difference between COIN in one’s own country and attempting it in somebody else’s. The former is literally a survival strategy because you have no place else to go and the second is an exit strategy.

That said, your point that there are things to learn about the successes and mistakes made in COIN in other places is valid. The history experiences have not been exhaustively mined and disseminated yet. How many western COIN experts study the Basmachi Revolt? Not many, unless they were previously Soviet or Turkic specialists.

The School of the Americas taught COIN after the fashion of those times but the overriding purpose of that institution, I would argue, was the cultivation of career-long mil to mil ties between Latin American officer corps and the U.S. Army.

Then there is Nepal, Sri Lanka, India, and even — yes — Pakistan. To say nothing of China’s continuing inability to successfully conquer Tibet.

That last one is stretching the COIN thing a lot, but the point is there is a huge variety of insurgencies, and their relative success and failures, to study. But we still default back to Galula talking about Algeria.

Great question. In my view the reasons for that are:

1. Largesse of primary sources, secondary literature in English and living eyewitnesses who can communicate in the same. Secondarily in French, a commonly taught FL in American public education.

2. Those examples are of foreign armies executing COIN abroad or assisting locals to do so. Yes, the French considered Algeria to be la patrie but a sizable number of Algerians said “Non”.

3. Some old school counterinsurgency tactics executed by Latin American colonels or French or Belgian commandants in the 20′s and 30′s or German junkers in Africa prior to WWI are not going to fly, morally speaking, in modern 21st century democracies.

you bring up some excellent points and topics to explore. I am glad I found your site.

here’s hoping i land on my feet somehow – without having to resort to staying in North America and taking a PR job or something equally as execrable.

I learned a lot of details about AFG, for example, by reading various blogs, including Registan. The problem’s rather that there’s too much information (one reason why I’ce been slow to put Twitter to much use so far).
Of course, one has to try to stay out of the echo chambers as good as possible and deliberately include the stuff one disagrees with (at times that’s harder than one thinks).

But I seriously wouldn’t want to miss it anymore. Done right you’ll so much more than by reading any number of newspapers.

OK, not really deep thoughts here but I’m tired