Probably the best CT/COIN Article to Date...

Leave it to Foreign Policy to put out one of the most brilliant assessments of the current situation in Central Asia. Highlights from "All al Qaedas are not created equal" below:

Insurgents and terrorists: not interchangeable

In theoretical terms, a key difference between ‘insurgents' and ‘terrorists' is the focus for each group: for insurgents it's the population, but for terrorists it's self-preservation, namely the ability to train effective operatives while maintaining operational security. Terrorists generally do not have nearly as much influence over a population as do insurgents, nor do they need as much support from it. Unlike an insurgent group that recruits among the population, al Qaeda in AfPak has rarely recruited among Afghans.

Al Qaeda in Iraq vs. al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Despite their shared brand, AQ in AfPak operates very differently from AQI (even in its heyday) and it has very different strategic aims. AQI aimed to control territory in order to discredit the Iraqi government and establish the first blotch in a jihadi oil-spot strategy aimed at redeveloping the caliphate. To achieve this end, AQI built a broad infrastructure that it tried to scale up dramatically, attacked U.S. forces daily, demanded that local insurgents and tribes swear allegiance to a formal State that it declared, provided a detailed -- though ridiculous -- description of the State's responsibilities, named a cabinet (that included positions like a Fisheries Minister), and directly imposed judicial punishments. AQI's aspirations of governance (and, critically, delusions of grandeur) put control over the Iraqi Sunnis at the heart of its strategy, which meant that the group was very vulnerable to a COIN approach designed to separate the group from the population writ large. AQI's strategy was fundamentally dysfunctional because it adopted the goals of an insurgent group without an entrenched social base and despite the fact that non-Iraqis composed its leadership and provided general direction. This mismatch is what Petraeus, McChrystal, McMaster and others so skillfully exploited in Iraq.

Terrorism after COIN

Counterinsurgency achieved what no other strategy could have in Iraq. The Iraqi government is more functional than it was three years ago, and AQI is a shadow of the organization that it was in 2006 and 2007. But even after a COIN strategy was successfully implemented, AQI is still capable of mounting attacks that kill hundreds of people at a time. And because of that, it is worth thinking about the dynamics that have enabled AQI to remain operational in Iraq.