groups or deprive more established elements their freedom of operation. Almost inevitably the seductive promises offered by this turn to irregular warfare remained largely illusory. In the southern Philippines, the conflation of the local Islamic extremist Abu Sayaf Group (ASG) with a broader Al-Qaeda-inspired global insurgency obscured the far more relevant and parochial explanation of a lengthy tradition of ethnic marginalization of the Muslim Bangsamoro people at the hands of the Philippine state. Such a misdiagnosis ensured that the lengthy and concerted U.S. military assistance effort to the Manila government had a little observable effect upon the ASG’s operational capacities. In Mali and Niger, various forms of capacity-building designed to pre-empt the emergence of Islamic militancy in that region proved a minimal impediment to both Al-Qaeda and indeed Islamic State’s subsequent ability to make ground there, while in Somalia attempts by the United States to use neighbouring Ethiopian proxies to undermine the dominant Islamic Courts Union’s (ICU) hold on power simply resulted in the emergence of a far more powerful, capable and unpleasant adversary in the form of Al-Qaeda allied Al Shabaab. In the Caspian basin, by contrast, the train-and-assist programme designed to aid the Georgian government’s offensive against Chechen militants in the Pankisi Gorge may have blended conveniently with pre-existing U.S. concerns over regional oil security, but it soon exposed the problematic implications of forging intimate military relations with a country that was viewed by a major strategic rival – Russia – with intense suspicion. By way of forensic interrogation of the official sources Ryan lifts the lid on these previously little known missions (and others) and knits them together into a much broader whole; that of a concerted attempt, across the span of nearly two decades, to use irregular warfare capabilities to undermine and destroy a range of violent non-state actors that American policymakers perceived as comprising a pressing threat to vital U.S. interests. Those capabilities and doctrines were undoubtedly impressive. But when arrayed against the layered and highly specific complexities pertaining to these lesser-known fronts on ‘The War on Terror’, irregular warfare proved far less than the sum of its parts.

中文翻译：

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书评：二十一世纪的城市战争安东尼·金

团体或剥夺更成熟的成员的行动自由。这种转向非常规战争所提供的诱人承诺几乎不可避免地在很大程度上仍然是虚幻的。在菲律宾南部，当地的伊斯兰极端主义阿布沙耶夫集团 (ASG) 与受基地组织启发的更广泛的全球叛乱混为一谈，掩盖了对长期的穆斯林邦萨摩洛人种族边缘化传统更为相关和狭隘的解释。菲律宾政府手中。这种误诊确保了美国对马尼拉政府的长期和协调一致的军事援助努力对 ASG 的作战能力产生了一点明显的影响。在马里和尼日尔，旨在防止伊斯兰激进分子在该地区出现的各种形式的能力建设证明对基地组织和伊斯兰国随后在该地区扎根的能力构成最小的障碍，而在索马里，美国试图利用邻国埃塞俄比亚的代理人破坏占主导地位的伊斯兰法院联盟 (ICU) 的掌权，这只会导致以基地组织联盟青年党的形式出现一个更强大、更有能力和令人不快的对手。相比之下，在里海盆地，旨在帮助格鲁吉亚政府在潘基西峡谷对车臣武装分子的进攻的训练和援助计划可能与美国对地区石油安全的预先存在的担忧方便地融合在一起，但它很快暴露了与一个被主要战略对手——俄罗斯——高度怀疑的国家建立密切军事关系的问题影响。通过对官方消息来源的法医审讯，Ryan 揭开了这些以前鲜为人知的任务（和其他任务）的面纱，并将它们编织成一个更广泛的整体；在近 20 年的时间里，他们齐心协力地尝试利用非常规战争能力来破坏和摧毁美国决策者认为对美国重要利益构成紧迫威胁的一系列暴力非国家行为者。这些能力和学说无疑令人印象深刻。但是，当面对与“反恐战争”中这些鲜为人知的战线有关的分层和高度具体的复杂性时，