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For the "strong" power, guerrilla wars are extraordinarily demanding. Guerrillas typically melt away into the general population, either because they have political support there or because they terrorize civilians into protecting them. (My guess is that in Iraq today both conditions are met.) So the strong power has to hunt the enemy not on the battlefield but in towns and villages. The risks are twofold: an ambush like that in Mogadishu or a gradual alienation of the local population leading to unbearable political pressure to end a war--which is how the French were forced out of Algeria. In the 1950s, the British perfected antiguerrilla warfare in Malaya, Cyprus and Kenya. But that was before the invention of the video camera and the globalization of news. It was one thing to frog-march a Malay headman to jail or torch a Kenyan village in the privacy of one's own colony; it's quite another to do so in the full glare of TV lights. One unarmed Afghan--or Iraqi--killed by a scared G.I. can have greater political consequences than a truckload of humanitarian aid.
It is not just the armed forces that will have to adapt to guerrilla warfare. So will the public. Americans like their wars to have clean endings, with ticker-tape parades and a memorial on the Mall in Washington. But guerrilla wars aren't like that. Parents of fighting men in the old colonial powers got used to hearing that their sons had died in sordid skirmishes whose names nobody had heard of or--like the six Americans killed when their helicopter crashed in Afghanistan last week--in accidents far from home. Guerrilla warfare may have fine American antecedents, but we have always recoiled from accepting a slow, endless drip of casualties from contests whose stated purpose we have long forgotten. Soon we may have to get used to it.