Did anyone else read that thing?
I don’t want to sound like a total nut, but whoever wrote it was brilliant. Subtract the metaphysical new age language and such. Once you do, it is clear that the author had a profound and prescient understanding of the forces that drive terrorism and the means to fight it.
One quote make a great example (and realize, this was written over 30 years ago):
“The day the terrorists discovered television and mass news coverage they committed large scale acts with small scale forces and the need for strategic micro action arrived.”
The manual goes on to recognize something that has taken us years to learn in Iraq; that fighting terrorism is about delivering social justice to populations underserved by governments (i.e. they want courts, security and commerce - the people’s loyalties flow nakedly to whoever can deliver these social basics).
It is a god damn shame that this manual was written in such a way that folks would write it off so readily. The pseudo-spiritual psycho babble links the concepts to hippies and other cultural movements military minded folks tend to (for good reason) write off. Than again, so was Sun Tzu…