Our old friend John Robb has an interesting post on the failure of nation-building and the U.S. move to back militias, on the Anbar model, in Pakistan:

THE US EMBRACES OPEN SOURCE WARFARE?
The US military is on the slow path to the realization that nation-building -- from reconstruction to other forms of traditional COIN dogma that serve to return legitimacy to the government -- doesn't work. Politics and populations in our new global environment fragment faster than they can be assembled into cohesive entities. What does work to slow the spread of temporary autonomous zones and open source insurgencies are open source militias. While messy (and many times as bad as what they replace), these militias do work:

* Colombia. The AUC blunted the spread of the FARC and other revolutionary groups.
* Sao Paulo, Brazil. Neighborhood militias have purged neighborhoods of the PCC (a criminal drug gang).
* Iraq. Anbar awakening and other militias have radically diminished al Qaeda's operational sphere.
....
Final Note: The use of a plethora of militias to fight a global open source insurgency from Nigeria to Mexico to Iraq to Pakistan is effective within a grand strategy of delay (it holds disorder at bay while allowing globalization to work). Most beneficially, it eliminates the need for nation-building, massive conventional troop deployments, and other forms of excess. Some questions remain: can the US manage something this complex or this messy? Will the rest of the US military/contractors sit idle (and as a result fall victim to budget cuts) while light weight special operations forces (and their allied private military corporations) take center stage?
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/...-embraces.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/wa...gewanted=print