Looked at historically, counterinsurgency was largely the war-fighting option of empires, of powers that wanted to keep occupying their restive colonies forever and a day. Of course, past empires didn't spend much time worrying about "protecting the people." They knew such wars were brutal. That was their point. As George Orwell summed such campaigns up in 1946 in his essay "Politics and the English Language": "Defenseless villagers are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set afire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification." The rise of anti-colonialism and nationalism after World War II should have made counterinsurgency history. Certainly, there is no place for occupations and the wars that go with them in the twenty-first century.