3 - Methodology

Summary

This chapter specifies the methods used in the book to studying the alliances between local and intervening counterinsurgency allies. Nine wars are examined in the book. Five wars are studied using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, including the USA in Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam, as well as India in Sri Lanka and the USSR in Afghanistan. For these five wars, thousands of primary source US, Indian, and Soviet government documents describing the day-to-day workings of these alliances were examined and used to identify 460 specific policy requests, which were then incorporated in an original dataset tracking local compliance and other relevant variables. The coding rules for each variable are detailed in this chapter. The remaining four wars, namely Vietnam in Cambodia, Egypt in Yemen, Cuba in Angola, and Syria in Lebanon, rely on secondary historical accounts or primary source observations from outside actors such as US intelligence agencies.