Early in Richard Rowley’s documentary Dirty Wars, based on the book of the same name by Jeremy Scahill, an Afghan civilian confesses that fellow villagers call American Special Forces, the gold standard of counterinsurgency operators, “the American Taliban.” After all, he indicates, like the fundamentalist insurgents, the American operatives often sport long beards, tend to strike at night, and attack those suspected of heretical views — or, sometimes, those accidentally appearing on JSOC’s (Joint Special Operations Command) “kill list.”

Hearts and Minds, a collection of essays edited by Hannah Gurman, explores the military practice of counterinsurgency. From its beginnings in British Malaya, the Philippines, and Vietnam, to its ongoing reverberation in Afghanistan through elite military formations like JSOC, Gurman explores how the doctrine of counterinsurgency, or COIN, inevitably becomes a self-defeating strategy: “At its core, counterinsurgency is a struggle for the population’s support” in the midst of violence — producing, almost inevitably, sentiments similar to the Afghan villagers Scahill interviewed.

Hearts and Minds is subtitled as a “People’s History of Counterinsurgency.” Using the accounts of journalists, academics, and historians, the book attempts to shine the same light on those ignored by official history as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States did. COIN lends itself well to this sort of treatment, as its operations are decidedly one-sided in their official telling. With rare exceptions like the classic Vietnam War documentary from which the title of Gurman’s book comes or journalist Dahr Jamail’s reporting on the war Iraq, the civilians on the receiving end of COIN operations — residents whose doors are kicked down, whose villages are torched — are never heard. Instead, Gurman and her fellow writers pull from a range of primary sources to give voice to the silenced and address whether future generations can avoid further strategic blunders and moral atrocities under the banner of COIN.