<p>Thomas Gregory’s new book critically rethinks the wartime politics of civilian protection, as experienced during the US-led war in Afghanistan. He shows US strategy aimed to treat protecting the civilian population as both an end and a means alike: something that was desirable to do, but that would also aid in producing political support for a US project of armed state building. I locate the roots of this reasoning in the intellectual history of counterinsurgency. I argue the ideas underpinning these practices were not new: they are reflections or refractions of previous counterinsurgency theories of civilian politics and protection. Their presence here reflects a historical tendency to periodically forget and then later (mis)remember them in new contexts. This pattern has implications for how we should read their recurrence in the present.</p>