Seth G. Jones is an academic, political scientist and author. Jones is most renowned for his work on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism; much of his published material and media presence relates to US strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and in confronting al Qa'ida. He is currently a Fellow and Director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Biography Seth G. Jones holds the Harold Brown Chair, is director of the Transnational Threats Project, and is a senior adviser to the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining CSIS, Dr. Jones was the director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center, and senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, where he worked from 2003 to 2017. He served as the representative for the commander, U.S. Special Operations Command, to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations in 2010, and in 2011, as a plans officer and advisor to the commanding general, U.S. Special Operations Forces, in Afghanistan (Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command–Afghanistan). From 2002-2009, he was Adjunct Professor, Security Studies Program, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, where he taught classes on "Counterinsurgency" and "Stability Operations." He has also served as Adjunct Professor, Center for Homeland Defense and Security, United States Naval Postgraduate School, since 2005. Jones attracted considerable attention for his historical analysis of Afghanistan and Pakistan in his book In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan. The book examines the collapse of the Zahir Shah regime, the rise of the anti-Soviet war, the Afghan civil war in the early 1990s, the Taliban take-over of much of the country in the late 1990s, the U.S-led overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, and the subsequent insurgency. Jones also received considerable attention for his work with Ambassador James Dobbins on nation-building. Their RAND book America's Role in Nation-Building, which examined the U.S. history of nation-building since World War II, suggested that the U.S. needed nearly 500,000 soldiers to stabilize Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's government. L. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, took the study to U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush. Based on the study's conclusions, Bremer suggested that the United States military needed to reconsider downsizing its forces in Iraq and, on the contrary, increase them to help