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Recent critics have advocated shifting intelligence operations in Afghanistan towards a highly inductive approach; the authors argue, however, that this may be a mistake. In this article, two leading experts of the war in Afghanistan show that deductive reasoning plays a crucial, but often underappreciated, role in military intelligence. In past conventional conflicts there has been a reliance on an implicit 'mirror image' model of the enemy to allow for deduction, while in a counterinsurgency one should work to develop an appropriate model of the enemy, rather than abandon deduction altogether. The authors show the necessity of deductive reasoning through illustrative cases and in doing so have two main aims: to provide a new lens through which to assess military intelligence doctrine; and how this can be used to formulate policy suggestions for dealing with counterinsurgency in the war in Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]