  The Red Queen's notion "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the
same place" has been applied within evolutionary biology, politics and
economics. We find that a generalized version in which an adaptive Red Queen
(e.g. insurgency) sporadically edges ahead of a Blue King (e.g. military),
explains the progress curves for fatal insurgent attacks against the coalition
military within individual provinces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Remarkably
regular mathematical relations emerge which suggest a prediction formula for
the timing of the n'th future fatal day, and provide a common framework for
understanding how insurgents fight in different regions. Our findings are
consistent with a Darwinian selection hypothesis which favors a weak species
which can adapt rapidly, and establish an unexpected conceptual connection to
the physics of correlated walks.
