One of the most deadly flaws in our CT/COIN approach to the events of 9/11 is to not recognize the two levels of conditions of insurgency that the many national, regional and transnational groups are relying upon and emerging from.
As the Arab Spring clearly attests, many population groups around the greater middle east (around the world as well, but I'll restrict this to the Sunni Muslim populations targeted by AQ as this is about our post 9/11 activities) have deep grievances with the systems of governance that affect their lives. Some of these systems are formal and national. Some are informal and more regional. Some are formal and international. Some are informal and international. Some grievances are real, some are largely perceived. The key in studying and thinking about these populations and what conditions of insurgency might exist is that the perspective of anyone or any group other than the actual population in question is moot. We need to deal with that reality. So do many of the governments we support around the region. We also need to deal with the fact that while effective government and the provision of governmental services are nice, they will not buy a government out of trouble when that same government is offending some population in more fundamental ways.
So, for the US to appreciate is that there are many pockets of nationalist or regional (in places like Yemen, Somalia or the Maghreb where borders mean little and populations straddle multiple systems of governance) revolutionary insurgency. So simply helping those governments build security force capacity in an effort to sustain the status quo makes a certain tactical logic, particularly in the context of how we have framed AQ and the degree of colonial bias still infused into our doctrine. But all this can do is help suppress the current set of actors emerging from these populations, while at the same time enabling said systems of governance to continue on with the family of sins that brought them to this place to begin with. It also serves to validate a one of three primary points in AQ’s UW sales pitch: "You can't win at home (get your own government to listen to you and evolve) until you break the support of these powerful external players, such as the US, to those regimes." In fact, it is our very support that contributes the most to making those governments "apostate."
For AQ each of these pockets of revolutionary insurgency energy is a playground for their larger UW campaign. What our Intel community has broken out into several different branches of AQ (AQAP, AQIM, etc, etc) are more accurately simply separate theaters of operation for AQs larger UW campaign to change the overall governance of the region. To call these separate segments of AQ and to include the local revolutionary actors under the AQ umbrella for ease of CT targeting is a strategic disaster of the highest order. It may "mow the grass," but it also "poisons the soil" at the same time.
What is this poison soil? Well, that gets to larger perspective. We can all appreciate how a resistance insurgency to a physical occupation occurs. The many famous resistance movements across Europe to German occupation during WWII are recent examples. The resistance to US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are more recent examples. But does it require a physical occupation for conditions of resistance insurgency to grow?? I don't think so. I think what we have are broad conditions of resistance insurgency to an occupation by policy, if you will, of the US-led efforts and programs put in place over the post-WWII era to contain the Soviets and to lend stability to energy markets and critical lines of communication. These are the conditions of insurgency that AQ relies upon to recruit individuals for acts of transnational terrorism. When we simply help defeat revolutionary insurgents, and when we bundle revolutionary insurgents accepting help from AQs UW teams as also being AQ and conduct CT against them, we make these conditions of insurgency and this source of causation worse.
We need to reframe the problem. We need to separate, not conflate diverse actors. We need to put a much finer point on our CT efforts, and we need to recognize that security force capacity is only a mitigating effort in dealing with revolutionary insurgency, but is in no way a cure.
To do this will be far less expensive that efforts of the past 12 years. It will be far less offensive to people everywhere (to include our "war weary" population at home), and will bring US foreign policy back much closer into line with how we see ourselves (rather than what we have become). Oh yeah. And it will also be far more productive at the strategic level. We need to stop promoting generals and admirals for great tactical success in the face of strategic failure. Flag officers are supposed to be strategic leaders; we need to hold them to a strategic standard.