Marc, "NGO" point of view ...
was a generalized reference to the NGO that is "neutral" and aimed at fixing or lessening the humanitarian problems of the population without regard for whether the individuals are incumbants, insurgents or neutrals.
I realize that is a stereotype; and that there is considerable disagreement about what NGOs are and what they should do. In any given situation (whether it has reached the armed conflict stage or not - as defined by GCs), there can be a lot of Karpman Drama Triangles. Some of them will shift and some will not.
Colonialement - Vive les Marsouins et les Bigors !
Mike
Strategy and insurgency: an evolution in thinking?
This appeared on an email and appears to be an amalgam of thoughts, one author appears on SWJ regularly. Sub-titled:
Quote:
America's internecine counter-insurgency debate is now making some progress, though not on a single predefined path.
Big compliment paid to Steve Metz:
Quote:
Army War College professor Steven Metz’s 2007 monograph Rethinking Insurgency is a seminal—if under-referenced—work in the emerging understanding of insurgency. Metz helped move the field away from its 50s-60s roots in countering broadly “Maoist” Vietcong-style movements, incorporating a wider template of data on conflicts over the last thirty years, Metz particularly focused his research on the emerging blurring of crime and war. His eye was not on the Algeria of the 1950s but more fractured and chaotic places like Mexico, Somalia, and Afghanistan. The complex blurring of greed, grievance, and criminal insurgency promises greater challenge for aspiring counterinsurgents on tactical, operational, and strategic levels.
Concludes with:
Quote:
The narrow focus of the COIN debate in America will eventually end, but as long as irregulars defy state authority, police and military forces will employ a variety of means—some new, others stretching back thousands of years in origin—to combat them.
Link:http://www.opendemocracy.net/john-p-...-08-16%2013:27
External War as a Pallative Against Insurgency
Here's an idea I'm playing with as I continue to work on the "reconceptualizing insurgency" manuscript I've been struggling with for the past couple of months.
Internal conflicts involving a strategy of insurgency often arise in nations where there are poorly integrated peripheral regions. Governance in these places is a form of internal colonialism, with the core--often simply the capital--having a parasitic relationship with the periphery. The national government is seen as an outsider in the periphery. Develop programs are seldom enough to overcome this.
History suggests that the most effective method for forging a nation is involvement in successful interstate war. (This is what Mike Vlahos calls "sacred wars.") It took the Civil War and the world wars to truly make the United States a nation. The same happened in many other places such as Britain, France, and Russia.
In other words, states which have been involved in successful interstate wars are much less likely to have major internal, sectional conflicts, whether ones that take the form of insurgency or conventional civil war. (Failed external wars also do not serve the "forging" function, e.g. Iraq and Pakistan).
But, and here's the rub, the current international system constrains major interstate wars, thus preventing nations from undergoing the "forging" process that lowers their chances of facing major internal conflict.
There also seems to be a couple of other factors at play. First, the external war has to be big--"sacred" in Vlahos' term. India's wars with China and Pakistan, for instance, didn't work. Second, the "forging" effect of external war declines over time. E.g. post-Soviet Russia.