Understanding Causation > Defining Manifestations
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Fuchs
I submit that high level authorities have published official texts about COIN and take away the option of defining it at will from you long ago.
Invent your own term if you think of something else. Do not seize an established term for something different.
Submit as you wish, but I submit that the current crop of definitions (of which there is certainly no one version or concrete perspective as you imply) are all overly concerned about what the problem looks like at a given time rather than looking to what are the common causations of a variety of problems that can all then manifest in a wide range of non-violent to violent ways; but that demand common cures to address causation.
For example, Drug-driven violence in Mexico look more like insurgency in Afghanistan than car burning in France does;
But the car burning in France shares a much closer causal connection to Afghanistan by far. So COIN-based approaches in France focused on understanding the concerns of the populace, mitigating violence and repairing governance could work.
In Mexico the driving causation comes not from the government, but rather from the demand for illegal drugs in the U.S. COIN approaches there would totally miss the mark on causation, only address the common symptoms of violence and violent organizations, and leave the primary causation untouched and thus the problem unsolved.
When I pull out my US COIN manual it tells me in the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter that "COIN is warfare." That puts the US military in an intellectual and operational box that virtually guarantees long, drawnout military-led approaches to COIN. I prefer not to limit myself to that small, ineffective, unproven box; others like it there. I don't judge, I just think they are missing the big picture in very important ways that hinder true success.
Orange alert: lessons not learnt?
Rod Liddle writes in a certain style for The Spectator, but within are some gems, such as:
Quote:
An awful lot of the new nastiness, spreading across Europe, can be put down to the refusal of the traditional parties to engage with the problems which their voters are forced to put up with. It is not simply political correctness, but political blindness — of much the same kind which afflicted our own Labour party in the past 15 years and which saw the British National Party, a lumbering creature of the dark led by idiots, bite huge chunks out of the Labour vote in the north of England and in Essex.
You can stretch people’s tolerance for a surprisingly long period of time, but when it snaps, it snaps back with real violence. And there are plenty of people like Pim Fortuyn or Le Pen or Griffin or Jorg Haider poised to make whatever advantage of it they can.
Link:http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/al...ge-alert.thtml
Europe's Supposed Islamic Crisis
A US writer for once takes a different viewpoint to Europe turning Muslim:http://www.realclearreligion.org/art...is_106239.html
I also found this article on Europe's effect on the Muslim Middle East & North Africa interesting:http://www.realclearreligion.org/art...on_106230.html