How Insurgencies End

[Dayuhan]

To throw another monkey wrench into the gears, I don't think Insurgency should be classified as "war" at all.

Again, I think one of the problems with these discussions is that we, like the Rand monograph, lack a consensus definition of insurgency. It's all very well to take the the "I know it when I see it" approach, but it makes discussion difficult, because while we all know it when we see it, we may be seeing it in different places.

I think we gain clearer insights as how to approach insurgency and the relative roles of the Host nation government, its military and that of any outside governments and their militaries that intervene to assist by looking at insurgency not as war, but as a civil emergency. Not to apply the rules of war, but to apply the rules of military support to civil authorities. Not to supplant the civil leadership, but to supplement the same, holding them to task.

Agreed, but I'd point out that these formulations have little or no applicability to our current engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, because in neither of these cases did we "intervene to assist".

He saw this as a spectrum along a scale of violence. The causal factors being the same, but what begins as "subversion" at some point becomes "insurgency", not because the events somehow changed in nature, but merely becuase it had become more violent. So, Kitson would call non-violent insurgency "subversion." Same event, just different stages. Sometimes the subversives win without having to employ violence, as with Ghandi or King. Or sometimes an insurgency is suppressed back down into a subversive phase for a number of years before it goes "insurgent" again, as in Mindanao. You solve it when you address the root causes, and level of violence is only one of many metrics to measure success with, and certainly not the decisive measure.

I'm not sure that the level of violence is the only distinguishing factor. Certainly we could imagine a continuum moving from dissidence to subversion to insurgency. But where, then, would we place someone like Timothy McVeigh? Based purely on the level of violence, we'd call it insurgency, but I'm not convinced that's appropriate. I'd think that a certain level of organization and scope is necessary to distinguish an insurgency from the work of a small number of very angry dissidents.

In similar vein, we often assume that dissidents embrace violence because no peaceful avenue for change is available to them. In some cases that's true, in some it's not. Sometimes people embrace violence because they are unable to generate enough popular support to make use of conventional vehicles for change... again, such as McVeigh, or the Baader-Meinhof, or other violent but extremely restricted fringe groups. Certainly this is violent dissidence, but can it be called "insurgency"?

Possibly a load of unnecessary semantic detail, but given the extent to which insurgency is discussed here it might be useful to define the term.