Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
What strikes me after 40 pages or so is that there's no apparent effort to distinguish between insurgency and resistance to foreign occupation. The US role in Iraq and Afghanistan seems to be treated as that of an "external sponsor of COIN"; in fact if I read this and didn't know better I'd get the impression that the US had entered both conflicts to defend pre-existing governments threatened by insurgency.

I'll have to read the rest of it before reaching any conclusions, but that seems a quite strikingly bizarre way to start.
Reasonable minds differ, but to me three broad categories makes sense:

Revolutionary: Overthrow one's own government

Resistance: Throw out an occupying government

Separatist: Break a region off from one's country to form a new country.

Or some combination of the three. All three were going on in Iraq at the same time.