That's the key question, isn't it?Originally Posted by Bob's World
We've recently shown a tendency to assume that any government we install is "the government" and anyone opposing it is "an insurgent". Those definitions are debatable.
In Iraq we faced an armed competition to fill the vacuum left by the removal of Saddam. To us that was insurgency, because we had already proclaimed one of the competing factions as "the government". To those who had never acknowledged that faction as the government, this wouldn't have made much sense.
A definition of what makes a government a government will likely be complex, but for starters I'd say it needs to be acknowledged as a government by its populace, and it has to govern. The situation in Somalia, for example, can't be reasonably called an insurgency because there is no government.
In Afghanistan, I'm not convinced that the paradigm we hold up - Taliban vs GIROA, US "doing FID" in support of GIROA's COIN - accurately reflects either popular perception or the reality on the ground. Possibly I'm wrong; I hope so.
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