I'm not quite sure how this fits with the insurgencies we're actually trying to manage today:Originally Posted by Bob's World
I can't see that Bin Laden's ideology has ever inspired any populace anywhere to "rise up for political change". It has inspired small numbers of people to commit and directly support acts of violence, but that's a very differnet thing. The "insurgencies" in Iraq and Afghanistan were not about Bin Laden's message rallying populaces to rise up for political change. They were driven by local narratives and local issues; bin Laden may have used them for his own ends but he and his ideology are beneficiaries, not the cause, of those insurgencies. What message are we actually fighting in Afghanistan? Is it "establish an Islamic caliphate dominated by Wahhabi and/or Deobandi beliefs" or is it "drive the foreigners out of Afghanistan"?Bin Laden, on the other hand, is no Messiah. He uses an ideology infused with religious overtones to rally the populace to rise up for political change for the same reason so many leaders who have gone before him have: it works. The question then for the counterinsurgent, is how to defuse that message without affronting the valid religious beliefs of the very populace whose support, as the true center of gravity in any insurgency, we are battling for.
To some extent there is certainly an ideological component to insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan and Iraq, but the US has no duty, right, or capacity to launch competing ideologies into the local marketplaces of ideas.
In Afghanistan I suspect the core of the ideological battle lies in the struggle to frame the conflict. The US is trying to frame the war as an insurgency, the Taliban fighting to overthrow the Karzai Government with the US "doing FID" in support of the Karzai Government's COIN. The Taliban want to frame the conflict not as an insurgency, but as resistance to foreign occupation: Taliban vs the invaders, us vs them. I'm not at all sure we're winning that particular fight.
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