Gun Control in Counterinsurgency

[Dayuhan]

Hopefully they'll come up with a pistol to their temple. This is the whole point of allowing the common man to be armed. All the farmer need do is present the weapon to said Taliban center-mass areas, pull the trigger, rinse, and repeat as necessary.

Unless village action is collective, large-scale, and sustained to the point that it deters future intimidation, using a personal weapon against the Taliban seems likely to result in larger-scale retribution. Indeed, from an insurgent point of view, it would be essential to make the point that "resistance is futile." Unless counter-insurgent forces have sufficient presence and response time to prevent it, the insurgents control the "escalatory ladder." (This is probably why some of the more successful cases of village self-defence in Afghanistan occur near coalition forces or where there are embedded SF teams.

I think Rex is right on this one. There are good and obvious reasons why an armed farmer wouldn’t want to bring his weapon along on his daily rounds. The Taliban get to show up where and when they choose, and if there are 5 or 10 or 20 armed Taliban and one armed farmer it’s not likely that the farmer would be presenting his weapon to the center-mass area of the Taliban. More likely the farmer would have to choose between contributing his weapon to the Taliban arsenal and fertilizing the field of his sons. The gun is likely to stay home, where it gives its owner the option of banding together with similarly armed neighbors to fight as a group if it’s necessary to do so.

Canada actually has somewhat higher levels of interpersonal trust than the US, suggesting that while we think you're less likely to use a handgun in a bad way, we are also less likely to think you should have one in the first place.

The desire of a populace to hold weapons is not necessarily proportional to perceived threat or trust. In some cultures it’s simply expected that a man will have weapons and know how to use them, whether or not there’s an immediate threat and whether or not police and security forces are generally adequate.

They are my police (I'm the district civil affairs officer) and indirectly my military. Now, if you're telling me that my cops and troopers won't tell me what they know, then we're into a different problem.

Again, based on the actual realities in areas with insurgency issues, that’s a problem you’re quite likely to have.

Again looking at my area, the cops and the military know there are plenty of guns out there, but they do not know exactly who has them or where they are… and they aren’t going to start asking, lest they find themselves on the receiving end of that well-stashed arsenal.

Sounds to me that what you have is a pretty good solution. The local population in effect is its own power center, with its own armed force, so that, at the least, it has something of a Mexican standoff with both the government and insurgents.

It’s an adequate solution. Essentially the communities have agreed to accept the nominal authority of the national government, as long as that government doesn’t press to make that authority actual.

So, this district officer would not rock the boat, but would want to know as closely as possible what potentially harmful stuff is out there. Patience and time would yield those answers - the python who slithers, not the bull who stomps. It would also help if the district officer is at least something close to local - and not some knucklehead born and raised in the capital's suburbia.

In this case “as closely as possible” would mean accepting that there’s enough stuff around to make a major mess, that you don’t know where it is or who has it, and that you can’t find out without provoking a major mess. It helps in our case that the communities are tribal societies with effective methods for internal dispute resolution, which means there’s little likelihood of the guns being used unless the community as a whole sees itself as threatened.

Were the soldiers (and their Os and NCOs) outsiders ? I could relate to that if a bunch of Trolls (them that live under the Bridge; it being the Mackinac Bridge) were sent up here to garrison us Yoopers. Obviously, my solution (as the fictional district officer) would be different (both preventative and reprobative) than what occured in your town in 1988.

I suggest that, where the folks that represent the government are "outsiders" (wherever the locals draw that line), those folks (1) are very similar to an occupying foreign force; and (2) are practicing what is in effect foreign COIN - as we did in Iraq, and are in Astan, by being the lead sled dog.

Yes, they were outsiders, and you’re right, they were (and are) viewed largely as a foreign occupying force.

We don’t have district officers, of course; we have locally elected Mayors and Governors. Police and military forces are answerable to a national “outsider” chain of command, though in the case of the police, who are mostly locals, actual affinity in practical terms is more with traditional tribal governance. The military chain of command and the local power structure have a somewhat uneasy relationship.

I realize that in your hypothetical situation you would not condone or tolerate abuse of the populace. My point was that given the realities of most places with active insurgencies you would probably have to deal with the legacy of events that happened before you arrived… and that trust once broken is difficult to restore.