Supply and Demand.
Demand for illegal drugs in the US drives a requirement for an illegal supplier. If filling that demand also makes said illegal supplier rich and powerful, he may expand his area of interests to other fields...
Demand for Good Governance drives Insurgency. If no effective legal means are available to the populace then someone will come along and leverage that demand. It may be a mix of internal and external actors, but they have unique status based on their unique roles.
The key to true success in both of these cases is the effective reduction of demand, while while mitigating the damage caused by the supplier's efforts. The tactics may be similar, but the focus of where they applied are very different. For example, In Afghanistan the source of "Demand" is the Government of Afghanistan. Focus there. In Mexico the source of Demand is the American Government (yes our populace buys the drugs, but our government makes them illegal and has been unwilling to take the hard steps to curb it).
On the surface they look very similar, but they both demand very different solutions to resolve them. This is like integration calculus. Step one is to be able to identify what type of problem it is so that you can apply the correct type of solution. Even once one's identified the right type of problem there are still a hundred ways to screw it up. But if you misidentify the problem, no matter how well you work through all the reduction steps, one's answer will still be wrong. (Who knew that getting an F in integration and having to retake the class would later help me to better understand insurgency...)
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