Defining Insurgency

[Dayuhan]

#1 insurgency the US needs to worry about: The one in Saudi Arabia.
Now, I realize you say "what insurgency?" Fine, I say there is one, and it is the pulsing heart of what the US calls the GWOT. 9000 Saudis arrested and jailed with no rights to trial or habeas corpus since 2003 on charges of "Terrorism." Now clearly there have not been 9000 acts or attempted acts of terrorism in Saudi Arabia since 2003, so one must presume there are networks of those who are collaborating and plotting to act illegally against the state and their membership is being sniffed out and rolled up.

Ok, as you define “insurgency” there is one in Saudi Arabia; as the rest of the world defines “insurgency” there isn’t one. This I think highlights two problems with your proposed redefinition of the term.

The first problem is that if we adopt your definition of “insurgency”, we’re going to have to find another term for what everyone else calls “insurgency”, because they are two very different things. This kind of semantic realignment is going to cause a good bit of confusion in the discourse; might it not be better to let “insurgency” keep meaning what it already means and come up with a new term for what you’re proposing as the conditions that generate what we now call insurgency?

As a comparison: lack of clean water and sanitary facilities produce a high risk of a cholera epidemic. They are the conditions from which a cholera epidemic grows, and they must be corrected if the epidemic is to be averted or, once started, if it is to be halted. They are not a cholera epidemic and it would cause all kinds of confusion if we referred to them as such.

The second problem is that while your definition rests on popular sentiment toward government, we often need to apply it in places where we don’t know what that sentiment is. In practice, you seem to base your assessment not on popular sentiment, but on the existence of conditions that you believe should produce popular resentment. You seem to be saying that insurgency exists where governments that you dislike exist. I don’t think this works. Our perceptions of government in other countries are irrelevant, and our observations of popular sentiment in other countries are often highly speculative and heavily impacted by our prejudices. While your definition of insurgency may be valid (if semantically inconvenient for reasons stated above), it is extremely difficult to measure or assess, and thus difficult to base decisions on.

By working to sustain the status quo in Saudi Arabia and attacking the spokes of the problem that come out of that hub, we empower AQ's message.

Are we working to sustain the status quo in Saudi Arabia? Not really. We protected them from outside aggression, yes, but that was a common interest and I doubt that turning the place over to Saddam would have won us any points with the Saudi populace. We kept troops there after Saddam was defeated because it was useful for us in ongoing operations in Iraq, not because the Saudis needed them to sustain the status quo. The Saudis don’t get or need any help from us in protecting their status quo from internal dissent.

But the hard truth is that less is more, but understanding what aspects of governance are them most important, and tailoring them to the very real concerns of both the Saudi populace and the Saudi Government we can turn down the heat in Saudi Arabia in a way that causes these spokes to retract, that makes a huge powerful Stratcom message for the US that cuts to the heart of AQ's message, and that is executed within our value system without asking the Saudis to act outside their value system either.

It seems to me that when you bring that little “we” into the picture your argument goes completely off the rails. We can’t “turn down the heat in Saudi Arabia”. We have no influence at all on Saudi internal politics. None. The populace doesn’t want us messing in Saudi internal politics. Nobody wants us messing in Saudi internal politics. If we try the only beneficiary will be AQ.

By usurping AQ's role as the solution to the problem we reduce the perception that the US is the source of the problem.

AQ isn’t filling that role. They tried, but they couldn’t persuade enough people that they offered a solution to allow them to fill that role in any viable way. Neither can we, and it would be silly for us to try. We are not the solution to Saudi Arabia’s internal political issues, and for us to try to force ourselves uninvited into the relationship between the government and its populace would be hubris to an extent bordering on insanity. It’s not our problem, we have no solution, we have no influence. Let it be.

How does "Empowerment" work? To be candid, I'm not sure. Currently it is a fuzzy concept woven throughout the administration's foreign and domestic policy output; but there is certainly no clear framework for what exactly it means or how to implement it. There is also the inertia of Containment. The boss is asking for empowerment, but everyone around him is trained, organized, equipped, experienced, etc in containment.

Is the boss asking for empowerment, or is the boss rolling out a buzzword that his audience likes to hear? Politicians do that. I don’t think Mr. Obama is naïve enough to think we have the right, the responsibility, or the capacity to designate ourselves as the empowerer of the world’s populaces.

I do think that empowerment is the opposite of what we are doing in Afghanistan. That is probably more accurately "Enablement." We enable the Karzai regime to be ineffective and corrupt by our very presence and approach to the problem. We also disempower the populace by enabling the government to disconnect their historic means of shaping government (the use of shuras, Jirgas; and when that fails swords and rifles). So empowerment means changing how we engage governments and populaces both, and relinquishing a lot of control over outcomes.

I don’t fully grasp how you reconcile a desire to relinquish control with proposals that, for example, we should turn down the heat in Saudi Arabia or take it on ourselves to empower others. Interference in the domestic affairs of other countries is not consistent with relinquishing control. It sounds to me like you're not arguing for relinquishing control or reducing interference, but for using control and interference to advance an agenda that we think is best for the populace. That seems to me a dangerous idea.

(I would argue that we currently enable many governments to ignore their populaces, and that this more than any factor gets to the roots of GWOT)

Which governments do we enable to ignore their populaces? Certainly not the government of Saudi Arabia… but which others? I think you vastly overestimate the influence we have and the degree to which we can enable anyone to do anything… other than in Iraq and Afghanistan, of course; our two post-9/11 aberrations.

I realize that perception can mean more than reality, but our first step in devising a response to perception is to assess whether the perception is accurate. If a negative perception of a US policy is based on an actual policy, we may be able to change that perception by changing the policy. If a negative perception is inaccurate it’s a bit more difficult: we can’t stop doing what we’re not doing in the first place, and we can’t relinquish control that we haven’t got. Certainly there are things we can and should do, like resolving the engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan and making no more attempts to install governments, but they have to be based on what we are actually doing and what we can actually do.