Columnist-Europe's Identity Crisis Fuels Rising Anti-Muslim Sentiment

[120mm]

I agree that Fuchs' concept of COIN is tragically limited, and therefore flawed.

A perfect COIN campaign, in my mind would involve minimum to no violence, and would result in insurgent shifting from, or even avoiding violence and resolving their root causes by entering into political discourse.

This is, of course attributing rationality to insurgents, as well as the government.

[Fuchs]

I submit that high level authorities have published official texts about COIN and take away the option of defining it at will from you long ago.


Invent your own term if you think of something else. Do not seize an established term for something different.

[Bob's World]

I submit that high level authorities have published official texts about COIN and take away the option of defining it at will from you long ago.


Invent your own term if you think of something else. Do not seize an established term for something different.

Submit as you wish, but I submit that the current crop of definitions (of which there is certainly no one version or concrete perspective as you imply) are all overly concerned about what the problem looks like at a given time rather than looking to what are the common causations of a variety of problems that can all then manifest in a wide range of non-violent to violent ways; but that demand common cures to address causation.

For example, Drug-driven violence in Mexico look more like insurgency in Afghanistan than car burning in France does;

But the car burning in France shares a much closer causal connection to Afghanistan by far. So COIN-based approaches in France focused on understanding the concerns of the populace, mitigating violence and repairing governance could work.

In Mexico the driving causation comes not from the government, but rather from the demand for illegal drugs in the U.S. COIN approaches there would totally miss the mark on causation, only address the common symptoms of violence and violent organizations, and leave the primary causation untouched and thus the problem unsolved.

When I pull out my US COIN manual it tells me in the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter that "COIN is warfare." That puts the US military in an intellectual and operational box that virtually guarantees long, drawnout military-led approaches to COIN. I prefer not to limit myself to that small, ineffective, unproven box; others like it there. I don't judge, I just think they are missing the big picture in very important ways that hinder true success.