Time for a FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency Update

[Bob's World]

AQ has very little to do with populaces or nationalist insurgency. It is not a populace based movement and has only very tenuous connection to nationalist insurgency.

This oft stated position is simply not the case. AQ has no populace, true. AQ also has no power without its ability to leverage the populaces of others. AQ takes sanctuary in it's non-state status and employs an Islamist ideology to leverage and incite both individuals and organizations experiencing conditions of insurgency to support actions that advance the AQ cause, while advancing their own causes at the same time. Without the existance of significant conditions of insurgency in the many distinct states that AQ leverages their influence, this movement would be little more effective than that of Tim McVeigh and his little group of buddies.

It's good to remember that AQ's initial prominence and much of its residual legitimacy emerged from a struggle against the Soviet Union, not the US, and that it has only achieved meaningful popular support for struggles against direct foreign intervention.

Also not the case. Certainly the Saudis have always encouraged the dissident members of their populace to take their issues elsewhere, and taking them to the AFPAK region during the Soviet invasion was a popular cause and destination. It is good to remember that the Cold War was still in full effect at this time, and that if the Soviets could invade Afghanistan, they could certainly expand into Iran and down into the Arabian Pen. as well. At that point in time the presence of the US in the Middle East was welcome to the degree that it was far superior to the alternative.

AQ really got going in the first Gulf War. The KSA rejected Bin Laden's offer to protect them and brought in a very overt Western, US-led presence for that mission. A significant presence remained following the defeat of Saddam's push south; and not insignificant in this is that the Soviet threat no longer existed. Tolerence for Western presence that deterred the Soviets waned just as quickly (if not more so) in the Middle East than it did in Europe. We vastly downsized our presence in Europe in response to this pressure, but actually increased it in the Middle East. This shifted the bullseye of AQ squarely onto the US; and also made the US the easy scapegoat for poor governance in the region.

To declare a linear causative relationship among US policy, nationalist insurgency, and AQ terrorism is to assume what has yet to be demonstrated, and to excessively simplify a very complex causative environment.

US policy is to GWOT as Domestic Policy is to insurgency. Just as each state shapes the degree of the conditions of insurgency within their populace through the domestic policies they adopt and enact; so too does the US shape the degree of the conditions of international terrorism directed against us through the foreign policies we adopt and enact. Some dynamics are indeed simple, though the facts of how they materialize are always going to be diverse and complex.