Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
I think the reasoning that people join an insurgency because they don't have a school or clean water is spurious and un-proven. Lack of clean water means you die. Lack of school means you are uneducated.

Where does it reason that good infrastructure helps defeat an insurgency? Cyprus, Thailand, and Northern Ireland all had/have excellent infrastructure. They did not help stop an insurgency in any way. The only time when provision of infrastructure the might stop an insurgency is when it's lack is the issue. In Peru, the road building program, actually aided the drugs trade!

I think the military mission should cease at prevent death and stop suffering.
Defeating an insurgency and eliminating the grounds that motivate an insurrection are very different activities. George III and his ministers had the chance to do the latter with the Atlantic coast colonies in North America before 1775 and were forced to try the former with the military after failing to take that opportunity. The French monarchy had a similar opportunity in the later 1700s and failed so miserably that it lost the ability to take the miltary option, leaving it to the other crowned heads of Europe to restore the status quo, at which they also failed miserably (thus the Revolutions of 1848 and the rise of the Anarchists following Metternich and the 1815 Congress of Vienna).

I believe that people tend to be motivated to "act out" against the current power hierarchy for a range of reasons that happen to correspond with Maslow's needs hierarchy. If folks are used to certain levels of misery and then are made more miserable, they may well view the return to their former stayte of "objective" misery as sufficient to stop their complaining, at least until they learn how miserable they are compared to others in the world (the so-called "crisis of rising expectations"). An adequate infrastructure lets folks focus on other things that bother them. I suspect that this is the case in all three examples Wilf cited. If one has adequate food and shelter, one is more likely to view the government's apprently different treatment of one's neighbors, who happen to practice a different form of religion, be of a different ethnic background, etc., as a ground for acting out against the perceived inequality.