We need less Chemo and Surgery and more "Voom."

[Dayuhan]

Which leads to "counter-terrorism," which equally is a little more than a commitment to seek to disrupt, defeat, deny, etc those individuals and organizations that employ terrorist tactics. It is very symptomatic in nature, and as such does not much consider WHY some organization or individual is acting out, or why they have come to a position where they believe terrorist tactics are their best hope for achieving their goals.

Disrupt, defeat, and deny is essential. It may not be the only the only thing that's essential, but it's certainly essential. That doesn't mean you don't have to look at and address the "why", it just means that when someone is actively trying to kill you or your people you stop them first and then worry about why.

One of the problems with efforts to identify and address causes is that they are very much open to erroneous interpretations of causes. One trend we often notice in the US is the tendency to assume that everything happens because of us, and that everyone else simply reacts... thus if AQ wants to kill us that must be a "backlash" against something we did to them, and we can make them stop by not doing whatever that was. I think we underestimate the extent to which AQ is proactive, acting not in response to situations but in an attempt to initiate conditions they believe will be conducive to their growth.

AQ is actually more accurately a non-state political action group that operates outside the rule of law to conduct unconventional warfare to leverage the insurgent populaces of a wide range of primarily Muslim states, employing both guerrilla warfare and terrorist tactics, to force change upon the governments of those states and their foreign allies.

Again we have the contention that AQ primarily exploits an "insurgency" dynamic (built around relationships between Muslim governments and the populaces they govern) rather than a wider perception of direct occupation of Muslim land and direct oppression of Muslims by the West. This contention could use less repetition and more supporting evidence, as it is anything but self-evident.

We did not fly drones to Moscow and attempt to kill soviet leaders with missiles. But we fly drones in the sovereign airspace of many countries where AQ and nationalist insurgents operate and attempt to kill them. I find this odd at best.

Not odd at all. By the time we had effective drones the Soviet Union no longer existed... and there was always that MAD thing going on.

But the energy source of any successful UW campaign is an insurgent populace. One cannot go to a stable, satisfied populace and create an insurgency. One can, however, go to place where such conditions are strong, but suppressed, and employ ideology, motivation, arms, leadership, funding, etc to move such a populace to action.

I don't see the relevance of this, since AQ is not creating an insurgency or moving a populace to action.

I suspect this is why AQ has never resonated nearly as well among the Muslim populaces of the Asia-Pacific Region as they have in those areas that have not had the political revolutions yet such as have occurred there. As you well know, things are not perfect in Malaysia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Cambodia, or the Philippines - but these people and these nations have already thrown off the major aspects of external, illegitimate manipulation and are working toward their own destiny. Small groups and small numbers of individuals are open to help from groups such as AQ, but nearly so much as in the greater Middle East.

That's certainly not true in, say, The Philippines or Thailand, where "external, illegitimate manipulation" by national governments that Muslim minorities do not accept is alive and well. The limited appeal of AQ in these ideological markets stems more from AQ's preoccupation with pan-Islamic issues and foreign occupations that seem very remote in these parts: Southeast Asian Muslims are for the most part more concerned with their own domestic issues than with what's going in the Middle East or South Asia.

The assumption that those who support AQ do so because they want to change their own governments is inherently suspect and needs to be supported by evidence and reasoning. It's not credible simply because it's said to be so.