Originally Posted by Bob's World
But without insurgent populaces who are both very dissatisfied with their own systems of governance, and who equally perceive that external Western influence, money and manipulation is a major factor in why their governance is so out of step - there would be no AQ.

Dayuhan counters:
You keep saying this, but you provide no evidence or reasoning to support the contention. It's simply laid out as revealed truth. The problem with this is that it's not consistent with what we see on the ground. We know that populaces aren't turning to AQ for help in getting rid of their own governments because every attempt by AQ to raise an insurgency against a Muslim government has failed to draw anything close to a critical mass of popular support. What we actually see is that while Muslim populaces are happy to fund and support AQ as long as they're fighting infidels far away, that support stops as soon as AQ tries to bring the jihad to their neighborhood. Interview-based studies on foreign fighter motivations have not revealed any hint that people are traveling to fight in order to affect governance in their home countries: the motivation is consistently to end the oppression of Muslims and expel the infidel in the place where the fight is going on.

The contention that AQ s driven by populaces who oppose their own governments and believe that support for AQ will change those governments has to be supported by convincing evidence and reasoning to be accepted. It can't simply be decreed.
We are looking at the exact same evidence, just as a city person, an occasional hunter and an experienced woodsman all look at the same sign in a forest. Just because the first two "see no evidence" of the many things the woodsman sees does not mean the woodsman is just making stuff up. He sees nuances that the others miss. This is true in all walks of life. We are talking about the nuance here, and I realize nuance is hard to describe, and equally hard to appreciate. One has to rely on a bit of faith.

AQ's message has always relied heavily on the pillar that Muslim populaces dissatisfied with their own situations of governance (under "apostate" regimes -i.e., regimes that have sold out to the West), must first break the sources of that corrupting external influence and support before they can find success at home. This is a bit part of their UW campaign message. They use this to recruit individual fighters and to solicit economic support and to find "sanctuary" for the nodes of their networked operations.

People contribute to this for many reasons, but if it is hard evidence you seek, if you much touch the holes in Jesus's hands, look simply at products such as the report on foreign fighters in Iraq prepared by Dr Joe Felter several years ago, and then compare where those "foreign fighters" came from with where the "Arab Spring" later burst into action. AQ drew upon the the very high conditions of insurgency in those states and drew upon the sub-populaces who were most dissatisfied with their own governments. They traveled to Iraq not to help make Iraq part of some "Caliphate," but rather to help defeat this source of foreign influence so that they could finally find some success at home.

Now, when those insurgencies did finally go active at home (with AQ support and influence), did the people all rally under an AQ flag and attempt to elevate AQ into the governance of their country or to join some "Caliphate"? Of course not. Again, revolution is not to bring some specific form of governance seen as good, revolution gains popular support to remove some system of governance widely deemed as bad. With success finally at hand after so many generations, why would anyone want to submit themselves to the extremist view of the world offered by AQ? Revolution, perhaps more than any other condition, makes for strange bedfellows. We need to stop judging people by who they associate with in times of great crisis and need, and instead appreciate the nature of all the relationships in play, and the primary purpose for action by the various parties.

Bill says
"governments have a right to defend themselves"
This is very true, but in life as in law, for every right there are reciprocal duties.

We are too quick to jump in and help certain governments exercise their "rights" to defend themselves from their own insurgent populaces when we are in hot pursuit of the handful of AQ operatives working among those populaces conducting UW. We are so consumed by our own pursuit of our "right" to exact our revenge on AQ and to render them unable to conduct future attacks on the US and our interests that we forget our own reciprocal duties as well.

It is time for governments under attack by non-state actors, be they insurgents at home, or regional UW/terrorist actors from abroad to stop using the "right to defend themselves" as rationale for acting in ways counter to their own principles and in ways that are so abusive of the sovereignty of others. It is time for governments to equally hold themselves to task for the "duty" part of that equation.

The governments where the insurgent populaces live must (IE "have a duty") to listen to and seek to govern their entire populaces fairly and in a manner consistent with fundamental aspects of human nature (which manifest uniquely in every populace). Instead they cling to the status quo (not to be coerced by terrorism), and seek simply to "enforce the rule of law."

When any nation seeks to vigorously enforce rule of law that is perceived as unjust by those that law is enforced against, it is tyranny. Doubly so when the government seeking to enforce those laws is perceived as having no legitimate right to do so by those they affect.

We do not need to fix the national governance of others, but neither should we enable others to ignore their duties to their own people. What the US needs to focus on is updating our foreign policies so that we operate under the same principles abroad that we operate under at home. Our problem is not a domestic one (though that is growing as well), but rather a foreign one. Governance does not stop at borders, and US governance affects people around the globe. We have a duty to ensure to the degree possible that our governance does not provoke others to bring illegal violence back against us. Excessive pursuit of our right to defend ourselves does far more damage to make those perceptions worse, than the killing of a few particular actors serves to make things better. We celebrate our tactical victories, while we ignore our growing strategic failure.

But boy do we love tactics. No nuance to interpret there. Dead is dead. Success, next target.

We still have those rights, but we must tailor how we pursue those rights into the larger context of how we pursue our duties. You can't hand some one a gift with one hand, and then punch him in the face with the other and expect a positive result. We must subjugate all of our tactical actions of every nature to the larger strategic effects we seek to achieve. Currently we just measure tactical successes of tactical actions and then assume they will add up to strategic success. That does not work in this type of conflict.