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

[Bob's World]

The discussion was of AQ, how did it move to insurgency and populaces? AQ is not an insurgency and has no populace, seems to be wandering a bit off the topic.

AQ indeed is not an insurgent.

AQ indeed has no populace.

The hard fact is that without the insurgent populaces of others AQ would just be a bunch of radical crackpots of no consequence.

But the other hard fact is that many populace groups in many countries across the greater Middle East have high conditions of insurgency and are either suppressed currently from acting out, or are actively acting out. This is the energy source that gives AQ significance.

AQ conducts what in US Doctrine is called Unconventional Warfare. They leverage the insurgent populaces of others to advance their own agenda for their own purposes. Just as the Soviets did throughout the Cold War. Just as the US did throughout the Cold War.

This is a reality of the new information age. Not only is it harder for governments to keep insurgent populaces suppressed, or to suppress insurgent populaces once they go active; but equally it empowers non-state actors such as AQ to conduct a distributed, networked approach to UW.

It is a bold new world. Age old dynamics, but leveraged as never before through the tools of modern technology. Now more than ever people matter. Now more than ever governments must actually seriously take into account how their actions will affect people. This is not limited to the people living within some system of governance alone, but also people everywhere who are affected by that governance.

US governance affects people all over the world. AQ is leveraging that fact to recruit members of insurgent populaces to join their ranks as foreign fighters and as terrorist operatives. AQ is also leveraging that fact to gain influence among such insurgent populaces and the insurgent groups that emerge from such populaces as part of their UW campaign.

The great irony for the US is that in many cases it is AQ that is in the role of "de Oppresso Liber" while it is the US dedicated to sustaining in power the regimes these populaces rise against. Many don't want a radical Islamist solution for governance. Many don't want complete change of their governance. Most only want a few, small but significant changes to bring governance into synch with the evolving will and expectations of the people it affects.

Those who feel the US is losing control and should double down on seeking to sustain outdated relationships are calling for an approach that is far more likely to make terrorism worse, not better. Neither should the US simply turn our backs or call for government leaders to stand down. Better we act as mediator to bring the parties to the table to work these things out without the avoidable chaos that is Syria today, or Libya last year.

We need a new approach to foreign policy that allows us to build and wield influence without relying so heavily on regime change, nation building or overly broad programs of targeted killing.

We can do this, and it will be far cheaper and far less offensive to those it affects, and much more insynch with US principles than approaches of the past decade.

But if one can't see that suppressed insurgent populaces and a US policy perceived as keeping the status quo in place as a major aspect of the energy source powering this, then one is not likely to get past programs designed to simply "defeat, disrupt, or deny" the symptoms of the problem.