Meta-Warfare

[Azor]

I wish I’d seen this sooner, but the one man blog known as Outlaw can bury the “Recent Council Posts” list inside of an hour.

I am fine with that. I don't find the term "Sunni Fundamentalism" helpful. Fundamentalism offers a level of correctness to their thinking that I don't think it deserves, so they can beat me up on that too.

Well, I used “Sunni fundamentalism” rather deliberately. I do think that those guys do have a good point about distinguishing Salafism from Wahhabism, as the latter involves acquiescing to the authority of church and state, whereas the former involves establishing a revolutionary authority over both the spiritual and the temporal. Neither Bin Laden nor Al Baghdadi recognize(d) any authority higher than themselves, and Al Baghdadi has taken on this role of supreme leader in a way that even Bin Laden never did. Of course, Mohammed and Qutb are both conveniently dead, just as Lenin was in 1929 prior to Russia’s Third Revolution. Certainly, there is a great deal of philosophical overlap between Salafism and Wahhabism as regards asceticism and dismissal of other Muslim sects as heretical, but what should interest us is auctoritas and potestas, and more specifically, who is permitted to do violence to whom and why, as well as who grants permission to do so.

I like your comparison with the IRA. I believe that, in 1975 you would have found that half the population of Boston would have "morally sanctioned" the actions of the IRA. But they did not hop a plane to Belfast (although some did).

I’m a numbers guy. I started out by quantifying insurgency death rates to determine at what point there was acceptance of a problem. The conflict in Northern Ireland was actually the least troublesome of all modern insurgencies in terms of the violence meted out on all sides e.g. the black-on-black homicide rate is actually three times higher than the death rate in Northern Ireland annualized per hundred thousand. My digression helped me to understand racial divides in the United States as some groups were experiencing life in a warzone by any other name, while others had no comprehension of the killing in their own country.

So, suffice it to say, Northern Ireland is my benchmark, or more accurately my floor, against which I compare other episodes of violence, from the Malayan Emergency to Vietnam to America’s occupations in the Middle East. Curiously enough, whether we are talking about Northern Ireland or Irish political violence from 1919 to 1999, the conflict was overwhelmingly one of islanders killing islanders, with under 10% of the fatalities being residents of England, Scotland or Wales.

Throughout the Troubles in Northern Ireland, roughly 0.08% of both the Protestant and Catholic populations were members of paramilitaries. Currently, roughly 0.14% of the Pashtun people are members of the Taliban, so clearly their “hearts and minds” aren’t won over. You probably have more of a feel for Afghanistan than I do, but I am convinced that Pashtun ethno-nationalism was subverted by Pakistan into radical Islam in order to: (a) prevent secession and (b) give Pakistan a hand in Afghan affairs, not unlike what Putin seeks by way of “Novorossiya”. One might suggest giving the Pashtuns a nation carved out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the latter could never accept that lest the Balochis fly the coop as well, and it does have nuclear weapons. Therefore, the only sensible solution would be to abandon southern Afghanistan as a no-man’s land, build up the state in the north and keep the Pashtuns out so long as they accept Taliban rule.

With regards to “moral sanctioning”, I appreciate Outlaw’s updates on the Russo-Ukrainian War, but I am apprehensive of some of the sentiments expressed in Ukraine, particularly the lionizing of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Zaporizhian Cossacks under Khmelnytsky. I am supportive of Ukraine’s right to self-determination, but unfortunately, the Ukrainians’ two great bids for independence (17th and 20th Centuries) saw Ukrainians spend more time annihilating Jews (vast majority of deaths inflicted) than fighting for an independent state (killing foreign soldiers). Again, the devil is in the numbers.

I think it is very hard to equate who morally sanctions the actions of the terrorists with who would actively engage in the fight, although it is far to equate that number with who you have to convince that the terrorists are not worthy of their support.

Well, unless one is prepared to use Stalinist methods , one has to convince the guerrillas/terrorists’ supporters to abandon them. Northern Ireland went through a tragic cycle of Protestant supremacists successfully suppressing Catholic egalitarian integrationists, and then being forced to deal with violent Catholic supremacist separatists. After three decades of conflict, the Catholics finally accepted the terms that they had originally asked for in the early-to-mid-1960s, and supremacists on both sides were forced to more or less go along with it.