How To Win

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Instead of focusing on keeping any particular government in power regardless of their relationship with their own populace so long as they support our Government; Instead of chasing “threats” on an ever expanding list of “Violent Extremist Organizations” with the goal of "defeat the threat, defeat the problem"; Instead of either of these approaches I simply suggest that the true COG, the source of all strength and power, for any government and any Insurgency is the populace from which it arises.

To date, even where the populace is recognized as important, the position is usually one of “how can we get this populace to support its government and how can we separate them from the insurgent”? This is usually coupled with an engagement program aimed at building host nation capacity to defeat the insurgent and facilitating that effort with U.S. enablers; while at the same time essentially trying to bribe the populace with all types of aid based upon what WE think they need.

What I am suggesting is to simply begin with the populace in mind, and to always keep them in mind as the focus of your engagement throughout. If there is an insurgency (not to be confused with a handful of violent nut jobs like Tim McVeigh), then by definition there is a movement with some degree of active and (primarily) tacit popular support. You must understand why that is before you can aid a government in addressing the problem.

Rare is the government that is going to admit its failures and shortcomings. Insurgent acts are criminal acts, so the government is technically and legally correct to blame the insurgent and to prosecute him for his actions. That will not, however solve the problem. He exists for a reason. Determine that reason, and design a program of engagement to address it. The focus of this engagement must not be on dumping aid on the populace (which often makes the problem worse by highlighting the failure of their own government to provide such services), but to instead focus on fixing the failures, with any engagement with the populace being executed with and through the populaces own government.

An alternative view of governments is that they largely exist as another form of welfare. They tend not to do much that has real value-add to the society they allegedly rule. With perhaps the exception of defense and law enforcement, societies would tend to be well shut of them. One might view a government as legitimate only insofar as the rest of the folks in the country do not find the tax (AKA diversion of some part of the fruits of one's labors away from one's own use) required to keep this otherwise useless collection of leeches as too onerous. Instead of executing policies through the government, a better approach may be to convince the government to be less intrusive in the lives of those who allow it to live off the fat of the land.

(yes, it is the job of government to support the populace).

As noted above, this last is just backwards in large measure--the function of most of the pieces of government is to provide some work to what would otherwise be a portion of the populace that is without much value (except perhaps as entertainment--maybe that explains the surge in actors/actresses/pro athletes getting elected lately). The general populace provides support to them by paying them and allowing them to think their "work" has real value. Government, on the view esposed in this response, is actually a form of welfare, as noted previously. The populace supports government, not vice-versa.

So again, I am not saying that we need to stop doing anything, we just need to change our priorities, change our focus, change our leads, and do a better job of seeking first to understand WHY things are the way they are before going in and apply a “Made in America”, one size fits all, solution.

Changing focus makes a great deal of sense. Success entails a need to get the governments elsewhere to recognize that they only are allowed to continue as long as the demands they put on the producers of value in their country are not viewed as excessive. Once the general populace starts to feel that the diversion of their productive work to support the "village idiots" who "govern" them gets too high, change is inevitable. If the government resists too much, then that change will probably become violent. Replacement movements (AKA rebels, insurgents, guerrillas, etc.) gain purchase because they suggest that they will be less of a drain on the people's earnings than the incumbent government is. (Alternatively, they claim that they will provide some value to offset the economic drain they put on the people.)

However, since those who govern anywhere tend to be deluded into thinking that they are producers of something of real worth, the likelihood that the light will dawn on them is quite small, IMHO. This, BTW, is also the explanation for why one rarely finds a government that admits its "failures and shortcomings." To do so would be to deny the government's "value-add" and acknowledge its true status as "value-less."