How Sri Lanka defeated the LTTE

[Bill Moore]

I agree that extreme, violent groups must be dealt with, and often they must be dealt with harshly; but my point is that in so doing one must understand that the group they are dealing with exists because the conditions of insurgency exist and feeds upon those conditions and that the defeat of the insurgent group is a very different thing from the defeat of the conditions of insurgency

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Hard to disagree with this statement, it is quite logical as far as it goes, but you didn't really respond to my questions above. A lot of insurgent groups are violent minorities (not necessarily talking ethnic group), so does the government really need to address their extreme views or defeat neutralize the group?

In some cases what you're arguing is very applicable (the Philippines and Sri Lanka both being good examples), but in other situations a minority with extreme views whipped into violent revolt by internal or external leadership is not a failure of government in my view.

Every situation is different, and in some cases it is more appropriate for the security forces to be the main effort to quell the problem, in other cases it will take more of a holistic approach that addresses legitimate grievances.

I think we're simply talking past one another, because my point isn't that the military is always or even normally the best approach to quelling an insurgency, but on the other hand I think we tend to downplay the importance of force intelligently applied. Where we may disagree is that I think security force pressure (again intelligently applied) on the armed insurgents is valuable, and something that I don't think we're doing as well as we could be in Afghanistan. I also am against re-writing history to force historical events conform to our views, so I always welcome your counter arguments. We're going to be doing this for many years, so if we can do it more effectively I'm all for it.