Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
I do not know. What is reasonable? If they took up arms, then it suggests that their demands were unreasonable to the Government. Why were they excluded?
You only get fighting when one of the parties cannot be convinced that a peaceful achievement of their policy is either necessary or possible.

The purpose of fighting is to force peace. The conditions for that are many and varied, but my basic premise is that a primary objective in "COIN" should be to force the enemy to give up violent means/military methods of achieving their political goal.
This assumes that the governments we support are reasonable and responsive to their citizenry, which has not always been the case. I've seen people join insurgencies because their Governments were forcing them out of their homes to make way for dams, plantations, etc. When they tried to protest peacefully they were shot, by government soldiers - and this was a government that the US considered an ally. The people in question were not consulted, and had no opportunity to vote. In cases like this, do we need to force the insurgents to give up "violent means/military methods of achieving their political goal" or do we need to force the government to stop stepping on its people?

Here's a scenario, and I don't think it an unreasonable one:

Tribe A represents a majority of the population in a given jurisdiction. They get their people elected to key positions, and use Government resources in an effort to force tribe B, a traditional rival, off lands that have been in dispute. Insurgents, aware of the conflict, offer aid to tribe B.

As the leader of an outside force, you have tribe A, allied to the Government, and you have tribe B, allied to the insurgents. Do you necessarily want to take the side of tribe A, because you are nominally on the side of the Government and so are they? Or do you want to position yourself as a neutral broker and try to resolve the dispute that led tribe B to ally with the insurgents in the first place? Or do you simply see "insurgents" and "government" and not even look deeply enough to notice the original conflict?