Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
That is all true. It is certainly relevant to the early days of Ulster, but it in no way detracts from the efficacy using force to convince the armed opponent/insurgent that he can gain nothing by using violence to gain his political objective.


Combine that with the fact that Hezbollah's standing in the Southern Lebanon is dropping, and it may be filtering through into the Arab and Palestinian consciousness that violence against Israel cannot bring about their desired political objectives. I think the Tamils may be coming to the same conclusion.
What if the political objective of the insurgent is reasonable, and they adopted violence in the first place because they were excluded from any peaceful means of resolution?

I'm not saying that violence has no place in fighting insurgency; that would be absurd. I'm saying that before we assume that the solution to insurgency is killing as many insurgents as possible, we might be well advised to try and identify the various motivations driving the actual fighters (not necessarily the leaders) and remove as many of those motivations as possible. Plenty of people who supported and fought for communist insurgencies wouldn't have known Karl from Groucho; they were fighting over local and often personal grievances with government, many of which were legitimate grievances. I suspect that the same may be true of many Islamist insurgencies. Identifying and addressing those grievances can be an effective way of isolating the ideological core of an insurgency from their active and passive support base.

What we may see as defending a government against insurgents may be locally perceived as an outsider taking sides in a local quarrel, not a role that anyone really wants to play. It pays to be very careful before deciding who the "good guys" and "bad guys" are.

In my part of the world, and I suspect elsewhere, Americans in particular have a reputation for being very easy to manipulate. One piece of advice I'd give anyone who is bringing resources (military, financial, whatever) into a chaotic situation is to be very, very wary of anyone who agrees with everything you say, tells you just what you want to hear, and wants to be your loyal ally. An alliance that falls in your lap without hard work on your part is more than likely an attempt to manipulate you and use the resources you have in pursuit of an objective that likely has nothing to do with yours.