Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
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 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.