Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
Since when were insurgencies not an attempt to seize power?

The COIN crowd never want to look at Sierra-Leone and Mexico, because it tramples the model, so they dismiss it as relevant to what they want to study, and talk about. War is War.
This time I'm with Wilf in the eternal, and ever interesting, Bob-Wilf debate.

I'm italian and I'm viewing Mexico like an example of what could have happened in Italy some years ago when our mafia began a "war" with the government with a string of terrorist bombing.

We followed a completely different strategy: we send in thousands of soldiers in Sicily to help our police in low level actions and we opened the way to covert deals to fracture "cosa nostra".

The military wing of the mafia, once isolated, was soon arrested and the "business like" wing abandoned terrorism but has become somewhat collateral to the institutions,generating a possible secession with the northern part of the country (an unarmed insurgency??) that is no more willing to accept the burden of the southern economic "black hole".

Do we obtained a clausewitzian unuseful victory?