Bob,First all crimes and wars are committed by people, so it makes sense that any major counter strategy must include a population based solution, hence my interest in your PCE theory. However control of the terrain is critical in fact land ownership and usage is often at the base of some insurgencies. There was actually a paper that was published about how fencing should be our main strategy, I think it is in the SWJ library somewhere.

Second Rank Am raises a very important point in that many infrastructure projects can actually enable the insurgency and we should be careful about building them.

Which goes back to my original point about defining our enemy. Part of SBW is the OPS theory. Other Peoples Stuff. Criminal organizations/Drug Dealers do this all the time and so do Terrorist Organizations and they can be very difficult to track and to attack because the cure can be worse than the disease. They use other peoples terrain but don't own it,they use other peoples money but not their own. We do not fight these organizations very well because of this. There is no COIN solution for them and Gian is right in that respect in that we should not go hog wild on COIN everything as opposed to creative use of more conventional forces.

IMO how we should fight AQ and UBL in Astan has nothing to do with COIN or at least it shouldn't have. We got into a lot of trouble when we attacked the Tali-ban instead of staying focused on AQ.

Gian, is also right in that we haven't Won anything yet.....we have certainly improved the situation through COIN TTP's but it ain't over by no means.