Hearts and Minds?

[marct]

Bonjour Francois,

It's nice to see another Canadian here .

So according to the author the key is to create what he calls contingent incentives. You need to give the people, or part of the people, something your opponent cannot give, something they cannot have if your opponent wins. This give them a reason to support you and take personal risks to make sure you win. Winning heart and mind is not about random acts of kindness.

A good point with a good illustration. One of the keys with peasant revolt type insurgencies, and the VC case would probably fall into that category along with Cuba and Bolivia (and probably the English Peasant Revolt), seems to center around land tenure / use. It's a case where a large part of the population make their individual livelihoods off of the land and control of that land is of central importance to a majority of the population.

The same isn't true when you are dealing with industrial societies. Control of the land isn't crucial, it's control of the production and distribution processes (the Marxists always forget about distribution). So most of what should have been called "insurgencies" in industrial states, weren't. Some examples: the organization of the 5th Comintern and its ties into "organized labour" unrest, the Fascist takeover in Italy in the early 20's and the Nazi takeover of Germany in the '30's, etc.

So, now we come to the information age when most people make their livelihood off of information processing of some kind (including via state sponsored welfare or employment) or raw materials production (e.g. oil) rather than via producing either agricultural produce or manufactured goods (they are cheap and readily available). The rallying cry is no longer "own your own land" or "control your own labour" but, rather, "control your information processing" (i.e. ascription / interpretation of meaning).

It's in this area that AQ and the Muslim Brotherhood have been so successful. They have created an international "I/O" campaign, for want of a better phrase, that is highly suited to the current economic reality of many people. This is also one of the places where the Western nations have fallen flat on our collective faces.

And indeed, you haven won their hearts and minds if they're still shooting at you. But lets say you're dealing with an insurgency, and by definition insurgents are few and highly-motivated. The objective isn't to win their hearts and minds, it's to win the hearts and minds of the people they rely on for support, who are weaker (psychologically) and are the means of support for the insurgent. Its my contention, and others, that the objective is not the insurgent; it's the population as a whole.

I would certainly agree with that SE! A large pat of the problem, as I see t, is that the West (loosely construed) hasn't produced a global I/O campaign that can take on the AQ/MB campaign head on. While the I/O target has to be the "population as a whole", it might also be useful to have a coherent message

Marc