Good comments, Steve, and I should clarify my position. That page just pissed me off. Certainly, if you can find a way to end an insurgency nonviolent, that is wonderful just like my favorite insurgent is Martin Luther King achieving his political aims nonviolently. But, from what I've experienced and studied, those instances are typically outliers.
Let me try this another way. Once a community has gotten to the point where they are willing to send their teenage daughters or eight year old boys to blow themselves up, then you're probably going to be engaged in a tough fight.
The ironic thing is that most Pop-Centric dudes don't disagree with me. As we discuss it, they typically say, "Mike, you are absolutely right, but we can't say it like that. It sounds too harsh." I respond that the way they are saying it confuses others and leads to more people getting killed.
Case in point. A couple of pages later, Dr. K follows up with,
He regains his sanity. Unfortunately, most people don't make it to that page.Again, in practice, this population-centric approach often involves as much fighting, if not more, than an enemy-centric approach, because putting in place effective population protection forces the enemy to come to us, so that we fight the guerrillas on our terms, not on theirs. Ironically, an effective population-centric strategy usually results in far greater losses to the enemy-- in terms of insurgents killed, wounded, captured, surrendered, or defected-- than does a superficially more aggressive enemy-centric approach.
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