I think Rex is right on this one. There are good and obvious reasons why an armed farmer wouldn’t want to bring his weapon along on his daily rounds. The Taliban get to show up where and when they choose, and if there are 5 or 10 or 20 armed Taliban and one armed farmer it’s not likely that the farmer would be presenting his weapon to the center-mass area of the Taliban. More likely the farmer would have to choose between contributing his weapon to the Taliban arsenal and fertilizing the field of his sons. The gun is likely to stay home, where it gives its owner the option of banding together with similarly armed neighbors to fight as a group if it’s necessary to do so.
The desire of a populace to hold weapons is not necessarily proportional to perceived threat or trust. In some cultures it’s simply expected that a man will have weapons and know how to use them, whether or not there’s an immediate threat and whether or not police and security forces are generally adequate.
Again, based on the actual realities in areas with insurgency issues, that’s a problem you’re quite likely to have.
Again looking at my area, the cops and the military know there are plenty of guns out there, but they do not know exactly who has them or where they are… and they aren’t going to start asking, lest they find themselves on the receiving end of that well-stashed arsenal.
It’s an adequate solution. Essentially the communities have agreed to accept the nominal authority of the national government, as long as that government doesn’t press to make that authority actual.
In this case “as closely as possible” would mean accepting that there’s enough stuff around to make a major mess, that you don’t know where it is or who has it, and that you can’t find out without provoking a major mess. It helps in our case that the communities are tribal societies with effective methods for internal dispute resolution, which means there’s little likelihood of the guns being used unless the community as a whole sees itself as threatened.
Yes, they were outsiders, and you’re right, they were (and are) viewed largely as a foreign occupying force.
We don’t have district officers, of course; we have locally elected Mayors and Governors. Police and military forces are answerable to a national “outsider” chain of command, though in the case of the police, who are mostly locals, actual affinity in practical terms is more with traditional tribal governance. The military chain of command and the local power structure have a somewhat uneasy relationship.
I realize that in your hypothetical situation you would not condone or tolerate abuse of the populace. My point was that given the realities of most places with active insurgencies you would probably have to deal with the legacy of events that happened before you arrived… and that trust once broken is difficult to restore.
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