Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
When we stop thinking of COIN as war, and thinking of every intervention as COIN we will begin to be able to step back and see more clearly what actions are most likely to support our national interests in a region.

Insurgency and COIN are very much family business, and family violence. It is between a populace and its governance, outsiders can and do get involved on both sides, but for them outside the national family it is a totally different dynamic best described by our military doctrine as UW and FID.
This is certainly true in what most of us would see as a "typical" insurgency. I'm not sure it's completely accurate in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are of course the only insurgencies we need to deal with at this point.

We are not an external player in these insurgencies. These insurgencies exist because we intervened, removed governments, and replaced them with governments of our choosing. We can't approach these problems as if we're intervening to support pre-existing governments that have gotten into trouble with their people, because that's not what we're doing. We're trying to support governments that are an extension of our presence until they have the capacity to govern on their own... if they ever do. We can't pretend to be a peripheral player in these cases, because we're not: we placed ourselves in the center of the picture, wisely or not, and that's where we remain.