"War is war. There are varying types of warfare, but defeating an irregular enemy is rooted in some fairly well understood methods of applying military force. What we see with "counterinsurgency theory" is a collection of fallacies that seeks to suggest that somehow defeating an irregular force in rebellion or revolt is not best enabled by applying lethal force against the right people for the right political reason.
If you inflict military defeat on the enemy, you remove his ability to use violence as a political instrument.
You do not out-govern the enemy. You kill him." (Posted by Wilf on a different thread).
Ok, I think this quote represents fairly Wilf's point. It is a reasonable position, and one that is widely held. You don't have to knock on too many doors at the Pentagon to find someone who thinks the best response to illegal violence is a well applied dose of legal violence in kind.
But how does that resolve the underlying condition that gave rise to that violence? Suppression of insurgency works, granted. Tito's Yugoslavia, Stalin's Russia, Saudi Arabia, to name but a few. The examples are many. But in all of these the conditions of insurgency continue to smolder and fester, and once that suppressive force is removed, tend to explode in uncontrolled violence that no one wants (Balkans, Rwanda, and on and on...)
So, if insurgency is seen not as the violent response to these conditions, but rather as the condition itself, it opens up options to both the insurgent and the counterinsurgent as how to go about best resolving the problem. The military may well be given the task of violently suppressing some insurgent group; but that will not resolve the conditions of insurgency. It never has, and it never will. Just as the state must judiciously apply violence when necessary, but most often hold it back in the form of the threat of violence to impose it's will, so must a savvy populace when faced with conditions of insurgency.
Besides, sometimes the government yields its position when faced with non-violence because they recognize it is the right thing to do for everyone involved, and the actions of the insurgent have served primarily to accelerate the timeline. They are not faced with the potential loss of face associated with yielding to violent pressure, and they also have many sane and legal voices from respected organizations around the globe that often come on line supporting the position of the non-violent insurgent as well. Bottom line is that while they could win "the final argument of kings", they realize that doing the right thing is more important than proving one is more powerful. The U.S. Civil rights movement, the collapse of Soviet control of Eastern Europe, the independence of India, etc.
I suspect there are some timelines in the Middle East that could use a bit of acceleration as well. Better that is done non-violently than through the terrorist tactics espoused by Bin Laden and his AQ organization. The sooner the populaces of the Middle East come to recognize this, the sooner they can correct the conditions that they find oppressive. Bin Laden is not an insurgent, he is waging UW to leverage the conditions of insurgency that exist in these populaces. Once those populaces believe they have better options, Bin Laden becomes moot and his movement collapses. To simply destroy Bin Laden and AQ will open the door for the next generation to step forward, and they may well achieve levels of violence that Bin Laden only dreams about. That would be a major strategic error on our part to enable that to happen.
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