Anyone else notice how similar our approach to Insurgency and/or terrorism is to our approach to drugs?
Step one: Declare a war on the problem.
Step two: The problem must be the supply, not the demand, so set out aggressively to defeat the supply.
Step three: Recognize that Demand is important, but still only put minor energy against that to avoid having to make any hard choices that affect yourself. Enforce 'rule of law' at home to criminalize and punish those who participate, but ignore why they participate and how changes in governance approaches could mitigate demand or change the destructive nature of the market that has been forced into illegal and often violent approaches through the denial of legal venues to operate.
Step four: Take the war against the Supply overseas and pick a couple of key states to focus your efforts in.
Step five: As problem continues to grow put more and more money, people and effort against eradicating supply in those key states.
Step six: Having "squeezed the balloon" adequately in key states, but not done anything to address demand, watch suppliers simply move to a different state and continue operations.
Step seven: Shift focus to new supply state and begin squeezing the balloon again.
Step eight: Repeat steps 1-7 as necessary, often returning to states where the problem was previously "defeated" until your national influence and economy begin to wane under the burden of direct and higher order effects.
One word: "Responsibility." Until governments are willing to take responsibility for the effects of poor governance, bad laws, and bad choices and instead are allowed to focus massive time, energy, blood and treasure attacking the naturally occurring effects of their causation, we are doomed to a downward spiraling do-loop on these issues.
Drug Dealers don't create the illegal drug problem, they exploit it for their economic gain.
Insurgents don't create insurgency, they exploit the condition of insurgency for their own purposes as well when and where governments fail to provide the type good governance that immunizes populaces against such movements.
Target Demand first (not to be confused with those who actually participate in the "market," but rather why the market exists); and mitigate the damaging effects of Supply while continuing to focus on Demand.
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