War is War

[Dayuhan]

(But then I also am strongly of the opinion that it is governments who cause insurgency (or at least the conditions of insurgency that others then come in and exploit to their own ends) rather than some malignant internal or external force that comes in and "radicalizes" the populace. Poor Governance is what radicalizes a populace, those malignant forces just take advantage when government lets that happen.)

In many cases this is true. In some cases it is not, and the existence of those exceptions is very relevant to our current situation.

We're now fighting in conflicts that we choose to call "insurgencies" in Iraq and Afghanistan. To the extent that we are trying to counter insurgency, we are thus involved in COIN, though we may choose to call it FID if it suits our purposes to do so. In both cases, the conflict existed before the government existed, so in both cases it's hard to say the "insurgency" was caused by the government. We could of course claim that once a government existed it was then the responsibility of that government to generate governance good enough to magically resolve these conflicts, but that is an extremely unrealistic expectation.

We need to face reality, and the reality is that these "insurgencies" do not exist because of the governments they are fighting. They exist because we chose to remove governments we didn't like and replace them with governments that we like. This may mean by your definition that these conflicts are not actually insurgency, but that is neither here not there: whatever we call these conflicts, we caused them.

The nice thing about that realization is that if our choices result in unfavorable outcomes, we can make different choices in the future. We are in no way condemned to a future of COIN: we may be stuck in the fights we're in now, but we won't be there forever and there is absolutely nothing requiring us to make similar choices in the future. The COIN community, which is heavily invested in the assumption that COIN is an unavoidable feature of our future, may not want to face up to this, but it is nonetheless true. If we don't want COIN to be our future, all we have to do is stop creating insurgencies.

Certainly there are many insurgencies on the planet that we did not create, but these are for the most part not our problem, and none of them require anything beyond a limited FID presence on our part. The only "insurgencies" existing where we are actually doing the fighting are the ones we created.

A whole lot of governments around the world became emboldened by the support of the US and have come to act with impunity toward their own populaces. Many of those places are predominantly Muslim.

I think you're imposing a causative relationship here that is not really supportable. The way that governments relate to their populaces in these countries is not a consequence of US support, it's just the way it's always been in that part of the world. I think you vastly overestimate the extent of our support and the degree to which it has enabled the status quo.

In any event these countries are not really a problem for us, since AQ's attempts to generate insurgency in these environments have generally been abject failures. AQ flourishes when they fight foreign intervention that can be pitched as infidel aggression against the lands of Islam. They draw their support from the "expel the infidel from the land of the faithful" narrative. When they oppose Muslim governments they generally fail. That's something we need to remember.