Quote Originally Posted by Steve the Planner View Post
Bob:

Something about losing hope.

Even in a bad circumstance, if people believe they have a chance for a fair shake, you have (legitimacy?) to society/government.

It's only when they lose hope....
Things can get pretty bad, but if the people have faith in the system, even when they have lost faith in their current leaders, there is hope. Where there is hope, there is not likely to be insurgency.

Sometimes fixing the problems of governance are a long, time consuming process. But if one focuses their COIN efforts on creating perceptions of legitimacy of governance and on creating and implementing new (or better yet, refurbishing old) processes and tools of legally shaping governance, they can put insurgency onto an off-ramp.

We tried to do that in Afghanistan with the elections and the constitution, but we really just went through the motions on each and totally missed the mark. I say go back and re-engage on those two strategic targets until we get it right, and everything else will fall into place.

(Meanwhile, the mission is still AQ, and the Taliban are still the key to our stated mission with AQ. We need to wrap our brains around that little fact as well).