Posted by Bob's World,

This is the core problem with pop-centric COIN (Galula) vs threat-centric COIN (Tranquier), is that both are efforts to manage the symptoms of natural resistance to illegitimate government, coupled with little effort and no intent to ever address that base problem of illegitimacy. In fact, the primary purpose for such intervention is to create an illegitimate government that will prioritize the interests of the intervening power over those of their own people and nation.
Bob's post provoked some rather old thoughts. First we're terribly concerned about legitimacy and related ideas, as though there existed somewhere in history a legitimate government that was never opposed by its people or neighbors. We tend to imply in our remarks that all illegitimacy is imposed by the modern West on the developing world. Yet history tells us that in all these lands (even before they were states) people were in nearly continuous states of conflict. We didn't introduce violence and conflict into these lands, it already existed, why? It wasn't to oust an occupier. It wasn't to oust a form of illegitimate government. They were conflicts about power, greed and identity (fear).

Democracy as practiced today is an advanced form of governance that attempts to mitigate the forces of power, greed and identity, but it only appears to work in countries where the masses are educated and share what can probably be called Judeo-Christian values.

Getting back to the topic of the post, there may well be times when it is appropriate to be cruel to be kind by establishing a dictatorship to bring some level of order (predictability) to society so it can begin to develop. In my view our attempts to force our form of government on other nations has generally backfired and resulted in several needless deaths to no discernable end. Germany was a democracy before we occupied it, so we just returned it to its previous state after eradicating the Nazi influence.

I really don't know if a dictatorship is required as a first step to develop a state from a non-state, but the evidence is pretty clear that imposing democracy on developing nations or non-states doesn't tend to work out too well.