Quote Originally Posted by M-A Lagrange View Post
Bob,

With all respect, this is not completly exact. South America insurgencies/rebellion have proven this to be only partially true.
What you describe here are the perfect conditions for an insurgency to not find ground to be rooted.
The other option for an insurgency to not be able to develop is a strong and extremely well targetted repression. (Cf issurgencies started by Che Gevara after Cuba or other small insurgencies in South America.)

You may argue that it just delay the insurgency growth (which is true) but staying in power and maintaining the status quo isn't the goal of a partly legitimate power? Especially in such a case.
As I understand your post, you wish to make the point that a government that is failing its populace (creating in effect a dry, highly flammable forest of a populace through its poor governance) may well prevent insurgency through aggressive programs of "fire" prevention and suppression? This is very true. Certainly the Saudis currently, Saddam, Mubarak, The Shah of Iran, Qaddafi, etc, etc, etc all did this in their respective day and situation. Karzai does this with our tremendous assistance at this very moment.

This is well within the legal right of government to do. Such legal governments are also "legitimate" in the sense of that word that they are legally recognized as the official government of some place and populace. Insurgency, however, is by definition illegal; and the type of legitimacy that matters in insurgency is not that of black letter law, but more that of the equitable principles of the common law. It is a form of legitimacy based in perceptions of the populace and their acceptance and recognition of the right of some government to govern over them.

Certainly a government that is merely legally and officially legitimate may remain in power through dilligent efforts to suppress illegal challenges from a populace that finds them to be illegitimate in the sense that they no longer (or never did) recognize their right to govern.

But insurgency is not about the rule of law, it is not about the facts, it is not about what those outside the populace or inside the government know. It is about what some distinct and significant (though often quite small) segment of the populace believes.

Many find this too fuzzy of a concept to work with, and persist in wheeling out arguments based in fact and law and officalness. Such arguments are interesting, but they have little to do with insurgency. The fact that the vast bulk of our COIN doctrine and material are based upon the facts as understood by official governments in their efforts to enforce the rule of law creates a tremendous bias in our understanding of this human dynamic of insurgency. The fact that most of those same writings are derived from second party experiences in efforts to sustain Colonial or Containment controlling relationship executed through some "legal" (though typically higly illegitimate in the eyes of the populace) local government, further clouds our vision.