Plowing Over the Taliban

[Dayuhan]

If it does not "elevate to a degree of violence" there is no need to use the military deal with those peacefully contesting the authority of the state.

RCJ can of course speak for himself, but I'd have to point out that insurgencies often evolve in places where "those peacefully contesting the authority of the state" are likely to get a billy club in the teeth or a bullet in the back of the head. It's often not insurgents who initiate violence: states do it too.

So the bottom line that when the hurly-burly of everyday politics develops into an armed insurrection that is when effective military action is called for.

So quite honestly your apparent inability to understand the need for military action to quell an armed insurrection/insurgency is difficult to understand.

That comes back to the critical question of why the insurgents - not necessarily the leaders, but the people doing the fighting - are taking up arms against the state. If they have a reasonable grievance that can be reasonably addressed, it may not be necessary to use force to quell the insurgency. Of course that will not always the case, but since it's usually easier to address the grievance than to keep on quelling recurring insurgency, it's always worth asking from the outset what the causes of the insurgency are, and whether its possible to address those causes without killing people and blowing stuff up.

People where I live fought a small war against their government because their government wanted to drive them off their land, and when they tried to peacefully contest the plan the government sent armed men to kill them. Over 10 years of fighting led to a stalemate, and the Government finally decided to stop trying to drive the people off their land, at which point the insurgency ceased. It would have been a lot less trouble if they'd tried that from the start.

We cannot assume that "the authority of the state" is always legitimate, or that it's always something we want to ally ourselves with. Often it's neither. From an American perspective, way too often we've joined fights on the side of governments any one of us would rebel against, if we had the misfortune to be their subjects.