I wrote out a big long reply to this, but then my computer crashed so I'm going to keep this one short. I think the definition of legitimacy needs revisiting in terms of its importance to counterinsurgency. I am working on a thesis attempting to create a model of insurgent conflict that incorporates the population and both repressive and soft government approaches.

Legitimacy can have the value-laden meaning put forward in this debate so far, but more important is legitimacy derived from being able to back up your words with actions. This lends itself to understanding legitimacy from a political economy perspective rather than a normative one.

The oppressive government that chooses to obliterate population centres associated with insurgent groups needs to convince the population that it will do so if it has to have the desired effect, namely force the population to stop supporting the insurgent group.

The same still applies to governments who attempt to use the softer 'carrot' approach. Socioeconomic improvements and good governance are only going to have the desired effect if the government can legitimately claim to be able to keep providing them in the long term. Upon doing that the population will change its behaviour in order to maintain access to these incentives - one aspect of which will be the provision of security (the military aspect of the ops).

In Afghanistan the first option was, for good reason, not available to us. So we had to pursue to softer approach. We lost legitimacy not because we held fundamentally different beliefs to the Afghan people but because we did not provide the positive changes we promised. Largely because we placed in power a whole load of people who had no incentive to alter their behaviour to make those changes.

Democracy to this end does not create legitimacy because it idealises freedom, but because it creates a mechanism for the people to hold the government to account for failed promises. This makes the government more likely to adhere to promised improvements, knowing it will be removed if it does not. This makes long-term promises more legitimate. In Afghanistan they are rejecting democracy not because it does not sit right with their beliefs, but because democracy to them has just seen the same old people returned to power and made them powerless to resist - other than through the insurgency, which is only attractive to a few. Perhaps this is our big mistake in the West, being single minded in that democracy is the only way to create this mechanism - without understanding how more traditional systems of government create the same effect and better incorporate these into the system of government in Afghanistan.