Profusion of Rebel Groups Helps Them Survive

[Jedburgh]

If you really want to lose the war you could follow their advice and not disrupt the enemy's activities and not clear his sanctuaries, and not take and hold. The report offers no suggestion for winning.

What the report boils down to is the author's recommendation that a serious focus be taken on delegitimizing the insurgent factions - not attacking their legitimacy from our perspective, but from the perspective of those who currently support their operations. Legitimacy has long been recognized as a key strategic component of counterinsurgency. The relative degree of legitimacy of the government versus that of the insurgents as perceived by the indig population can make or break the COIN effort over the long term. And, at the risk of repeating myself, I cannot stress enough that legitimacy needs to be viewed through the eyes of the population - not mirror-imaged through our own point of view.

And it is correct that there are no purely military prescriptions for winning in the paper. That is not the author's intent, and it does not fit with his premise. But neither does he advise a halt or reduction in our current efforts. Nowhere in the paper does the author advise not disrupt the enemy's activities and not clear his sanctuaries, and not take and hold.

I would like you to consider that, of the six bulleted recommendations in the Conclusions section which I quoted above, several elements are already being implemented - although perhaps more gradually and quietly than the author would like. The elements he harps on most - torture, excessive civilian casualties, reigning in sectarian militias - are ones that we've been taking very seriously for quite a while now.

Finally, I just want to say that I found the paper of interest simply because of the unique nature of his analysis - looking at the evolution of the various insurgent groups through their open discourse - primarily on-line, although other, more traditional forms of media were also used.