Posted by AP
Mao was worried people would interpret his broad guidelines as a doctrinal 3 phases, and not apply rigorous analysis and adapt to the local context, so I agree he rejected normative values. On the other hand, as we often do, we embraced excerpts from Mao's writing as a normative way to conduct an insurgency.From a structural perspective, the name of the organization is really a matter of semantics. The protracted popular war (PPW) as a model I think is applicable regardless of its origins in Maoist political theory. The value in communist theory is not its ideologically prescriptions for the ills of capitalism, but it's rigorous dialectical materialism which divorces analysis from the subjective normative values that so often cloud assessments. The Islamist movement was born in its current iteration in 1979 - the Iranian Revolution, the attack on the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabia, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. We are witnessing today the culmination of an escalating series of events which trace their roots directly to those three events.
The three phases are little more than articulation of the way most insurgencies unfold over time based on interaction the adversary. They rise up, they get hammered, go into a strategic defensive posture, if they can, they move into a strategic stalemate, and if it needed they transition into strategic counteroffensive. Hard to argue George Washington didn't do this long before Mao's writings. Mao's three phases are not a strategy, but we often confuse with it one. Mao also didn't abide by winning hearts and minds as we claim, he was expert at applying terror as we saw in Manchuria to achieve objectives. , but we have a PC interpretation of everything.
True about the vulnerability, but that doesn't mean strategic defeat, just means they'll try another way if they're not successful.That said, I do agree with TC (and with the COIN FM) that the 'insurgency' is most vulnerable when transitioning from one phase of conflict to the next. I do not think ISIS is incapable of governing in the most broad and basic sense - that is, to monopolize violence in its territory and to extract rent from the population. As another poster stated, they have done that already in Syria. Fundamentalist movements have been successful in those basic tasks in Iran (1979), Afghanistan (1996), and Saudi Arabia (~1924). I have no illusions that ISIS will somehow form a Westphalian, bureaucratic, complex state. That's not in their politics.
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