Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
While this may be definitional, I think it is a mistake. I would argue that some socio-cultural logics allow and encourage insurgency as a general purpose form of political discourse. This would mean that the source of the insurgency is not the fundamental shortcomings of the state but, rather, the acceptance of insurgency as a valid political "talking point". While you could argue that this is a state failing, I would place the causal impetus more in the socio-cultural realm.

Taking that point a little further, I would sub-divide it into two main versions:
  1. States where military force is monopolized by the state and there is no "right of revolt" such as exists in the Anglo Culture complex; and
  2. States where military force is dispersed through multiple groups and institutions operating in a dynamic tension.
To cloud the issue further, I would point to the extensive use of ideological warfare as a form of socio-cultural subversion that creates a perception of state shortcomings. In that case, it would not be internally perceived shortcomings of the state, but externally constructed and marketed shortcomings.

That having been said, I would suspect that a large majority of insurgencies do fall under the form you list - just not all.



Now that is a really good point. The corollary is that Washington will have to admit the failings in its own governance structures within the US itself, otherwise it will lack any moral authority in the international arena including the "partners" it is trying to influence.



I think this is spot on, and it shows off one of the glaring errors with your political system (BTW, I assume that all systems have flaws ). This error wouldn't be a problem in the early days of broadcast communications, since the raucousness of CONUS political exchanges rarely were available to the general population of the "partner" country.

However, when you change the communications technology to the highly interactive ones prevalent today, you have a completely different situation where the lines between domestic political propaganda (party based) and external political propaganda are pretty much erased. This is a point that Matt (Mountainruner) and I have been talking about for a while now.
I meant to suggest that the "flaws" which allow the formation of an insurgency can be ones of omission or commission, so I don't think we disagree. Allowing a violent, alternative narrative or ideology the "space" to propagate is a sin of ommission.

In my mind, I sort of compare counterinsurgency to social work. One of the big challenges for a social worker is convincing their clients that there are things about their basic lifestyle and attitude that need changed for things to improve.

Or, here's another metaphor that I floated at a COIN workshop at Brookings a few weeks ago (which included luminaries like T.X. Hammes, Ralph Peters, and Bob Kilibrew): it is the rare alcoholic who can or will admit they have a serious problem and make major life alterations to deal with them. Most simply want to be functional drunks. They don't want to live in the gutter, but they don't want to stop drinking either.

In counterinsurgency support, most of America's partner regime don't want to be sober (after all, the elites have made a pretty good lives from themselves from a corrupt and often repressive system). They just want to be functional drunks.

That's the rub for the United States: our counterinsurgency doctrine and strategy assumes that our partners want to be clean and sober when most simply want to be functional drunks.

I think we're seeing that in Iraq. I believe the Maliki government can tolerate the current situation for a long time. They don't want a full cutoff of American assistance, but they also don't want to undertake the really hard steps required to undercut the cause of the conflict. They are a functional drunk.