Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
Certainly separatist movements like that executed by the American Colonies or the Iraqi Kurds had no intent or interest in "overthrowing a constituted government," they simply did not want to participate in it any longer.

Likewise resistance movements like that executed by the French against the German invaders; or the Iraqis against the American invaders of there respective countries were not "aimed at overthrowing a constituted government" either.

Yet both are categories of insurgencies in my book. It sounds like what he is dealing with is a subset of a separatist movement. Also, the insurgency is not the irregular military itself, irregular military is just what insurgencies tend to employ for their dirtier work toward achieving their political ends.
I think there's another type of insurgency, one that gets less attention here than it might. My own familiarity with this comes from an environment far removed from Afghanistan, but it would not surprise me to see the same phenomenon appearing there.

I would call this type of insurgency "issue-driven", with the driving issues primarily local. People in this position may not be trying to overthrow a government or secede from a nation, they are simply trying to force a government to stop doing specific things that they find offensive or opposed to their interests.

We tend to see these things in national terms: a national insurgency fighting a national government. It is said, though, that all politics are local, and this tends to be very true in tribal areas of decentralized states, where national governments (and for that matter nations) may seem very remote. In these environments, if people are fighting there are often immediate, local reasons that may be resolvable, addressable, and even legitimate. Many of my neighbors were insurgents once (they won, one of the rare places where that's happened), and given the way their government treated them, I can't blame them at all: in their shoes I'd have done the same thing.

National insurgencies tend to be aware of these local issues, and often move to exploit them by offering alliances. When these offers are accepted, that may give the impression that the local insurgency is a subset of the national one. That impression may be false: alliances may be a matter of convenience, and if local issues are addressed they may dissolve.

Of course these local issues may not be immediately visible to an outsider, and local government may not be at all eager to see them become visible, especially if the government or its agents have done specific things that provoked a violent response.

Again, I'm not at all sure that lessons learned among the hill tribes of the northern Philippines have any relevance at all to the hill tribes of northern Afghanistan, but I think it's worth considering that in any given area, some insurgents may be fighting because of local, immediate issues, and that it might be possible to divide these groups from the national insurgency by addressing and resolving the issues that motivate them.