Is an insurgent an insurgent?

[marct]

Hi Bob,

In the broadest sense, I can make the case that EVERY populace and EVERY Government is some stage of Insurgency at ALL times.

A lot to consider....

On the whole, i would agree with you on that take. "Government" is a recent invention, say 10-12 kya, and one that many people still dislike.

NB: What follows is me playing academic Devil's Advocate

Consider an x - y Axis; with "Violence" on the y axis; and "poor governance" or "Despotism" on the x axis. Most populaces and governments plot in the lower left corner, not perfect, but with low violence and reasonable satisfaction within the populace of their governance.

Hmmm, I think this is too limited in a number of ways.

First, using a scale for "poor - good governance" implies that there is a singular model on which this can be tracked and rated. Not all "poor governance" is despotism and not all despotisms are poorly governed. I don't think there is, and I believe that the assumption that there is has caused a lot of problems in the current conflicts in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Second, even if we restrict our definition of "violence" to person on person kinetic conflict, different cultures (not societies) have quite different definitions of acceptable levels and types of violence. We (North Americans) may not consider honour killings as "acceptable violence", but some cultures do. We (Canadians this time) don't accept the level of violence prevalent in most major American cities - does that mean that the US suffers from "despotism" (note, I didn't say "poor governance", especially in light of people's apparent views of Congress )?

Basically, I think that your "violence" scale is flawed and your "governance" scale is way too limited.

As governance begins to fail, the plot moves to right as to governance despotism; and upward for populace violence. This is in the natural state. A dictatorship may exert strong controls on a populace to keep violence low even as the governance trends to the right and despotism; but if that pressure is removed the populace pops straight up on the violence scale (think end of Tito regime in Yugoslavia).

How would you account for non-despotic regimes that have a high degree of violence in their populace? This gets back to one of the flaws I see with your scale for governance; there are too many assumptions about what "good governance" means. In particular, you seem to be setting up a situation where any violence is an indicator of poor governance.

This implies, to me at least, that the State as the institution of governance, must be a Total Organization - responsible for the welfare, emotional states and mindset of all of its citizens. Even worse, again to my mind, is the extrapolation that the State is capable of such responsibilities.

The goal of effective COIN then is to not just attack the violence and suppress the populace straight down; but to also "attack" the conditions of poor governance so that the populace and the governance move together down the x-y slope to a sustainable state in pre-insurgency.

Would that include removing the government? If, for example, the activities of militias and gangs in the US reached an unacceptable point, would you feel that the military would be justified in removing Congress and the Executive branch?

NOTE: This is a rhetorical question, I do not expect an answer! I told you I was in Devil's Advocate mode !

Some take aways from this perspective:
1. Insurgency happens when governments fail; so it is the fault of the civil government for breaking it, and the responsibility of the civil government to fix it.

How about externally engineered insurgencies (e.g. those pushed by the 5th Comintern) designed to first subvert the government, then overthrow it?

2. COIN is continuous and primarily CIVIL and focused on providing good governance to the populace.

Still need a good definition for that.

3. Any COIN effort focused just on defeating the military arm of the insurgency merely suppresses it.

While, at the same time, increasing support for it.

4. Any effort to target key leaders or ideology without addressing poor governance also merely suppresses the insurgency. New leaders, new movements, new ideology will emerge to lead the populace once again.

Um, that would, of course, include the insurgents, wouldn't it?

5. The goal of insurgency is not to "defeat" the insurgent, but to repair the poor governance and generally move the populace back into the fold. Efforts to "defeat" are highly likely to be counter to your true goal. After all, how much of the populace must one kill to re-earn their support?

Sounds like a definition of a disfunctional family to me .

When you don't think you have an insurgency until the situation is so failed as to be in open violence, it is like not thinking you have a fire until the flames are visible from the street. Too late. Too damn late.

Hmmm, if that is accepted, then any political opposition would automatically be considered as an "insurgency". Sounds totally opposed to any form of democratic ideals I'm familiar with!

[/Devil's Advocate]

Okay, moving out of the DA stance, I happen to agree with a lot of your comments even if it didn't seem like I did . I went to the DA position because part of the reason for this thread was the implications of using certain words/understandings, and I wanted to pull out some of the ones in your post.

BTW, I really do think your governance scale is flawed. There are culturally accepted levels and types of "governance" even as there are culturally accepted levels and types of violence. Consider, by way of examples of both, the difference between, say, Texas and New York in how they, as a State, would deal with someone who shot a trespasser on their property (I doubt they'd even be charged in Texas).

I think a better governance scale could be constructed using a combination of cultural expectation of governance and the distance of lived reality from that expectation. Both of these will change and both are also susceptible to change from external sources. It certainly avoids the single implied model in your current scale. In effect, it would ask "What do you expect your government to do?" rather than ask "How well is your government doing X, Y and Z" (which may be culturally not the role of a government).