Quote Originally Posted by jmm99 View Post
I recognize the difference in your approach from the what I would call the "reformist" (population-centric) approach - no word-coining on my part; I ripped off Eqbal Ahmad.

So, the question is: What do you do, given the needs of the populace (and including in the rights to self-determination and to good governance), where the incumbant government cannot or will not meet those needs ?[*]

This question posits that the existing insurgency against the incumbant government is also unacceptable. Historically, we could pick any number of Latin-American countries in the past century - with a number of US interventions. That is, oligarchs ruling over very poor and exploited populations, with insurgencies too radical for our taste as well.

Do you simply pack up your bags and leave; or do you engineer a "third way" movement - perhaps, not that far from the radical insurgents, but expressing the needs of the populace ?

Further posit that the NCAs have given COL Jones complete freedom of action to do what he thinks is right.

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[*] Also posited is that the incumbant government has no ears to hear the excellent briefings of COL Jones, who is therefore in the same shoes as Paul of Acts.

PS: Upon reflection, you can answer this in two parts, using two roles: (1) COL Jones, USASF - not indigenous (so, not "his fight"); and COL Jones, indigenous military, who has the appropriate group of "misfits", military and civilian, to engineer a "third way" (so, it is "his fight").
Like my country, I must start with our Declaration of Independence. We are founded on the principle of the unalienable right and duty of every populace to rise up in insurgency at such time as its governance becomes "despotic." What exactly is despotic? Well, that is something for every populace to decide for itself as well.

So, If I am faced with a country that has a government that first was so despotic (what I call poor governance) as to incite some significant segment of its populace to insurgency; and then is so lame as to not be able to deal with the problem that it started; that to me is a government that must go. No government has a right rule when its own populace thinks it must go. To intervene and attempt to preserve the government against it populace's will creates the very conditions that I think are at the root of what we call the GWOT.

When a populace believes that its government draws its legitimacy more from some source that they do not recognize than it does from one they do, they will target that source in the conduct of their insurgency if need be to achieve good governance. I believe this conditions exists throughout the middle east due to our Cold War engagement, and AQ is conducting a savvy UW campaign to incite and support these disparate insurgencies, and also encouraging them to attack the source of inappropriate legitimacy over the same. So the Main Effort for the US should be to ID and address these perceptions of inappropriate US legitimacy over these allied governments. And then, where necessary, be a mediator between the governments and their populaces to try to keep change evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Now, it is not up to us to decide if the incoming government is "acceptable" or not. By definition any government that prevails is "acceptable" to the populace. If it turns out that it did not have full support and itself becomes despotic, it too will suffer the same fate. Some things you just have to work out for yourself, because any external solution, no matter how good, will be bad. We can certainly let the new kids on the block that we have eyes in the sky, and that if we see them violating international law and abusing their populace that we will punish key leaders. We have the tools to do this; and we don't need to occupy the country to do so.