New Guidance on Counter-Insurgency

[Bill Moore]

Posted by BW,

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.

I'm not sure where to go with this argument, because on the surface it makes sense, but when you go a little deeper it tends to become less stable. I agree with your premise that Vietnam is doing O.K., but it took time for Vietnam to get to that point. It is also true that Vietnam would be probably be O.K. if we prevailed. Using that logic you could argue that Cuba did O.K. under Castro compared to Batista (since there was a valid reason for the insurgency); however, Castro then exported his revolution throughout Latin America and many parts of Africa (and his policies further bankrupted his country). However, going back to your argument the people won (that can be argued), so it isn’t our business, yet Cuba’s policies were clearly challenging U.S. interests. Another example is a potential future Afghanistan government (post U.S. military involvement on a large scale). We’ll assume this new government is tolerated by the people, but that the new government supports, or turns a blind eye towards, Al Qaeda who has once again established a safe haven in Afghanistan. Once again we have an acceptable solution to the people, but it is not in our national interests.

In these examples it appears you’re making an argument that we can target the leaders of these countries and not the populace, but if the populace supports the government that is quite a task. A foreign government can’t target our national leadership and win the support of the American people. Just how do we go about targeting national leadership without targeting or punishing the people? As you stated we tried this in Iraq with sanctions, and seriously harmed the local populace while further strengthening Saddam’s hold on power by even further centralizing power. I think your arguments may be founded on false assumptions.

So while I partially agree, I think there are some fatal flaws in your argument. We deploy forces to achieve national security objectives, and that is not always in line with popular opinion of the country we're conducting operations in. While state conflicts have always had to consider the populace as a critical planning factor, the level of populace empowerment, as you pointed out, is new due to the proliferation of information technology. Thus the challenge we seem to be wrestling with is finding "effective" ways to neutralize the population’s hostility towards us.