New Guidance on Counter-Insurgency

[Dayuhan]

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.

It's a good thing to think about "the populace", but it can also be a dangerous thing. Very few countries have a monolithic populace. In many cases populaces are deeply and bitterly divided, with competing factions fighting for their own interests. Policies that one faction demands may be seen as incendiary provocation by another. The concept of majority rule with minority protection, so familiar to us that we often take it for granted, is wholly alien to many places and populaces.

I certainly recognize the foolishness of the cold war pattern of supporting inept dictators over reform-minded populaces simply because the dictators were nominally "on our side", but we do ourselves no favors by imposing this paradigm on circumstances where it may not fit. A small, violent faction may be outraged over poor government; it may also be outraged at its own inability to control government or draw enough popular support to wage an insurgency. We cannot assume that every angry violent group represents an insurgent populace. It is inappropriate to assume that anyone who takes up arms against a government is an evil terrorist manipulated by a foreign ideology. It is equally inappropriate to assume that that anyone who takes up arms against a government represents an honest populace outraged by bad governance.

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.

I'm not at all sure this is true, and I think the allegation deserves good deal more supporting evidence and argument.

What is this thing we call GWOT? It is not a war on terror, or a war on terrorism: terrorism is a tactic, not an actor, and nobody ever fought a war against a tactic. It's also not a war against an insurgency, or a populace. We were not attacked by an enraged populace, or an insurgent group. Our response to attack may have created insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, but those are consequences of the GWOT, not causes.

The distinction is significant. In the past efforts to find an address a grand overarching cause behind terror attacks have led to decisions that diluted ourt efforts and empowered our opponents. The neocon clique declared that the long-term solution to ME-based terrorism was to "drain the swamp", and declared Iraq the pivotal front in that effort. The resulting war diverted our efforts from attacking those who had attacked us and generated a wave of support for our enemies; for quite a while we were closer to drowning in the swamp than to draining it, and a positive outcome is still in no way assured.

I am similarly suspicious of any effort to declare that the long term solution to ME-based terror is to reverse cold war errors by intervening in nations that are currently not major fronts in the GWOT on behalf of populaces who have not sought our assistance. I suspect that the effort would produce more suspicion and hostility than appreciation from the populaces in question, destabilize existing (flawed but necessary) alliances, and would be likely to accomplish nothing, divert attention and resources from core efforts, and make existing tasks more difficult.

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.

We can only mediate if we are asked to mediate and our mediation is acceptable to all parties concerned. If we attempt to impose ourselves as mediators we are simply reinforcing the perception of inappropriate influence.

We have to recall also that perception is not necessarily real, and in many of these areas we actually have very little influence and very little ability to place pressure on allied governments. If we attempt to influence a government on behalf of a populace and fail, we antagonize the government, leave the populace feeling betrayed (assuming on scant evidence that our intervention was sought in the first place), and appear impotent.

We have a tendency to think that all populaces want what we would want and will respond as we would respond, and that we are entitled to speak on behalf of any given populace. Not necessarily true. My view is that any intervention, armed or unarmed, imposition or mediation or anything else, should be undertaken very reluctantly, only after very deep examination, and with a clear idea of exactly what we are trying to accomplish and how we propose to accomplish it. Sticking our faces into another nation's domestic affairs on the illusion that we do so on behalf of "the populace" is not going to get a positive reaction from either government or populace, and is likely to create more problems than it resolves.

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.

How is that the case? If a government seizes power in an armed coup, or cheats in an election, it has prevailed, at least for the moment, but it is not necessarily acceptable to the populace. It is not up to us to decide whether that government is "acceptable", but it is up to us to decide whether or not we want to support that government.