Pashtun / Pashtunwali / Pashtunistan (catch all)

[Bob's World]

Yaderyne,

Welcome Aboard, and thanks for the link. I enjoyed the article. Here's my take based off my current thoughts on small wars.

1. Similarities of differing insurgencies. The description provided by the authors was the strongest point of the article. The simple answer that they did not highlight was that both groups were conducting a version of Mao's Protracted War. IMO, it's THE playbook for a people's rebellion, social movement, or gang warfare. In each case, you take Mao broadly and apply it for METT-TC (Mission, Enemy, Time, Troops, Terrain, Civilians) in a given situation.

2. The Sine Qua Non of Counterinsurgency: Legitimacy. I disagree with this assertion, and IMO, it is something that we get fundamentally wrong when trying to understand small wars. Instead, the sine qua non of small wars is control. Legitimacy is merely a subset. For instance, does a farmer out in the boondocks care if Karzai is legitimate? No. He cares about his farm and his family. In terms of control, he wants to know who to go to IOT get fair settlements when he has disagreements with his neighbor.

Mike

I think it is probably more useful to consider any and all governments as "legitimate." I realize that flies in the face of traditional logic, but traditional logic also creates tremendous obstacles to effectively dealing with governments who's legitimacy WE disapprove of; and also causes us to overlook problems with the nature of the legitimacy of a government that WE do approve of. Bottom line on legitimacy is that what is important is that the populace served by any particular government recognizes its source of legitimacy.

The U.S. gets into a lot of trouble in meddling efforts to manipulate who gets into, gets removed from, or sustain in government over the populaces of others. We value OUR approval of such governments over how well the populaces of those same states approve. This is what, in my opinion, causes a manipulating outside state to become the target of a nationalist insurgency movement when the people act out to attempt to get a government whose legitimacy they recognize.

So, we ask the wrong question. We ask: "Is this government legitimate by our standards." What we should ask is "Does the relevant populace recognize the legitimacy of this government."

Next, "Control." The majority position that comes up over and over is that a measure of effective governance is its ability to control the populace. This is a slippery slope. Most people don't want to be "controlled," so much as they want the government to control the things that enable them to pursue their lives in relative peace and security. A fine nuance, but the government needs to exert reasonable (as defined by the populace) control over the environment the populace lives within, not over the populace themselves.