Quote Originally Posted by John View Post
WM. Interesting, thought provoking comments. However, I would question the Taliban's technique of suppressing the will of the people as, in fact, an end to a political means....arguably a religious end. I agree with your ideas of the trinity, and contend they need to be tweeked for insurgent context. Obviously religious objectives create ambiguity.
John,
I was going to respond that at some level religious motivations actually are political ones but the next post after yours by Intel Trooper made that point. We could probably tussle a while about what we mean by religion and religious, but I think I'll let Marc T chime in on that first, if he is of a mind to do so.

Instead, I'll just suggest a couple of interesting struggles between church authority and state authority for consideration that religious struggles can really be political struggles in disguise:
Consider Bishop Ambrose of Milan threatening to excommunicate Roman/Byzantine Emperor Theodosius I in connection with the effort for suppressing Arianism, or
Hildebrand of Sovana (AKA Pope Gregory VII) actual excommunicating (twice) Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV and Henry's response by installing the "anti-Pope" Clement III. This last initiated what we could easily call a "civil war" in the Catholic Church.

If we choose to define politics (as found in Clausewitz) as the process of conducting inter-state relations, then insurgency may well fall outside the pale of politics so defined. I say this because an insurgency usually is a matter of intra-state relations (returning to my point that an insurgency is really a struggle between two different parties for control of at least one of the three parts of Clausewitz' trinity). But at some point, an insurgent party may garner enough support that it may have its own trinity within the geographical boundaries by which we normal refer to nations as political entities. At that point, we might consider the struggle to be inter-state with the application of CvC now appropriate.