Quote Originally Posted by Pete View Post
A counter-intuitive, yet promising move is to do something that's likely to be associated with failure and weakness. An army could allow the guerrillas to expand their useful repertoire instead of suppressing it as much as possible. The guerrillas might eventually step over a threshold and turn into a rather conventional force. Once beyond that point, it would be possible to push them back ...
What assumptions does this make about the relationship between guerrillas and the population? In Peru they apparently didn't so much step over a threshold that rendered them susceptible to conventional attack by external forces as their ideology was given the breathing space to manifest contradictions in practice which poisoned the water.

-peter