"I have yet to see any evidence that either foreign fighters or AQ terrorists act as "members of insurgencies", unless we are to embrace the "global insurgency" notion, which I personally find insupportable.
I do not agree that the US is threatened by the populaces of our allies. I don't think the US is threatened by any populace at all, but by a group of radicalized individuals recruited from many populaces (including our own) but neither representing nor acting on behalf of any of them."
One merely needs to look past the cover story of "Terrorism" and "Counterterrorism."
And, for the record, no one is a bigger critic of the "Global Insurgency" theory than I am. Does AQ use a common cause to get support from many diverse insurgencies to put effort against common objectives? Absolutely. Does that make it a "Global Insurgency"? NO. The effects may be massed, but the solutions remain diverse. The US must trace each line of foreign fighters back to their homelands, and then honestly assess our relationships with the governments there. Not just from our biased perspectives, but from the biased perspectives of that populace as well. At the end of the day it is the perception of the affected populace that controls.
So, just a couple examples from a couple of articles I googled. I don't agree with these articles, but there are good facts to pull from them.
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-A...g=en&id=108612
From this article: "top five foreign fighter producing cities for that cohort of individuals per capita were: Darnah, Libya; Mecca, Saudi Arabia; Jawf, Saudi Arabia; Dayr al zur, Syria; and Sanaa, Yemen, respectively."
Pay attention to those locations, they will come up again.
US-Saudi Cooperation in War on Terrorism Lauded in State Department Annual Report; 30 April, 2004
http://www.saudi-us-relations.org/ne...est-04-30.html
This second article is full of interesting facts. It praises the Saudis for their tremendous efforts in Combating Terrorism, and even for pushing for governmental reforms at home (This was 6 years ago, it would be interesting to see if any real action on these reforms took place).
Take this paragraph for example:
"Since May, Riyadh has arrested more than 600 individuals during counterterrorism operations and continues investigating the Riyadh attacks. Saudi security forces have suffered significant casualties while conducting counterterrorism operations and raids. Raids in Mecca, Riyadh, and Medina led to arrests and document seizures and netted large quantities of explosives and a variety of weapons. In July alone, security services seized more than 20 tons of explosive-making materials in Qassim. In November, the authorities seized a truck bomb at a reported al-Qaida safehouse in Riyadh. Meanwhile, Saudi officials met several times with their Yemeni counterparts in an effort to stanch the flow of weapons into Saudi Arabia from Yemen."
Ok, news flash, this isn't CT, this is COIN. The Saudis have been in nearly continuous LVL 1 insurgency for at least since FDR gave them his blessing of US Legitimacy. The beauty of doing COIN with in a despotic monarchy is that you can simply label your citizens who dare to challenge your benevolent rule as "Terrorists" and crush them, so it never really begins to look like a classic insurgency. This will however train your insurgents to look for more indirect means to achieve their goals. This is where Bin Laden comes in. He offered an indirect approach. Take down the Western protectors first, and then redirect your energies at home.
I could be totally wrong, but what I see (and there are thousands of articles out there, these are just two that popped up at the top of one search) are restless populaces, joined and energized by the modern information age, drawing strength from each other to rise up to resist their own separate conditions of poor governance. Many of these countries, like Saudi Arabia and Yemen, were US allies from the start. Some, like Libya, came to the US late to gain our blessing as an ally in the War on Terrorism and get a US sanction to ruthlessly attack their own insurgent populace in the name of "counterterrorism." And they all send fighters to work under the AQ flag to nick away at the US where ever we might be.
Global Insurgency? No. Global War on Terrorism? Equally no. Global friction to a US foreign policy in dire need of a fresh approach that is more populace focused and less rooted in sustaining "friendly dictators"? Yeah, I really do think so. But that is just my assessment. I toss it out here not to "radicalize" anyone, but just to gain other perspectives to help shape my own.
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