How Insurgencies End

[Dayuhan]

In US policy terms only elected officials have any legitimacy, so the "idea" is purely political. Killing those who disagree enforces the policy!

Possibly so, but what applicability do US definitions of legitimacy have to Afghanistan? Isn’t it the Afghans who have to decide whether or not a government is legitimate? If we decide for them and try to kill all who disagree we may find ourselves set for a whole lot of killing.

The thread seems to have narrowed its focus from insurgency in general to Afghanistan. I believe that Afghanistan is a bad case to study if you are seeking to construct (or argue about) a taxonomy for insurgency, because it is as close to unique as any war can be.

Agreed. But if you look at the first line of the Rand study:

Insurgencies have dominated the focus of the U.S. military for the past seven years, but they have a much longer history than that and are likely to figure prominently in future U.S. military operations. Thus, the general characteristics of insurgencies and, more important, how they end are of great interest to U.S. policymakers.

It seems that the authors of the study consider the conclusions applicable to the current conflict. That’s what I was questioning.

we attempted much more than just creating a national authority; we sought to construct an entire governmental structure reaching down to the district level, disenfranchising both the traditional (tribal) and organic (warlords) local power centers. Moreover, this had to be a government that could survive the withdrawal of our forces at some unspecified future date, so it had to gain a certain amount of popular support - in other words, it required 'legitimacy' beyond that afforded through the right of conquest.

Unfortunately, we allowed competitors to arise who were trying to fill the governance vacuum at the same time we were. The difference between 'us' and 'them' is that they have no intention of withdrawing, ever. They will be able to sustain their version of an Afghan government with their bayonets, rather than rely strictly on popular support or legitimacy.

Won’t a political vacuum always call up competition for the right to fill it? Maybe instead of seeing the indigenous actors that arose to try and fill that vacuum as “them” or “the competition” we could have tried to work with them… after all, as you say, they are at least indigenous and will not be withdrawing. They may well represent those local power structures that we have disenfranchised, and as such they might well enjoy as much or more popular support and legitimacy than our version of governance.

It seems that somewhere along the line our original goal in Afghanistan – drive out AQ and assure that they don’t return – was elevated to the much larger goal of constructing “an entire governmental structure reaching down to the district level”. That’s a beautiful goal, but I’m not sure that we’ve the capacity to achieve it, or that the Afghans particularly want foreigners to design and build their government.

Does foreign intervention to elevate one faction above others constitute an end to a civil war - or do these foreign interventions simply prolong it?

Did we intervene to elevate one faction above others? I don’t think so. Seems to me we intervened purely in pursuit of our own interests, to remove a “government” that we disliked and assure that the subsequent government would not provide a safe haven for AQ. The faction we ended up elevating didn’t exist prior to our intervention.

The core conflict at the moment is us vs the Taliban, and I don’t see how you can call that a civil war. If we were intervening in support of a pre-existing government, yes, that would be civil war with foreign participation. That's not what we're doing. We're an occupying power trying to install a government that suits us, and our enemies not unreasonably perceive us to be their primary antagonist. If the dominant party to a conflict is a foreign occupying power, I can't see that conflict as a civil war.