Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
I just think that the idea that you can create a nation that does whatever it is told is ridiculous and that you have to expect to be manipulated.

Marc
but that's not what I'm saying. Let me stick to simple basics. Insurgency is an attempt to achieve political goals through violence. Insurgents know they can't win militarily but they keep their recruitment rate high by making the population angry at the government. They keep their loss rate low by hiding in the population. By recruiting more then they lose, they survive a long time and if they're violent long enough, they figure people will give them what they want.


To effectively counter an insurgency - and this is somewhat metaphorical, but literally true in a simple insurgency - you build a wall around the population. The insurgents can no longer hide among the people, making them easy to kill. To make sure that people don't sneak out of the wall and join the insurgency, you pacify people with job creation/hearts and minds etc inside the wall.

In Iraq - as the Washington Post article states, and as AM reiterates - the more walls we build around the Sunnis, the less incentive the Shi'ite government has to make life inside the walled Sunni enclaves livable. Therefore, a new insurgency erupts inside the walls. (Precisely because we don't control how the Iraqi government spends their money.)

In other words, as the political scientists point out, because the goals of the government and the counter insurgent aren't aligned we can - under certain circumstances - get a new insurgency: insurgency 2.0.

We need to better understand those circumstances. The manual needs more game theory.

Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that is used in the social sciences to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others.

Put another way, every time we create an inkspot, Maliki will change his strategy. Iran, the Sunnis and the Kurds will also change their strategy. One, or more of those people may decide to turn to violence. Therefore more clearing and holding could be - under certain circumstances that are difficult to comprehend, but that can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy - be counterproductive.

Just like we need help from anthropologists, we need help from game theorists.