Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
Only one case of course, but it illustrates the importance of understanding why the insurgent fights - not "the insurgency", as a whole, but the individual insurgent. The insurgency may be Communist, Islamist, Separatist, what have you, but it's often the case that many of the individual insurgents are fighting not because they are devoted to those goals but because of some more immediate and often more local grievance. Addressing those grievances may not eliminate the insurgency, but it can dramatically reduce the appeal of the insurgency to the populace, reducing recruitment and increasing defections.
An excellent point. If you look at fluctuations in the strength of Hamas over the years, for example, it soon becomes clear that it has relatively little to do with IDF military activities. Rather, it grew during the first intifada (at a time when the IDF shifted from initial passive tolerance to active countermeasures--in a sense, IDF military action against it enhanced its "street cred"), waned sharply at the beginning of the Oslo process (when it fell to single digits in some polls as a consequence of optimism about the peace process), grew to over 40% by 2006 (because of a combination of collapse of the peace process and poor Fateh/PA governance), and has slowly slipped since then (largely because Hamas governance hasn't been much better, although here it could also be argued that IDF military action has had some effect).