Studies on radicalization & comments

[Bob's World]

Certainly if an insurgency is driven by resistance to Western-supported despotism one would be right to revisit the policy of supporting despots. We found ourselves in that position with a depressing regularity during the Cold War, but that paradigm is not necessarily applicable in every circumstance.

In Iraq and Afghanistan the "insurgencies" (using the term loosely) are not driven by resistance to Western-supported despotism but by a desire to take advantage of a power vacuum left when Western governments removed despots. The Western supported governments in both cases are widely perceived as ineffectual and vulnerable and likely to collapse as soon as Western support is withdrawn, leaving the prize open for whoever has the means to seize it. Western support is perceived (probably accurately) as being unsustainable over the long haul, so the "insurgents" try to erode that support and gain position to take power when it is withdrawn.

AQ, for its own part, may have had its roots in resistance to foreign-supported government and foreign occupation of Afghanistan, but the power in question was not Western. AQ's continuing campaign is based less on resistance to Western-supported despotism than on a desire to impose a despotism more conducive to AQ's goals.

It is in some quarters fashionable to attribute all that happens in the world (at least all that involves violence) to a response to Western actions. In some ways it would be lovely if this were true: if everything everyone did was a response to our actions, we could easily control the responses by modifying our own actions. The world, alas, is a bit more complicated than that, and the non-West is not simply a reflexive responder to Western stimuli. There are people out there with their own agendas and they have both the will and the capacity to proactively pursue those agendas, for their own purposes and quite apart from any knee-jerk response.

First Afghanistan: There was an alliance of northern tribes in insurgency against the illegitimate Taliban government that was installed and supported by Pakistan. We went into that mix to get revenge against AQ and to wrest control of Afghanistan away from the Taliban with out, I assume, fully appreciating the role of Pakistan in their regime. The follow-on insurgency we are dealing with in Afghanistan now has nothing to do with GWOT, and has everything to do with the current Karzai regime that draws its legitimacy from the West/US; and the Taliban insurgency to challenge that; along with a general popular resistance against the western military presence in their country.

In Iraq there was no insurgency and no connection to GWOT. They just happened to be governed by a guy who pissed us off. The insurgency there was purely a response to our invasion.

This is the great irony, the two places we have sent our military to "defeat terrorism" in fact, have very little to do with the root cause of the political factors that gave rise to AQ and also that motivate many nationalist insurgents across the middle east (from places like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Algeria) to engage the West in acts of Terrorism.

Until we are ready to stop using GWOT as an excuse to attack the States that we don't approve of; and instead recognize that we are not being attacked by the populaces of our enemies, but are in fact being attacked by the populaces of our allies, we will not may true progress in defeating terrorsim.

This is the critical strategic point that we must address. The West supports a handful of the most oppressive regimes in the world across the Middle East, and it is the insurgent populaces of those countries that attack us; along with the relatives of those populaces who have migrated to western countries.

This is like a magicians trick. No one is seeing the real problem because we are all staring intently at the misdirection.

Yemen is the latest poster child for this. An oppressive despot being promised US aid to oppress and suppress the insurgent segment of his populace that dares to stand up to his autocratic rule all in the name of "GWOT" and because he is an ally. We can only expect more attacks on the west from this policy. We should be cracking down on the government of Yemen, not the populace of Yemen. Once we change our policies and refocus our military efforts accordingly the populaces of places like Yemen will find they don't need what AQ is selling; and they will also have little reason to feel that they must attack the US to be able to get out from under oppressive regimes at home.