How Insurgencies End

[Dayuhan]

Strategy is the use of all instruments of power. However, without military power, the rest are generally useless. If you do not get the military bit right, you can do nothing else. Solving an insurgency means getting the military bit right, before anything else. Do some armies do it badly? Yes. That does not alter the reality.

There is a common fallacy that development helps end insurgencies. It simply is not true. Let's stop using the silly word insurgency.

Is there any coherent historical evidence that building public amenities has ever defeat an irregular force conducting a rebellion or revolt?

I agree that underdevelopment is overrated as a cause of insurgency, and development overrated as a remedy. Poor design or implementation of "development" projects, in fact, have often provoked or exacerbated anti-government violence.

It is hard not to notice that insurgencies do most frequently emerge in underdeveloped environments. That does not necessarily mean that underdevelopment causes insurgency. It seems to me more likely to suggest that many of the same factors that produce underdevelopment - including but not limited to weak or absent justice systems, unaccountable and abusive elites, and persistent use of state power for personal gain - also drive insurgency.

People don't take up arms against a government for no reason, and the reasons tend to be fairly direct and fairly personal. A farmer might grumble and complain that an irrigation system no longer works or the road he uses to get his crop to market is impassable, but he's not likely to start ambushing soldiers. Throw him off his farm, that changes.

People fight their government because they're angry or scared, often both. If you can determine why they are angry or scared and remove the cause of the anger and fear, you may not need to get the military bit right because you may not need to employ it in the first place.

To break it down to the level of the individual insurgent (ultimately what it's all about), suppose a clan takes up arms against the government because the provincial police chief's son raped one of their daughters and the justice system proved inoperative. Do you send in the military to shoot the whole clan, or do issue a contrite apology, fire the police chief, and haul his son off to the local dungeon?

Before you think of sending troops in to suppress an insurgency, why wouldn't you ask why these people are fighting (not the leaders, but the people actually doing the fighting), and whether that cause can be removed without having to send in troops?

[William F. Owen]

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People fight their government because they're angry or scared, often both. If you can determine why they are angry or scared and remove the cause of the anger and fear, you may not need to get the military bit right because you may not need to employ it in the first place.

People fight to alter the political power that effects their lives.
If you can solve the problem with politics, then great.

To break it down to the level of the individual insurgent (ultimately what it's all about), suppose a clan takes up arms against the government because the provincial police chief's son raped one of their daughters and the justice system proved inoperative. Do you send in the military to shoot the whole clan, or do issue a contrite apology, fire the police chief, and haul his son off to the local dungeon?

Huh? Sorry, is that a question?
OK, so what's the political danger of prosecuting the Police chief? What tribe or clan does he belong to? Solving that problem is entirely political. It's not a military problem. What would you do in New York City?

....but if the clan comes through the jungle carrying weapons, then you inflict harm upon them, until they surrender.
What is so hard to understand about the simple dynamic of using armed force against armed force that threatens the state or "your" control of the state?

[Dayuhan]

What is so hard to understand about the simple dynamic of using armed force against armed force that threatens the state or "your" control of the state?

What I don't understand is why we should assume that the only possible response to armed force is the use of armed force, rather than starting with an attempt to determine whether the problem can be resolved through political measures short of armed force.

Sometimes people resort to violence because they have real grievances and have been given no recourse other than armed force. When that is the case, why escalate an armed confrontation into what can become a prolonged and destructive conflict if you can resolve the issue by addressing the grievance? And if we look at it from our usual position of assisting foreign power, shouldn't we be reluctant to provide military assistance to assist a government in the suppression of armed resistance that it has provoked through its own conduct?

[William F. Owen]

What I don't understand is why we should assume that the only possible response to armed force is the use of armed force, rather than starting with an attempt to determine whether the problem can be resolved through political measures short of armed force.

Why should I reward the use of political violence? Would you let a murder go unpunished?
If they haven't given them what they wanted when they didn't have guns, why would you when they did?
If someone assembles an armed force to be used to extract political concessions, the first demand you make is for them put down their arms or else. It's good housekeeping.

Sometimes people resort to violence because they have real grievances and have been given no recourse other than armed force.

Sometimes and maybe....and if the Government thought their grievance legitimate, then they should have dealt with it. It's almost always political suicide to reward violence.

[Dayuhan]

Sometimes and maybe....and if the Government thought their grievance legitimate, then they should have dealt with it. It's almost always political suicide to reward violence.

Sometimes a Government doesn't recognize that a grievance exists until somebody gets up and says so with a gun. A lot of the Governments we deal with in these cases aren't exactly notorious for their responsiveness in dealing with the concerns of the public.

There are plenty of countries out there where filing a court case against an influential person, or going to the press with a grievance, or leading a peaceful demonstration, or any number of things that Westerners take for granted can get you killed. Not surprisingly, such places often produce insurgencies.

It can also be political suicide to refuse to accept that the violence you face was provoked by your own actions, something any number of ex-dictators - many of them once our "allies - could attest to. From the perspective of a nation that doesn't face an insurgency but often meddles in those of others, that just means we need to be more careful than we sometimes have been about who we support.

[Steve the Planner]

From KGS Nightwatch: (Re: the Pentagon report)

"Comment: NightWatch has studied Afghanistan for more than 30 years and based on that body of experience it challenges the assertions of the study as jejune, as reported. First of all, no baseline study of Afghan attitudes towards corruption has ever been performed. We do not know how Afghans define corruption, even. Further, it is remarkable that any analyst or agency would pretend to assert that there is some kind of homogeneity in the attitudes of the residents of any district in Afghanistan without reference to tribal leadership.

Louis Dupree came as close as anyone to defining corruption in Afghanistan. It does not mean honest government, as understood in the west. The meaning is closer to overreaching for personal advantage without spreading the benefits to the tribe. The idea of "fighting" corruption is American political cant, not anything related to Afghanistan.

The idea of supporting the central government is an alien import. Legal and institutional reforms? are pretty meaningless in a country that is illiterate. Again, there is no baseline for measuring support for the government, whatever that means. If the dominant tribal elder in a district benefits from Karzai's cronies, the district will support the government. It is astonishing that someone in Washington could conclude that 29 of 400 districts support anything.

This kind of sophistry, as reported, is symptomatic of the problems about which the US intelligence chief complained in January. Bold assertions are meaningless and lack context without definitions and baselines.

For example, in 1996 more than 100 mortar, rocket and direct fire attacks occurred daily in Kabul when Hekmatyar was prime minister. That is a baseline datum for how bad security can get in Kabul during a civil war. The Taliban and all other anti-government forces have never come close to achieving that level of insecurity in ten years.

The arrival of Americans did not reset the baseline for violence or political loyalty in Afghanistan. The insurgency is not a function of the American definition of corruption. Such a suggestion misleads policy makers. It is much more about foreign soldiers occupying Afghan tribal lands. In other words, there would be fighting and insurgency to drive out the invaders even if the government in Kabul were as clean as a hound's tooth, to quote CIA Director Casey. It is ignorant to suggest otherwise."

My take:

Beetle's comment about control volumes suggests you identify some variables that, if managed, could have a result of lessening the detrimental impacts and undesired externalities.

The stream modeling analogy which he and I are familiar with goes like this: in natural conditions, rain falls in the watershed, trickles through the trees and soil to meander through gentle stream. Cut down the trees, channelize the drainage, and any rain event become a force---gushing down the stream, tearing out embankments, and carrying away a lot of soil to build up in choke points somewhere else.

Two obvious choices: recreate the natural pre-development circumstance (not desirable) or mitigate and or manage the peaks and surges into the stream and/or their detrimental consequences.

In Afghanistan, with few exceptions, there never was a bucolic prior period to recreate, and no guidepost to a steady state. Just detrimental peaks and externalities to be limited and managed.

Translate that to Afghanistan and the questions are: Where is the watershed? Afghanistan itself, and areas surrounding in many directions. What variables are controllable? Here, the answer seems to be corruption, governance, and development? How, if controlled, can these variables be employed where to alter what? What are the limits and capabilities of these variables to the detrimental impacts and externalities you are trying to effect? What are the costs, resources, trade-offs and consequences of applying them?

The real question, since resources and resource commitments are highly constrained for the Afghanistan problem, is: If only limited efforts are going to be applied, can they have much positive effect?

It seems to me that, for Afghanistan, the limited questions and answers always drive both the choices and the results. Given that I can only control a piece of the watershed, and only have a few resources that can actually be employed, what if I just do one or two of these things in an area? Can it make a significant and sustain able difference?

In Iraq, the shear volume of resources and commitments often overwhelmed a problem, especially where Iraqis themselves (as in development) were a resource that was seldom even tapped, and they were also (for better or for worse) an active and malign "stabilizing" force (ethnic cleansing).

Certainly an empowered Non-Pashtun military force, like Shias, would have scores to settle, but there is no significant internal dynamic in Afghanistan today driving activity except the Taliban and corruption; the "voice" of peace, stability, good governance and prosperity is, at best, a quiet one with, as yet, little influence.

On the other hand, the RAND study, by excluding Iraq, Iran, misses two prime examples where the "watershed" was, in fact, in the immediate and adjacent countries, as in Afghanistan. It is not just that there are influences from Pakistan, or India or Iran or Tajikistan. Ten to twenty percent of the population of Afghanistan (and many of the active and influential ones) are next door.

It is that all of these are part of the problem set---Afghans are in those countries too, and a part of influencing the system: Stomp the bugs on the floor all you like, the bugs are in the wall.

Having said that, when Ireland was crushed by oppression, disastrous land and agricultural management and famine, it's best and brightest left. You are dealing with an equivalent "remnant population" of the mostly the weakest and most unempowered, seeded with a most predatory survivor "leadership," and yet, influenced, like Irish in America, from afar.

Study the four (paper) walls of Afghanistan all you want; the solutions are really in the whole watershed, and cannot be found in just the remnant population.

It "ends" when conflict and instability are moderated to a tolerable range.

[William F. Owen]

From the perspective of a nation that doesn't face an insurgency but often meddles in those of others, that just means we need to be more careful than we sometimes have been about who we support.

Dam Straight!
All I am saying (endlessly it seems) is that military force is an instrument of Policy. You can "what if" that statement to death, but it does not change the instrumental nature of military force, when it comes to defeating an armed insurrection, rebellion or revolt.

- and yes, as Clausewitz so wisely teaches, when you apply violence in support of an objective, that may alter the objective.

[Dayuhan]

All I am saying (endlessly it seems) is that military force is an instrument of Policy.

That's why a discussion of insurgency (or revolt, rebellion, whatever) that focuses exclusively on the military aspect and neglects policy is incomplete to the point of being irrelevant.