Sunday, June 10, 2007

RETHINKING INSURGENCY: A military analysis that explains the massive difficulty of countering insurgency and why it sometimes shouldn't be done.

If somebody understood the implications of this analysis, it might suggest that Ron Paul is a military genius.

If, in fact, insurgency is not simply a variant of
war, if the real threat is the deleterious effects of
sustained conflict, and if it is part of systemic failure
and pathology in which key elites and organizations
develop a vested interest in sustaining the conflict, the
objective of counterinsurgency support should not be
simply strengthening the government so that it can
impose its will more effectively on the insurgents, but
systemic reengineering. This, in turn, implies that the
most effective posture for outsiders is not to be an ally
of the government and thus a sustainer of the flawed
socio-political-economic system, but to be neutral
mediators and peacekeepers (even when the outsiders
have much more ideological affinity for the regime
than for the insurgents). If this is true, the United States
should only undertake counterinsurgency support in
the most pressing instances and as part of an equitable,
legitimate, and broad-based multinational coalition.


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