What can I say about a title (that the author admits is provocative)?
Why military force is usually the wrong choice for counterterrorism and counterinsurgency
He writes that the violence problem (terror/insurgency) stems from some other deeper problem that must be addressed to halt the visible problem of violence.
Well, yeah.
This is why I've long spoken of the need to give Arab Moslems another choice for governance than their traditional alternatives of autocracy or Islamist government.
That's why I had hopes for the Arab Spring (and still do, given a long enough frame of reference).
And that's why I always thought the Iraq War and aftermath was more important than Afghanistan.
Afghanistan was the surface problem--where the 9/11 attack was organized--and too peripheral to the Arab Moslem world to matter for that deeper problem. Iraq was in the heart of the Arab Moslem world.
So a successful post-Saddam Iraq that avoided the Islamist alternative would be a victory in addressing the deeper problem that a post-Islamist Afghanistan that avoids the autocrat route could never be for the Arab Moslem world.
So the author could have made this point. But he didn't. He simply says that force is the wrong way to fight terrorism or insurgency (except when the insurgent/terrorist group is already isolated or if massively brutal forces is applied) because it fails to address the deeper problem.
What the author fails to realize is that until the deeper problems can be corrected, the insurgents and terrorists will continue to kill their target audience. Are we really to shrug off the losses and look forward to the day when the thugs decide they don't want to kill us any more?
And success in that killing (and they do love to video them) will strengthen the thugs, countering the hearts and minds campaign with both fear of resisting these thugs and the appeal of success.
Military actions are a necessary but not sufficient aspect of a fight against terrorists or insurgents. Military actions are absolutely crucial to protecting the targets of the thugs until the deeper problem can be addressed. Let me repeat a quote in an old post from an old Vietnam hand about this very same subject:
George Jacobson, an "old hand" who altogether served eighteen years in Vietnam and was a mainstay of the pacification program in these later years, often observed that "there's no question that pacification is either 90 percent or 10 percent security, depending on which expert you talk to. But there isn't any expert that will doubt that it's the first 10 percent or the first 90 percent. You just can't conduct pacification in the face of an NVA division."
So close to arriving at a good point, the author ends up just totally wrong.
UPDATE: Oh, about that title.
