Is It Possible Defeat a Guerrilla Insurgency?

I have come to conclude that the Iraq and Afghan conflicts are virtually unwinnable. Now that we're almost a decade into the conflcits, one has to wonder if a popular insurgency can ever be defeated. Robert Kaplan has a piece in The Atlantic on how the Sri Lankan government defeated the Tamil Tigers. It wasn't pretty, and the US and NATO troops will never be permitted to try the brutal tactics. Here's two examples:

The insurgents are using human shields? No problem. Just keep killing the innocent bystanders until you get to the fighters themselves. There is no comparison between the few civilians that have been killed by American Predator drones in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, and the many that were killed by the Sri Lankan government. The Americans have carefully targeted select al-Qaeda members and, in the process, killed a few—at the most, dozens—of civilians among whom the fighters were surrounded. By contrast, the Sri Lankan military indiscriminately killed large numbers of civilians—as many as 20,000 in the final months of fighting, according to the United Nations.

Bad media coverage is hurting morale and giving succor to the enemy? Just kill the journalists. That's what the Sri Lankan authorities did. Precisely because insurgencies are unconventional, there are no easy-to-follow infantry advances and retreats, so the media holds the power to shape a narrative for the public. Aware of the need for a compliant media to aid the war effort, the Sri Lankan government struck fear into the ranks of journalists. There were hundreds of disappearances of top opinion leaders.

In the run up to the Afghan War and more particularly, the Iraq War, was anybody asking if the Americans had a solution for a guerilla uprising? They lost Vietnam that way, you would think somebody might have. I guess nobody thought of it.

It should also be noted that it took Sri Lanka 26 years to totally defeat them. I can't see a democratic society accepting a commitment for that long.

Robert Kaplan: The Revenge of Geography

Heavyweight writer Robert Kaplan has a huge essay in Foreign Policy, about how we need to view the world, and its realities for the 21st Century. The focus is on Asia and the Middle East. All the big shot US government officials and policy makers read Foreign Policy.

I increasingly think a certain amount of isolationism is necessary for Europe and North America, away from the Middle East, and this article underlines some catastrophes and conflicts that could happen. Not to mention a power reorganization of Asia and the Middle East. (Guess what? There's not a lot of room for Americans.) We have to start looking at geopolitics in a new way and Kaplan gets the ball rolling. It's definitely one of those articles to plug in the coffee pot, find a comfortable chair, print it out (too long for on screen) and have a good read. There are too many parts to excerpt, but I'll put in this taster from the opening:

So now, chastened, we have all become realists. Or so we believe. But realism is about more than merely opposing a war in Iraq that we know from hindsight turned out badly. Realism means recognizing that international relations are ruled by a sadder, more limited reality than the one governing domestic affairs. It means valuing order above freedom, for the latter becomes important only after the former has been established. It means focusing on what divides humanity rather than on what unites it, as the high priests of globalization would have it. In short, realism is about recognizing and embracing those forces beyond our control that constrain human action—culture, tradition, history, the bleaker tides of passion that lie just beneath the veneer of civilization. This poses what, for realists, is the central question in foreign affairs: Who can do what to whom? And of all the unsavory truths in which realism is rooted, the bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic of all is geography.

(READ the entire article here.)