The Insurgent's Dilemma by David H. Ucko

Author:David H. Ucko [Ucko, David H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780197651681
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2022-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

From Darius’s frustration at his enemy’s evasion in the Scythian campaign of 513 BC, to Napoleon’s anger at guerrilla resistance during the Peninsular War (his ‘Spanish ulcer’), it has become an axiom of strategic studies that states struggle when faced with insurgency. And yet, in reviewing the overall insurgent experience in recent years, there are exceedingly few instances where they have toppled an established government and seized sustained power. Indeed, rather than being overthrown one after the other, most states survive the onslaught of insurgency, often by relying on their superior resources and military capabilities. Though the counterinsurgency manuals preach mobilization and hearts and minds, it is typically through suppression that states contain their adversary, causing their movement either to fizzle out or to become a peripheral concern. Outright victory may elude both sides, but the stalemate nonetheless favors the state, which in the absence of a decisive outcome remains the constituted authority.

This trend represents a dilemma for the world’s insurgents. During the Cold War and into the 1990s, insurgents found ways to mobilize rural populations and build coercive capability, making a conventional showdown against the state an ambitious yet feasible path to power. Today, this approach is less likely to succeed and is therefore also rare. For sure, those few groups that act as proxies for states can expect more, yet for most the path to military victory is blocked. Even insurgent heavyweights such as ISIS and LTTE were denied their counter-state and experienced military defeat within three years. For other insurgents, most of whom will not amass similar capability, the overall track record raises legitimate questions of how to prevail in today’s strategic environment. ‘Do we get to win this time?’—the question was of course Rambo’s, that quintessential American warrior, when first told that he was to return to Vietnam.1 Today, the question belongs to the insurgents. How can they do better against stronger states? How can they overcome the insurgent’s dilemma?

In examining this question, it is important not to draw too many conclusions from the singular, and exceptional, Taliban victory in Afghanistan. Indeed, rather than represent the future of insurgency, the movement’s conquest of Kabul in the late summer of 2021 has more in common with insurgency’s distant past, during the era of empire and the Cold War. In Afghanistan, we saw an insurgent group capable of mobilizing a primarily rural population against a distant state, much as movements of national liberation did during the Cold War. We also saw a central government in Kabul so dependent on foreign forces that it harks back to the puppet regimes of colonial times. Similar to those regimes, which were overthrown or defeated with some regularity, the Afghan state proved itself not just artificial but therefore also incapable of exerting itself beyond the capital. And, finally, we saw a non-state armed group receiving military assistance and sanctuary from a neighboring state, namely Pakistan. In these three ways, the context in Afghanistan resembles that faced during the heyday of insurgency rather than the decidedly less forgiving conditions that today’s and tomorrow’s movements confront.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.