We ARE winning the war on terrorism!, page 1

Originally posted by Omniscient

You CANNOT win a war on terrorism. Tell me how you can POSSIBLY do that without killing everyone. In order for terrorism to end, the human race would have to.

There specific instances in history when terror campaigns by a given organization were halted.

Geronimo, Pancho Villa, IRA, Various Kazakh uprisings against the Romanovs. Movements like the Holy Vehm and the Hutterites of the Middle Ages and Renaissance are historical terror groups that failed to achieve their goals before being disbanded.

Basically, the terroist movements that succeeded, like the Viet Cong, Mau Mau, the "Mountain Boys" of the American Revolution, all of them were simply one facet of a larger struggle that also relied upon conventional arms and diplomacy to complement the terrorist activities.

The U.S. led response in Iraq is succesful in that their allies are denying the insurgents the opportunity to construct conventional units with which to fight a rebellion. OBL's policy of refusing to negotiate has meant that he'll never aquire conventional forces.

An historical example from US history might be the Klu Klux Klan of the Reconstruction (1865-1875), that was trying to build a second succession of the southern states. They ultimately failed, again because they never developed the conventional forces necessary to drive out the federal troops. Note that an organization called the Klan still exists today, but is largely a "vacuum-sweeper" operation controlled by the FBI, and is politically irrelevant.

That is the US goal for the various islamofascists - turn them into irrelevant fringe groups, unable to recruit enough members to do anything other than hold parades. While they'll never go away, the goal is to reduce the viability of their threat.

There are several elements to forcing them into fringe status:

-deny them a recruiting base by raising the standard of living in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The vast majority of the populace will not participate in terror movements if they have hope of prosperity on their own. Right now, the US is succeeding on the ground in Afghanistan, by building wells and power grids for rural villages. When farmers have the chance, they'd rather farm than fight. This leaves the Taliban in the position of having to DESTROY utilities in order to keep the people desperate. Large numbers of the population see through this, and refuse to assist in their own oppression.

-Creating opportunity.
Opening markets, bizaars, and transport networks that give people a chance to flee terrorist press gangs, and develop their own economy. The terrorists still have to pay for things, like bribes, informants, salaries for auxillary troops, etc. By creating opportunity, the coalition forces the terrorists to spend more of their precious money on running an organization, and getting less for what the terrorists spend.

-Making the life of a terrorist too expensive for the individual and his family.
Israel has learned to do this within the occupied territories, which is why indigenous terrorism has fallen off. Now, the vast majority of attack come from outside the occupied territories. Regardless of what you think of Israel and its "punative countermeasures," such as leveling the houses where terrorists lived, has had a dramatic impact on the PLO, and now Hammas.

In Sum, while it is ideologically popular to say that "you cannot win against terrorism," this is simply not the case. Sun Tsu wrote about this in the introduction to "art of war." The ultimate battlefield is in the heart of the individual soldier. You win, not by making the enemy die, but by making him give up.

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