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I agree with the author's assertion that what we need is a strategy "...similar to the strategy used to halt the insurgencies in El Salvador in the 1980's and Colombia in the 1990's. In those cases, these militias used local knowledge, unconstrained tactics and high levels of motivation to defeat insurgents..."
A Middle-Eastern version of "Los PEPES"...
Terrorists don't follow a rule book. We do, and the bad guys have read it. Our hands are tied, and they know it. We need to motivate a force of locals that have a stake in this game, and encourage them to covertly adopt the same tactics as the terrorists. Kill every fund-raiser, hate-preaching cleric, banker, friend, relative, business partner, and everyone associated with the terrorists. Shoot them, blow their houses up, booby-trap their cars....whatever it takes, then leave a sign around their necks describing who they are and what they did. Terrorize the terrorists. It's something they'll understand.
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“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." John Stuart Mill
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