Insurgencies

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Unless terrorists gain control of a full arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, they will not be able to do as much damage to states and societies as full-blown insurgencies. In Iraq, for example, terrorism cannot force the disintegration of the state, but any number of possible insurgencies could. The dividing line between a terrorist group and an insurgency lies between the inability of the former to attract mass support and the ability of an insurgent movement to mobilize the population whose cause they claim to represent.

For all the drama of terrorist attacks, insurgencies and the civil wars they spawn kill vastly more human beings. Those insurgencies range from Latin-American narcotics syndicates that challenge governments (the term "narco-terrorist" is wrong - these rich, powerful groups wage modern insurgencies), to classic ethnic or religious resistance struggles, such as those that recently plagued Sudan, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, much of central Africa, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Turkey, the Russian Federation and dozens of other states.

Insurgencies are harder to fight than terrorist movements, at least in the sense that more killing is required. Fighting terrorists may take longer, but insurgencies command more active support - and they're increasingly well-armed. Not do all insurgencies originate outside of a government - the butchery in Rwanda had its origins within the state apparatus. The Hutu Interahamwe militias targeted an ethnic group, not the government. Subsequently, the new Tutsi-dominated regime in Rwanda sponsored a bloody military operation in Zaire (now Congo again) that amounted to an insurgency-as-invasion. Overall, the forms of insurgency and its motivations are expanding, exacerbated by a world of faulty borders and revived competition over religious and ethnic issues.

In trying to understand 21st-Century conflict, it's helpful to view human societies as mass organisms, as ecosystems of flesh and blood. The bewildering violence we see in the developing world reveals attempts by complex human systems to regain their equilibrium after being forced out of their natural balance by European colonialism and its legacy of ill-drawn borders. Societies around the world are trying to put themselves right - and the default impulse is to do it through violence. Of one thing we may be certain: Until the international community takes the improbable (but essential) step of devising a system for peacefully correcting bad borders, we will see no end of insurgencies and civil wars.

Had we wished to design a world where conflict was inevitable, we could not have done better than yesteryear's Europeans, who drew borders in dazzling ignorance or cynicism, forcing together people who hated one another, or separating those who felt an historical affinity.

Add in the revival of religion-as-blood-cult, and counterinsurgency warfare looks like the primary mode of fighting that civilized states will face in this century. The violence in the developing world over the past six decades was just a rehearsal.