Something that most people don't think about is when we do fight a war that are we creating more enemies? Kill someone with a bullet or RPG and it could be questionable who killed them. Kill someone with a drone strike, especially in the middle east, than the only country to blame is the USA. We are fighting people that were not even alive when we first got to Afghanistan, we are fighting their kids who were taught to hate the west. The difference is they have been watching our tactics for 20 years and adapting
McChrystal math
Quote:
In 2009, General Stanley McChrystal pushed the conversation in that direction. He pointed to the counterintuitive aspects of terror recruiting. Calling it "COIN Mathematics," he laid out his argument. "Let us say that there are 10 [insurgents] in a certain area. Following a military operation, two are killed. How many insurgents are left? Traditional mathematics would say that eight would be left, but there may only be two, because six of the living eight may have said, 'This business of insurgency is becoming dangerous so I am going to do something else.' There are more likely to be as many as 20, because each one you killed has a brother, father, son and friends, who do not necessarily think that they were killed because they were doing something wrong. It does not matter you killed them. Suddenly, then, there may be 20, making the calculus of military operations very different."
Though McChrystal did not explicitly connect U.S. military operations to the perceptions of the broader Muslim community, Osama bin Laden and his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, certainly did. Five years before 9/11, bin Laden railed against the presence of the U.S. military in Saudi Arabia, home to the two holiest sites of Islam. On other occasions he spoke of the "American crusader forces" and "American occupiers." His recurring theme of grievance centered on the U.S. waging war with Islam. Later, in 2005, al-Zawahiri put an exclamation point on it. In a letter to the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, he reminded him, "The Muslim massesdo not rally except against an outside occupying enemy, especially if the enemy is firstly Jewish, and secondly American."
McChrystal math