From Guerillas to Terrorists
From time immemorial never was there a regular armed force with communally-trained troops able to defeat a guerilla (guerilla: irregular war waged by small bodies acting independently) insurgency. A country's troops, trained in conventional warfare mode acts communally, as a unit with a central commander, using a detailed military plan to defeat the enemy - the convention of war. The enemy is seen to be an entity, another country with its own armed forces trained the very same way; each country's commander seeks to out-strategize the other in the deployment of their troops. The creative element of surprise tactics is likely of fairly recent vintage, and likely a creation of guerilla warfare - to catch the enemy off guard, to unsettle him, to win by stealth, fear and attrition.Strategems of ordinary, regular troops, each representing a particular country's massed forces fall flat when brought to bear against an enemy that is elusive, clever and determined. Guerilla warfare was originally a grass roots peoples' defensive movement motivated by a belief in their own victory. Acting for emancipation, against exploitation, rebelling at colonialism throughout history. A regular army is intrusive, unwieldly, it takes with it, along with its actual warriors, a vast other army of those whose job it is to provide services which the combatants require, from medical services to food services and everything in between.
A rebel army comprised of guerilla combatants is elusive, self-reliant, resourceful and capable of thinking independently, a human trait conditioned out of a regular soldier in a regular armed forces unit. A regular soldier is driven theoretically by patriotism, by the knowledge that his country has called upon him to perform a duty. A guerilla is a socially-disaffected, self-directed individual allied with others of the same persuasion to fight against what he/they perceive to be a personal social slight, injustice or damage, political or religious, without necessarily allegiance to a State.
Asia, Central America, the Middle East, Africa, have all seen instances of guerilla warfare. These dedicated fighters for their brand of justice or perceived injustice or autonomy can melt into a crowd, as unlike troops they are un-uniformed, they can take advantage of geographic anomalies, geological features, receding into surrounding forests, mountain sides, small villages; they have the advantage of knowing their territory in a way others do not, and use that as yet another destabilizing tactic.
Guerillas have somehow transmogrified and become something else: terrorists, deliberately seeking to instil terror within populations and state structures that they defy and seek to topple. From the Viet Cong and Tamil Tigers to Shining Path Guerillas, from the Taliban to the Sandanistas, from Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Janjaweed, and others in Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines, there are deadly fanatics who seek to destabilize and murder in the name of their passion.
Where once the smuggling of slaves within North America to the safety of non-slave-owning places was a kind of guerilla warfare practised by gentle people of humane tendencies, we now have death-dealing fanatics intent on causing as much mayhem as can be gloriously reflected back on their fearsome reputations. The new terrorists are the response to the fundamentalist religious fanatics who decry the world's apathy in not embracing the one true religion, that faith which calls them to deadly action on its behalf.
posted by Pieface @ Monday, August 14, 2006
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