I’ve long planned to read Petraeus’ praised counterinsurgency manual, but I just haven’t done it yet. With that said, I openly wonder what COIN orthodoxy says about suicide bombers.

Presumably, by ingratiating yourself with the local populace and ultimately gaining their trust, you will prevent insurgent groups from getting succour from an embittered population which resents your presence in the country. Using Mao’s famous metaphor for insurgent armies being fish swimming through the water of the general populace, you drain the water so the fish can’t swim.

Sounds good when applied to mobile guerilla bands who value their own lives and who occasionally fight real battles, however asymmetrical. But it sounds much less applicable to suicide bombers who have decided to forfeit their lives in advance and who don’t need a vast network of support to carry out their outrage.

I suppose one could hope that a sympathetic population will be able to rat out bomb-making nests and could point out suspicious activity to the authorities before an attack takes place. But the sheer susceptibility of even the most advanced, coherent societies such as ours to the irrational attacks of determined psychopaths suggests to me that past a certain population density, the full cooperation of a sympathetic population becomes much less effective than we’d like to believe.

I mean, what can we possibly do about acts such as these?