Following Gen. Doug Stone's presentation on de-radicalizing former insurgents at the New America Foundation's counterterrorism conference earlier today, National Security experts Kenneth Ballen and Gregory Johnsen sought to throw a little cold water on the idea that terrorists could be rehabilitated -- pointing to the fact that the rehab program developed by the Saudis hasn't been in existence long enough to be carefully evaluated and that the Yemeni terrorist rehabilitation program looks to be a failure.
The problem is that Stone wasn't talking about rehabilitating terrorists. He was talking about rehabilitating former insurgents. While the former is motivated by ideology, the latter might be motivated to fight by a whole host of reasons -- hardcore, career terrorists are a relatively small group. Ballen and Johnsen may be right about the ideologically committed few being beyond rehabilitation, I have no idea. But that description can't be applied to most of the insurgents fighting in Afghanistan, if recent reporting is to be believed. A recent Boston Globe story described the current Taliban as mostly "vying for control of territory, mineral wealth, and smuggling routes."
“Ninety percent is a tribal, localized insurgency,’’ said one US intelligence official in Washington who helped draft the assessments. “Ten percent are hardcore ideologues fighting for the Taliban.’’Ballen and Johnsen simply were not talking about the same group of people as Stone. It's easy to see why someone (not Ballen and Johnsen) who is opposed to the fair treatment of detainees (torture, indefinite detention, ect.) might suggest that they're all hardcore terrorists, and they might deliberately blur the distinction between "insurgent" and "terrorist" in order to do so, but there's an important distinction.
Of course, if you believe that what's really fueling the insurgency is our presence there to begin with, then it doesn't follow that any kind of policy short of withdrawal will help quell the insurgency.
-- A. Serwer
