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Comment by GoatInGrey | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary, the US-led coalition achieved military victory in Afghanistan in under 60 days. Which is an incredible feat. Though what that coalition failed to achieve, and where people try to adjust the definition of tactical victory, was the nation-building goal of creating a functional, independent Afghanistan government. The counterinsurgency aspect was the process of protecting that fledgling "nation".

The very uncomfortable truth here is that Israel is demonstrating how to effectively destroy insurgencies in Gaza and Lebanon. You cannot pussyfoot with nasty, brutal tactics and expect to accomplish anything. This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars, and we seem to have collectively forgot it again.

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> The very uncomfortable truth here is that Israel is demonstrating how to effectively destroy insurgencies in Gaza and Lebanon. You cannot pussyfoot with nasty, brutal tactics and expect to accomplish anything. This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars, and we seem to have collectively forgot it again.

Israel is getting sucked into their own quagmire right now as we speak and is taking on an expensive ground invasion and occupation of a territory they don't want to be in (like we did) for an unforeseeable amount of time, over a hostile population, against the advice of their own military leaders. They are also actively starving civilians, who are at this very moment dying of malnutrition in scores every week.

It's easy to win the brute force battle with money in the modern world. But wars aren't about destroying things and people with brute force. They are about achieving political objectives. That's what we failed to understand in Afghanistan and Iraq and what Israel failed to learn from our failures in those regions

The counterinsurgency lessonz of note from a doctrinal standpoint have little to do with how you framed it and I recall it. So before we go in on Total War is the Best War, your framing feels convenient vs actually thought out.

How to do counterinsurgency, as I ran into it from the “what works” angle in the formal setting to learn these things.

- the Malaya/British example. Notably Britain doesn’t run Malaya anymore and that country doesn’t exist. This is the direction you’re arguing works fwiw

- COIN and Patraeus (sp), assuming conditions were correct across the board and you could get a unit commander and all related stakeholders to try it. Notably we didn’t “win the insurgency” in Afghanistan

So there are both well established COIN case studies, one heavy and one light, both didn’t work, and no overlap with what you’re arguing.

Defeating the government of an impoverished, low-tech country in 60 days is not exactly like Napoleon crossing the Alps. It's also not victory.

The US fought for 20 years, could never eliminate the insurgency, and then withdrew with its tail between its legs, leaving the old government to come back to power.

Yes, if you kill 10%, 20%, 30% of the population, maybe you'll eventually destroy the insurgency, though that approach hasn't worked yet for Israel in Gaza. But if you're not completely genocidal, that's not an option.

> This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars

The world wars were not counterinsurgency operations (except from the German and Japanese side in the occupied countries). They were traditional wars between major powers.

We killed 10% of Germans in WWII, eliminated Nazism, and no one says there was a genocide against Germans.

We didn't forcibly starve Germans with food waiting to reach them from neutral parties during a multi-year long occupation of Germany

The Germans weren't a stateless people who had lived under an oppressive foreign military occupation for over half a century, after getting kicked out of their homeland. They were a major world power that decided to launch a war of conquest against the rest of Europe and beyond.

These are more not remotely similar situations.

What is the ideology that is even supposed to be eliminated in Gaza? Killing people who are oppressed is not going to make them start loving their oppressors.

By today's standards, mass rapes against german civilian women by the soviet army and other allied forces[0] or bombing of various cities of no industrial importance, such as Dresden would be easily considered as war crimes.

Saying "but they were nazis" is no different that when the Hamas explains that every Israeli civilian is a soldier to justify their actions.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_o...

A lot of people say "We did Dresden" to justify Israel's crimes but they don't realize Dresden was viewed very negatively even by the allies and the people involved in the attack after the war...

Defeating the army of one the poorest country on earth is not an incredible feat. Understanding the fact that it's borderline impossible to import american-style democracy in Afghanistan didn't require more than a few anthropologists and historians specializing in this part of Asia. Or they could have asked anyone who had lived there for some time. US soldiers would have been much safer this way.

Israel didn't suppress anything in Gaza so far, and for sure the next generation of insurgents (not necessarily Hamas) who have nothing to lose since Israel destroyed their homes and killed their families is being cultivated right now. This is why now the government talks openly about their own "final solution"[0][1], as they know that it will be difficult if not impossible to stabilize the situation.

[0]https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-07-15/ty-article/.p...

[1]https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/05/06/smotrich-sees-gaza-de...

Yep, and the US won the Vietnam war too. /s

> The very uncomfortable truth here is that Israel is demonstrating how to effectively destroy insurgencies in Gaza and Lebanon.

Neither Gaza nor Lebanon are insurgencies - Israel is trying to destroy terrorist organizations, not rebellions.

> You cannot pussyfoot with nasty, brutal tactics and expect to accomplish anything. This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars, and we seem to have collectively forgot it again.

Neither world war was either an insurgencies nor a war on a terrorist organization, so unclear why this is a relevant example at all.

A better example of how to win that type of war would be the Malay insurgency (especially when compared to your example of the Vietnam war)

> Neither Gaza nor Lebanon are insurgencies - Israel is trying to destroy terrorist organizations, not rebellions.

Terrorism and insurgency are not mutually exclusive.

The classic example of a modern insurgency, the Algerian resistance against the French, was led by a terrorist organization, the Front de libération nationale (FLN). More correctly, it was a political organization that used terrorism as a tactic, and which eventually became the government of an independent country.

Hamas is a pretty similar case to the FLN (though the PLO was more similar in the old days, in terms of ideology).

Even Israel was founded by terrorist groups who waged an insurgency against the British

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