Tom Ricks writes on his blog recently about Mark Kramer's explanation about how the Russians have been effective at COIN through the past 60 years.
The basic idea is that by using brutal violence the Russian were able to suppress any will to resist, and while they didn't get a friendly government out of the process, they did get a suppressed populace. And I don't think this should be too surprising. There is that famous adage, about making a desert and calling it peace. This article makes me think of Roman and Mongol pacification efforts. They would just raze town, sell entire populations into slavery, and worse. You could write books on Roman atrocities in the name of pacification.
But to get back to the article, I don't think anyone should be surprised in an autocratic country with tight control of the media, that that same autocratic government can and will use sufficiently extreme violence to pacify the situation at least temporarily.
We in the U.S. should be glad this option is foreclosed to us. Certainly the U.S. military kills far more innocent civilians than it should, but it is nevertheless a good thing that our official policy isn't 100 of them killed for every one of our own.
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This is why I get annoyed / angry when people make simplistic claims of equivalency between the U.S. government and military and other countries whose governments are generally considered to be authoritarian / evil / wrong. Don't get me wrong, I am not our government's biggest fan. But let's not muddy the waters by claiming that the U.S. military is "just like" some other, more horrible group. Our military and our government are hugely destructive in so many spheres, but we can talk about that without the too-easy comparisons to Nazis or North Korean authoritarians.
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