Guerrilla Warfare

No we didn't. I mean kill everyone like go into villages and start shooting all the women and children. Force relocate people and if they even speak out against it, kill them. Torch the rice crop and force them to live on government handouts where they're kept half alive. That sort of thing.

Not some fucking carpet bombing here and there. That wont do shit.

All that does is turn the locals against you. What you want to do is get the population to like you and support you and to stop harbouring the guerrillas. If the population is against the guerrillas, they guerrillas can not win.

That doesn't work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine–American_War
That works.

Whils the way to fight guerillas is to commit genocide, agreed, some people might claim that it... goes against what is expected of a superpower...

I would say that in modern times it has become easier to actually fight guerillas, with tanks and planes etc., but in terms of controlling a country guerilla warfare is more effective now than in the past, with mass media able to inform people around the world of any atrocities a big country might commit against guerillas, and also the fact that people today are more sensitive about the killing of civilians.

Well what about Afghanistan, its not going well...

Yeah, especially that last bit. Winning a war against guerillas is quite easy if you have a technological advantage and if nobody cares about killing civilians. In other words, by committing war crimes. It worked well during the Aceh war as I pointed out before. Public opinion nowadays no longer allows that (fortunately), which makes defeating dedicated guerillas close to impossible.

That's what I mean. If we wanted to simply kill all the Taliban, we could probably do it fairly easily today, with our advanced weapons. However, clearly if a government were to do that then all the world would know very quickly, and the county that did the attacking would very quickly become hated around the world, and certainly the government would be overthrown and the leaders would be locked away for ever, and the Afghan people would probably be freed by the international community.

So there is really no way to defeat guerillas if you take into account the response from the rest of the world.

Guerrilla warfare is very effective. I highly suggest anyone who wants to read a good book (fictional) about guerrilla warfare, then you should check out The Man With the Iron Heart by Harry Turtledove. It is a great book and shows exactly how modern guerrilla warfare works. I also think that guerrilla warfare is really a tactic best used by forces attempting to combat an occupation.

Technically America doesn't have to abide by the international criminal court, because we refuse to recognize them.

Well would you consider getting rid of your government is they had just killed 500,000 innocent people? Very possibly, and that is what I mean.. you don't need an actual 'court' for the government to face condemnation from around the world, I'm sure there'd be some sort of trade sanction is nothing else. Anyway, in America it would be illegal to kill innocent people, so whoever was responsible could go on trial on their home soil.

The funny thing is, we don't recognize it because some of our top leaders (including possibly Bush) could be put on trial for war crimes in Iraq if we did.

Bush, definitely. Also some of our former cabinet members, some high ranking officers, and maybe even some Guantanamo prison guards.