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Adopting "counterinsurgency" tactics for use against wide swaths of Americans can only make the situation worse.

Members of the political class are buying into burgeoning fantasies about a second civil war, indulging visions about sparring with parts of their own subject populations. In the wake of recent conflicts culminating in the Capitol riot, prominent figures have been extrapolating from our violent polarization to a dystopian future of insurgency within our borders. Officialdom seems dead set on fanning the sparks of existing political strife into something resembling a national house fire.

"The challenge facing us now is one of counterinsurgency," Robert Grenier, former CIA station chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan and later director of the CIA Counterterrorism Center, insists in The New York Times. "Though one may recoil at the thought, it provides the most useful template for action."

The danger, Grenier adds, lies in "a large, religiously conservative segment of the population, disproportionately (though not entirely) rural and culturally marginalized." He doesn't believe that the entire segment is violent, but it constitutes "a mass of citizens—sullen, angry and nursing their grudges—among whom the truly violent minority will be able to live undetectably, attracting new adherents to their cause."

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While neither Grenier nor Brennan are currently in government, both are well-connected and influential. Tellingly, the same day that Grenier's Times screed appeared, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a terrorism bulletin that read like a sales brochure for the former CIA officials' desired domestic policies.

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But few members of the rural and conservative segment of the population that troubles insurgency war-gamers are QAnon devotees, and only a tiny sliver had anything to do with the Capitol riot. If they come to support "violent individuals" because they "see them as reflecting their interests and fighting on their behalf," it will be because of deeper divisions and resentments that brought them to that point.

And those resentments really are deep. According to January YouGov polling, 53 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of Republicans, and 57 percent of Independents "think that the biggest threat to their way of life comes from domestic enemies."

The best way to calcify those perceptions of "domestic enemies" is for a government in the hands of one political faction to start treating its opponents as insurgents. That will inevitably entail the excesses and abuses that come with turning the security services loose not just on those who have committed crimes against others, but on whole segments of society viewed as potential threats.

"Overreactions give people an incentive to become terrorists—not only by creating grievances but also by reducing the relative risks of turning to violence," Northeastern University's Max Abrahms, a professor of public policy, recently cautioned in Reason. "A standard assumption in political science is that terrorists are rational actors. Many people decide against becoming terrorists because they know that the costs to them will be severe. But if the government is going to treat innocent people like terrorists anyway, then no additional risk is incurred."

Writing before Grenier's call for counterinsurgency efforts, Abrahms pointed out that John Brennan "did not distinguish between those who use extreme tactics and those with whom he disagrees politically. For Brennan, both are enemies worthy not only of contempt, but action or at least government scrutiny."

Grenier, for his part, wants to adopt tactics used in Afghanistan and Iraq, but neither country is exactly doing spectacular 20 years after the U.S. invaded and began battling insurgents. Iraq's capital city recently suffered two suicide bombings and the Biden administration is poised to, again, delay the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan because of escalating fighting in the country. Do we really want to inflict comparable counterinsurgency campaigns on our own country and risk similar outcomes?

That doesn't mean that we're helpless against politically motivated violence. Grenier rightly suggests that we "investigate and bring to account those who commit crimes." It makes sense to target people for harming others rather than for belonging to suspect groups. If he'd stopped there without talking about counterinsurgency efforts against whole communities, his column would have been unobjectionable.

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Herbert Simon noted that there are two types of rationality. "Substantive rationality" is based on the actual "achievement of given goals". By contrast, "procedural rationality" depends only on "the [thought] process that generated it." In other words, substantive rationality is concerned with the consequences of the decision, whereas procedural rationality makes no claim that the actor correctly anticipates the consequences of his decision.

Max Abrahms, Why Terrorism Does Not Work

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