After this piece by Robert Kaplan in the Atlantic , I got a few emails saying, "see, the take gloves off approach does work."

Yes, it works in the specific case of Sri Lanka if you are willing to do what the government did to subdue the Tigers.

But Iraq and Afghanistan are not Sri Lanka and lets face it, a plurality of voters in the US will not go along with the tactics used by the government of Sri Lanka.

Lets start with the geographic differences first.  Sri Lanka is a self contained island nation.  Afghanistan is land locked with pourous borders and Iraq is nearly land locked with those same pourous borders.

Those pourous borders allow new fighters to enter the fray.

Compounding the borders problem is that at various times the Islamic components of Iraq and Afghanistan had a huge recruiting base--the Tamil Tigers never had such a large base.

An attrition war, attempting to kill every would be Islamic Freedom Fighter is impossible.  In my years running around Iraq I have seen entire HVT lists killed or incarcerated without causing a hiccup in insurgent operations.

Killing and incarcerating the enemy is required and killing them is always a good thing, but it is not the be all end all solution.

But the major difference between Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Iraq is that, despite its brutality, the government of Sri Lanka was still the "home team."  The harsh tactics of the government were approved by a plurality of the voters year in and year out in their dysfunctional democracy.

The US and the coalition are the "visitors", the outsiders, the invaders and the occupiers.  In the case of Iraq it was a three way with two home teams.

Anything done by the visitors to the local nationals causes them to unify against the visitors.

The goal of the visiting team is to gain the passive support of the local population.  There is no precedent in which killing on the level of Sri Lanka worked for the visitors--just ask the Soviets.

The successful counter insurgencies by a visiting force focus on doing things the insurgents cannot--commerce, medical care, security, stability.  They rely on census and ID card programs, controlling the movement of the population, building an intelligence net and denying the insugents the ability to hide in plain sight.

The classic example is the Briggs Plan the British used Malaya as detailed in Richard Clutterbuck's classic, "The Long, Long War."

In societies with a strong revenge culture like Iraq and Afghanistan, for every innocent civilian you kill, you create another batch of insugents.  They are not in it for the cause, but because the blood debt demands it.

The passive support of the population then flows to the insurgents who can hide in plain sight and attack at time, place and manner of their choosing as the intel dries up.

Much of Iraq was tamed using the basics that have worked for visiting armies time and again.  As noted by former Army Cav. Squadron Commander LTC Jim Crider what worked was census data collection, building an intel and jump starting commerce.

(I was with Crider's soldiers when they first started to use the proven techniques in 2007.)

They became more successful in the Doura area of Baghdad when they "put the gloves back on."  (And the gloves on/off analogy is always wrong, you can hit a person harder with boxing [or even hockey] gloves on causing much more trauma to the skull without breaking your own hand.  Which is why MMA is actually safer, the lighter gloves prevent repeated punching with full power.)

The "gloves on" approach to counter insurgency allows the visitors to land harder hits to the insurgents ability to operate.

Afghanistan and Iraq are not Sri Lanka.  The US is the visiting team and should use the tactics that have proven successful in the past for visiting armies.

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