CFR Thailand

CFR on Thailand:

The Council on Foreign Relations has a new fact sheet on the Thai insurgency. I appreciate people trying to make the complex nature of the insurgency easy to understand, and for the most part this is a good primer. On the other hand, there's this:

Why isn’t the new government’s approach working to end the insurgency?

Experts say Thaksin's stance set in motion a rise in bloodshed that will take time to control. "Once the spiral of violence starts it is difficult to stop," says Croissant. Liow predicts "the problem will get worse before it gets better" and that Thaksin's policy mistakes "set the government behind several decades in terms of critical intelligence gathering" necessary for effective counterinsurgency operations.
What? You stage a military coup against an elected government and suddenly you get "decades" before you have to prove effectiveness in your COIN activities? Maybe we should revisit that Arkin idea after all...

Seriously, guys, that's not helpful. The military coup in Thailand seems to have had the backing of the palace, which is a reasonable source for legitimacy -- the monarchy in Thailand is not only widely beloved, but has produced monarchs of the sort you really might want to follow, including the current one. Cutting them "decades" of slack, however, is too much. Ultimately, if you just want to say that the King's people were right to back the overthrow of the democracy, just say it.

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