[Itse]

Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction

I'm not going to do the research on it right now, but I watched a video before that talked about wars and conflicts, and the biggest contributors to long lasting peace. The angle of the study was to establish whether peace-keeping missions actually worked to establish peace. The answer was yes, peace-keeping works in general, but not always and usually takes an extremely long time.

The problem with these studies is that they're ultimately pure hypotheticals. There's no test laboratory with the same country without a peacekeeping operation to compare to.

Long lasting peacekeeping operations also don't just randomly appear in one country but not in another. Certain kinds of situations get peacekeepers and others don't, and the things that affect whether or not a peacekeeping operation starts also affect whether peace happens.

This is not a comment on whether or not peacekeeping works, just pointing out that this is something that's borderline impossible to study conclusively.

The number one factor for bringing about long lasting peace was a quick undisputed defeat for one side. The longer a war lasted, the harder peace would be to establish. Even destruction and casualties played a smaller role.

Basically, the formula for winning a war is that you have to pound one side into oblivion so that they never want war again.

By slow-burning them, you condition them for perpetual war. By trying to negotiate peace between two sides who don't feel like they have actually lost, you just buy time before someone breaches the peace again.

This makes sense until you realize it's just a bunch of truisms spinned into the shape of a study.

The kind of war that can be solved quickly and decisively is obviously going to be the kind that's less likely to start again, because that tells you that it's a war where all sides are willing to make peace.

You can't pound forces like the islamist troops into oblivion through military forces. That wasn't for lack of trying, it's just that they're not the kind of armies that can be destroyed with military force.

Quick decisive wars also don't end in peace treaties for numerous obvious reasons, such as there being a clear winning side that has nothing to gain from giving up anything in negotiations, and there not being a pressing need to settle the matter through negotiations (because a military solution will appear anyway).

The idea that you shouldn't try to negotiate a quick peace between two sides who feel they haven't lost is also in direct contradiction to the idea that prolonged wars breed new conflicts while quick wars don't.

Also, most wars have more than two sides. Afghanistan for example has had at least three at any given moment, and that's if you bundle all the western countries as one, all the islamists as the second, presume the government actually controls all the troops that are under it's flag and ignore all the local militias.

It's tough these days because wars are on TV and politicians have to appease people at home by not showing them how horrific "victory" actually looks.

This is completely upside down.

Decisive military victories play extremely well to any public and create fantastic PR imagery, while prolonged conflicts are the types of conflicts that creates endless stories about human suffering.

Ordering the military to create decisive victories is exactly what politicians do when they want to appease the public.