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It really depends on the enemy you are facing. If you are facing an organized state with citizens comparable to your own in intelligence and conscientiousness, your framing makes a lot of sense. This is, to be a bit reductive, the "thermostat" view of violence. And I agree it can be done in those situations. Of course, sometimes it leads to losing, such as when the English lost their American colonies. But losing in those limited situations is acceptable, after all, it worked out quite well for England. America has been its best ally since approximately 1813.
But, if you are dealing with loosely banded together warlords governing over mobs of unintelligent, spontaneous, people, this method does not work. You have to deal with that kind of violence with the on/off switch model. The on/off model is the one, correctly, used by law enforcement (ideally) because there is no thermostat in dealing with a crack addict who might have a knife. Progressive attempts to impose the thermostat model continually fail in that context. Often officers suffer either on the job or in the courtroom because of such poor models of reality. And the same is actually true of Somali pirates. You can't really deter them properly by judiciously arresting a few of them once in a while after the fact. The thing that actually works is just blowing them out of the water. And that same thing would have worked with the Taliban, but no one was willing to do that thing.
Sure, the ideal amount of force or destruction is context-dependent. I think of Chinese history as one context, for instance: you can argue that the correct amount of force to use against steppe raiders is to wipe them all out to the last man, woman, and child, as with the Dzungars, but that this is a very inefficient way to handle a rival Chinese state (which is why e.g. Sun Tzu recommends leaving them lines of retreat). On the other hand, wiping out steppe peoples to the last is extremely expensive and only buys you a couple of generations before a new group of nomads moves into the void and then you have to do it again, so a preferable solution might to be strongly disincentivise raids with punitive strikes and alliances with some tribes as proxies (who can do your dirty work for you by punishing tribes who don't play by your rules); but of course those alliances can also end going quite badly and turn into the tribes just extorting tribute from you.
It's always a pretty delicate balance, I think. I don't claim that maximum force is never the merited response - just that it's a very expensive one that is not always to be desired.
Steppe people have little in common with modern dissident states. The mongols and huns, by way of example, were masters of modern (for the time) military technology such as husbandry, siege craft, etc. Pretending they are analogues to the Taliban or Somalian pirates, is acting like those people have fleets of aircraft carriers and a host of ICBMs.
I didn't say they're analogous to any one modern group. I gave them as an example of a context where there's a case to be made for annihilation.
Sure, but the Chinese weren't even capable of annihilation of the Mongols almost all of the time. And its not like the Mongols were incapable of trade or cooperation.
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