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Notes -
The other night my father rhetorically asked "I feel like asking Netanyahu, 'when has a terrorist group ever been defeated militarily?"
I immediately said "In Sri Lanka in 2009?" The reason it occurred to me was because of @CriticalDuty's write-up here.
Naturally, my father immediately commenced moving the goalposts of the question.
Out of curiosity, are there any other recent examples of terrorist groups being defeated militarily?
Shining Path in Peru was largely defeated militarily. The Peruvian government even armed, trained and deputized civilians with the authority to kill Shining Path members.
Generally speaking, I think people who say things like "you can't destroy a movement" or "there are no military solutions to this problem" are just people who do not want to see that particular movement or problem destroyed, and have to cloak it in the language of strategic wisdom rather than admit to their desires. I have a particular disdain for Arab liberal types like Shadi Hamid who claim destroying Hamas is complicated because Hamas isn't just a group of militants, but a government with a bureaucracy and employees and yada yada yada, we will need to find some way to live with them - the LTTE was all of these things and also considerably more advanced and sophisticated than Hamas, as pseudo-states go. ISIS had a government, a bureaucracy, courts, all of the mundane accoutrements of statehood, and somehow we managed to bomb it into oblivion. There are very few problems that violence can't actually solve, so long as you're committed to the necessary scale and force of violence required.
Similar kind of highly motivated argumentation to how you cannot possibly stop illegal immigration by protecting your borders.
Yes, the usual tactic is to present the problem as a fait accompli that must be grudgingly tolerated because nothing can be done to change it.
I wonder whether I do the same. Are there any standard conservative / libertarian / reactionary arguments that follow the same pattern?
Yes, many examples. And I think there's at least some degree of truth to these arguments:
There are hundreds of millions of guns in the US, so any large scale attempts at gun control cannot work.
The government cannot significantly tax or otherwise confiscate the wealth of the ultra-rich because they will just leave the jurisdiction.
Attempting to regulate carbon emissions at this point won't stop climate change, and many of the biggest carbon emitting countries won't get on board anyway.
It's not possible to introduce effective mass public transit in most US cities because they have already been designed around cars.
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