THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2026 53 had begun the war in 1980 with about 200 members and, even at its apogee, had at most 10,000 to 20,000 members, compared to a Peruvian military and police force that exceeded 100,000 and a much larger civilian government apparatus. The Shining Path relied on violence, including the engagements it lost, to build support. Members justified terrorism and the selective assassination of real or perceived opponents, armed and unarmed. Their methods were crude, but as I reflected in 1993 while retrieving pieces of an engine block from the car bomb that had exploded outside my Embassy Lima office, crude methods can work. The group’s emphatic but flawed analysis of Peru’s systemic inequality and injustice, if accepted by recruits, led to the “logical” next step of justifying revolutionary violence to conduct systemic change. In George Orwell’s 1984, the protagonist Winston Smith observed that the Party could order citizens to believe that “two plus two equals five.” The Shining Path stoked the resentment among non-white Peruvians over racial, regional, and class-based exclusion to shape it into the class-based violence Mao had championed. The Shining Path’s Marxist competitors looked down on them as unschooled cousins from the country (reflecting more than a little racism, classism, and big-city snobbery on their part). But the pro-Soviet communists were behind the times, the Trotskyites were irrelevant, the traditional pro-China parties were uninspiring, and the new pro-Cuban Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement that sought to emulate Central American guerrilla groups was ineffective. The legal leftist parties challenged Sendero in the towns, often paying with their lives, but they were hopelessly divided at the national level. Under the circumstances, Peruvian elites had assumed, wrongly, that the large enough use of indiscriminate military force would defeat Shining Path; instead, it had the opposite effect. As the United States had learned in Vietnam and in El Salvador, and would relearn the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan, a military can kill real or suspected guerrillas, and civilians, in such a way that motivates even more persons to join the guerrillas. In 1989, facing failure, Peru’s military changed its doctrine to treat civilians less as enemies, and more like potential allies, and expanded armed self-defense groups, or rondas, in the villages to fight Sendero. The police changed too. Police officers I met in 1988 had proposed a more intelligence-based effort. And in 1990 the Peruvian police formed a special counterterrorism group that used legal investigative techniques. Two years later, with alleged U.S. support (according to American journalist Charles Lane and former police officers in this unit), the counterterrorism group captured Sendero head Guzmán and his senior leaders without firing a shot. The leadership’s decapitation led to Shining Path’s collapse. Almost no new Sendero leaders emerged, and recruitment was near zero. e The United States has also struggled, and sometimes failed, to comprehend extremists, terrorists, guerrillas, and insurgents. In Iraq and Afghanistan, our tactical intelligence often identified enemy capabilities and even intentions, but we lacked sufficient understanding of insurgent motivation, recruitment, and support. Success requires understanding why otherwise normal individuals join an effort that they know they may not survive and how people, per Orwell’s observation, can believe that two plus two equals five. One reason foreign (and local) observers misjudge foreign internal conflicts is that having lived in societies that have functioned relatively fairly and effectively, we fail to appreciate the resentment generated by societies that are systemically less fair and effective, more discriminatory, divided, and sometimes even predatory. “Clientitis”—excessive confidence in host country governments and elites’ strategy and understanding of their country—was another huge obstacle for the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. We gloss over critical factors that are hard to measure, such as people’s desire for justice, for understanding why they always remain on the bottom, for belonging to something bigger than themselves, and even why they might relish the companionship born of the shared risk of clandestine activities. We have excessive confidence that a globalized, democratic, private sector–led economic model will self-correct toward stability and social justice. To overcome these challenges, foreign and local observers must get outside the middle- and upper-class enclaves, open their eyes, and employ vigilant empathy—at times, an armed empathy—to understand the causes and drivers of extremism. U.S. Foreign Service officers, our diplomats, are in a unique position to understand the capabilities and intentions of non-state actors, including extremist and violent groups. Doing this, outside the diplomatic bubble, requires taking calculated risks based on experience, analysis, tradecraft, and intuition. We also rely on the role of luck, even if we don’t know how much. Not every risk is worth taking; not every dance with the devil ends well. But the reward is unique insights that boost our ability to pursue our objectives in a dangerous world. n
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