How do you judge which side has popular appeal in a war-zone?

It's necessarily a tough question to answer because truth is the first casualty of war, information is hard to find and no voting is going to happen when tanks are rolling past. Also, a side controlling a recently contested territory, isn't going to do a referendum that anyone should trust.

I do have a theory of sorts though: If a side has an volunteer army prepared to put bodies on the line and a local population prepared to support it, then it's a regime with some serious popular appeal.

Someone asked if Assad was popular in Syria. He clearly wasn't, given how quickly his regime collapsed after a major defeat. Like them or not, the rebels against his regime kept fighting long after they'd seemingly lost the war in 2019 and has been reduced to guerillas on the fringes of their country. Guerillas can only survive at all as long as local people support their cause so they clearly have (at least) regional hegemony.

It's similar with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The western military was never able to take them out because rural Afghan communities hid them, fed them and supported them. For contrast, the well-founded pro-western army lost as soon as American military left the country.

People who say that Ukrainians resisting Russia are mere tools of western imperialism are wrong by this hypothesis. Why would they keep fighting and dying in a war they are losing if they didn't care about Ukrainian nationalism? Zelensky would win an election against a pro-putin Ukrainian. The people's reaction to the war tells us that.

Obviously there are other geopolitical issues in all these conflicts and my own opinions are different. Though I do think my general hypothesis is true.

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sree251 · 41-45, M

You ask a great question but it is a rhetorical one. The answer is already in the question as you have laid it out for us.

I also have an answer and I shall use it to refute yours. This is not to say that you are wrong and I am right. You and I are like two oriental medical doctors taking the pulse of a patient to fathom the cause of disease. It's symptom is obvious: war zones with opposing sides caught up in conflict.

Your over-arching assumption is that every individual in society has universal suffrage and exercises his/her right to form the kind of society he/she lives in. This assumption is wrong even in America which claim to practice democracy. Our system of government is a set up that forces every individual to accept the system framed in accordance with the Constitution. It's the only game in town. If you don't like how it rolls and challenge it at the Capitol as people did on Jan 6, you can get shot to death and thrown into jail. How do you expect camel riders in Saudi Arabia and goatherds in Afghanistan to exercise free will? Local people support guerillas the way Americans support thugs who control the neighborhoods in inner city ganglands. Mexican cartels operate in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Woke Americans live in their ideological heads. They believe the USA is a free country and the rest of the planet must be set free also. This is why we have a military bases all over the world to take on any nation that don't abide by our rules-based order.

The war zones are US contested domains. The contestants are US assets on both sides of the conflicts. The popular appeal is US Dollars paid to fighters. The only exceptions are the conflict zones in Ukraine and Taiwan. The Russians and the Chinese have popular appeal. They will fight us to the death to be free of our meddling.