As a realpolitik thought experiment it seems to be a common refrain in counter insurgency warfare that going after the Taliban and the fighters in similar tribal/indigenous insurgent groups is very difficult and generally non-productive as they blend into the landscape.
If a warlord or dictator was bloody minded enough that they decided not to bother going after the fighters mounting insurgency campaigns against them, but simply rounded up the women and children in the villages and tribes associated with the insurgents and killed them or exiled them would that work?
In instances where this has been done how does it pan out? Do the fighters withdraw or re-double their efforts? If their local support bases (ie the tribes and villages) are truncated/killed or threatened with extinction if they cooperate with them does the insurgency subside?
A similar strategy (absent the actual genocide) worked for the British in the Anglo-Boer War. After the Boers turned to guerilla warfare, the British burned the farms and interned the women and children in concentration camps. It was, though, combined with a large network of blockhouses to try to subdue the Boer commandos.
I’m pretty sure this approach has been used in places like Rwanda, Uganda and so on. After killing hundreds of thousands or millions of people and creating millions more refugees, it usually “pans out” with a lot of failed states and war crimes trials.
Well, gruesomely, it is highly effective when applied rigorously enough. The threat has to be pretty total, though. The Nazis kept resistance in Europe to insignificance using exactly such techniques. See Lidice for an example – ultimately about 1,300 people were killed (counting people outside Lidice itself) in reprisal for the assassination of a single Nazi, leading the British Special Operations Executive to begin actively discouraging resistance activity likely to lead to reprisals, such as assassinations or sabotage (simple spying was less likely to lead to mass reprisal).
Not that I’m recommending it for anyone to put into practice today – quite the opposite – who wants to use the Nazis as models for behavior?