I’ve been scarce on the blog front for a while; both this blog and my work blog have suffered badly. Sorry about that – work has been ridiculous (which is a good thing) for the last few months, and I have a client who wouldn’t be happy with me blogging too much about what I’m doing. We’re leaving for three weeks in Japan in a week, and getting work squared away, planning (and budgeting!) for that has been intense.
Plus there’s the malaise…just looking around at the scenes (California, the nation) that interest me – it’s all bad news all the way down.
But BG got Internet, and we’ve had some great chats, and – I’m embarrassed – I look at the fact that he goes to work every day and risks everything when he’s as upset about everything as I am and get pretty deeply ashamed. It’s not like I do much, but throwing the seeds of ideas out there and trying to trigger discussion is what I have and can do. So I need to do it, and – once I get back from Japan, I will. Or maybe even a bit before then.
Right now, I’m thinking about Afghanistan and Vietnam, and while no it isn’t Vietnam, the parallels to the way we’re approaching it are becoming frightening to me.
So I’m thinking about working my way through ‘On Strategy‘ and seeing what maps to what we’re doing today. My gut answer is: a lot.
What to do about it? I honestly don’t know. I know smart people who think we withdraw now, and smart people who (frighteningly) seriously think we withdraw through Tehran.
But we can’t keep doing what we’re doing. We’re spilling blood and treasure and don’t know why or what for.
Here’s Summers quoting Clausewitz:
Not every war need be fought until one side collapses. When the motives and tensions of war are slight we can imagine that the faintest prospect of defeat might be enough to cause one side to yield. If from the very start the other side feels that this is probable, it will obviously concentrate on bringing about this probability rather than take the log way round and totally defeat the enemy.
– On War 1:2
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I think the first thing is to figure out what a reasonable, achievable “victory” in Afghanistan looks like.
It for damn sure isn’t anything like turning Afghanistan into a modern, western-style state or into a self-sufficient, self-securing state. Those are not achievable goals.
Strategic goals? I’d be thrilled if they’d just come up with a consistent definition of and name for the enemy, which owes more to the fight that we are in than to domestic or UN politics. I honestly wonder if we’ve become like late Rome: too sophisticated and show-oriented to save ourselves.
The logistics are what really worry me, besides the problems in ” ‘the vision thing’ “:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_thing department. Our supply lines are either via road through Pakistan (especially the Khyber Pass) or by air via airbases in Central Asia, in countries which ask “how high?” when Russia tells them to jump.
A simple, easy strategy for the Taliban would be to concentrate on targeting the lines of supply in the passes, which would make the war prohibitively expensive if we were forced to do more supply via air. I think they know this as well, but the Predator decapitation strikes have made coordination not as easy as it used to be for them.
Again, we waited too long. And now the stabilizing forces we wanted to create are very very difficult to pull off. Tribes are weary, our successes have been minuscule, the government makes our work look worse, not better. Corruption has been endemic, (in both aid & government).
At this point, I don’t know what to do. This morning, news broke that ore deposits have been found. I assume the idea is to interest corporations which will then build jobs and infrastructure. but it’s going to a very risky venture.
4 years ago, when the country was stable and market strong, this would seem plausible. Today, not so much.
The first step to defeat the Taliban must be the support of the populace. I’m not sure we can do that. I guess the next question is how much we can pull off without them?
I think we’ve always been to reactive to be successful. You can’t hope to pick and choose which tenets of COIN you want to accept, and one of the classic requirements is to isolate the population you are trying to win over from influence/repercussions of the enemy… particularly an enemy with a relatively safe refuge. We have no initiative in this fight (aside from a few ‘magic bullets’ that can’t hope to ultimately resolve the war).
We’ve never contested the border with Pakistan- we haven’t had the troops to do so. That is true, but the question is if you don’t have enough troops to interdict a long mountain border with many natural choke points, how can you hope to have enough troops to hold the vast countryside behind it? The math of perimeter vs area is obvious.
We would have been well served to use our engineering brilliance to destroy as many passes as possible, and attempt to interdict the rest with patrols. But one of the unspoken givens of our strategic formation is not to allow the possibility of a squad to be cut off and overrun. Tactically, once you establish that and particularly given limited numbers of troops to begin with, you really cede that terrain to the enemy. The question becomes is it worse to risk losing 20 men at once while changing much of the theater away from your charges, as opposed to losing a man a day for 20 days trying to hold far too much real estate against a running tide?
A fair question. I think kicking the Taliban into a box and trying to play ball with the Pashtun outside that context needs to be our goal to establish a settled peace. I think the best leverage we have in that regard is to physically separate Afghanistan from Pakistan (since the tribe straddles the border) as best we can (imperfectly surely). This puts us in something of control of commerce and gives us a seat at the table that obviously just holding our guy up in Kabul doesn’t accomplish.
In other words, we need to think in Afghan terms of whats worth negotiating over instead of fighting. To us (even this late in the day historically), holding the capital of the ‘nation’ still means you’re winning. That isn’t realistic. I don’t think we can win over the populace in the countryside because we aren’t staying and anybody left is going to be 6 of 1 half dozen of the other. I think threatening what commerce (and hence kingmaking) there is in the region, and proving we can do it with a light, mobile, footprint, basically indefinitely, and we have a pretty good bartering hand for whoever will play ball.
I think the problem is sending troops to a country like Afghanistan and involving them in nation building is just plain ridiculous. The mission creep there has been disastrous.
The last administration, with its Neo-Con delusions involved us not in one war in Asia, but two. It is really hard to believe, when you think about it. And to top that off they focused on the wrong one.
Our business in Asia was to get Bin Laden and get out. We wound up with propping up governments in both Iraq and Afghanistan that will revert to what they were 3 to 5 years after we leave. We could stay there for another 5 generations and the same thing would happen. We look at Afghanistan as a country. Why? It is an agglomeration of tribes that have tribal loyalties.
I think we should go back to the tried and true virtues of geopolitical power by simply making the enemy of our enemy our friend until it no longer benefits us to befriend them. There, we are just another tribe. To base our strategy on anything else only proves that we have learned nothing by these adventures.