Who is the enemy?
So McChrystal is out and Preteaus is in! It looks like Obama and I were on the same wavelength. It was the only tactical maneuver possible under the circumstances, but the strategic problems still loom large, and given our “accomplishments” thus far, they may be intractable. Time, which is required to heal all wounds, is not on our side.
We need to examine the track record or our “accomplishments” if we want to understand how we got into this mess and how we can begin digging out.
1. We lifted the Taliban to power, by way of the Mujahideen as our proxy warriors in our battle with the USSR. We armed them. We trained them. (See “Charlie Wilson’s War” for Hollywood version of this story.)
2. Following the defeat of the Soviet invaders, the Taliban coalesced and exercised authority throughout Afghanistan and were qute popular with the Afghan people. They restored order, built roads, quashed reliance on opium, and organized and provided schools and other social services, and were supported for several years by the U.S. It is true that they were a bit strict — sort of like towns dominated by fundamentalist Christians in Bible-Belt America — but they did bring order to a people who had been brutalized by the Soviet military machine and thereafter by inter-tribal warfare.
3. Having “achieved” our objectives with respect to the USSR, the US reneged on promises of assistance and squandered away the ties and influence that had been built with the Taliban and the Afghan people in general, for economic rather than ideological reasons. There’s no oil in Afghanistan.
4. Al-Qaida was no more than a blip on the Taliban radar prior to our invasion of Afghanistan. The evidence indicates that the Taliban had little interest and no part in the agenda of Bin Ladin and his small group of jihadists bent on avenging the US presence in the Saudi Arabian holy land during the Gulf War.
5. Had we kept our eye on the al-Qaida ball circa WT Center I (1993) prior to our invasion of Afghanistan, there was very little preventing us from using intelligence and covert ops to systematically undermine them in concert with allies. A few intelligence agents did keep their eye o the ball, and several opportunities to dismantle him and his group out were missed. But both Clinton and Bush II were frying other fish ($$). Surprise, surprise when the 911 attacks actually stung us!
6. During our inglorious post-911 invasion of Afghanistan, which was in itself mostly political posturing designed to appease US public opinion that we “do something” to get the bad guys, we attempted to repeat our anti-Soviet proxy strategy, this time by recruiting the Taliban’s enemies, the “Northern Alliance”, to unseat the Taliban who were supposedly allied with al-Qaida. The narrative of al-Qaida = Taliban was a contrivance of the same sort used in the Iraq invasion that claimed Saddam = al-Qaida. Although these equations were dubious in the extreme, they did provide a justification for “shock and awe”, spending billions and putting American youngsters in harm’s way.
7. As was the case with Iraq, we transmuted the identity of our adversaries from a small group of dangerous radicals into a wider theater of military conflict involving not only the Taliban, but the whole of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and ideologically, Muslim populations throughout the region and the world. To this day, it remains very unclear as to why we are leveling cities made of mud, who we are supposed to be killing and why they need to be dead.
8. From the beginning, we have resorted to using proxies to fight our battles and then we discard the proxies and resort to massive military theater ops designed to use our throw weight to subjugate whole populations while minimizing loss of US lives at the cost of necessary ”collateral” damage. By trying to MAXIMIZE our ROI rather than by optimizing the complex interactions between peoples and cultures, we have failed utterly to understand the true nature of our enemy, and in doing so, we have created exponentially more enemies and made it impossible for us to devise effective methods for confronting the initial threats.
Simply put, our methods, designed to shock and awe the world into submission to our values, our interests, and our rage, have magnified our problems a thousand-fold and even if we come to the realization of our foolishness, we cannot simply change the channel. Nevertheless, pressing on with bigger guns and more massive military ops will only multiply our enemies, intensify their resistance, and dig our hole deeper.
Sadly, along with his predecessors, President Obama has fallen into the trap, laid in large part by the US military that cleaves to Clausewitzian doctrine that eschews intelligence; built upon relationships of shared interest, and espouses military might as the most effective means of extension of political will. Give people a really cool hammer and everything looks like a nail. But the nature of today’s enemies, who though small in number, have the means to turn our own inventions back against us and do us great harm, does not lend itself to this 19th Century doctrine of “a bigger hammer”.
My solution to our problem:
Step one to reversing our problem-amplification system is to withdraw from the situation that makes us “fact-on-the-ground” invaders. Only then can we begin to rebuild the relationships, resources and means needed to address substantive threats posed by enemies who have no clear national alignments or central authority.
We must address a decentralized threat with a decentralized solution.
NOTE: This entry has been updated to more accurately reflect the sequence of events involving our role in arming and supporting the loosely organized alliance of Mujahideen freedom fighters and subsequent rise of the Taliban as a religious-civil authority in the otherwise lawless expanses of Afghanistan. Tip of the hat to John Dowd.
