It feels about as inappropriate as telling a joke at a funeral, but it has to be said.
Perhaps Afghanistan is not such a clever investment at the moment?
The shelling of Waziristan and the surge of troops in Afghanistan is taking place under the heaviest media cover I can remember:
First of all, Obama won the election. How much credit does that buy him?
Not as much as people would think, judging from his popularity, in the US and world wide. The main reason is that his predecessor already spent a lot of social capital (as well as financial) with the wars.
I will wager people in the Middle East, particularly in war torn Afghanistan, are not going to care a great deal if the bullets are authorized by Bush or Obama.
The best card in the hands of the American troops is the ferocious cruelty of the Taleban warriors. If they continue to blow up schools and the US troops can stear clear of repeating the massacres and scandalous torture scenarios from Iraq, they could win a public diplomacy victory over time.
Unfortunately, as we know from both US and UN military operations, soldiers tend to stray. How much they stray and for how long and with which consequences has to do with policy.
The second reason Obama does not have too much social capital or trust as people tend to think is domestic: There is a financial crisis, and sentiments tend to heat up quicker among the poor and desperate. Also, there is a deep partisan rift in spite of all claims to the contrary.
Unity? With the CO2 debate, the Darwin versus Genesis debate, the race divide, the abortion issue, and everything else separating the two parties? I don't think so. The opposition is aching to see this man go down. There's some kind of Kenneth Star waiting on the sideline for his time in the spotlight.
If you compare Obama to a new CEO the deadline before the board begins to doubt him is tighter than on average. More has to be done swifter.
There is a difference between the level of social capital Obama sits on in USA when compared to Europe, if not too significant, and again when compared to the rest of the world, namely the Ummah (we will deal with this factor later in the article).
Basic principles of warfare
Ironically, the financial crisis / recession also serves as the perfect media cover for the Afghanistan operation. Again you venture into dangerous territory without having fully assessed the situation.
As I tried to explain when USA got locked down in Iraq fighting the same insurgents over and over again Tsun Tzu stressed the importance of establishing deadly ground. That is just Oriental for "make sure you can capture or kill you enemy in a confrontation".
USA failed to control the borders of Iraq, believing she could fight a "War Light".
During the election campaign the issue of whether Obama knew the difference between strategy and tactics was frequently raised by his opponent. As far as I recall none of the candidates ever really qualified that they knew the difference.
In fact, I cannot remember one single person in the media explain the difference. It all stayed safely in the realm of political rhetoric and backbiting.
The difference is simple:
Strategy is organizing ressources.
Tactics is about coordinating maneuvres.
Some relevant lessons from history
Most wars have been lost and won with logistics. Superior ressources, including economic base, does not matter a lot, if it is impossible, impractical or even inconvenient to transfer them.
The Crimean War developed into a disaster mainly due to poor planning of ressources - as well as political differences and disagreements.
In the Second World War Hitler spread his forces on two fronts, unable to gain a quick victory to the East and in need of a success story in Africa. Spreading the forces he also spread ressources, and as the Red Army employed the scorched Earth to draw the German troops far into the icy country thus draining them of strength, morale and supplies, the superior training of German soldiers (one or two ranks above their actual rank) was not enough to replace the officers who were put in the ground.
In very few cases superior tactics have triumphed over superior strategy. The warfare of Roman Empire was almost completely based on rigorous planning. Hannibal's quest was heroic, but he was a sick horse long before he arrived near the gates of Rome with his elephants. Too much transportation will do that to you, as anyone with a significant number of frequent flyer miles will know.
What makes people like Alexander the Great, Djenghis Khan and Hernan Cortez so unique is that they were able to triumph against superior forces by employing "War Light". Essentially, "War Light" effectively uses rapid deployment of forces, one of the two major military principles, which forms the foundation of modern military strategy.
In essence, the post-Clauswitz text books will tell you effectiveness in combat is based on two factors:
Mobility and fire.
On top of this terrain, as most will know, plays a crucial role. It is rarely ever contested that controlling an elevated position is to the advantage of any army.
Then there is a fourth factor, which was proven very important in the Battle of Judland, a naval confrontation between the British fleet and the German. England won the contest against the German challenger, simply because her fleet was not destroyed, yet it was a Pyrrhus victory in which the fleet suffered dysproportional casualties.
The enormous casualties of the British navy is most often explain as a combination of the doctrine of mobility, the German emphasis on strong armor and lower mobility and British imperial hubris leading to mismanagement of the ammunition.
The doctrine of mobility had prompted the British to build light and fast moving ships with weaker armor. At the same time they were surprised about the endurance of the slower German battleships under fire. Thirdly, the British marine soldiers neglected two basic security measures when transporting the missiles below deck.
First, they did not cover the missiles as they should, but transported them raw.
Secondly, they did not shut the doors between the sections of the battleship.
Whenever a British ship was hit, sparks would fly through the interior decks, igniting the ammunition. Often the British ships sank as a result of their own ammunition exploding rather than a devastating direct hit.
It's a variation of "friendly fire", but it is also a reminder that your own weapons and ressources can be used against you, which is a principle the CIA themselves mentioned in the manual for fascist guerillas in South America publicly available on the Internet until around the turn of the millennium (I read it myself).
Basic assessment of the enemy
Iraq spans 437,072 square kilometers or 168,754 square miles. In comparison Afghanistan spans 652,225 square kilometres or 251,825 square miles (slightly smaller than Texas).
The country is dirt poor, just like when Alexander briefly conquered it at the cost of the heaviest losses in the entirety of his (successful) campaign (right after he got booted out of India).
Afghans were also dirt poor, when they gave the Red Army a beating the Russian soldiers still recall, nearly two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
They are poor, but their morale is high. How much combat advantage does that buy them?
Reports from Afghanistan are vague and sporadic in the press, and academic articles on national security outlets highly abstract bordering on foggy.
The fact of the matter is that the borders are wide open. If sentiments favour it, there'll be a free flow of additional forces against the US forces from any of Afghanistan's six borders and not just the lethal 1500 mile long Durand Line along Pakistan to the southeast.
To the north you find Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan—three former Soviet republics, members of the C-5 which also includes Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
To the West we find Iran with which USA is still in a de facto state of war, even if not formally.
A northeastern panhandle of Afghanistan borders on China.
The Afghan terrain consists mostly of mountains and desert. One
thing is, like
Alexander, to conquer fortified cities and declare victory. Another thing is to look insurgents up in the desert and the mountainside to secure the peace.
The climate is dry with cold winters and hot summers.
Large parts of the population is highly trained in warfare from the days of Soviet invasion. Warfare here means far more than carrying and firing arms.
Moving on to the FATA
The population of Waziristan, also known as FATA, where Osama bin
Laden is thought to be hiding, is Pashto. Rumor has it Osama bin Laden
was granted asylum according to the ancient and complex honor code of
the Pashtun culture, and as such they cannot deliver him into the hands
of his enemies.
The Pashtun culture is one of the oldest and largest tribal populations of the Earth, predating both Islam and Zarathustra.
There are - just like in the case of some native American tribes - rules about who can marry who, so the population has very distinct features and is notoriously difficult to infiltrate. The cultural code is so complex that even an agent of Pashtun origin would likely compromise himself.
On top of it there is said to be three circles of protection around Osama bin Laden. If he has been granted hospitality that is very likely. The Pashtun take their honor code quite seriously.
The ideological warfare to demoralize Pashtun is intensified, which can be seen for instance on YouTube, where locals will publish video slideshows of local people and scenarios with titles like "Pashtun Pride" and opponents will publish videos of prostitutes in Afghanistan claimed to be Pashtun or music videos with women who are called "Pashtun transsexuals".
The dilemma, which at one point will occur to President Obama, is that in order to complete the mission and demoralize resistance by triumphantly displaying a captured Osama bin Laden the US forces may have to breach the Pakistani border (the actual boundary is heavily disputed) and wage ground war against a people who will fight to their last drop of blood and, perhaps, in turn destabilize Pakistan even further.
The Pashtuns have struck a deal with the Pakistani government, but as Kabul stresses the chiefs in order to prove to the bellicose Americans they are cooperative, a division has set in between the chiefs of the tribes.
There can be little doubt the American administration, hope and change or not, is getting ready for the end game. The drones are not there to just keep insurgents out of the Western controlled regions of Afghanistan.
The surge in Afghanistan is necessary to keep relative peace in a country, which itself has the potential to be torn into many factions.
If too many troops are lost or injured in a final battle, the forces in Afghanistan will be depleted in order to replenish the forces in the front line.
With wide open borders to at least four countries which are likely to harbor fundamentalist sympathizers a lot hangs on the ability to win a PR war in which USA starts out with a huge deficit.
If you keep track of Al Jazeera, a comparatively moderate news
outlet (even if Washington under Bush pretty much declared it hostile),
you will find that scepticism about Obama abounds, even if he is not
spoken of as harshly. This may be partly due to some level of
connection, but more likely it is just because Middle Eastern
commenters are careful enough to give him a chance to prove his valor.
This brings us to the concept of the Ummah, which I dare to say is something the vast majority of Westerners do not understand. In one way it is a far more frail concept than the solidarity between Westerners or even Christians. In many ways it is an abstract brotherhood, and young zealous Muslims on the Internet frequently complains the brotherhood of Muslims only exist, when the Prophet is being insulted.
No matter that Muslims are being exiled oppressed and forced into exile from their country, or Islamic nations overrun by Western soldiers, with tremendous civilian casualty as a result or at least by-product.
That's what they complain.
The Al Qaeda is a completely new phenomenon, startling in the way it has been able to interpret and exploit this hunger for a universal Arab Islamic identity. Riding on the wave of Wahabism the organization has been able to make Muslims from different sects and a variety of nations work together against the Western enemy.
Arab nations have never been united. It is a saying in political
circles that the only time Arab have stood together was when they were
tribes and not yet nations, and they were lead by a Westerner (Lawrence
of Arabia).
But in the fringes of the Islamic community, the Ummah, if you can reasonably speak of such a thing, there are revolutionary politicos as well as religious devouts who will dream of such a thing, even at the cost of much blood.
That's where the young Islamic bloggers have a point: It seems with fundamentalists that the death of innocent Muslims only matter, when it is death by the hand of an infidel.
A case of history repeated
The obvious question from anyone sceptical about my assessment is:
If odds are as stacked against us like you claim, what should we do instead?
My answer would be: Reserve the right to wait and see. Even humanitarian intervention cannot be a moral imperative, if the consequence is far worse disaster. Just because you watch a conflict in television, it does not mean you have the obligation to end it. Only people who have lived protected lives and are used to waging wars with vastly superior firepower will think like that.
In my view what is at risk in Afghanistan is worse than military defeat, which the West could survive at this point. It could lead to moral defeat, a perception or conviction that the West is impoverished, demoralized and in swift decline. With the amount of conflict and anti-Western sentiments still lingering on in the world today, it would be profoundly poor timing (not that there is a good timing for a defeat, but some circumstances are more damning than others).
It is pretty much the same argument made by people before the invasion of Iraq. These days people cling to the belief that Afghanistan was a "legitimate target" for (allegedly) protecting Osama bin Laden who (allegedly) engineered 9/11. As such the invasion was "justifed", even to many Democrats who opposed or at least opposes the invasion of Iraq.
Today claims are made the ever illusive Osama bin Laden is hiding in
Waziristan
between tall and bearded tribal warriors and as such they become legitimate targets too. It is not "war against terrorism". It is not even "preemptive warfare". Now it is a mission for justice, just as media shows made the battle against Taliban a humanitarian issue prior to the invasion of Afghanistan with ghastly reports of murders and human rights violations.
Let me say this: We have no idea where Osama bin Laden is. If he is hidden in some tribe there is no way we can know for certain. For all we know about for instance the absurdly conflicting intelligence reports about the whereabouts and supernatural migrations of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama might as well be in Islamic heaven or in any of the C5 countries with the impossible to pronounce names, pulling the strings to get us deeper into a cultural territory he has been playing for ages and we know next to nothing about.
But large parts of the right wing is still riled up for war against Muslims, and on the other side of the not so thick political fence a lot of people are reluctant to cut off the legs of their new president, and the president has long before he was sworn in promised to take the battle to Afghanistan (let's see what turn Iraq will take meanwhile, as attention is diverted).
Those two attitudes in combination makes for war. But it is not "war on terrorism".
Everything changes, and everything stays the same.