Unless there is a change in how it perceives the nature of warfare, the West will lose the war in Afghanistan, despite declaring victory, and spend the next 10 years in splendid isolation wondering what went wrong.
Patrick Bury is a former Captain in the British Army’s Royal Irish Regiment who has served in Afghanistan; he delivered his Masters dissertation on Military-Media Relations and a memoir of his experiences, ‘Callsign Hades’, is to be published in September by Simon and Schuster
The leaking of the contents of log reports two weeks ago from an American military headquarters in Afghanistan may have surprised the media and the populace, but it will not surprise any soldiers who have served there.
It appears that much of the media and many people are out of touch. That they still think that war should be clean, clear cut and concise. It is none of these.
Maybe the precedent of low casualty victories, like Iraq in 1991 and Kosovo in 1999, delivered by the technological Revolution in Military Affairs, has helped shape this false belief, maybe it is the failure of the media to convey the true horrors of war, but for leaked reports, detailing civilians getting killed by accident, special forces operatives on ‘kill or capture missions’, and Pakistani intelligence service collaboration with the Taliban to surprise anyone who knows anything about either war or Afghanistan, is ridiculous.
Of course, the media has an important watch-dog role in modern society and there is a definite need for the primacy of rule of law in military operations. Yet the way some of the media, and therefore the population in general, expect soldiers to win wars that are ostensibly fought in their name is unrealistic, and given the changing nature of war, becoming even more so.
The leaked logs show higher civilian casualties than previously reported. When our enemies fight us amongst the people, high rates of civilian casualties are unfortunately inevitable. Indeed, as in the Taliban’s case, inducing the West to cause civilian casualties is an explicit tactical and strategic goal of insurgents. And it seems much of the West’s population and media are not aware of this manipulation.
Moreover, heavily armed young men, despite the best training and restraint, make mistakes sometimes. You would, if you were in Afghanistan and a car that you couldn’t make out was hurtling toward your checkpoint and ignoring your shouts and warning shots and driving right toward you, and what about that report of three vehicle borne suicide bombers in the bazaar just before you left base?
And unfortunately, war makes both states and men act in ways they may not like to act normally. Special operations provide an example. They operate in the grey area between Realpolitik and law, they execute foreign policy at the tactical level, with all the myriad moral complexities this entails. If you think ‘kill or capture missions’ are morally suspect you are right, if you think they are always unnecessary you are wrong.
War has changed, probably irreversibly. The prospect of defeat in Afghanistan for NATO and the U.S is now real. Wars amongst the people and Improvised Explosive Devices have negated Western militaries’ once all powerful control of the battlespace and turned soldiers into little more than heavily laden slow-moving targets.
Meanwhile a lightly armed, agile militia called the Taliban are using every trick they can to win. They use children proxy bombers, they use human shields, they lay ambushes for NATO soldiers returning Taliban dead to their mosques. They do not care for the Geneva Convention, nor human rights. And it pays off.
And they have time and a long term view of strategy.
The only time the West fights to win is in a war of necessity, such as in World War 2. Then the rules are bent and the gloves come off, for a period. This is usually acceptable, if unknown, to the population the state is acting to protect. This happens in a war of survival; survival of the fittest, the most adaptable.
A government should not go into a war if it is not a war of survival, if it is not prepared to fight to win. It owes that to those risking their lives on its behalf.
Unless there is a change in how it perceives the nature of warfare, the West will lose the war in Afghanistan, despite declaring victory, and spend the next 10 years in splendid isolation wondering what went wrong.
44 Responses to “Afghanistan: Get Serious or Get out”
Afghanistan: Get Serious or Get out « The best Labour blogs
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Robert
Every one knows if your at war it’s total you cannot go around saying OK we will not kill anyone today, tomorrow well OK we can kill people tomorrow. War is total is nasty it’s dirty, and people guilty and innocent get killed.
You cannot fight the Tali Ban by not dropping bombs on them, if your not willing to allow innocents to die the Tali ban will use this.
But we are not at war with the Tali ban we are a Police force, and thats no good at all, the Americans now realize like the Russians you cannot win this one, so get out
Matt Owen
I think I’ll just reiterate what Ash said above. Am I really reading a piece on this blog suggesting that “the rules are bent and the gloves come off, for a period” in Afghanistan? The suggestion being that we follow the Taliban’s lead and forget “the Geneva Convention” and “human rights” – after all, this “pays off”, right? How can anyone seriously expect the people in these countries to submit themselves to our values of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ if we refuse to play by the rules we ourselves create? I’m astonished reading this piece, truly astonished.
Also, you say that “war has changed, probably irreversibly” – but hasn’t war been like this for a long time now? Aren’t we losing for exactly the same reasons the US lost in Vietnam fifty years, and the Soviets lost in Afghanistan thirty years ago? I have a friend in the forces who sees our failures in the Middle East conflicts as stemming from the fact that our military leadership has completely failed to learn from the past, or adapt its approach.
andy williams
You are going to have to decide whether you want to win this war or not, bearing in mid what WILL happen to the people of Afghanistan if we leave and the Taliban retturn to power.
Then once we have made our decision if we are happy enough to let the Taliban return, we should pull out as fast as possible. If however we decide that we should wage the war and defeat the Taliban then whether hand-wringers like it or not, we ae going to have to take of the gloves and leave them in no uncertain doubt that we are going to eliminate each and every one of them no matter what the cost in men or materials.
At the moment we are losing a war we should easily win and the reason is because the civilian population here in the UK and America and other countries in the Coalition Forces seem to think we can win by playing fair and being nice.
Unfortunately in war the best you can hope for by playing fair and being nice is runner-up. War is a dirty, messy, brutal and inhuman activity and if you want to be in it, then you have to be in it to win it no matter what or you are courting disaster.
PS – I served 22 years in the Infantry.
Patrick
Ash and Matt,
Thanks for your comments. I wrote this article to hopefully spark a debate, and you are both right to pick up on certain questionable parts of it. The interesting thing about the Taliban’s strategy is that they see what you both very rightly see as the West’s strength, ‘Freedom and democracy’, as our very weakness. This being the case, if war is essentially about winning, the point I am making is that we need to adapt to win. This happens in wars for survival and is usually acceptable.
What has changed about war is that it is now ‘amongst the people’, in Vietnam it was not, neither to the same extent in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Other questions I saught to raise are: is Afghanistan a war of survival for the West? What are the criteria for committing our forces now the Powell Doctrine is obviously obsolete, and what effect will this have on future foreign policy? I understand these are distasteful questions, especially to liberals like myself, yet I feel not searching for answers to them would be the height of folly…