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.
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44 Responses to “Afghanistan: Get Serious or Get out”
Patrick
And thanks Andy!
Ash
Visit your favourite left-of-centre blog next week to read the rest of this hard-hitting new series: ‘Terror Supect Interrogation: Torture Them or Don’t Bother’, ‘Burglars: Amputate Their Hands or Forget It’ and ‘School Bullies: No Cane, No Gain’.
Matt Owen
Patrick – Thanks for the response. Firstly, I’d argue that the Vietnam war (especially in its latter stages) was fought almost entirely ‘amongst the people’. The tactics employed by the Viet Cong provided a virtual template for future guerilla forces like the Taliban – using human shields, blending in with locals etc. But anyway, that’s another debate, and we should probably leave it be.
I guess my argument would be that while you’re entirely correct in saying that the Taliban view our Western values as a weakness, by discarding them, we corrupt exactly what we were fighting to achieve in the first place. It’s all very well to, as Andy tactfully put, “eliminate each and every one of them no matter what the cost in men or materials,” but if we want there to be a country left when we’re finished, or more specifically a population that doesn’t want us out more than ever, we have to be the ones setting an example; we have to demonstrate that the value systems we represent are morally superior to that of the Taliban. Do you see what I mean? As the invading force, the burden of proof is on us to prove that we are offering a better alternative, and degrading ourselves by using the methods employed by the Taliban means we instantly fail in this. If you believe some of the studies that have emerged from the recent wars – http://bit.ly/b6HDFx, just to name one – our recent policy in the Middle East has done nothing, in fact it has helped us to continually fail, in our global ‘war on terror’. If we want to buck this trend, we absolutely cannot discard the values and the ideals that we went there in the first place to promote. In a simple sense, we cannot claim to be morally superior – or more civil or compassionate or however you want to term it – if we then willing to lower ourselves to the standards set by the vicious, regressive and morally repugnant Taliban.
I realize it’s not black and white, but that’s my view. Your later questions are broader geo-political ones, but if you want to discuss them i’d want you to clarify a) what differentiates a “war of survival” from any other war, and b) why you think the Powell Doctrine is obsolete, seeing as none of its criteria were met for either of our recent Middle-Eastern interventions.
Matt Owen
Apologies, i meant ‘b) why you think the Powell Doctrine is obsolete, seeing as ALMOST none of its criteria were met for either of our recent Middle-Eastern interventions.’
Patrick
Thanks Matt,
And you’re right about Vietnam now that I ponder it, especially the latter stages…
Not only do I understand your main point, to a large degree I share it, but that, unfortunately, means the West will lose in Afghanistan. That will have strategic implications for the West, and these may, or may not, be serious. One of the lessons from the West’s defeat in Afghanistan (and to a large degree Iraq) will be that anybody with an idea, an AK and patience can defeat our militaries. This is exactly what AQ saught to herald when they began their operations and could have far reaching consequences.
I completely see what you mean, and i have fought out there for those priciples and expounded them to the men under my command. Some of us died for them. But I do not think they will deliver victory where I was, (Sangin) and proabably not in the rest of Afghanistan. My argument is saying: if the West wants decisive victory in Afghanistan, it will have to become the strong man. I do not think we should claim to be morally superior by one iota, just realistic. Unfortunately for us, most Afghans respect strength, not Western liberal ideals. That may well be unacceptable to the West, and I accept that.
Wars of choice vs wars of survival? I think the history of interventions we’ve seen in the last 10 years fall into the former. WW2 was a rare latter.
On the Powell Doctrine, again you’re right. My terminology was sloppy and indeed those criteria were arguably not met at all. However, the use of ‘overwhelming’ military force detailed within the Powell Doctrine, using precision weapons, aircraft and armoured thrusts, is obsolete. But thanks for catching me out and having a decent exhange of ideas!;-)