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”
Ash
Patrick – I think you’re replying to me and not Andy!
“It is also somewhat naive to think that ignoring the rules does not pay off.” – I don’t think that for a moment. Obviously it can sometimes pay off to behave unethically – that’s precisely why we need rules proscribing unethical behaviour. This applies to everything from sitting an exam to filling in a tax return to putting someone on trial to fighting a war – if it didn’t sometimes pay to cheat, fudge the figures, rig the jury or torture the POW, no-one would be tempted to do such things and there’d be no need for rules.
“I’m talking operating within the rule of law, but not strictly all of the time” – and if you were talking about bending the rules just a little in the most extreme, exceptional circumstances, no doubt that would be fair enough. But the argument you actually seem to be putting forward is that we should treat *every* war, at every time, as an extreme circumstance – a fight for survival – so that in the context of war, there should be a permanent presumption in favour of the legitimacy of bending the rules by as much as it takes to win.
Since you acknowledge that our enemy in the present context gains a significant advantage by bending the rules to an extreme degree, the clear implication is that it may very well be necessary in order to win – and so legitimate – for us to bend the rules to a similarly extreme degree. (This, of course, incentivises our enemy to bend the rules still further in order to regain the upper hand, and so it goes on.)
Patrick
Ash, sorry!
No I don’t mean bending the rules to an extreme degree, I mean it would be worthwhile for some introspection and debate on how the West is meant to wage war, thats all. A look at what the rules are and how they affect our power is something I think would be worthwhile for us all.
Also the survival battle: the point I made in the article is that we should not get involved militarily if we do not judge it to be of vital interest; that will be the lesson of Iraq and Afghan. I am not saying all wars are for survival, but that we should stay out if we are not prepared to fight to win. Fighting to win does not mean ignoring every ideal we hold dear, but rather a more contextual and adaptable recognition of our ideals within the the changing nature of warfare and the wider world.
Also war is a completely different activity from sitting exams, tax returns and courtrooms and must be understood differently, although I agree that you need to uphold our ideals as best you can throughout all society’s activities…
Mike
I am serving in Afghanistan right now
Mike
I am an American serving in Afghanistan right now and have just read this excellent article and the comments made regarding it. In simple terms we are trying to fight a counter-insurgency war within an artificial political timeline. Long term victory requires long term investment. When the political leadership of the two biggest players (UK and US) have already announced our departure it is hard to see how it is even possible to begin to think that we will ‘win’. The Afghan people are a proud and noble race, and unlike many reports suggest highly intelligent. They will not side with ISAF when they know that in 4 years they will have their throats slit by the Taliban/insurgents. This campaign requires long term investment – if we as the Western World are not able to deliver this then we whould be slightly less deceitful and just leave. The debate as to whether we handover to the Afghan Security Forces is pointless – we all agree we should and indeed must in due course but in reality they will not be able to do what is needed for at least a generation.
Ash
Patrick – “war is a completely different activity from sitting exams, tax returns and courtrooms and must be understood differently”
– of course, and I’d expect the rules governing war to be completely different from those governing other activities. But the point still holds that within each domain, the rules are there to counterbalance incentives that exist to behave unethically. So while war should (of course) be governed by rules appropriate to war, I think it’s dangerous to suggest that the ‘high stakes’ involved in war mean the rules applying in that area need to be treated as more bendable than those operating in other areas. (In fact one could make a case for the opposite conclusion – that given what’s at stake, given what it means in terms of human rights and lives to bend the rules of war, those rules should be regarded as *more* sacred than those governing more trivial activities.)
What you said in that last reply makes sense to me, though: of course there’s always room to review & debate the rules.