Stardate 20020207.1757

(On Screen): I have now finished reading "Strange Victory: a critical appraisal of Operation Enduring Freedom and the Afghanistan war." I'm still not impressed; I still think it is mistaken. My comments from yesterday still stand; this shall be a more overall appraisal of his argument.

It is routine for war retrospectives to ask how victory was achieved. But Operation Enduring Freedom poses an additional, more fundamental question: Where has victory delivered us?

So it begins – and instantly destroys its own argument by introducing a false premise. The entire article is based on the assumption (perhaps caused by wishful thinking) that the operation in Afghanistan was the war, that the war is now over, and it's time to determine whether it actually accomplished the goals of the war. It then evaluates the current status of al Qaeda, concludes that it is still capable of operations against us, and concludes that the war was a failure. The paper's ultimate conclusion is:

A true appreciation of the new terrorism should draw our attention back to the "problem cluster" of which it is part, encompassing the phenomena of fragile states, war-ravaged societies, inter-communal and ethnic conflict, and associated regional rivalries. It should accentuate the importance of remedial steps: conflict reduction, humanitarian relief, and development assistance of all types. And it should sensitize us to the problem of inadvertency in the conduct of military affairs.

"We tried combat; it didn't work; so let's get back to dealing with root causes like poverty and giving everyone in the world clean drinking water. The right way to deal with this is by spreading the wealth around and making everyone love one another."

The entire argument fails, therefore, because this in fact was not the entire war. It was the first battle of the war, but the war will be going on for a long time, quite possibly decades. It is too soon to say that the strategic objectives of the war have failed, because we're not finished yet. In my comments yesterday, I pointed out the benefits of Operation Torch in 1943, but also pointed out that at the end of it Germany was clearly still not defeated. But that doesn't mean that it was a waste of time, nor does it clearly mean that the war had been lost overall simply because it hadn't been won at that point. Yogi Berra famously said, "It ain't over until it's over."

This one ain't over yet. It's a bit too soon to be throwing in the towel, or waving a white flag.

A major defect of the paper is that it assumes that a goal of the initial battle was to give Afghanistan a good government. Again, I think this is projection. One goal of the war was to depose the Taliban, to remove the existing government of Afghanistan, because the Taliban were dangerous to our interests. But exactly what replaced them was far less important, and that was never a primary object of the war.

Actually, the odd thing is that he actually states as much at the beginning, and then completely ignores the fact for the rest of his analysis:

Operation Enduring Freedom was not intended or designed be a stability operation. The Taliban regime was removed in order to punish it and to expedite intense, large-scale action against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan -- not to stabilize the country or relieve its humanitarian crisis.

Exactly so. But if it was never intended to do any of those things, then how can it be considered a failure for not having accomplished them? The reason is that he is actually arguing with the purpose of the operation. He thinks it should have been about setting up a stable government in Afghanistan. On that basis he then proceeds to show that it didn't do so (yet) and thus it was a failure. But he never explains why that should have been a goal, so far as I can see.

But given that he thinks we should have made that a goal, he also thinks that to do so we should have slowed the military operation down. But that would have been extremely dangerous.

In the game of Go, there is a concept called sente (SEN-tay). While it is true that the players take turns and alternate plays, there are intervals in which one player controls the flow of play while the other player is responding to that flow. It is a truism that if you can keep sente for most of the game then you will win. And indeed, one tactical goal of play when you don't have sente is to see if you can figure out how to pattern your response plays so as to wrest it away from your opponent.

The same kind of thing happens in war. There it's called "initiative", and one goal of war is to try to set up a situation where your opponent is stretched to the limit simply responding to your moves, so that he can't plan any of his own. With only one major exception, the Allies kept initiative on the Western front in WWII from Operation Cobra (the breakout from Normandy) all the way until the end of the war. In the Pacific, the Americans kept the initiative starting from 1943 onwards. The Japanese never planned another major offensive; all their planning was reactive.

By the same token, one of the remarkable aspects of the way Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) actually unfolded was the fact that the Taliban never engaged in significant positive operations at all. Once events bega