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It's a bit more surprising when it's a supposed military expert saying it. It's by no means the case that the war in Afghanistan is won; there are many, many problems yet to solve. We have to figure out what to do about a future guerrilla operation in the mountains around Kandahar, and we have to figure out what kind of government to put in place in Afghanistan post-war. These are serious problems indeed -- but we are blessed to have them. William Arkin writes for the Washington Post about how badly the war is going. The article is not out of date; he wrote it after the fall of Mazar-e Sharif (though probably before the fall of Kabul). He makes many criticisms most of which come down to carping. (In many cases it's no more than "That's not how I would have done it!") He complains that the war is being run in a conventional and unimaginative fashion -- which is blatantly false; the use of special forces and the extreme efforts involved in causing the Afghan warlords to change sides has been completely unprecedented. In any case, the goal wasn't to be imaginative, the goal was to win. Who cares about imaginative? He complains that buildings like the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Security and so on have not been bombed. Yes, and the reason was two-fold: those buildings don't matter, and they're in the middle of heavily populated areas so the risk to nearby civilians would be severe. Why bother? He complains that we haven't been attacking bridges, electric power, oil storage and so on. He's also complaining that the bombing has been "conventional" -- and yet those kinds of targets are what a conventional bombing campaign, such as happened in Serbia, would go after. (Make up your mind!) Evidently attacking troop formations and supply dumps and other direct military assets (which is what most of the bombing has concentrated on) is just a bit too unimaginative to him. He carps about the fact that not very many targets have been hit, as if it was somehow important that the air campaign achieve a certain intensity. By so doing, he confuses means with goals. The point of war is to achieve a goal; means are subordinated to that. You use as much force as is needed to achieve the goal, but no more than necessary, because a well fought war is economical in application of force. It's no doubt true that we could have bombed at a higher level of intensity, but it's not clear that doing so would have achieved any greater result. On the other hand, while advocating a higher intensity of bombing he at the same time laments the fact that we may be running out of advanced munitions. Of course, a more intense level of bombing would only have exacerbated that problem, and conservation of those weapons is one of the reasons that the campaign has operated at the level it has. (Make up your mind!) But by and large, when B-52 heavy bombers aren't dropping strings of dumb bombs on Taliban front line troops, most planes are dropping JDAMs and laser-guided bombs on individual tanks and armored vehicles. According to Wald's mathematics, targets are being "hit" at a rate comparable to the Gulf War. But is this a useful measure of success? And is it a sound strategy? Is it a useful measure of success? Absolutely not, but Arkin is the only one trying to apply it as a measure of success. Is it a sound strategy? Evidently so, given how fast the Taliban collapsed. (It was so fast that it resembled shattering glass.) Anything which is successful is sound strategy. It's hard to think of any other criterion which makes any sense. One of Murphy's Laws of Combat says, "A stupid plan which works isn't stupid." When you get right down to it, Arkin's article comes down to saying that "Damn them! They didn't make any mistakes for me to criticize, so I'll criticize them for not making any mistakes, because criticism is my job." (discussion in progress) |
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