USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011117.0645 (On Screen): Game Theory is, despite the name, one of the most important new mathematical fields of the last 200 years. It began as a study of games but it clearly became obvious that it was actually a study of conflict, and it has application to such things as negotiation strategies, business relations and war. For example, it includes formal ways of creating decision matrices to try to evaluate what you can do, what your enemy can do, what the outcome would be in each combinatorial case, and thus permits you to choose an option which is least detrimental to your side. But part of that is that you assume your enemy is smart and crafty and doesn't deliberately screw himself over by doing something stupid.

One mistake when evaluating such a decision matrix is to look for the outcome which is most advantageous for your own side (which usually involves your opponent doing something stupid) and then to select that tactic on your own side in hopes that your opponent does in fact do the proper stupid thing. It's been known to happen, but that's not the way to bet. The right way to handle it is to first evaluate the decision matrix from the point of view of your opponent and decide which of his choices are best for him; then you figure out how to counter them.

A sure sign that you're dealing with amateurs is if you find them trying to plan their war for the best outcome for themselves. And that's what this news article reports that the Taliban/al-Qaeda top command seem to be doing:

Bin Laden, Mir said, had decided to "carry on his fight from the mountains" and turn the war into a guerrilla conflict rather than an unequal fight pitching the Taliban against an opposition backed by massive U.S. bombing.

"According to my understanding, he knew the Northern Alliance would take Kabul and other cities," Mir said.

"But he said that if the Northern Alliance came out into the cities and came out into the open, the Taliban would get the advantage. He wants to get the Americans into the open also."

In conventional battles, anti-Taliban troops were able to leave most of the work to U.S. bombers and missiles, something that particularly irked Zawahri, Mir said.

"They are just sitting playing chess and playing volleyball while we are getting bombed," Mir quoted Zawahri as saying. "We want to bring them out into the open so we can attack them."

In other words, we Taliban can still win this if only the other side makes a drastic mistake and does the one thing that would give us the best chance of wiping them out. Why aren't they doing that?

Because "they" are not fools and don't want to lose the war. Yes, indeed, we are sitting back and waiting while we bomb the crap out of Taliban forces, and only moving in after they've been shattered by the bombs. And the result has been a major victory with minor losses to the Northern Alliance forces.

Part of this is, I think, also the warrior mentality. To the Taliban top command the way this war has been fought is vaguely dishonorable; it's not how you're supposed to fight. You're supposed to win with courage and valor, you're supposed to come out and fight man-to-man, so that you can prove that you're the better warrior. And the battle should go to the side with the best warriors. These stupid Americans won't do that; they just sit back and drop bombs on us and we can't fight back or prove that we're better warriors. Uh, yeah; and that's the difference between soldiers and warriors: warriors are trying to prove their bravery, soldiers are trying to win wars. And it's why soldiers will always defeat warriors.

If these are the terms in which the Taliban leadership are still thinking, then they are doomed. That's because we're not going to give them a set-piece open terrain pitched battle any time soon. If it happens, it's only going to be after they've been severely weakened by months of bombing. (discuss)