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It's been one for the books. As a student of military history, I'm hard pressed to think of a military operation which has been run as well and has had such spectacular results. US strategy leveraged our strengths to the maximum and minimized the strengths of our opponents. And let's be clear: handled wrongly, the Taliban could have been extremely formidable. A direct assault by American troops in quantity would have united the Taliban's army and given them better morale than they actually had, and the result would almost certainly have been substantial American casualties -- and more important, no decisive victory and quite possibly a defeat. And even if such an approach had won, it would have left the Afghan people bitter and resentful and made a post-war settlement nearly impossible. American precision bombing set a whole new standard for surgical application of force. Yes, there were misses -- but damned few. There were friendly casualties, but what was remarkable was how rare those were. Of course, the biggest point to notice is the contrast between the Soviet experience there and that of the United States. The Soviet Union moved troops into Afghanistan and stayed there nine years, and accomplished nothing. The United States began its war there and won it in two months. Why were the results so different? The results were different because nearly everything about how the two wars were fought were different. The Mujahideen who fought against the USSR were aided by a tremendous covert flow of supplies and money and information and advice from the US via Pakistan; the Taliban had no patron, with every surrounding nation (and nearly all of the rest of the world) hating it. The USSR tried to fight a western war, with the primary emphasis being on attack and battle. The US fought a traditional Afghan war, with the primary emphasis being on convincing Afghan groups to change sides. The USSR fought with foreign (Soviet) troops against the home-grown Mujahideen, and so the traditional Afghan xenophobia was directed against the USSR. The United States used the bare minimum number of American troops necessary and used local troops to do most of the fighting, with heavy and effective use of American air power to give them the edge in battle. Since the core of Taliban military was foreign (al Qaeda) troops, Afghan xenophobia was directed at the Taliban, not at the US. And it has to be said that the US military was better in nearly every regard than the Soviet military was: better planning, better training, better equipment, better doctrine, better flexibility. But the biggest difference was the goal: the USSR fought to create and sustain an unpopular government, whereas the point of the US war was to dislodge the unpopular government which was there and to let the Afghans themselves create a popular replacement. The USSR was fighting a war of conquest and intended to stay; the US was fighting what amounted to a war of liberation and intended to leave afterwards. The USSR was fighting against the will of the Afghan people; the United States had the will of the Afghan people on its side. That was the biggest difference, and one to keep in mind if we go into combat again, in another nation such as Iraq. We will need local popular support to win; it will be far more difficult to prevail if the people of the next nation actually do believe in and support the government against which we fight. If that should turn out to be Iraq, then it's fortunate that there's every reason to believe that the Iraqis hate Saddam Hussein just as much as the Afghans hated the Taliban. (discuss) Oh, by the way, here's why we're going to lose in Afghanistan. (Thanks, Andrew.) |
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