Recent media reports are that the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is deteriorating with more refugees, deaths and greater intensity in the conflict. This is received with some surprise by the current American administration operating on previous administration’s plan for success. The previous administration should have been able to warn of the deterioration based on its failures in Iraq, but it never learned any lessons.
Administrations change, but the military continues to subscribe to the Cheney-Rumsfeld model for world conquest. To mid-level military bureaucrats continued conflict is the road to promotion and bodies are only promotion points. Destroyed villages are like monopoly houses, chips on the road to winning the game. The military axiom is that although its strategy of more troops and firepower didn’t work in Iraq it will work in Afghanistan.
The Cheney-Rumsfeld model was a failure before its first shot was fired. World conquest is an idea two centuries out of date. It has taken that long for proof of failure to be easily to found. World wars for territory and resources can be dated from the American Revolution where modern great power conflict crossed oceans. The Napoleonic era carried warfare to around the world reaching full global conflict for the first time. The sun finally set on the British Empire in the 20th century. An Empire built through a series of global colonial wars that served as the basis of the Cheney-Rumsfeld model for resource exploitation. That model however was built on a failure to learn, a series of false assumptions and one glaring error in fact, despite two hundred years of death and destruction world conquest has not been achieved.
The Bush administration’s group of Texas oilmen saw an opportunity to cheaply seize vast Mid-east oil reserves. Unsatisfied with only the prospects of oil from Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan the model included Africa, South America and world oceans. A techno-war was to be funded by the sale of capture oil creating a great power win-win situation of forcing the vanquished to pay cost of defeat. A page out of the Versailles Treaty, which not only forced the losers to pay for WWI but also created and subjugated the states of the Middle East. In the decades following Versailles the new states were able to eject their colonial masters creating western resentment and eastern suspicion.
Under the cover of falsified information the former colonial masters’ Christian west again invaded the Muslim east expecting easy victories. The western techno-warfare appeared victorious as it quickly annihilated regional forces. The apparent victory soon turned sour, as victors became occupiers intent on new colonialism. Domestic power struggles hide the emergence of resistance movements and the colonials blamed everything on Islamic radicals.
Using western military data it is interesting that there are now thousands more “foreign” radicals than when the conflict began. While the bureaucrats see this as opportunity, it fails to correlate foreign military buildup and their excesses with increasing regional resistance. The Afghans long view has resisted the world’s best militaries for centuries.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Lessons learned 070209
Lessons learned 070209
It has been said that governments always fight the last war. There is some truth to this but in America’s current wars the generals are reaching even further into history. They attempt to lay a technological veneer over old wars, but looking at their words and deeds quickly demonstrates that they learned the wrong lessons from the past.
The ringing rhetoric of “War on Terrorism” disguised the fact that the (then) administration embarked on an old fashion 19th Century colonial war. Colonial wars are wars of conquest and exploitation of foreign resources. Under the cover of fighting terrorism the national strategy was to secure energy resources for Texas oilmen. The plan was to occupy oil producers everywhere in the world. It appeared that the United States’ plan was to occupy Afghanistan with a mercenary force while invading Iraq with the majority of American troops then turn and attack oil producer Iran from both sides. This would leave America in control of Iraq, Iran and Afghan oil and gas fields but also pipelines from the CAS while threatening other oil producers with displayed force. The plan began to unravel when friendly oil producers refused American occupation of their oil fields and promised resistance to American attempts at occupation.
Fighting on the same British colonial battlefields of Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan the Americans borrowed heavily from British policy and tactics of the 19th and 20th centuries. Their grasp of history however failed to note that all three countries established resistance movements that were ultimately successful in ejecting British control. But like America the British are slow learners and the Afghans had to eject three British invasions. With little understanding of regional issues and culture the Americans listened to the British and attempted to establish colonial rule across the occupied territory. It surprised the Americans that resistance movements began to emerge and ally with diverse terrorist movements. Terrorists are fractured ideological competitors unlikely to cooperate among themselves or other ideologues except against a common enemy.
With inflated expectations and little understanding of the regional dynamics the military soon came to recognized that they would be unable to stage a successful invasion of Iran and worse, they had failed in Iraq. The American generals did learn one successful tactic from the British, loudly declare victory and just go home, a tactic that is now being attempted in Iraq with little success. Faced with failure in Iraq the Americans refused to recognize failures of policies and are now attempting to apply their same tactics to Afghanistan, with assurances that failed tactics will work in that country. Unable to see beyond misinformed preconceptions to face the reality of a vast region of diverse cultures loosely aligned by a common religion the war is now expanding into Pakistan, China, CAS and Africa. While it is unlikely that China will ever allow an American occupation forces on its territory the other areas are unable to resist American coercion and local dissent groups are now scattering the seeds of resistance.
There are two types of military, there are the troops who fight and die and then there is the military bureaucracy claiming credit for the sacrifices of the troops. The bureaucracy learned one lesson from Vietnam. During the Vietnam War the public blamed individual soldiers for the government’s flawed policies that carried the country into war. In the present war the bureaucracy used the public’s guilt over the treatment of Vietnam veterans as a tactic of deception. The government mounted major campaigns for public support of the troops as a cover up of even more flawed policies. According to the bureaucrats to question policy is denigration of the troops’ sacrifices, which silences political debate in a cloak of Vietnam shame.
Vietnam makes an interesting school for lessons learned. There is the lesson of body counts, “Every dead body is an enemy body and a battle success.” While history identified flaws of body count policy, it has again been adopted as policy. Vietnam also provides the lesson that big bombs make impressive holes. Thousand pound bombs dropped on Afghan mud huts creates a fine dust that covers lots of bodies for the count. Repeated investigations proved that many of these bodies are in fact non-combatants becoming collateral damage in military speak. In 2007 the military announced with great fanfare that it would no longer drop 1000-pound bombs on villages as a humanitarian gesture. It the future they would only drop increased numbers of 500 pound bombs. Villagers soon saw that smaller but more bombs destroyed more of the village and increased the civilian body count.
Vietnam also restated many lessons on resistance and insurgency right out of Mao’s thesis on war. It is interesting that Mao drew on American Indian resistance and the American battles in the Philippines along with classic resistance to the Romans, Napoleon and the British in developing his thesis. In modern history the American have faced insurgencies and resistance movements more than any other country with the exception of Britain. One of the lessons is that a foreign nation can support an internal insurgency but can not create a successful insurgency that supports its own policies. Occupation of territory by a foreign power, no matter how benign, will generate a popular resistance. Eventually frustration will drive resistance to prolonged insurgency, a lesson that the Afghans have been teaching centuries of occupiers.
While the lessons of the past are there for all to see powerful governments attempt to reinvent the wheel in their favor. The American military, born by resistance, with all of its experience in counter-insurgency express surprise when faced with resistance. In the present wars American General Petraeus re-published counter-insurgency lessons but they appear to fall on deaf ears as more troops and bombs continue to fracture Afghanistan. Again the American policies are spreading resistance where the past will haunt the future of the powerful. A major unlearned lesson is that the military is ill equipped for nation building.
Government policies can not ignore that in true education, lessons must be honestly applied rather than recited for a grade. For international policy today the grade is cooperation rather than 19th/20th Century conquest. The greatest lesson is that self image is never the world’s image of self.
It has been said that governments always fight the last war. There is some truth to this but in America’s current wars the generals are reaching even further into history. They attempt to lay a technological veneer over old wars, but looking at their words and deeds quickly demonstrates that they learned the wrong lessons from the past.
The ringing rhetoric of “War on Terrorism” disguised the fact that the (then) administration embarked on an old fashion 19th Century colonial war. Colonial wars are wars of conquest and exploitation of foreign resources. Under the cover of fighting terrorism the national strategy was to secure energy resources for Texas oilmen. The plan was to occupy oil producers everywhere in the world. It appeared that the United States’ plan was to occupy Afghanistan with a mercenary force while invading Iraq with the majority of American troops then turn and attack oil producer Iran from both sides. This would leave America in control of Iraq, Iran and Afghan oil and gas fields but also pipelines from the CAS while threatening other oil producers with displayed force. The plan began to unravel when friendly oil producers refused American occupation of their oil fields and promised resistance to American attempts at occupation.
Fighting on the same British colonial battlefields of Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan the Americans borrowed heavily from British policy and tactics of the 19th and 20th centuries. Their grasp of history however failed to note that all three countries established resistance movements that were ultimately successful in ejecting British control. But like America the British are slow learners and the Afghans had to eject three British invasions. With little understanding of regional issues and culture the Americans listened to the British and attempted to establish colonial rule across the occupied territory. It surprised the Americans that resistance movements began to emerge and ally with diverse terrorist movements. Terrorists are fractured ideological competitors unlikely to cooperate among themselves or other ideologues except against a common enemy.
With inflated expectations and little understanding of the regional dynamics the military soon came to recognized that they would be unable to stage a successful invasion of Iran and worse, they had failed in Iraq. The American generals did learn one successful tactic from the British, loudly declare victory and just go home, a tactic that is now being attempted in Iraq with little success. Faced with failure in Iraq the Americans refused to recognize failures of policies and are now attempting to apply their same tactics to Afghanistan, with assurances that failed tactics will work in that country. Unable to see beyond misinformed preconceptions to face the reality of a vast region of diverse cultures loosely aligned by a common religion the war is now expanding into Pakistan, China, CAS and Africa. While it is unlikely that China will ever allow an American occupation forces on its territory the other areas are unable to resist American coercion and local dissent groups are now scattering the seeds of resistance.
There are two types of military, there are the troops who fight and die and then there is the military bureaucracy claiming credit for the sacrifices of the troops. The bureaucracy learned one lesson from Vietnam. During the Vietnam War the public blamed individual soldiers for the government’s flawed policies that carried the country into war. In the present war the bureaucracy used the public’s guilt over the treatment of Vietnam veterans as a tactic of deception. The government mounted major campaigns for public support of the troops as a cover up of even more flawed policies. According to the bureaucrats to question policy is denigration of the troops’ sacrifices, which silences political debate in a cloak of Vietnam shame.
Vietnam makes an interesting school for lessons learned. There is the lesson of body counts, “Every dead body is an enemy body and a battle success.” While history identified flaws of body count policy, it has again been adopted as policy. Vietnam also provides the lesson that big bombs make impressive holes. Thousand pound bombs dropped on Afghan mud huts creates a fine dust that covers lots of bodies for the count. Repeated investigations proved that many of these bodies are in fact non-combatants becoming collateral damage in military speak. In 2007 the military announced with great fanfare that it would no longer drop 1000-pound bombs on villages as a humanitarian gesture. It the future they would only drop increased numbers of 500 pound bombs. Villagers soon saw that smaller but more bombs destroyed more of the village and increased the civilian body count.
Vietnam also restated many lessons on resistance and insurgency right out of Mao’s thesis on war. It is interesting that Mao drew on American Indian resistance and the American battles in the Philippines along with classic resistance to the Romans, Napoleon and the British in developing his thesis. In modern history the American have faced insurgencies and resistance movements more than any other country with the exception of Britain. One of the lessons is that a foreign nation can support an internal insurgency but can not create a successful insurgency that supports its own policies. Occupation of territory by a foreign power, no matter how benign, will generate a popular resistance. Eventually frustration will drive resistance to prolonged insurgency, a lesson that the Afghans have been teaching centuries of occupiers.
While the lessons of the past are there for all to see powerful governments attempt to reinvent the wheel in their favor. The American military, born by resistance, with all of its experience in counter-insurgency express surprise when faced with resistance. In the present wars American General Petraeus re-published counter-insurgency lessons but they appear to fall on deaf ears as more troops and bombs continue to fracture Afghanistan. Again the American policies are spreading resistance where the past will haunt the future of the powerful. A major unlearned lesson is that the military is ill equipped for nation building.
Government policies can not ignore that in true education, lessons must be honestly applied rather than recited for a grade. For international policy today the grade is cooperation rather than 19th/20th Century conquest. The greatest lesson is that self image is never the world’s image of self.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)