Global warfare 072109

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 World conquest is an idea two centuries out of date.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.