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.