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Six Lessons from Our Past Wars
While the presidents of Pakistan and Afghanistan were in Washington last week telling President Barack Obama what he wanted to hear, things back home were busy going from bad to worse.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari took the occasion to declare war on the homegrown version of the radical Islamic Taliban and said he'd ordered the Pakistani military to clear them out of the Swat valley and neighboring areas near the frontier with Afghanistan.
More than 100,000, and perhaps as many as 500,000, Pakistani civilians have now fled for their lives, crossing the border into Afghanistan, of all places, and seeking shelter in refugee camps in Pakistan.
Meanwhile, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai made the rounds in Washington, American military commanders scrambled to investigate Afghan and International Red Cross reports that U.S. airstrikes had killed scores of civilians while targeting Taliban insurgents in western Afghanistan.
The initial U.S. response was to minimize the number killed, claiming that only 50, not nearly 150, had been killed, and that most of them were Taliban fighters. The unfortunate civilian casualties, commanders said, were human shields the Taliban kept close to during the fighting. Therein lies the rub. Civilian casualties infuriate the very people whose hearts and minds we're attempting to win with our stated goal of protecting the people and making their lives better.
Imminent threat
Although they haven't yet begun to arrive, the U.S. military reinforcements ordered in by President Obama can only make that situation worse as they fan out into small remote outposts where their only recourse when they're attacked is to call in airpower.
Everyone involved in the Afghan riddle pays lip service to the fact that, as in Iraq, there's no purely military solution. Eight years of Washington's benign neglect have allowed the Taliban to grow stronger, fight smarter and become an imminent threat to the government we installed in Kabul.
So before any meaningful nation-building and improvement of the lives of the long-suffering Afghan people can be accomplished outside Kabul and Kandahar, U.S. strategists say we must establish security and at least attempt to seal off the freeways for Taliban fighters commuting from Pakistan.
The chances of achieving anything remotely resembling success with the 50,000-plus American troops that President Obama has approved appear to be somewhere between slim and none.
What, then, are the chances that the Pakistani Army can succeed in its reluctant war against Pakistani Taliban guerrillas in the rugged North West Frontier Province? Since its inception with independence in 1947, Pakistan's Army has been trained and equipped to fight a conventional war with neighboring India, not the war it's grudgingly beginning against the tough tribesmen in those never-conquered mountains.
Obama has thrown in a lot of chips on this hand, acknowledging this week that while ''there will be more violence, and there will be setbacks,'' we will support the Pakistan and Afghanistan governments.
Almost half a century ago, we had another new president who came to office with an agenda of historic social change and a small, nagging guerrilla war that he inherited from his predecessor. In the end, both the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson and the man himself were devoured by that war he couldn't win but seemingly couldn't find a way to end without looking weak.
There are lessons aplenty to be learned from Vietnam, which consumed the lives of 58,249 American troops, but apparently most of them have now been forgotten. Here's a reminder:
• Lesson One: Don't get in the middle of another country's civil war.
• Lesson Two: Know and assess your enemy first. Study his history and culture with a sharp eye on his fighting ability -- and never underestimate him.
• Lesson Three: Arrogance and ignorance are almost always a fatal combination.
• Lesson Four: If your enemy can seek shelter across an international border where you can't chase him, then you have just ceded him the strategic initiative. He'll decide when and where to fight and for how long, and all you can do is react.
• Lesson Five: Don't begin a war without knowing what you hope to achieve and how you intend to get out.
• Lesson Six: War is too important to be left to the generals -- or to the politicians.
- Posted in
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19 Comments so far
Show AllGood piece by Mr. Galloway.
I would add 1 more lesson: Being an army of occupation in a foreign land on the other side of the globe where the locals hate your guts is a pretty tough mission for our guys.
odoco
I have great respect for Mr. Galloway, and believe his analysis for assessing likelihood of success in war is largely accurate - albeit for one critical element: the intrusion of the MIC into the formula. The MIC cares little about ultimate victory, the costs or consequences, the 'strategic' scope vis a vis actual foreign policy based upon the will of the electorate. It only cares about its profit - the most obscene source of profits yet devised by man. Until this 'element' is reigned in, brought to bay by the general population, our sons and daughters will continue to die in far off places, for all the wrong reasons, with only negative results to show for it.
Yep, the only lesson remembered is how much money can be made on war.
Sioux Rose
ODOCO: You beat me to the punch, however, I would add that there is more to the nature of profit in this region than that directly related to the MIC. Bankers tend to profit from war, and as others have wisely delineated, this region is the gas/oil pipeline to much of the planet and seizing it is equivalent to possession of a precious asset indeed. All the talk about stabilizing the nation(s) is just PR, as proved the case with Iraq. A nation that doesn't provide health care for its own citizens, tells its military personnel exposed to lethal (if subtle) weapons that it's all in their imagination, doesn't give an iota of consideration to the well-being of those in the nations it invades. And when the reports of civilian casualties meet that threshold that warrants public outrage, those who collect the data have their reputations destroyed, or the losses are blamed on the loco locals. Few therefore challenge the crux of the issue: what the f--k is America doing meddling in these regions? Iraq was turned into a civil war the full blowback of which has not yet been felt; and if the Pakistan/Afghanistan region is stirred up the likelihood increases that some fringe element, now empowered by support from its own homeland citizens, will gain access to a nuclear arm.
This most recent Avian/swine flu panic reminds us that a biological weapon can wreak as much havoc as a more conventional one. There are scientists in other lands (some of whom probably have the moral make-up of those delightful shrinks who presided over the U.S. torture camps) who are no doubt prepared to take such an item and make it portable. The U.S. has run out any good will it might have had and although MANY of its citizens (most of us in this forum, for example) oppose its foreign policy, nations that have been on the receiving end of U.S. excess force (a/k/a violence) have citizens who possess a legitimate desire to strike back.
Years ago I met a quadrapelgic young man in a fancy wheel chair who came to the coffee shop I liked in St Pete. Since I don't believe we get knocked with the absolute tough stuff without prior warnings I asked him if he had any other close calls before the motor cycle accident that left him in that state. He had been on a submarine that caught fire, and then when he got back, he found his wife with another man. (To some, that is a mortal blow to the psyche.) Then he came thundering down a mountainside in North Carolina only to find a logger truck at the base blocking his way out. He told me he attended a support group and the mantra there was that if someone rode a motor cycle it was not a question of IF but WHEN they would have an accident. The U.S. military is riding that motor cycle, and the inevitable accident is apt to impact citizens in our homeland. Violence begets violence, there is no karmic impunity for wars of aggression or exploits based on imperial conquest.
After 7 years, wars lose any profitability - from then on, they are a complete drag on the economy.
What nonsense. Military spending is always a drag on the economy. 7 years?? did you pull that out of your golden ....???
I assume MIC = Military Industrial Complex. Good point. The Iraq War was generated by neo cons, and the neo cons have been the mouthpiece for the MIC. No better proof of that than Dick Cheney, the loudest mouth piece trying to sell Americans on the invasion of Iraq and his deep connections with Halliburton. I also agree with avoid becoming an army of occupation. Missions should generally be linear, from point A to point B, with the starting point and ending point clearly defined. Non linear, asymmetrical wars are the type we can't win. Stick to conventional war with the enemy in front of us and the battle front clearly defined.
We owe it to our soldiers to avoid future Vietnam - Iraq type quagmires.
Correct, it was generated by the Neocons, and the spark for the whole thing, the predicate act, was the attacks at WTC and their explosive demolition.
smipypr
Afghanistan has always been a pretty rough neighborhood. Each valley has it's own regime with a hierarchy, and they've always handled their own local affairs. A quick review of British and Soviet efforts in the area will demonstrate the Khyber Pass area is no place to mess around in. The Pakistan/Afghanistan/India border areas are like almost no other area in the world in terms of wilderness and isolation. No place to try and wage a traditional war. This leaves only two extremely dangerous options - drone air strikes, conventional Cruise missile strikes, or theater nukes. None of which will solve anything; guess which one would escalate rapidly, with no hope of remaining limited to the theater itself, and no hope for the rest of the world.
-- our stated goal of protecting the people and making their lives better. --
That's interesting to hear. Our written goal is 'preventing future terrorism' by our enemies (Public Law 107-40).
• Lesson Five: Don't begin a war without knowing what you hope to achieve.
So when will someone (preferably from our corrupt and despicable Congress) explain how we achieve the goal of 'preventing future terrorism'? It's only been seven years, after all, and nobody's noticed that our goal is insane?
Or will people just keep adding more and more goals that 'are stated', in the hopes that one of them is achievable? (and victory can be declared, and the parades begin).
The only parades related to the depravity involved here are where the fiends of the MIC parade to the bank to collect their ill-gotten loot.
I enjoyed this analysis, but see this differently.
Civil War: This is not the US in the middle of a Pakistani conflict; this is the US causing conflict in Pakistan. That is true of every US conflict since 1945.
Know your enemy: Know who is NOT your enemy
Arrogance & ignorance: Fatal to others, too. And contagious.
Crossing borders doubles enemies
War without knowing:People invade to get in, not out. They do for personal motives: no public motive exists. Knowing? -- wow, wouldn't that be great!
War not for generals or politicians: Amen.
I might add one more important qualification: ground all your military jets, airplanes, helicopters, drones, missiles, etc - anything that flies or is capable of projecting force past your immediate horizon. Those are defensive weapons, to be used against actual hostile military formations that are directly assaulting our nation's shores. These projectiles are like those 'Polish Pistols' - they inevitably cause more damage to us than to any perceived 'enemy' since we really can't see who we're destroying (usually innocent civilians).
This advice isn't just because I come from an army background - it's the result of unassailable facts-on-the-ground compiled since the first use of air power in WWI. Dog fights and stealth aircraft, drones and missiles, may seem glamorous - but they have an atrocious record of harming the civilian population, exhibiting only the last-resort of a failed campaign - terrorism, and have little actual military significance. Tomes have been written on this subject - you can do your own research and verify my claims. If you're sincerely astounded, I can supply a couple titles - but you're better off investigating this on your own, so you can argue with the knotheads who still think flyboys are the end-all and be-all of advanced civilization.
If the US military has devolved to the point where it can't stand up to a few scraggly, rabid, poorly-armed bandits wreaking havoc on their formations, then we're wasting about a trillion dollars too much on it. We'd be better off with a conservative well-armed state milita and minutemen - all that most countries need to stave off any hostile occupation. You can't defeat any enemy you can't see - so all those fancy technological wonders are useless in G-4 situtaions. Sending in more troops won't make any difference if they can't hold their own without resorting to terrorism. (My brother - Air Force - chose A-10s, which are an excellent support for ground troops facing the superior forces of an organized formal military - we wouldn't need much more than those and helicopter gunships to defend our own borders.)
The problem with having too many 'toys' is the tendency to abuse them - which is what the US military has done, ever since WWI. And let's face it - air power eats up more 'defense' dollars than probably any other unjustified 'investment' - and 'our' representatives in Congress made sure to 'bring home the bacon' - pork - so this abomination festers in every state. It's a mosnter that will be hard to kill - but the message is clear. Air power is mostly about terrorism - and of little practical value to national defense. Time to start telling it like it is - and get away from all this mythology. If the US military has to resort to terrorism practically every day, then it really is time to pack it up and come back home. There is no hope.
Sioux Rose
ARMY BRAT: If Nader was president, you would be a GREAT person to have as a quality control officer on board to check the books and own a say in which tools to finance and which to let go. You raise excellent points and reflect the consciousness of that enlightened warrior who understands the benefits of peace, or at the least, what not to waste on foolish military "adventures."
No. The guy you want is Winslow Wheeler - he's the top dog in that category.
There is a 7th lesson to be learned from the Viet Nam war:
US military intervention always destablizes less developed regions and increases the violence.
In 1962 low-grade civil wars were simmering in Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia. By the time we finally left SE Asia in 1975, a million or more were dead in Viet Nam, Laos had fallen apart and Cambodia was in the hands of the genocidal madman Pol Pot. Back then, the rightwing crowd predicted that Hanoi would institute a new dark age of blood and terror, just as they do now with regard to the Taliban. But, over the following ten years Viet Nam brought order and peace to the region and is now one of our trading partners and a nice place for Americans to visit.
Seven: Never trust conservative politicians.
War has a profit margin.
I take issue with several premises of this article...
1st... The title... the author makes a few vague references to Vietnam (which was never declared as a war by congress), nor did he mention WWI or WWII, or any other war, so the title is incorrectly pluralized... Same goes for our invasions and/or occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan... Or the cold war CIA covert operations, they were never declared as war by congress...
2nd... The first "lesson" is that the US should not get involved in another country's civil war... Hmmm... The Vietnamese have been fighting off colonialists and foreign invaders for nearly 2000 years... The French were unsuccessfully attempting to colonize Vietnam for the rubber, tin, plantations, and off shore oil reserves... But the conquest was losing a war of attrition, and gladly handed over their mess to the Americans for a cut of the spoils...
The US military and CIA attempted to create a civil war to divide & conquer, and set up a puppet regime in Saigon, just like Karzai in Kabul, who's followers and supporters were rightfully considered to be traitors to their own people and their struggle for sovereignty and autonomy...
And third... Lesson six is bullocks... There is no such thing as a war that is too important for anything...
This article reads like a psy-ops puff piece, complete with historical revision & omission, and has more emphasis on the existential dilemmas of LBJ and military strategy than the victims of the US occupation of SEAsia...
War is a racket, and apologists for empire are the cat-gut strings...