Required Reading
Ralph Peters:
We invaded to smash al Qaeda and punish the Taliban for hosting them. Mission accomplished. Within six months. The correct military action would have been to remove our conventional-force presence while the jihadi bodies were still warm.
Instead, ideologues safe at home declared that we had to nation-build where there was no nation. Or “we’d have to go back.”
Going back would have been an eff of a lot cheaper.
I doubt they invented it, but the Romans had a way of dealing with bad guys from lands they didn’t want to (or couldn’t) add to the Empire: The punitive expedition. Go in, kick some booty as dramatically as possible, then bug out. It wasn’t a permanent fix, nor was it meant to be. Nor did it need to be.
How simple. How underrated. How did we forget that lesson?
Anyway, go read the whole thing.
They weren’t listening to Victor Davis Hanson.
Or to Bernard Lewis, who had pointed out that while it is easy to beat Muslim armies, it is impossible to conquer Muslim people.
“The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is killing more people. He’s about double the numbers now. Can you imagine if McCain had won and did precisely what Obama has done, with every speech and every political maneuver overseas? There’d be riots in the streets about the people we’re killing. And yet because it’s Obama, and he’s better looking and better at reading the teleprompter, we let him get away with it.” Penn Jilette
So the lessons learned from our experience 60yrs ago w/ Germany and Japan, and the mistakes made 20 yrs prior to that, were the exact wrong lessons to learn.
It’s a fool’s errand to apply the “lessons” of 1945 to Afghanistan. Germany and Japan were both modern, cohesive nation-states. Both had tried, with varying degrees of success, to fit themselves into the modern world as defined by Western Europe. Japan, in particular, was quite aggressive in modeling itself after Great Britain — at least in terms of having lots of their flags planted overseas. The results… well, they weren’t always pretty. But a good smackdown did finally instill some better lessons in Westernization.
Afghanistan is little more a place on the map where actual nations aren’t. And it becomes doubly dubious when we are unwilling to provide the same kind of smackdown to Afghanistan’s tribes that we applied to the Axis powers.
I’m not disagreeing w/ you or trying to be snarky. The post WWII lessons were the wrong lessons to apply. A Roman approach of going in, killing our enemies and anyone who even looked at our troops sideways, then leaving w/ a clear stern warning “don’t make us come back”, would have been the call. Certainly the “light footprint” approach Bush used early on was a stupid way to deal w/ a 7th century tribal culture based on strength and earned respect.
But the “light footprint” approach is the best approach when you’re planners are from NYC cocktail parties and Beltway rules-of-proceedure committees. The Roman way, as Michael Caine said in Zulu, upsets the civilians over their breakfast.
Worse, McChrystal and Petreaus crafted their insane COIN programs from stuff the French used in Algeria. And they sold it to Bush(quite willing) and then Obama(hoping to look tough fighting that “good war” in Afgahnistan). Think about that; why would anyone adopt the MO of a military campaign that not only failed but it’s blowback nearly toppled the government deploying it.
Algeria did topple the French government. Charles de Gaulle hung on, but only by ditching the Fourth Republic in favor of the new and improved Fifth Republic.
Everyone always forgets the last stage of a Roman punitive campaign.
Selling the captives as slaves.