OUT OF AFGHANISTAN?

The former commander of our forces in Afghanistan, Major Gen. (Ret) John Cantwell, has been doing the rounds of the serious news shows. His purpose? To tell anybody who’ll listen that it’s time our troops were out of that godforsaken crater.

            Should our boys be stuck in a Central-Asian desert, being shot and blown-up by people they think they’re helping? To answer that, it helps to re-examine why they were there in the first place. Let’s see if I can’t deliver a cogent argument here.

            A little under eleven years ago, US and allied forces had Osama bin Laden and his cronies penned in the mountains along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. With Pakistan’s then President, General Pervez Musharraf, eager to appear helpful, they could have either laid siege and starved them out, or chased the evil bastards right to Lahore, if need be.

            Instead, as we know, they promptly began diverting resources in readiness to open another front; the war that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the boys had been hankering after since before coming to office – Iraq, and Saddam.

            Now, I’ve always been inclined to defend George W Bush against those who blithely denigrate his intelligence: he may be a lot of unpleasant things, I’d say, but he’s certainly no idiot.

            That being said, however, you’d have to think that it takes a special kind of moron to break four of the most important rules of warfare in one fell swoop.

            The first rule? Know what you intend to accomplish. Every great commander, from Cæsar to Napoléon and beyond, insisted that all campaigns should begin with a clear objective. That objective is, usually, to destroy the enemy’s forces in the field.

            Second: exploit your successes and follow through. Ruthlessly pursue, capture and/or destroy the fleeing enemy. Do not allow him time and space to regroup.

            Third: Don’t divide your forces. And fourth: Never, ever, if it’s in any way up to you, fight a two-front war.

            There isn’t space here for a detailed analysis of the Bush Administration’s failings on these counts. Suffice it to say, they had no clear idea what they wanted to accomplish in Afghanistan. Capture or kill Osama? Certainly; topple the Taliban? Oh, sure, why not? Replace them, with what? A democracy? Okay, how?

            The truth is, almost from the start, Afghanistan was an after-thought. Several well placed accounts have Cheney and Rumsfeld, on September 12, 2001, already pushing for an invasion of Iraq. It was Colin Powell who appears to have said, “Hey, fellas, do you think we should start by attacking the guys who actually did this?”

            By invading Iraq and leaving Afghanistan to fester the US launched a war, not on two fronts, but, with no front line at all. And we came along for the ride.

            Iraq descended into civil war and a resurgent Taliban began fighting back in Afghanistan. Both countries witnessed brutal, determined insurgencies. The answer, we were told, was a “Surge”.

            Here, it’s worth mentioning another two useful military maxims: think twice before committing too heavily to someone else’s civil war; and, more important, it is impossible to defeat a popular insurgency by conventional military means.

            In the first instance, the US had little choice; they had caused the Iraqi Civil War.

            During the Nixon Administration a phrase began to be heard – behind closed doors – in connection with Vietnam: “a decent interval”. Having acknowledged there was no way they could win, the goal became to ensure “a decent interval”  between the withdrawal of American troops and the collapse of South Vietnam – “It wasn’t me; it started falling over before I came and finished falling over after I left”.

            An insurgency buys legitimacy simply by being in the field. You can’t defeat it – attempts to do so, by inflicting civilian casualties, simply strengthen it. All you can do is fight it to a position where you can deal on terms less unfavourable. This is the philosophy behind a Surge – it buys you that “decent interval” or, if you prefer, “victory with honour”.

            Should we have been in Afghanistan to begin with? It’s hard to say no. Should we have stayed after the misadventure in Iraq? That depends on whether you think we were keeping in good with the big guy who protects us from neighbourhood bullies or chaining ourselves to the deck of a sinking battleship.

Whatever the case, it’s hard to make the argument that we should still have young men fighting and dying (and killing) there now, more than a decade later, for the sake of “a decent interval”.