29 January 2014

The trap

Pentagon’s proposal to keep 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan or nothing makes little military sense.
By N.V. Subramanian (24 January 2014)


New Delhi: Military campaigns are by their nature based on some kind of arithmetic. But the United States has carried it too far in Afghanistan. The Pentagon has advised the Barack Obama White House that the United States should retain 10,000 troops or nothing in war-torn Afghanistan after the withdrawal. The Pentagon figure has the state department’s approval. But the United States vice-president, Joe Biden, disagrees. He is not sure how the Pentagon arrived at that precise number, and questions why it cannot be more or less. For himself, he wants a clean break from Afghanistan, meaning, no residual military presence there. From the beginning to the end that dismally draws near, the United States’ occupation of Afghanistan has been an unmitigated disaster, without direction or overarching vision, and it is turning its back on the country, a defeated superpower. This judgment is not harsh but apt and realistic. 

The first rule of war is that you shouldn’t begin one unless you know how to end it. Emperors and dictators have lost everything by slighting this rule. You would think democracies would understand this principle better, but not the United States. There may be a case that outside its national borders, the United States forsakes the morals of a democracy. Be that as it may, but the fact remains that American unilateralism has reduced to serial blundering, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, one following the other, emitting bad military odour at their conclusion beside much else, cannot be expected to teach lasting lessons to the United States’ war-makers. 

The United States’ conflict against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan for aiding and abetting the 9/11 attacks was as just as it could ever get in the morally ambiguous, post-ideological, post-historic, post-Cold War world. But once evil was thought to have been evicted from the municipal limits of Kabul, so to speak, the George W.Bush administration lost interest in the Afghan war. Instead of pursuing the Taliban and Al-Qaeda terrorists to their Pakistani hideouts in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and determinedly hunting down Osama Bin Laden hidden in Pakistani garrison towns, the United States attacked Iraq. The world was misinformed that Saddam Hussein was going nuclear. He was tied to the 9/11 tragedy when it was well-known that his secular ideology clashed with Bin Laden’s fundamentalist Salafi one. 

When war is fought without a clear political aim, defeat is preordained. What larger strategic benefits accrued to the United States by bringing down Saddam? None that could be argued with any cogency. On the other hand, it made Iran stronger, which cannot have been the American aim. If Saudi Arabia and the other kingdoms thought they would grow more powerful in the Arab world with the Iraqi dictator down, that didn’t happen either. So, to all events and purposes, the United States fought a meaningless war in Iraq. Even that was sought to be prosecuted at the beginning with a precision unknown to any serious and successful military campaign, arising from a reservation bordering on fear of making ample commitments of ground troops. Shock and awe. The United States believed that the mantra would work in Iraq. Instead, a terminal surge had to be ordered to make the inevitable pullout look decent. 

If Bush blundered on the side of excessive unilateralism, Barack Obama grew paranoid to disengage the United States from foreign wars, linking it to his electoral popularity. Populism of either extreme is dangerous. If a war is going badly, you have to cut your losses and exit. But you do not give a withdrawal date years in advance, much less publicize it, and expect your military to neutralize the enemy within that time. It is unheard of, but Obama did just that. What did the Taliban have to do in counter? Keep the war going at a leisurely pace, and reserve the heavy fire for later, after the American pullout, and this is how it has played out. Naturally, no American initiative in this period has borne fruit save the drone programme, and its collateral damage is becoming unacceptable. The Afghan ground war had seamlessly to be extended to the terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan, but successive United States administrations have baulked from this decision. The Al-Qaeda was hit by Bin Laden’s assassination, but the United States’ withdrawal would provide oxygen for its revival. The Al-Qaeda is looking for a state again, and it will get it in Afghanistan, from where it will radiate terror towards Pakistan to gain its nuclear weapons. What can 10,000 troops do to prevent this denouement? 

Wars should never be prosecuted if the aggressor state cannot accept a mass of body bags. And however advanced weapons’ technologies get, wars cannot be won by them alone. The human race cannot be separated from numbers and military campaigns would be based on them till conventional wars are fought. But no commander can be dogmatic about troops’ numbers and still be sure of victory, and the United States cannot take such risks in Afghanistan, despite its considerably circumscribed military objectives. If the aim is to only defend Kabul and such American assets as are to be permanently located there, it is a losing proposition. It makes little political sense and is militarily illogical. But expect the United States to fall into this trap. 

N.V.Subramanian is Editor, www.newsinsight.net and writes on politics and strategic affairs. He has authored two novels, University of Love (Writers Workshop, Calcutta) and Courtesan of Storms (Har-Anand, Delhi). Email: envysub@gmail.com

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