Complications are part of the US's own doing. Good read.

Gargoyle

The war in Afghanistan has abundant complications: The terrain is more difficult than the desert of the Persian Gulf war, getting Pakistan, a reluctant but tactically important ally, to cooperate in overthrowing the Taliban regime it created will require subtlety and cunning, etc. Yet for all these complications, what the U.S. war effort most needs is the clarity of simple-mindedness, the understanding that nothing much matters next to the goal of achieving a decisive victory in Afghanistan, which in turn requires annihilating our enemies. Not disrupting their command-and-control, not degrading their infrastructure, not diminishing their morale — although these may be useful antecedents — but killing them.

It is a natural temptation to flinch from the awful necessity of killing, to think that conflicts and disputes can be worked out or, failing that, settled by the application of a nicely calibrated amount of violence. But a determined and fanatical enemy is immune to any persuasion short of destruction, and on that all else hinges. The U.S. has sought to prompt revolt in the Pashtun south of Afghanistan; the revolt won't come until the Taliban is destroyed. Pakistan complains that the bombing campaign is dragging on too long; it won't, if the Taliban is destroyed with dispatch. The State Department worries about forging the post-Taliban future; its leverage to do so will increase only when America destroys the Taliban with massive force.

At this stage, in other words, little ails the campaign in Afghanistan that can't be solved, or at least alleviated, by the ferocious application of American power. The administration pleads for patience, and we should indeed be patient about achieving our goals. But we should be impatient for the administration to take the actions necessary to achieve those goals. So far it hasn't. The administration has adopted a Clintonian approach to warfare, the usual cruise-missile strikes and air raids from 15,000 feet, with a dollop of special-operations raids. The war has been characterized by the incrementalism that has been the bane of American warmaking since Vietnam.

The Powell Doctrine has gone out of style in recent months, but if it sometimes seemed merely an excuse for never fighting wars, its emphasis on overwhelming force was correct. In the current circumstances, that means not only a stepped-up air campaign, but a large-scale effort to supply the Northern Alliance, and the use of American troops, at the very least to secure strategically important ground and possibly to prosecute the core of the campaign itself. It is unclear whether the assassination of Abdul Haq by the Taliban amounts to the catastrophic setback in the south that some have portrayed it as being. But its symbolism was disturbing: The Taliban killed an opponent, perhaps with their bare hands, while we sent an unmanned drone aircraft — too late — to assist him.

Winston Churchill wrote after Pearl Harbor that he knew that America's critics would be wrong. We wouldn't just "be a vague blur on the horizon to friend or foe." Osama bin Laden needs to know it too.

Magwitch

I agree with most of what you say but do think the air campaign thus far has been badly co-ordinated. Todays realese of footage of B-52 bombers striking Taliban frontline positions is a welcome change of tactic. All but the most extreme Zeolots should fade away in the face of such crushing fire power. The use of this conventional "terror" weapon is exactly what is needed. Hopefully it will mean a scaling back of air raids on targets close to civilain targets.

Once ground is made in the face of combined arms assaults the Taliban will be forced into he uncomfortable situation of having to redesignate, man, equip and supply new front lines. During these times they will be highly vunerable to the new tactic (which has yet to work effectivly, but its early days yet). I hope the results are better then what has gone thus far, but it does (maybe) point to a more pragmatic approach to the campaign than what has been done thus far by the Allies. Fingers crossed.

Von

How not to win a war

America is trapped in a B-52 mindset

Leader
Friday November 2, 2001

The Guardian

Shiminay

Good article in the Guardian that Von.

The longer the Americans keep this ever increasing tour-de-fource up and just drop bomb after bomb, it will make reconciliation more difficult and will cost them support on the international scene.

Gargoyle raises a good point about how they can't be afraid to kill and they should unleash hell, but mis-guided killing of innocents and civilians is wrong. Plain and simple.

The problem lies with America & co not being able to identify the key targets and effectivly ending this war by cutting the Taliban's legs from under them - but then that's the trick, isn't it?

Von

Originally posted by Kharn
The longer the Americans keep this ever increasing tour-de-fource up and just drop bomb after bomb, it will make reconciliation more difficult and will cost them support on the international scene.

Gargoyle raises a good point about how they can't be afraid to kill and they should unleash hell, but mis-guided killing of innocents and civilians is wrong. Plain and simple.

This is an excerpt from Confronting Empire by Eqbal Ahmad a couple of years ago.

"David Anderson is a senior lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He comments that this battle [imperialism v islam] will be a "long, perhaps never-ending, attritional war. Pandora's box has been opened, and it won't be closed again," discussing this issue of retaliation, counter-retaliation, an eye-for-an eye. I don't see anything as historically permanent. Nothing in history has been permanent. Frankly, I don't think American power is permanent. It itself is very temporary, and therefore its excesses are impermanent and reactions to those excesses have to be, by definition, impermanent. If Anderson means the next five years, then he's right. If he means the next fifty, he may not be right. America is a troubled country, for too many reasons. One is that its economic capabilities do not harmonize with its military capabilities. The second is that its ruling class's will to dominate is not quite shared by its people's will to dominate.

If the American people had a will to dominate the world, they would have Iynched Bill Clinton at the first sign of his hanky-panky in the White House. I'll tell you why. Britain had a will to dominate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Britain punished for very small crimes its most famous empire builders. Robert Clive was impeached and Warren Hastings was impeached, because an imperial society instinctively knows that it will not command respect on a global scale unless it shows uprightness at home. Unless it shows uprightness at home, it cannot commit excesses abroad. That's why imperial countries very often tended to be puritanical societies. The people of America don't want Clinton to resign because they think he's been a good president. They can separate his being commander-in-chief from his personal behavior. This is not a people with a will to rule. This is a people with a will to violence, yes, but not a will to dominate.

You can take other examples. A will to dominate means a willingness to sacrifice, to pay the price of it. The American public does not want American boys dying. So, in Somalia, when American Marines were attacked, the United States pulled out and sent in Pakistanis to do their dirty work and clean up the mess. They don't want to send troops abroad. They don't want to die in foreign lands. That is, they don't want to pay the price of power abroad, which they were willing to do during much of the Cold War. This changes after Vietnam. In that sense, George Bush notwithstanding, the "Vietnam syndrome" is very much alive."

The problem lies with America & co not being able to identify the key targets and effectivly ending this war by cutting the Taliban's legs from under them - but then that's the trick, isn't it?

The problem lies with america & co not being honest about what their objectives are. Elsewhere in that book he talks about how imperial powers need a ghost and a mission. The British carried the White Man's Burden. The French carried La Mission Civilisatrice, the civilizing mission. The Americans had Manifest Destiny and then the mission of standing watch on the walls of world freedom, in JFK's phrase. Each of them had the black, the yellow, and finally the red peril to fight against. There was a ghost and there was a mission. People bought it. After the Cold War, Western power was deprived both of the mission and the ghost. So the mission has appeared as human rights. We're told the Taliban must be defeated because it's a brutal regime, especially towards women. Yet saudi arabia is the most fundamentalist islamic state that ever existed. Its human rights record and treatment of women is appalling but it's one of the good guys. So all this "taliban are evil" stuff, while true, is not the real reason the US and co want them ousted. People are slowly realising this.

All day yesterday the news focused on the threat of attacks on nuclear plants including the claim that the plane that crashed in pennsylvania was headed for 3 Mile Island or somewhere. That's a new one. There was some dodgy documentary on the BBC (i think) featuring a "reconstruction" of an arab chap trying to buy uranium and Sellafield is apparently a prime target because reprocessing plants have 100 times more radioactive material. It seemed more like a response to growing public scepticism about the war as illustrated by John Pilger's Daily Mirror article and an attempt to scare everyone back onside with the US policy of bombing more than anything else.