Page 1 of 2 US hope lies in Pakistan
By George Friedman
Bob Woodward has released another book, Obama's Wars, this one on the
debate over Afghanistan strategy in the Barack Obama administration. As all his
books do, the book has riveted Washington. It reveals that intense debate
occurred over what course to take, that the president sought alternative
strategies and that compromises were reached. But while knowing the details of
these things is interesting, what would have been shocking is if they hadn't
taken place.
It is interesting to reflect on the institutional inevitability of these
disagreements. The military is involved in a war. It is institutionally and
emotionally committed to victory in the theater of combat. It will demand all
available resources for executing the war under
way. For a soldier who has bled in that war, questioning the importance of the
war is obscene. A war must be fought relentlessly and with all available means.
But while the military's top generals and senior civilian leadership are
responsible for providing the president with sound, clearheaded advice on all
military matters including the highest levels of grand strategy, they are
ultimately responsible for the pursuit of military objectives to which the
commander-in-chief directs them. Generals must think about how to win the war
they are fighting. Presidents must think about whether the war is worth
fighting. The president is responsible for America's global posture. He must
consider what an unlimited commitment to a particular conflict might mean in
other regions of the world where forces would be unavailable.
A president must take a more dispassionate view than his generals. He must
calculate not only whether victory is possible but also the value of the
victory relative to the cost. Given the nature of the war in Afghanistan, Obama
and general David Petraeus - first the US Central Command chief and now the top
commander in Afghanistan - had to view it differently. This is unavoidable.
This is natural. And only one of the two is ultimately in charge.
The nature of guerrilla warfare
In thinking about Afghanistan, it is essential that we begin by thinking about
the nature of guerrilla warfare against an occupying force. The guerrilla lives
in the country. He isn't going anywhere else, as he has nowhere to go. By
contrast, the foreigner has a place to which he can return. This is the core
weakness of the occupier and the strength of the guerrilla. The former can
leave and in all likelihood, his nation will survive. The guerrilla can't. And
having alternatives undermines the foreigner's will to fight regardless of the
importance of the war to him.
The strategy of the guerrilla is to make the option to withdraw more
attractive. In order to do this, his strategic goal is simply to survive and
fight on whatever level he can. His patience is built into who he is and what
he is fighting for. The occupier's patience is calculated against the cost of
the occupation and its opportunity costs, thus, while troops are committed in
this country, what is happening elsewhere?
Tactically, the guerrilla survives by being elusive. He disperses in small
groups. He operates in hostile terrain. He denies the enemy intelligence on his
location and capabilities. He forms political alliances with civilians who
provide him supplies and intelligence on the occupation forces and misleads the
occupiers about his own location.
The guerrilla uses this intelligence network to decline combat on the enemy's
terms and to strike the enemy when he is least prepared. The guerrilla's goal
is not to seize and hold ground but to survive, evade and strike, imposing
casualties on the occupier. Above all, the guerrilla must never form a center
of gravity that, if struck, would lead to his defeat. He thus actively avoids
anything that could be construed as a decisive contact.
The occupation force is normally a more conventional army. Its strength is
superior firepower, resources and organization. If it knows where the guerrilla
is and can strike before the guerrilla can disperse, the occupying force will
defeat the guerrilla. The occupier's problems are that his intelligence is
normally inferior to that of the guerrillas; the guerrillas rarely mass in ways
that permit decisive combat and normally can disperse faster than the occupier
can pinpoint and deploy forces against them; and the guerrillas' superior
tactical capabilities allow them to impose a constant low rate of casualties on
the occupier.
Indeed, the massive amount of resources the occupier requires and the
inflexibility of a military institution not solely committed to the particular
theater of operations can actually work against the occupier by creating
logistical vulnerabilities susceptible to guerrilla attacks and difficulty
adapting at a rate sufficient to keep pace with the guerrilla.
The occupation force will always win engagements, but that is never the measure
of victory. If the guerrillas operate by doctrine, defeats in unplanned
engagements will not undermine their basic goal of survival. While the occupier
is not winning decisively, even while suffering only some casualties, he is
losing. While the guerrilla is not losing decisively, even if suffering
significant casualties, he is winning. Since the guerrilla is not going
anywhere, he can afford far higher casualties than the occupier, who ultimately
has the alternative of withdrawal.
The asymmetry of this warfare favors the guerrilla. This is particularly true
when the strategic value of the war to the occupier is ambiguous, where the
occupier does not possess sufficient force and patience to systematically
overwhelm the guerrillas, and where either political or military constraints
prevent operations against sanctuaries. This is a truth as relevant to David's
insurgency against the Philistines as it is to the US experience in Vietnam or
the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.
There has long been a myth about the unwillingness of Americans to absorb
casualties for very long in guerrilla wars. In reality, the United States
fought in Vietnam for at least seven years (depending on when you count the
start and stop) and has now fought in Afghanistan for nine years. The idea that
Americans can't endure the long war has no empirical basis. What the United
States has difficulty with - along with imperial and colonial powers before it
- is a war in which the ability to impose one's will on the enemy through force
of arms is lacking and when it is not clear that the failure of previous years
to win the war will be solved in the years ahead.
Far more relevant than casualties to whether Americans continue a war is the
question of the conflict's strategic importance, for which the president is
ultimately responsible. This divides into several parts. This first is whether
the United States has the ability with available force to achieve its political
goals through prosecuting the war (since all war is fought for some political
goal, from regime change to policy shift) and whether the force the United
States is willing to dedicate suffices to achieve these goals. To address this
question in Afghanistan, we have to focus on the political goal.
The evolution of the US political goal in Afghanistan
Washington's primary goal at the initiation of the conflict was to destroy or
disrupt al-Qaeda in Afghanistan to protect the US homeland from follow-on
attacks to 9/11. But if Afghanistan were completely pacified, the threat of
Islamist-fueled transnational terrorism would remain at issue because it is no
longer just an issue of a single organization - al Qaeda - but a series of
fragmented groups conducting operations in Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, North Africa,
Somalia and elsewhere.
Today, al-Qaeda is simply one manifestation of the threat of this transnational
jihadist phenomenon. It is important to stop and consider al-Qaeda - and the
transnational jihadi phenomenon in general - in terms of guerrillas, and to
think of the phenomenon as a guerrilla force in its own right operating by the
very same rules on a global basis. Thus, where the Taliban apply guerrilla
principles to Afghanistan, today's transnational jihadis applies them to the
Islamic world and beyond. The transnational jihadis are not leaving and are not
giving up. Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, they will decline combat against
larger American forces and strike vulnerable targets when they can.
There are certainly more players and more complexity to the global phenomenon
than in a localized insurgency. Many governments across North Africa, the
Middle East and South Asia have no interest in seeing these movements set up
shop and stir up unrest in their territory. And al-Qaeda's devolution has seen
frustrations as well as successes as it spreads. But the underlying principles
of guerrilla warfare remain at issue.
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