Recently, after
insurgents unleashed sophisticated, synchronized
attacks across Afghanistan involving dozens of
fighters armed with suicide vests,
rocket-propelled grenades and small arms, as well
as car bombs, the Pentagon was quick to emphasize
what hadn't happened.
"I'm not minimizing
the seriousness of this, but this was in no way
akin to the Tet Offensive," said George Little,
the Pentagon's top spokesman. "We are looking at
suicide bombers, RPG [rocket propelled grenade],
mortar fire, etcetera. This was not a large-scale
offensive sweeping into Kabul or other parts of
the country."
Defense Secretary Leon
Panetta weighed in similarly. "There were," he
insisted, "no tactical gains here. These are
isolated attacks that are done for symbolic
purposes, and they have not
regained any territory."
Such sentiments were echoed by many in the media,
who emphasized that the attacks "didn't accomplish
much" or were "unsuccessful".
Even
granting the need to spin the assaults as
failures, the official American reaction to the
coordinated attacks in Kabul, the Afghan capital,
as well as at Jalalabad air base, and in Paktika
and Logar provinces, reveals a fundamental
misunderstanding of guerrilla warfare and, in
particular, of the type being waged by the Haqqani
network, a crime syndicate transformed by the
conflict into a leading insurgent group.
Here's the "lede" that should have run in
every newspaper in America: More than 40 years
after the Vietnam War's Tet Offensive, after more
than a decade of war in Afghanistan, even after
reviving counter-insurgency doctrine (only to see
it crash-and-burn in short order), the US military
still doesn't get it.
Think of this as a
remarkably unblemished record of "failure to
understand" stretching from the 1960s to 2012, and
undoubtedly beyond.
The lessons of Tet
When Vietnamese revolutionary forces
launched the 1968 Tet Offensive, attacking Saigon,
the South Vietnamese capital, as well as four
other major cities, 35 of 44 provincial capitals,
64 district seats and 50 other hamlets nationwide,
they were hoping to spark a general uprising. What
they did instead was spotlight the fact that
months of optimistic talk by American officials
about tremendous strategic gains and a foreseeable
victory had been farcical in the extreme.
Tet made the top US commander, General
William Westmoreland, infamous for having claimed
just months earlier that an end to America's war
was on the horizon. As he stood before TV cameras
on the battle-scarred grounds of the US Embassy
compound in Saigon - after a small team of
Vietcong sappers breached its walls and shot it
out with surprised US forces - pronouncing the
offensive a failure, he appeared to Americans at
home totally out of touch, if not delusional.
Since that moment, it should have been
clear that tactical success, even success in any
usual sense, is never the be-all or end-all of
insurgent warfare. Guerrillas the world over
grasped what had happened in Vietnam. They took
its lessons to heart, and even took them a step
further. They understood, for instance, that you
don't need to lose 58,000 fighters, as the
Vietnamese did at Tet, to win important
psychological victories. You need only highlight
your enemy's vulnerabilities, its helplessness to
stop you.
The Haqqanis certainly got it,
and so just over a week ago sacrificed 57,961
fewer fighters to make a similar point. Striking a
psychological blow while losing only 39
guerrillas, they are distinctly living in the 21st
century in global war-making terms. On the other
hand, whether its top civilian and military
commanders realize it or not, the Pentagon is
still stuck in Saigon, 1968.
Case in
point: Panetta belittled the Haqqani fighters for
not taking "territory". It's a claim that, in its
cluelessness, is positively Westmorelandish.
What territory, after all, could a
relatively weak and lightly armed force like the
Haqqani militants have been out to "regain" by
attacking Kabul's heavily defended diplomatic
quarter? The German Embassy? And then what would
they have done? A la US counter-insurgency
doctrine, launch an oil-spot strategy, spreading
out slowly from there to secure the American
Embassy, the British Embassy, and the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) headquarters?
While Panetta at least granted that the attacks
were geared toward symbolic effect, he remained
strangely focused on their "tactical"
significance.
As was the case in Vietnam,
the US military in Afghanistan regularly attempts
to prove it's winning via metrics like the number
of enemies captured and body counts from "night
raids". No less frequently, its spokespeople
create rules and measures for its enemies in an
effort to prove they're not succeeding.
This Westmoreland-ian mindset was evident
last week in those statements that the Haqqanis
didn't accomplish much of anything because they
didn't take territory, sweep into Kabul en masse,
or carry out a sufficiently "large-scale
offensive" - as if the Pentagon were the war's
ringside judge (as well as one of the fighters)
and the conflict could be won on points like a
boxing match.
In the Vietnam years,
Westmoreland and other top US officials were
forever seeking an elusive "crossover point" - the
moment when their Vietnamese foes would be losing
more fighters than they could replace and so (they
were convinced) would have to capitulate. That
crossover point was the Pentagon's El Dorado and
to achieve it, the US military fought a war of
attrition, just as in recent years the Pentagon
has been trying to capture and kill its way to
victory in Afghanistan through night raids and
conventional offensives.
More than a
decade after its own forces swept into Kabul,
however, what began as a rag-tag, remnant
insurgency has grown stronger and continues to vex
the most heavily armed, most technologically
advanced, best-funded military on the planet. All
of America's "tactical gains" and captured
territory, especially in the Taliban heartland of
Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, however,
haven't led to anything close to victory, and one
after another its highly publicized
light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel offensives, like
the much-hyped 2010 Marjah campaign, have faded
away and been forgotten.
Afghan and
American 'green zones' As the Haqqanis
meant to underscore with their coordinated
attacks, America's trillion-dollar military and
the hundreds of thousands of allied local security
forces are still incapable of fully securing a
small "green zone" in the heart of the Afghan
capital, no less the rest of the country.
The conflict in Afghanistan began with its
American commander declaring, "We don't do body
counts," but a quick glance at recent US military
press releases touting supposed "high-value kills"
or large numbers of dead insurgents indicates
otherwise.
As in Vietnam, the US is once
again waging a war of attrition, even as America's
Afghan enemies employ their own very different
attrition strategy. Instead of slugging it out
toe-to-toe in large suicidal offensives, they've
planned a savvy, conservative campaign meant to
save fighters and resources while sending an
unmistakable message to the Afghan population, and
simultaneously exposing the futility of the
conflict to the American public.
The
attrition of US support for the war is
unmistakable. As late as 2009, according to a poll
by ABC News and the Washington Post, 56% of
Americans believed the Afghan war was still worth
fighting. Just days before the Haqqanis'
coordinated attacks, that number had sunk to 35%.
Over the same span, the number of Americans
convinced that the war is not worth fighting
jumped from 41% to 60%.
Whatever the
Pentagon's spin, the latest Haqqani offensive is
likely to contribute to these trends, and Pentagon
press releases about enemy dead are powerless to
reverse them.
In the era of an
all-voluntary military, of the "warrior
corporation" and its war zone mercenaries,
breaching the "green zone" of American public
opinion matters less than in the Vietnam era, but
it still makes a difference. The Haqqanis and
their Taliban allies may be taking no territory,
but in this guerrilla war it turns out that the
territory that really matters, on all sides of the
battle lines, is the territory inside people's
heads - and there the Pentagon is losing.
On April 12, the same day that the ABC
News/Washington Post poll was released, US Air
Force Lieutenant Colonel James Routt flew his last
combat mission in Afghanistan. It was a noteworthy
flight. Routt began his career flying B-52 bombers
at the end of the Vietnam War, and was even
involved in support efforts for Operation
Linebacker II, president Richard Nixon's infamous
"Christmas bombing" of North Vietnam.
Just
a few years after those raids, Nixon was a
disgraced ex-president and America's Vietnamese
enemies had won the war. Decades later, the US
stands on the brink of another, more devastating
defeat at the hands of far fewer foes, a minority
insurgency with weaker allies (and no great power
backers). It's an enemy that has fought far fewer
battles and lost far fewer fighters, despite
facing off against a far more sophisticated
American war machine.
While Routt is
hanging up his bomber jacket and walking away from
another American defeat in Asia, the Pentagon
continues its efforts to conjure up, if not
victory then something other than failure, out of
a melange of money, dead bodies and rosy press
releases. The Haqqanis and their allies, on the
other hand, having evidently learned the lessons
of the Vietnam War, will undoubtedly continue
their carefully controlled war of attrition, while
Washington pursues the losing variant it's been
clinging to for years.
The Pentagon might
have swapped the Vietnam Syndrome for an Afghan
one, but its playbook remains mired in the Vietnam
era. It seems intent on proving that channeling
Westmoreland is the least effective way imaginable
to win a war on the Eurasian mainland.
Nick Turse is the associate
editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning
journalist, his work has appeared in the Los
Angeles Times, the Nation and regularly at
TomDispatch. This article is the latest article in
his new series on the changing face of American
empire, which is being underwritten by Lannan
Foundation. You can follow him on Twitter
@NickTurse, on Tumblr,
and on Facebook.
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