WHY WE FAIL

It's the American way of war.

Well. Every once in awhile, I awake to find the world has made a big turn while I slept. Today is one of those days. I finish the morning ablutions, flick on the computer for the news feed - which should be nothing, it’s Sunday, right? - and all the headlines are:

TALIBAN ENTER KABUL

What was thought in the evening news last night to be an event that was weeks away turned into one only hours away while we slept. As we did, the army and government of Afghanistan melted away. The Taliban announced a “peaceful” entry into Kabul, and that they were negotiating a surrender by the government.

The New York Times quotes General Douglas Lute, who ran the Afghanistan desk under Bush and Obama: “Under Trump, we were one tweet away from complete, precipitous withdrawal. Under Biden, it was clear to everyone who knew him, who saw him pressing for a vastly reduced force more than a decade ago, that he was determined to end U.S. military involvement. But the Pentagon believed its own narrative, that we would stay forever.”

Domestic politics, of course, will be another matter entirely. We know Republicans are past masters at blaming Democrats when they’re the ones cleaning up after Republican mistakes. As George C. Scott said in the opening of “Patton,” Americans like winners and hate losers. It’s hard to get much if any credit for rightly revealing that much of the time and lives and treasure spent over twenty years was wasted.

It’s not like they didn’t know.

In 2008, Ruslan Aushev, a highly decorated combat veteran of the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan who served two tours, first as an infantry battalion commander and later in charge of a full Soviet regiment over nearly five years, gave an interview to the Toronto Globe and Mail:

"Canadians and Americans are learning the hard way. You have been there seven years and you have no prospect of early victory. We knew by 1985 that we could not win," he recalls. It then took Moscow four more years to extricate hundreds of thousands of troops from Afghanistan, while claiming victory on the way out. Afghanistan was plunged into civil war."We could take any village, any town and drive the mujahedeen out. But when we handed ground over to the Afghan army or police they would lose it in a week.”

"The Taliban may not be able to win militarily but they can't be defeated and sooner or later the Western alliance will be forced with pullout," he warned. Support for the insurgents will grow the longer the foreign armies remain in Afghanistan, he said. Although the Soviets deployed more than 100,000 soldiers across Afghanistan and trained an Afghan army three times the size of Kabul's current security forces, it was never enough, Mr. Aushev said. "There will have to be an accord with the Taliban, because at least 50 per cent of the Afghan population supports them. It's impossible to conquer the Afghans. Alexander the Great couldn't do it, the British couldn't do it, we couldn't do it and the Americans won't do it. No one can.”

One would think that, of all the militaries in the world, the U.S. military would understand how an anti-colonial war of national liberation happens, since the United States was the first country in the world to be created by an anti-colonial war of national liberation, a war fought and won against the strongest empire in the world at the time. There are many U.S. officers, in all three services, with advanced degrees in history. It’s not like the facts aren’t there to be examined.

In fact, every war of national liberation fought since has followed the blueprint of the first one.

An advanced minority of a colonial nation’s population begins to think of themselves as separate from the imperial power that controls their destiny. After several years of increasing partisanship over issues that come to be seen as divisive between the two, after numerous attempts by the controlling power to exercise its authority and control the increasingly-restive population, an armed struggle breaks out. The imperial power deploys overwhelming military forces, far better -trained and better-equipped than the military force put together by the rebels.

The imperial power arms the domestic opponents of the rebels, thereby setting in motion a civil war within the colonized nation.

The rebels lose nearly every military engagement, but are never decisively defeated. Eventually they demonstrate staying power - sometimes with a surprising victory or two - but often just by continuing to exist, and they attract support from a third party power that is an opponent of the colonial power, and support is provided to the rebels as a way of weakening the the third party’s opponent.

The domestic opponents of the rebels are unable to defeat the rebels, and domestic political and military contradictions deepen as partisanship increases.

At the same time, domestic politics in the imperial power becomes divided between those who wish to maintain the status quo and those who see that the fight is draining their power and weakening them in other areas. Dissent grows. The actions of the imperial power become limited by growing public opposition to a war that appears endless, in which there seems no possibility of victory.

Eventually, with the support of the third party opponent, the rebels are able to stand against the imperial power militarily, convincing the imperial leadership of the futility of continued conflict, and a political settlement is made with the imperial power granting independence.

The domestic opponents of the rebels suffer losses personal, economic and political; many leave as refugees.

The only way the imperial power can avoid this outcome is to use overwhelming military force, without regard for casualties inflicted on the colonized population, to destroy popular support for the rebels. In U.S. history, the only time this strategy worked was in the Philippine Insurrection (1899-1905), which generated the first major anti-war dissent in the U.S., and “victory” was only obtained by making a public promise of a grant of independence at a date in the future, which gained enough support among Filipinos after massacres by such “military heroes” as General Jacob Devers, whose forces killed 40,000 Filipinos on the island of Palawan, which he proudly proclaimed to have turned into a “howling wilderness.” Indeed, that long, cruel war — treated quickly and superficially in our history books, but well-known in the Philippines to this day — gave rise to an Anti-Imperialist League, in which William James and Mark Twain were leading figures. House Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed, who I wrote about yesterday, found himself in such opposition to both his president and party that he was forced from his position as Speaker.

However it happens, in the end, the imperial power departs. The United States, Great Britain and France have all seen this play out.

The British at least found a partial answer following the American War of Independence when they granted independent “dominion” status to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with the result those countries remained loyal to their colonial motherland. However, they did not extend this liberalized view of empire to the non-white nations coerced into the Empire, with the result they fought several other wars of liberation - all of which they lost.

Why is it that these wars all come to this eventual conclusion?

One American veteran of Vietnam put it succinctly: “We were fighting to survive our tour, and they were fighting for their country.”

This morning, amidst the reports of the end of the U.S. Afghan war, NBC News Pentagon Correspondent Courtney Kube gave the best analysis of the actual military situation on the ground I have heard in 20 years of war reporting about Afghanistan.

She pointed out that, no matter how much training and equipment the United States could provide, we could not give the Afghans the will to fight, the willingness to fight to the death against the Taliban. “And throughout the war, the Taliban fighters have been willing to lay down their lives for their cause,” she stated, nailing the essential truth. She went on to point out that while there were Afghan special forces that had been fighting very competently for several years, “The average soldiers, they’re out in the rural areas, and they get told that the people who have been supporting them are leaving in a few months. That means no more medevac, no more air support, no more logisitics - the simple things like providing food and fuel and ammunition regularly. No more air control to tell the air force where to provide support. You have to understand the corruption there in the government, in the military, they’re unable to provide just those absolute basics.. That loss of support led to a loss of morale. And the result was they stopped fighting because they couldn’t see a way they could win.”

Another veteran of the U.S. war pointed out “The United States never even tried to understand the history or the culture of the people there, so of course they could never organize the kind of resistance to the Taliban that would guarantee victory.”

This is the thing Americans have done ever since the settlers at Jamestown in 1605 involved themselves in a local war between Native American tribes, choosing the wrong side and in the end making things worse. We’ve managed to do that in every war we’ve fought against non-white people, whether during our imperial expansion across the North American continent, in the Philippines, Central America, the Carribean, Korea, Vietnam or Afghanistan.

In fact, failing to understand the situation, paying no attention to the history of the people involved, choosing the wrong side and making everything worse is the paradigm of the American way of war.

And that is why we fail.

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