Business IdeasV V: The Af-Pak imbroglio
The American surge against the Af-Pak badlands on the turbulent North West Frontier is an unwinnable campaign for four reasons. All four are interconnected, but take them separately to begin with.
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First, historically no foreign power has been able to subdue Afghanistan or its borders. Three Anglo-Afghan Wars, first in 1839-42, the second 1878-80 and the third in 1919, led to nothing because the British were never able to control the countryside outside the three urban centres — Kabul, Kandahar and Herat. And when the Soviets blundered in 1979, it was one disaster after another until they were bundled out after a prolonged war of attrition in 1988.
Second, geographically, Af-Pak is ideal guerilla country: mountainous, criss-crossed with deep ravines where the foot soldier is far more dangerous than all the heavy metal and drones that modern technology can throw in. Add this to the porous Af-Pak border defined by the Durand Line that Afghanistan has never accepted, means that the guerrilla has a safe haven to fall back when the going becomes tough.
Third, the demographics. Af-Pak, dominated by Pashtus, is a land of fierce tribal rivalries that can’t be coalesced against a common enemy; if the enemy can be identified (loosely defined as the Taliban) in the first place. So, all the military talk of a covenant between the country and the armed forces is just so much hot air.
All three reasons in the Af-Pak imbroglio can be taken care of if there was a united western command against the enemy, Taliban/Al Qaeda, which it is not because it is loosely splintered between different regions. What’s worse, the soldiers are so confused because they find themselves fighting a war more intensive, in terms of firepower, than any they had encountered before in the Balkans or Iraq, but can’t understand what’s it all about.
Patrick Hennessey’s The Junior Officer’s Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars (Allen Lane/Penguin, special Indian price £11.99) is the story of this march of folly without mincing his words. As he says, “They had come to play with the Afghans and to teach them to use their rifles for the time when the real soldiers had blown up all the Talibaddies and could hand a peaceful, if not a prosperous, province (Helmand which is where the British troops are stationed in the south) with smiles and handshakes and flag ceremonies.” Put it bluntly, it was a one-off deal and nothing more.
The reading club that Hennessey and his friends set up was designed to pass away the hours of boredom when they had nothing to do and the whole day to do it in. But even when time hung heavy, they did not read at all because most of the officers had fallen off the habit; they had educated themselves about the modern face of war by watching DVDs. Hennessey adds tellingly that 57 per cent of the course teaching material at Sandhurst, Britain’s military academy, relied on scenes from war films for instruction of soldiers in the making, Gladiator, Saving Private Ryan, Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam war classic Full Metal Jacket were the hot favourites! No Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, other military classics or military memoirs were not on the reading lists any more! Given this background, the British soldier was a softie compared to the hardened Afghan guerrilla.
But it isn’t just the medium of instruction that had changed; it was the language to explain the nuances of war strategy that had changed too. It is a semantic nightmare if you look at some of these expressions to describe the war in Afghanistan: “agent for change”; “asymmetric means of operation”; “capacity building”; “conditionality demand reduction”; “injection of risk”; “light footprint”; “reconciliation and reintegration”; “upskilling”; “stability enablers”, you can carry on. Of course this is pure jargon (Americans have always specialised in acronyms), but it means much more: that words have replaced thought and that there was a lack of conviction in fighting this war. In fact, it is an embarrassment of sorts for a thinking soldier like Hennessey, and for so many others too. One reason given for the use of jargon is that the situation was so fluid at any given moment and objectives constantly downgraded that it was best to leave it vague and open to interpretation according to success or failure in the field. And usually, as Hennessey points out repeatedly, it was failure simply because the enemy couldn’t be easily identified.
You could say that Hennessey had seen the future and it doesn’t work because western troops are simply confined to little conclaves with little local support. Yet the American surge could well work because brute force can work for sometime. But time and patience is not with the Americans; sooner or later they will have to come to terms with the Taliban or whatever political configuration emerges in the country. What can be safely predicted is that the West will confront an enormous political vacuum, and an unsustainable government because of bitter tribal rivalries. There will be a steady descent into chaos but what will finally emerge is anybody’s guess.