Weirdly, for a war that involved an array of US, allied and NATO HQ elements until the end of 2014, there seems to be no allied input into the Trump administration's discussions and, judging from press reporting, very little media interest, at all, whether in the US or overseas.
I have no special insight as to what the extra 4,000 troops is meant to achieve in Afghanistan (population c30m). First Bush, then Obama, now Trump, seem to want to stave off the inevitable collapse of Afghanistan into its natural state of civil war amid competing Pashtu and non-Pashtu elements, who are themselves proxies for Pakistan, India, Iran, Russia and, going forward, China.
The Afghan war, so far as the West is concerned, now enters its 16th year, and the view from national capitals is that it is best not seen, and even better unheard. But the war continues, "over there", with young troops, even those now in training and support roles, still exposed to death and wounding in what seems an interminable campaign. Moreover, Western nations have suffered enormous casualties, included many who were traumatically wounded and will need constant medical and specialist support for the rest of their lives.
Even Trump's worst and most "broken" critic would acknowledge that the Afghan War is, at best, a stalemate, a slog, a meandering if deadly struggle, with no clear end in sight. Others might say, "quagmire". And some others might say, more accurately, a searing indictment of Western military command and its inability to apply the Western way of war.
Indeed, it is hard to look back at the last 16 years of the Afghan War and not see every, or almost every, principle of war and Western military theory, violated. This infamous image of the ISAF/NATO operational concept is a symptom of a much bigger problem:
Somehow, the Western military effort would, apparently, succeed in Afghanistan when the Soviets, who at their peak strength had deployed 120,000 combat troops, with no restrictions on rules of engagement, and who also employed a massive civic aid program, failed to prevail there.
The Afghan War's conduct would have ashamed any great captain of the past or even the recent present. One did not have to be Sun Tzu to look at Afghanistan and conclude, also, that "there is no good protracted war for a conventional army". The cancer spread among the military caste by politicians that reward and promote the, frankly, pliant Generals, who were happy to uncomplainingly manage failure at a horrendous cost in allied lives and treasure, will threaten the security of the Western body politic for decades.
Yet the NATO forces in Afghanistan were not just at war. They have also spent well over a decade and enormous resources trying to train local Afghanis in democratic state building, which included training their military and security forces. The effort by the West to effect a wholesale reform of Afghan ways and religious sympathies - not just deter them from hosting Sunni jihadis such as Al Qaeda - has been Herculean in its ambitions and unrealistic in the extreme. While there may be a very politically incorrect if economically rewarding case for military colonialism, there is no logic or economic reward in an endless occupation of foreign lands, especially at the enormous cost of precious lives, lost or forever damaged by war.
The great British military historian Corelli Barnett wrote that War is the auditor of a nation’s resources, talents and failings. In the case of Afghanistan, war as auditor has exposed the West's military liabilities as well as the political insolvency of many nations' capacity to wage and sustain war to a successful conclusion. World War One was a global war that lasted barely four years. World War Two lasted just under six years. Korea went for three years and Vietnam’s major commitments went for seven years. The NATO forces have been deployed in Afghanistan for almost 16 years, with no end in sight.
It is time to learn some lessons from the endless Afghan War even if will not end for many years yet.
Lesson 1: Strategic clarity matters
Western governments should avoid strategic mushiness as to the purpose of military force, and when and why it is deployed in harm's way.
Armed forces should only be deployed if necessitated by a threat to the nation's or an allies' territorial security and/or a threat to well-defined and well-enunciated national security interests.
That is, only deploy military force to serve actual security interests, not vague ambitions to prevent societal unpleasantness, promote democracy or export the 'rule of law', the last of which means something entirely different in an Islamic culture.
The Afghan War suffered from objective confusion, whereby no one in 2017 can explain what real interests drove the NATO military commitment from 2002 on, after Operation Anaconda's conclusion. As former US Defence Secretary Robert Gates recently said, the proponent of any future large-scale deployment of land forces to Asia or the Middle East or Africa should “have his head examined” .
Lesson 2: the Mission matters
Second, the mission matters, or as the maxim goes, “in war, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing”. And when the mission as stated is over, then that should be "it". Unfortunately, the experience of both Iraq and Afghanistan is that missions do not end, anymore.
The war phase gives way, inevitably, to an occupation phase that post-cold war Western militaries find very difficult to sustain and their societies find even more difficult to stomach. In words attributed to Genghiz Khan, "occupations turn soldiers into jailers".
While it is true, that the “main thing” of the Iraq war did shift from destroying Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to defending the new Iraqi state, Iraq was and remains a country that actually matters, given its position, its massive oil reserves, its and its susceptibility to domination by neighbouring Iran, the natural hegemon of a region that spans from Kabul to Kobane. Iran's posture and its willingness to both support Sunni jihadis as well as use Greater Khorasan to provide strategic depth, is probably one of the most important and yet underreported stories of our time.
Nonetheless, nothing similar can be said about Afghanistan itself, or about much of the war that has raged there since late 2001. The reality is that Afghanistan was only ever important because it hosted bases for Al Qaeda that had to be destroyed, not because the Taliban ran a brutal regime. The original 2001-2002 “main thing” was the destruction of Al Qaeda and all of its support networks, not the civilising of Pashtu culture. The original mission involved Special Forces, backed by airpower and, significantly, was supported by those non-Pashtu Afghans who were most interested in removing the Taliban and their foreign Al Qaeda allies. By the end of 2002, with Al Qaeda’s personnel and camps in Afghanistan bombed, raided, killed and destroyed to the maximum extent possible by military means, and Al Qaeda spreading to the four corners, the US-led coalition should have declared victory and gone home, having negotiated a realistic future that accommodated competing Russian, Iranian, Indian and, yes, Pakistani, interests. Afghanistan, in the absence of the decade-plus NATO mission, would then have reverted to its traditional role as a problem and battleground for these competing Russian, Iranian, Indian and Pakistani interests, all of which can occur without any need for Western troops to be exposed to the deadly consequences of these rivalries.
For reasons that defy any strategic logic, the Western coalition - first under Bush, then Obama - determined that Afghanistan should become some sort of civilised place, as if somehow a validation of the West's mission there, rather than leaving an historically brutal Afghan society to its warring tribes and factions. Quite inexplicably, conservatives, as well as liberals, in the last decade-plus have supported nation-building missions in the Islamic world, and mistakenly embraced foreign movements professing ‘freedom’ and which are led by, “those who wax eloquent about democracy and moderation, hold advanced degrees and speak English” , and are entirely unrepresentative of the people they purport to speak for. Trump, for what it is worth, has specifically disavowed nation-building in favour of "killing terrorists" but it is hard to make this distinction in form if, in substance, there is still a substantial Western presence, whose objective is to make Afghanistan something different from it has been, historically.
The confusion over the Afghan War's real mission meant, over time, that the mission became one directed against its most distasteful but dominant Sunni fundamentalism, which manifests itself in various forms of Taliban and other militias and movements. To the degree that Afghani Islam and the Taliban’s return to power is an internal matter, then Afghanistan’s future, however lamentable it may be to us in the West, is a matter for the Afghans to fight for and cannot alone justify a Western presence. (Albeit the strategic value of holding onto the Bagram airfield complex, north of Kabul, and perhaps the Kandahar airbase, would serve a s a significant justification for a residual NATO military presence in the vicinity of the Iranian and Chinese frontiers, not to mention the Pakistan that supports the Taliban and gave sanctuary to Usama bin Laden for years. The realpolitik case for Bagram as NATO's ongoing imperial stronghold to help guard a pacified Afghanistan, with obvious capabilities for future missions related to China, Russia, and Iran, etal, strangely, has never been made by any senior US or NATO military or civil leader.).
In future, Western forces should not seek to protect or secure a country that its own people have shown little or no interest in protecting or securing. Much worse, these needless, quasi-colonial occupations (without securing the extractive benefits of empire) have cost us dearly in blood and treasure. Never again!
Lesson 3: Public support matters
Third, public support matters. Strategic confusion and mission creep corrode Western population's trust in their Governments and the public support on which the armed forces rely, not just in current conflicts but for longer term recruitment and rearmament programs.
The peoples of Western nations should understand, in clear and unmistakable language, what the military mission is and how it relates, in clear terms, to the national interest.
They should also know what the end-state will be and how, roughly, it will be achieved.
Additionally, public support requires a level of transparency and regular dissemination of information, in which the Government treats democratic polities seriously and takes the people, whose sons and daughters are in harm's way, into their confidence. Citizens are not stupid and understand, indeed they expect, that their armed forces will target and destroy the enemies of the nation. For conservatives, the reality is that while security interests in 2017 mean that one cannot indulge in isolationism, the nature of the West's strategic position means we can also never indulge in do-gooderism.
Western governments should expect that their people will earnestly support armed forces and just military actions that require the targeting, destruction, killing and capturing of those who may threaten. However, no one has yet explained why the West's young troops and scarce national wealth should be expended for objectives far remote from national security, such as ensuring the success of infant and fragile democracies or propping up corrupt foreign regimes.
Lesson 4: Making war matters
Fourth and lastly, and most importantly, even despite the last 16 years’ experience, Western governments suffer from a regrettable and widespread naivete about war, which needs to be expressly anathematised. If nothing else, the making of modern war is a subject on which reality must be allowed to intrude and, in a sense, imposed.
Western political leaders and media can be relied on to decry the use of excessive force, ensure restrictive rules of engagement, and urge the winning of hearts and minds, not create a massive “body count”. They cannot be relied on to discuss war in any way that is honest, or which grapples with the true nature of conflict. This elite naivety refuses to face the central reality of war in the Western tradition: that successful war requires the swift application of massive resources in the guise of overwhelming force. If the war cannot be won by these means, it is pointless trying to fight it. The pliant Western Generals, who seemed to have told governments what they want to hear, are not innocents here, either.
It is no accident that the last wars unmistakably won by Western democracies were the Second World War and the Gulf War of 1991, where national leaders accepted that victory required defined objectives and the use of overwhelming force and speed to achieve them. These were also both inter-state wars, where nation-states battled nation-states, rather than some muddled through conflict occurring in broken and hopelessly tribalised states, such as Afghanistan and Iraq. The Second World War also featured a senior Allied military caste that was unafraid of speaking truth to power and demanding political support for decisive military victories. The Second World War also featured a political leadership that would listen to and work with its Admirals and Generals, even at times if fraught, and would listen to and rely on their professional military advice.
In Afghanistan, no General or NATO official could ever explain how a protracted intervention by an international Coalition can succeed in Afghanistan when local fighters and their Pashtu fathers, brothers and uncles have been fighting a jihad of one form or another since (at least) Russia’s invasion in 1979. No General or NATO official could, either, explain how 21st century Westerners, lacking any sort of relevant language and cultural knowledge, are temperamentally suited to occupying other countries and attempting to force our way of life on the locals. The fate of the US General Eric Shinseki, whose career ended under the Bush Administration, for saying, "beware the 12-division strategy for a 10-division Army". Shinseki's fate serves as a warning to those in senior command whose advice was all too real.
Future military deployments should only be made in a way that accords with our own strengths and own distinctive way of war, which applies overwhelming force, speed, firepower and decisive manoeuvre to achieve an identifiable result, as opposed to the continual drain of counter-insurgency warfare, seeking hopelessly to win the hearts-and-minds of people whose attitudes to Westerners vary from merely hating us to fighting a jihad against us.
The Strategic Costs of Dumb Wars
As a wise man once said, predictions are hard, especially about the future. No sensible person would predict whether there will still be an Afghan War raging on 11 September 2021, but, on the evidence of the drift and intellectual stagnation of the past 16 years, it is more than likely the war will still continue. The Roman imperial and British Raj aesthetic of sons relieving fathers on the front lines of empire looms large in any discussion of where this endless mission goes on – without end. In an era of volunteer militaries, it is unlikely that anyone will care beyond those immediately tasked with fighting wars and their anxious families.
One critical aspect of these wars adverse effects on Western security, missed by most analysts, and which has been raised by recent naval disasters and air safety issues, is that the enormous diversion of scarce defence monies into protracted land wars.
Across the Western world, fleets have contracted and squadron numbers have declined, as the urgent need to fund the Iraq, Afghanistan and other campaigns took priority, a priority that has persisted for almost 20 years.
Given the enormous contribution of Allied seapower to ensuring the security and safety of the sea as a global commons, which delivers commodities and prosperity to the world, it cannot be healthy for Allied fleets to have shrunk, especially as Chinese and Russian navies grow and start to operate in what were formerly 'allied lakes', particularly the greater South China Sea and the Persian Gulf, as access to regional ports grows. The West has not, since the 1970s, had a period when Allied naval supremacy was ever challenged and, even then, severe doubts plagued the Soviet ability to project and sustain sea power. However, the advent of Chinese seapower, and the leverage this will provide Beijing, should concern all observers.
Similarly, the NATO appetite to maintain forces to maintain a viable deterrence of Russian ambitions has waned to a dangerous degree. While European pusillanimity was a problem before Sept 11, the degradation of European defences has only grown more concerning in the last few years. Even in the US, the enormous cost and priority imposed by Iraq and Afghanistan has seen the US Army focused more on low intensity warfare, at the cost of the heavy army that would be needed to meet any challenge by the Russians to central Europe.
Truly, it seems that the only strategic effects of these dumb wars has been not to cause any decline in jihadist attacks, but to waste precious lives and increase Western indebtedness, and to provide the Chinese and Russians with opportunities to fortify their positions and expand their influence. It is difficult to understand how it was that Admirals and Air Marshals looked on as precious defence funds were absorbed by fruitless wars, as their own sea and airpower contracted and atrophied, dangerously. The diminished navies and air forces of the post-Vietnam era stand as a warning of what happens when land wars roll on, and on, with no sense of urgency and no identifiable objectives.
It is likely that Western strategic drift will get worse, before it gets better. In another age, composed of more serious people, the Western policymaker would be presumed familiar with history, maps, geopolitics and the iron demands of reality. She or he may not be Churchill, de Gaulle, Adenauer or FDR, but those that came after at least knew they should aspire to be like them, they should read and educate themselves, and they should be cautious of seeing politics as an end in itself, and not merely a means to conducting statecraft.
Unfortunately, in 2017, we have the political classes that we do and, in every Western jurisdiction from the Baltic States to the Atlantic, from Ottawa to Canberra, there is no relief in sight from the tyranny of the combined machinations of the political hack, the former lobbyist, the PR whiz, the "human rights lawyer", and those, frankly, who would be unemployable in government in any other age.
The Proconsuls, Legates, Tribunes & Centurions Must Speak
This is where the West's professional military cohorts need to, urgently, assert themselves more and pre-emptively capitulate less.
It is absurd that so few military officers speak loudly and clearly, even when in comfortable retirement, about proposed and continuing wars which serve no or at best dubious strategic interests. The bonds of camaraderie and duty of loyalty between leadership and led have evaporated in a political climate dominated by spin, lies, sound bites and the need to be seen to be 'doing something', however vain and ineffectual.
Perhaps this is the long hangover in Western Generalship since the notorious relief of General Douglas MacArthur by President Truman in April 1951? MacArthur had presented Truman with an honest military appreciation of the Korean War – and, after some impolitic remarks, MacArthur was fired. MacArthur did, nonetheless, continue to counsel and advise, including warning President Kennedy to not escalate the Vietnam War but, regardless, the cost to be paid for being the stentorian patrician in the MacArthur mold was more than clear to all who came after him. One suspects that, given the rise of China and the threat from North Korea, that a harsher and more critical view of Truman's relief of MacArthur will be taken in future, than has been taken in the past. MacArthur's military and historical grasp was vast, and he could see, as the provincial Truman could not, how precarious both Asian and Western security would be should the communist Chinese state be allowed to aggress and establish proxy regimes on their periphery. Moreover, good leaders know how to handle their difficult geniuses. President Roosevelt managed, in addition to the Second World War, not just MacArthur, but Admiral Ernest King, General George Patton, General Curtis LeMay, and a host of other war-winning military leaders who would be the nightmare of contemporary human resources' departments. Winston Churchill had not just Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery but the brilliant if tempestuous General Charles de Gaulle as well. Churchill famously said of de Gaulle, "He thinks he's Joan of Arc, but I can't get my bloody bishops to burn him". Good leaders keep their wild horses in harness.
Nonetheless, Generals since MacArthur, throughout the Western world, learned their lesson, that command honesty to the political authority would be rewarded with dismissal, not any sort of strategic dialogue of the kind that Churchill and Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, or FDR and General George Marshall, had enjoyed. The successful post-war commanders that survived political meddling, such as Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer and General Alexander Haig, were by the ends of their career seen by political insiders as oddities, notwithstanding their long-demonstrated military competence.
Sadly, the model for the modern General is David Petraeus. Despite Petraeus having championed Counter Insurgency (aka COIN) - the most insanely costly and self-defeating form of warfare for wealthy first world nations to pursue - as well as incurred a criminal conviction for sharing classified material with his mistress, and advocated the US arm Al Qaeda to fight Iran, Petraeus' record of catastrophically bad judgements has not impacted his reputation among the American elite. In any other age, Petraeus' record would have seen him retire to the back shed with his service revolver. In 2017, with a strategic culture mired in permanent idiocy, Petraeus is sought out, including by US Presidents.
While Prime Minister Churchill may have described a Field Marshal Montgomery as, "in defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable", Monty, and his like, were very familiar with history, with what was possible and what was not, and with the tragic results for the nation and its people of commanders engaging in wishful thinking in matters of war and peace. Like MacArthur, Monty had seen considerable action in the Great War, he had been badly wounded, and he had seen the carnage caused by unreliable allies on other fronts and bad planning and inadequate intelligence preparation on one's own front. It may be worth all of our whiles to have more Generals who are unbeatable and victorious and, to borrow from Lincoln, we should risk the "unbearable". If not MacArthurs or Montgomerys, at least we can aspire to have more General Shinsekis? It is too much to hope for fewer of the Petraeus ilk as the lesson of MacArthur's firing and after has been that truthtellers are relieved and pliant politicos are rewarded and, even if they fail, only fail upward.
In any event, either the military classes recover their belief in their own vocations, relearn and reapply the principles of war, and assert the profession of arms' role in the conduct of war, or they will see themselves and, more importantly, their troops, devolve more into the role of the doomed legionaries of the insane ambitions of the West's 'forever bubbled' political classes.
For the West to survive as a political and military entity, it has never been more crucial than now for its military leaders to provide to the West's peoples the honest and frank discussion of war and its ends that its political classes will not. As General George Patton wrote, not long before his most untimely death:
There is a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and much less prevalent. One of the most frequently noted characteristics of great men who have remained great is loyalty to their subordinates.
The only greater loyalty is to the Truth.
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