Well, it's That Day again.
I'm not going to bother going over all this nonsense again; it's bad enough that my country will, for the twentieth time, wave the bloody shirt of the towers and the Pentagon and the farm field where the fourth airliner went down to try and draw the audience's attention from the mountainous heap of death and destruction it built on those ruinous foundations.
I've already talked that sonofabitch to death and there's nothing more to say.
Instead I want to think about the original pile of corpses harvested from that day twenty years ago; the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
By pure coincidence, one of the books on my nightstand the day the last U.S. troop walked up the ramp to the evac bird was Andy Krepinevich's The Army and Vietnam.
Krepinevich is supposed to have been moved largely by another Vietnam post-mortem, Harry Summers' On Strategy, that posited that the problem was that the U.S. wasn't WW2-enough, that the real problem was that the Army never really went full-D-Day on the Communist forces and defeated them militarily.
Krepinevich's analysis, though, suggested that the opposite was true; that the Army have never really stopped trying to D-Day the war. That what he calls the "Army Concept" - "a focus on mid-intensity, or conventional, war and a reliance on high volumes of firepower to minimize casualties" (Krepenevich, 1986, p. 6) - was central to the reason that the U.S. failed to realize either it's military or political objectives in Vietnam.
Krepinevich's assessment of low-intensity (call it "guerrilla war" or "counterinsurgency" or "foreign internal defense"...) conflict is that the ultimate objective of the counter-insurgent forces has to be to separate the rebels/insurgents/guerillas from the bulk of the local people, and then to weld the locals to your local proxy through...well, a bunch of stuff, but basically by making the proxy attractive to the locals.
You do that, you eventually win.
He writes that while paying lip service to this objective that, outside a small and relatively powerless group of low-ranking officers (largely in the Special Forces and advisory cadres), the Army hierarchy had no interest in doing this. They wanted to meet the NVA and VC Main Force units in open combat and smash them.
So the low-level, day-to-day, grinding work of securing the population was left to the South Vietnamese, from the ARVN down to the Regional Force and Popular Force paramilitaries and the National Police.
And this crippled the actual counterinsurgency. The ARVN and the police were a corrupt mess even where they were militarily competent, the RVN government was, if anything, worse, and the RF/PF (the "Ruff-Puffs") starved for resources and unsupported so at the mercy of the local VC.
The "contribution" of the US and ARVN maneuver forces was to swing through in a "big sweep", shoot the fuck out of the landscape, create a bunch of refugees among the survivors, and then move on, leaving the locals to get re-occupied by the local force VC and the political cadres that had largely gone to ground before the sweep.
That pretty much tallies with my reading of the conduct of the war, and Krepinevich in his conclusion, says that:
"Low-intensity warfare represents the most likely arena of future conflict for the Army, and counterinsurgency the most demanding contingency. As in the period following the Korean War, (after Vietnam) the Army is erecting barriers to avoid fighting another Vietnam War...instead of gaining a better understanding of how to wage counterinsurgency warfare within the unique social, economic, political, and military dimensions comprising that form of conflict, the Army is trying...to transform it into something it can handle." (op. cit., p.274-275)
That, fundamentally, the Army Concept "won" the war for the U.S. Army's hearts and minds. Instead of being in Vietnam one year twelve times, the Army tried to forget that the nasty interlude even happened so it could return to the sort of high-kinetic warfare it was good at.
Fast forward thirty years, then, and the U.S. Army gets dragged into southcentral Asia.
I won't pretend to have read any tactical or operational studies of the ISAF mission in general, but the impression I get from what I have suggests that not only did the US operational command not review or learn from the lessons of Vietnam, it actively repeated the mistakes that it had made before.
The maneuver forces leaned hard on firepower and air-and-vehicle mobility. Units rotated in and out without ever spending enough time to truly learn the ground and the people they fought over. The primary focus seems to have been trying to find, fix, and finish the Taliban field forces rather than securing the population.
The Afghan military and police appear to have been as bad or worse than the ARVN; vastly corrupt and randomly brutal. The ISAF command doesn't seem to have been particularly picky who it sponsored, and that ended up putting a lot of the same people whose bad behavior had encouraged Joe and Molly Afghan to support (or, at least, tolerate) the Taliban in the first place - Anand Gopal's The Other Afghan Women does a good job of detailing the problems this created.
From what I can tell - and it's worth noting that whatever truth is there in the twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan it's surrounded by an imperial guard-size bodyguard of lies - what horrifies me the most is that having had twenty years to learn the fundamentals of suppressing a rebellion in Vietnam my Army, the U.S. Army, not only didn't learn those lessons but actively turned their back on them and spent another twenty years reapplying the methods they knew, they should have known from the beginning, had failed before.
And that, for me, sums up my personal connection to the tragedy of the twenty years that began this day.
My Army, my country, We, the People, forgot none of our outrage and fears and grievances.
And then we proved that we had learned nothing, as well.
You can argue about whether we should have sent an army into Afghanistan. I tend to agree that the occupation was not a bright idea...but I also understand why it happened.
But once that Army was there...how the hell did we manage to do things not just catastrophically wrong, but catastrophically wrong in nearly the identical way we'd done them - and knew we'd done them - wrong fifty years before?
We knew - we should have known - what would happen when we did the things in Afghanistan we did (and the way we did them) because we'd done them that way before - in Vietnam - and ended up with a heap of ashes.
And yet, here we are again.
That seems to me the bitterest legacy of the lake of bitterness that is this day.
6 comments:
The war in Afghanistan played out the same way as Vietnam for the same institutional reasons. Every decision made by a sergeant on up was informed by how to army as an institution does things. No general, no matter how smart or committed, could change the outcome, even if they wanted to. They would be constantly undercut by the thousands of smaller decisions made by their staff. You would have to fundamentally reshape the army itself, and for some dumpy little war in nowhere-izastan that simply isn't on the table.
The other "option" is to go full Beothuk and kill *all* the locals. Again, that isn't in the institutional cards (at least not anymore).
Given that, all the insurgents have to do is wait it out. And since they live there, it is easy to do. The puppet government knowing that they are only there for the short term, loot and rob what they can, while they can. Thus raising the cost and hastening the exit.
If the puppet government was able to think long term (or even medium term) they might be able to get a grip on the situation. However,if they were there for the medium/long term they would no longer be a puppet government, so again, not in the cards.
Learning lessons isn't an issue, it is as simple as trying to peel potatoes with a baseball bat. Not gonna work out.
Any moderately competent general could do this analysis. But again, as an institutionalist, they wouldn't. The closest one could come is what Eric Shinseki did by trying to raise the perceived cost of the occupation the start of the war. And he was crushed for doing it.
Chief - interesting if depressing reflection.
The incentives for the Army to adapt simply weren't there. Nobody (who mattered) was trying to hold them accountable in the way the press was doing in 60's/70's Vietnam. Had Trump (a Natsec outsider) not called the troops home, they'd probably still be running "the mission" now? The end of the mission (esp the chaotic way it ended) has thrown up a lot of revealing reaction from those who were obv quite happy for people to continue dying in Afghanistan, forever.
Esp here in the UK, some of it has been downright pathetic - the number of newspaper columns written about the Queen's portrait being left in the UK embassy as expression of a class of people who had their toys taken from them. The game seemed to be that those people get to engage in a sort of paternal colonialism, at the unfortunate but necessary cost of the lives of squaddies and Afghan citizens. Idiot cheerleaders wouldn't have been an issue if there was any contrasting coverage of what was actually going on in Afghanistan, but it was a conflict which you could forget was ongoing at all, so no scrutiny.
I'm sure clever people in the US Army who will learn lessons, but is there really any institutional pressure to do so?
I think of Jackie Fisher trying to knock the pre-WW1 British Navy into shape. He had to turn around an organisation where the incentives pushed commanders to, instead of practicing gunnery (to win battles), throw unused shells overboard (so they didn't have to repaint their ships blackened from firing). At least he had the spectre of the German High Seas Fleet to point to.
Krepinevich makes that point - I should have included that in my citation - that the one real factor that might have forced the Army to reconsider what it THOUGHT were the lessons learned from Vietnam (which wasn't that 1) it failed to see that securing the population was key and 2) failed whereever it was half-ass attempted...but that the "lesson" was "don't go fight where you need to secure the population") would have been political pressure from the civilian authorities.
And that was utterly lacking. Nobody in the Nixon or Carter or Reagan or Bush (x2) or Clinton or Obama or Trump administrations wanted to revisit Vietnam and consider what it taught about fighting a local rebellion. The civilians as much as the brass wanted to just forget the whole shameful thing and go back to fighting Soviets in the Fulda Gap (or, after 1990, fighting "radical Islamic terrorists" in the ghost-cities of Somalia, etc...)
I guess the really tragic part of this - for me, anyway - though, is that once we WERE back down in the weeds with the muj you'd think that SOMEONE would have thought "gee...this seems really familiar. Where have we done this before?" and gone back and found all the people like Vann and Krepinevich that told them how this might work. A study of the USMC CAPS program versus the "big sweep" fixation.
Emphasis on "might" work, tho - the problems in Afghanistan were that 1) the tribal entropy was always strong and would be more difficult than other COIN venues such as Vietnam, and 2) the Islam-vs-the-godless-West was always going to be a source of enormously difficult friction.
But none of that happened. ISAF never seemed to get away from the "big sweep", kinetic mentality.
Had this been a one-off, first-time experience that would be, while regrettable, at least understandable and forgivable.
But with the lessons of Vietnam preserved in print, ready to be discovered and applied? And, instead, making the same damn mistake of sticking with the "Army Concept"?
That's UNforgivable. That's a "First-Day-On-The-Somme" kind of culpability for all the lives wasted.
Excellent invocation of not only Krepinevich but also Vann.
I've been designing wargames that try to press these concepts for years - not surprisingly, lately people have been asking me how A Distant Plain, my game on Afghanistan, explains the sudden collapse.
It is possible, by assuming deliberately bad play on the part of the Coalition and Afghan Government players, but mostly by the Coalition player standing up and saying he has to get up early for work tomorrow, he has to be on the next bus, and it's his copy of the game so let's scoop all the pieces back in the box quickly please.
Brian
The problems within the ANA and AP have been there for decades - read the Afghanistan Papers (at the WaPo site - the link is in there); the ISAF trainers and evaluators knew how hollow the ANA was and have known for years. Between corruption and piss-poor leadership, the US repeated the fuckup they did with the ARVN; they built a mini-US Army that needed a United-States-level of air and technical support. When we took away the tac air and the log support it was pretty inevitable that they'd fold like a house of cards.
Hell, the ARVN did better than the ANA did against a bigger and badder enemy...
"I guess the really tragic part of this - for me, anyway - though, is that once we WERE back down in the weeds with the muj you'd think that SOMEONE would have thought "gee...this seems really familiar. Where have we done this before?" and gone back and found all the people like Vann and Krepinevich that told them how this might work. A study of the USMC CAPS program versus the "big sweep" fixation. "
I have a new saying that after a failure, the people who were right are the ones who are discredited and shunned.
Post a Comment