My finalized thoughts on Afghanistan. Please have the same sick, bitter taste in your mouth when you are done reading it that I had while I was writing it. “Redefining Victory in State Actions Triggered by Political Immediacy and Contested by Non-State Actors” Or “Lessons Not Learned” In the age of asymmetric warfare, in a war among the peoples of a client state, it is difficult to measure successes and failures. Asymmetric conflicts of political genesis deal in ideas and perceptions, a complex subjective web of shared understandings judged and affirmed by two separate populations. If we do not face state actors engaged in an organized industrial resistance, if armies do not clash, if the enemy is a shapeless blob, the desired political end state is also that much more difficult to recognize and judge. But is that judgment, or end state, even necessary? A political victory is victory in a war undertaken against non-state actors, if the war is undertaken due to the duress of political immediacy. One can argue that one has achieved victory regardless of the client state’s final condition, as long as the domestic political immediacy has been sufficiently addressed or suppressed. For example, a state is attacked by a non-state actor. This creates a crushing political immediacy for the leadership of that state to respond with force in order to allay the fears of the populace, and to respond now. Once that action has taken place, the political immediacy for which the war was undertaken has been addressed. The problem is that armed conflict creates a backlash of further political pressures and immediacies. There is born a need to ‘win’ the war which has already served the purpose of satisfying a political immediacy. A war conceived in the same manner as a man scratching an itch becomes the itch which must be scratched in turn. The complexity of achieving a victory versus the complexity of declaring a victory is easily seen. This war defies conventional endgames, it is hidden among the people, a war where an industrial state is contested by criminals, warlords, religious fanatics, and recreational resistors, only loosely associated with one another and drifting through the population with no central nervous system. It is a tar baby, a Gordian knot, a series of influences and actions and actors in a fractal event system so complex that causal chains become almost impossible to identify, unravel, and influence. In our example the state chooses to persist, striking the Gordian knot with the hammer of industrial forces…which does not unravel the knot. Instead, it creates an anti-western focal point for the region and allows fighters of any motivation an opportunity to take their best shot at it. Lacking firepower and training, the non-state actors inevitably fare poorly and prove to be only a hindrance. In the absence of any significant military losses and only moderate political damage, our state persists, having little choice but to follow though. After years of persistence, attacks against the state have begun to slow, at which point we will ease free of the mess, not so much declaring ourselves victorious as whistling and walking away with hands in pockets as if nothing untoward has taken place. We return to the original statement that political victory is victory. In a very real sense we have actually achieved victory, satisfying the political immediacy of the need for action, answering the political immediacies that arose because of that action, and fading away from that conflict having paid a price in blood and treasure, but a low one - as war goes.. Perhaps we did have a clear picture of an ideal end state for the client nation of Afghanistan. Failing to achieve that end state is certainly not a defeat. The aims for which the war was launched have been satisfied. The only real coin important to the architects of the conflict having been earned, physical realities on the ground become simply irrelevant. If the domestic population does not agree that the state has won it creates not a political immediacy, but a continuing political pressure to achieve victory, or at the least, determine why victory was not achieved and properly distribute the onus for that failure. The situation on the ground is again irrelevant to that understanding by the domestic population. That opinion is instead shaped by media ‘highlight’ events. That opinion is based on events not weighted by effect, but on prevalence of media coverage. The shape and application of our forces has not been ideal, given an understanding of the nature of contest we are engaged in. The force needs to be shaped in order to influence the consensus first, and the battlefield second. Since media ‘highlight’ events influence the consensus far more effectively than efficient battlefield policy, we should abandon the latter in favor of the former in any situation where they conflict. The following two concepts, while not comprehensive, are examples of policies that if executed in OEF, would have maximized our impact on the consensus, with some cost to our influence of the battlefield: 1. The size of our force should have been drastically reduced once the invasion was complete and the war turned to counter-insurgency. We should have only involved the best trained and most intelligence-driven units in kinetic operations of any sort. The resulting lower visibility would have helped allay the issue of creating an attractive anti-western target in the region. A smaller better trained force would have also created less negative ‘highlight’ events, such as embarrassing pictures and videos. Also, the special forces ability to collect and act on intelligence would have created more precision in target acquisition and execution of directives, creating less domestic outcry and fewer retaliatory insurgents. 2. There should have been more publicity for visible reconstruction efforts. The projects themselves are marginally useless politically to the client nation, since building a consensus in Afghanistan is not a supportable probability. But their greater visibility to our population would have influenced domestic understanding of the efforts made in the region. The real enemy is the domestic population, and the real war fought by CNN.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 01:19:34 +0000