Time on Our Side
Along with everything else.

By William R. Hawkins, senior fellow for national-security studies at the U.S. Business and Industry Council.
November 7, 2001 8:50 a.m.

ou can ask me for anything but time," Napoleon once remarked to a staff officer, but those who are demanding faster action in Afghanistan have far less insight into the nature of war than the French emperor. The New York Times and other media organs have begun to "worry" that Afghanistan is going to become another Vietnam. America, it is feared, is already starting to slip into a "quagmire" after only four weeks of air strikes. This is nonsense.

Shifting from the media elite's favorite war (because America lost), to the more recent and successful Persian Gulf War, it should be noted that it took five months to assemble the ground forces needed to liberate Kuwait and threaten Baghdad. That deployment was facilitated by the excellent military infrastructure of ports, roads and airfields that existed in Saudi Arabia. In poor and land-locked Central Asia, the infrastructure does not exist to rapidly deploy the American divisions that will be needed to finally liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban and purge the land of terrorists.

Fortunately, the Taliban militia is only about one-tenth the size of the Iraqi army, and much less well armed. These facts, plus the rugged terrain, means that this will be a war of infantry and airmobile troops, rather than heavy armored divisions as in the Gulf War. The burdens of force size and logistics will be more manageable, while still providing U.S. troops with superior firepower and mobility. Once deployed in theater, American soldiers and Marines will be able to wage war "energetically and with severity" which is, as Napoleon put it, the only true way to "make it shorter."

In the meantime, no one should be surprised that the Taliban are too tough to be coerced by air strikes alone. The ranks of the Taliban and al Qaeda are filled with what military historian John Keegan has described as "warriors." They come from societies where the young are "brought up to fight, think fighting honorable, and think killing in warfare glorious." This culture is prevalent not only in the Middle East, but also in the Balkans, the Andean region of Latin America, all across Africa, and in many parts of Asia. A warrior of this type, Keegan has written, "prefers death to dishonor and kills without pity when he gets the chance." Often the product of civil wars, insurgencies, and dictatorships that had have lasted decades, they endure daily lives that are extremely hard by Western standards, where death from disease, crime, or casual misfortune is a constant factor.

Another expert on this phenomenon is Ralph Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer. In his book Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? Peters argues "For the U.S. soldier, vaccinated with moral and behavioral codes, the warrior is a formidable enemy....We are at our best fighting organized soldieries who attempt a symmetrical response. But warriors respond asymmetrically, leaving us in the role of redcoats marching into an Indian-dominated wilderness." We know, however, how the wars for control of North America turned out.

Military operations conceived as a "peacekeeping mission" or "police action" rather than a war play into the hands of warriors whose approach to conflict is total, where any tactic is considered fair and where the masses themselves are mobilized in the struggle. As Peters has advised "You cannot bargain or compromise with warriors. You cannot 'teach them a lesson'....You either win or you lose. This kind of warfare is a zero-sum game. And it takes guts to play."

The ferocity of warriors, however, does not render American forces helpless. The U.S. has fought this kind of foe before, and won. The Japanese in World War II, the Chinese in Korea and the North Vietnamese all exhibited these "warrior" traits, but American troops usually prevailed in combat. It was their leaders back in Washington who more often failed to translate their battlefield valor into diplomatic victories.

Mohammed Atef, the military commander of al Qaeda, recently boasted, "America will not realize its miscalculations until its soldiers are dragged in Afghanistan like they were in Somalia." This bit of bravado was based on the myth of the 1993 firefight in the streets of Mogadishu, not its reality. That battle pitted about 100 American Rangers and Delta Force commandos against a mixture of warlord militia and armed civilians (some of whom were al Qaeda members). The Americans were outnumbered 50-1 and surrounded. Eighteen Americans died, but the Somalis took far heavier losses amounting to several hundred killed and hundreds more grievously wounded (many of whom undoubtedly died later). Total Somali casualties are estimated to have been 1,500 or more.

The discipline and training of the American soldiers were more a factor in this lopsided outcome than was high-tech firepower. The Rangers and Delta troopers, and light infantry from the 10th Mountain Division which came to their rescue, did not have the panoply of heavy weapons (artillery, tanks, air strikes) normally available in a combat zone. The American soldiers fought as warriors, and proved to be the more proficient at their trade.

American commanders have learned the lesson of Somalia better than the al Qaeda. The Bush administration is not going to cut and run at the first sight of blood the way the Clinton administration did after Mogadishu. In the coming months, U.S. strength, and that of its allies, will only increase while that of the Taliban declines.

Declaring over the weekend that "we're going to fight right through the winter," Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard B. Myers suggested that the harsh Afghan winter could work to the advantage of the United States and its allies in the region. A campaign of intensifying raids by special-operations units would keep the Taliban and al Qaeda forces off balance, while providing the U.S. with important information that would aid a spring offensive by ground troops who could use the winter months to move into the area and train.

America's problem is not an inability to meet the challenge posed by warrior cultures, but a lack of understanding about what it will take to win. As Peters writes, "we need to ask ourselves some difficult questions. Do we have the strength of will, as a military and as a nation, to defeat an enemy who has nothing to lose? When we face warriors, we will often face men who have acquired a taste for killing, who do not behave rationally according to our definition of rationality, who are capable of atrocities that challenge the descriptive powers of language, and who will sacrifice their own kind in order to survive. We will face opponents for whom treachery is routine, and they will not be impressed by tepid shows of force with restrictive rules of engagement." He then asks the ultimate question: "Are we able to engage in and sustain the level of sheer violence it can take to eradicate this kind of threat?"

This is a question primarily for the nation's political leadership. The American people understand that war entails casualties and extended efforts; and, unlike many in the media, are not overly sensitive to the plight of hostile populations. What they do not tolerate is failure; the expenditure of blood and treasure without victory. Even in Vietnam, what disillusioned the public with President Lyndon Johnson was not that he was fighting a war, but that he was not fighting it successfully. This desire for victory is why the public turned to Richard Nixon rather than to George McGovern; and after the post-Vietnam malaise found the strong leadership of Ronald Reagan so attractive.

Since the days of the Roman legions, civilized states have been able to defeat barbaric "warrior cultures" and bring peace, order and progress in their wake. But civilization has been able to triumph only as long as it kept some of the warrior spirit alive within itself. Societies that become overly civilized, effete and decadent, are unable to meet the warrior challenge and risk succumbing to a new dark age. What happens in Afghanistan will reveal the condition of American society. The world will be watching to see whether the last superpower of the 20th century has what it takes to lead in the 21st century.