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week ago, the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance was stalled outside
the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif. Despite what was described
as intense U.S. bombing, the Taliban were holding on. Many military
analysts were expressing doubt that the city could be captured before
the onset of the harsh Afghan winter.
For its part,
the press was warning that the U.S. was getting "bogged down"
in a campaign that didn't "appear to be going anywhere."
The pundits were decrying the "stalemate" in Afghanistan
and fretting about a "quagmire." In the words of an article
in the New York Times of Wednesday, October 31, "Like
an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word 'quagmire'
has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and
students of foreign policy."
But over the
past few days, the Taliban seem to have cracked, abandoning not
only Mazar-e Sharif but Kabul as well. According to press reports,
Northern Alliance fighters have begun to move into the Pashtun strongholds
of southern and western Afghanistan where support for the Taliban
has been strongest. The very success of the Northern Alliance has
created diplomatic problems, setting off alarm bells in Washington
and London out of concern that the rapid Northern Alliance advance
could destabilize the shaky government of Pakistan.
What does it
all mean? To begin with, the dramatic reversal of fortune seems
to vindicate the administration's approach. Once again, the American
"immaculate way of war," relying on air power while avoiding
the use of U.S. ground troops beyond special-operations forces (SOF)
appears to have worked, as it did in Kosovo.
But there are
some caveats. The future is always uncertain. In this conflict,
it is entirely possible that the dramatic victory of the Northern
Alliance will be followed by an equally dramatic reverse. It is
likely that the Taliban will adapt to the environment and begin
to fight in a way that does not favor the "immaculate way of
war," adopting some sort of asymmetric approach, e.g. guerrilla
warfare.
The reason
that this is likely was addressed by the Prussian philosopher of
war, Carl von Clausewitz, over a century and a half ago. "War
is not the action of a living body on a lifeless mass," he
wrote, "but always the collision of two living forces."
The interdependent nature of war leads to the sort of unpredictability
observed in what are today described as "chaotic systems."
Military action does not produce a single reaction but a dynamic
interaction, the very nature of which is bound to lead to unpredictability.
This unpredictability inherent in war as a nonlinear system is magnified
by three other phenomena that Clausewitz addresses in some detail:
chance, uncertainty, and friction.
Since war is
a human enterprise, the human dimension is central to the proper
understanding of the phenomenon. War involves intangibles that cannot
be quantified. War is shaped by human nature, the complexities of
human behavior, and the limitations of human mental and physical
capabilities. Any view of war that ignores what Clausewitz called
the "moral factors," e.g. fear, the impact of danger,
and physical exhaustion, is fraught with peril. As he observed,
"Military activity is never directed against material forces
alone; it is always aimed simultaneously at the moral forces which
give it life, and the two cannot be separated."
If they are
not careful, military planners will make the mistake of treating
the Taliban as an inanimate object rather than as an adaptive one;
they will not themselves adapt to changes that the Taliban make.
We have to make sure that we are fighting the kind of war we have
to fight to defeat the Taliban and not the one we want to fight.
This raises
another danger. The primary U.S. goal in Afghanistan has been to
root out and destroy Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network. To
accomplish this, it was first necessary to destabilize the Taliban,
because it was the Taliban that provided a haven for al Qaeda. Success
against the Taliban should not cause us to forget what our final
goal is.
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