No Quagmire
Fighting the war we have to fight.

By Mackubin Thomas Owens, professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College & an adjunct fellow of both the Claremont Institute & the Ashbrook Center.
November 13, 2001 4:40 p.m.

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.