Ranger Reveries
_______________Ranger recently viewed a television show worse than U.S. policy: The Ghost Whisperer.
As a result, he had a nightmare in which someone whispered to him that the U.S. had only one year to live, after which we would be a ghost, too. Just like Benjamin Button at Year One. This led Prophet Ranger to thoughts on how we'd come to our terminal point.
The fault is not solely George Bush's, but rather a pervasive worldview that might is right, and the Great White God has blessed all that drops from the limbs of the tree of democracy. However, not the entire world buys into this dogma. Our counterinsurgency [COIN] efforts are seen as post-colonial wars of suppression and aggression.
What are the honest goals of the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq? What does it hope to gain, and what does it actually gain? Do we fight to make people free, and what if they refuse the gift?
Who is the enemy in these theatres, and what is the battlefield? The enemy is the people we are supposedly there to liberate, and the battlefield is the country that we are unrealistically trying to build.
A nation-building project must have both [1] a national identity which to augment, and [2] a historical basis for the effort. Neither of these exist in Afghanistan. While preconditions exist, the impulse to federate must be internal.
Iraq was a nation without a national identity, a fact which is still true, despite U.S. efforts to the contrary. Afghanistan will never be a beacon of democracy. Both countries have been by-passed by history, and rightly so.
If a country wishes to remain pre-literate, that is their right. COIN cannot impose values that the country does not embrace. We can kill them, but that doesn't make them buy into our world view. If the U.S. were truly democratic, these country's very backwardness should be recognized as their expression of freedom -- even if it is repressive and repugnant to our perception.
The U.S. has no right or mandate to impose its will on any group outside of its borders. Even if it did it should be implemented through means other than military -- an introduction, versus an imposition.
Soldiers are not social workers, nor do they deal in feel-good products.
Military operations in these arenas have not been based in reality, nor have they been faithful to our principles. By extension, COIN is ineffective since COIN is a subset of military operations.
The entire military equation cannot be dictated by one hastily written Field Manual, even if it does talk pretty.
As a result, he had a nightmare in which someone whispered to him that the U.S. had only one year to live, after which we would be a ghost, too. Just like Benjamin Button at Year One. This led Prophet Ranger to thoughts on how we'd come to our terminal point.
The fault is not solely George Bush's, but rather a pervasive worldview that might is right, and the Great White God has blessed all that drops from the limbs of the tree of democracy. However, not the entire world buys into this dogma. Our counterinsurgency [COIN] efforts are seen as post-colonial wars of suppression and aggression.
What are the honest goals of the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq? What does it hope to gain, and what does it actually gain? Do we fight to make people free, and what if they refuse the gift?
Who is the enemy in these theatres, and what is the battlefield? The enemy is the people we are supposedly there to liberate, and the battlefield is the country that we are unrealistically trying to build.
A nation-building project must have both [1] a national identity which to augment, and [2] a historical basis for the effort. Neither of these exist in Afghanistan. While preconditions exist, the impulse to federate must be internal.
Iraq was a nation without a national identity, a fact which is still true, despite U.S. efforts to the contrary. Afghanistan will never be a beacon of democracy. Both countries have been by-passed by history, and rightly so.
If a country wishes to remain pre-literate, that is their right. COIN cannot impose values that the country does not embrace. We can kill them, but that doesn't make them buy into our world view. If the U.S. were truly democratic, these country's very backwardness should be recognized as their expression of freedom -- even if it is repressive and repugnant to our perception.
The U.S. has no right or mandate to impose its will on any group outside of its borders. Even if it did it should be implemented through means other than military -- an introduction, versus an imposition.
Soldiers are not social workers, nor do they deal in feel-good products.
Military operations in these arenas have not been based in reality, nor have they been faithful to our principles. By extension, COIN is ineffective since COIN is a subset of military operations.
The entire military equation cannot be dictated by one hastily written Field Manual, even if it does talk pretty.
Labels: democracy, phony war on terror, post-colonial behavior, PWOT
posted by rangeragainstwar at 9:01 PM
8 Comments:
one of the things that has rankled me ever since my military service has been the idea of taking soldiers and calling their mission "peace keeping."
i know they are trying to conjur the image of marshal earp walking tall down the dusty streets but they always seem to miss the biggest point.
if peace, and order is really the mission why on earth to they try to achieve by sending boatloads of teenagers with automatic weapons?
if you want peace, send the quakers, the hippies, the peace corps. not the marines and the army. they are supposed to be the last option, after all else fails.
just as basing their economic strategies on the turgid novels of ayn rand has failed us, so has the idea of "nation building" and armed intervention.
i keep yearing for the day when the original construction of the constitution is adhered to when sending troops into combat. debate the reasons in congress, formally declare war, raise the money and the troops, go do the fucking job.
war by presidential fiat has yet to produce a desireable result. it's time to look at the record of death and dismal failure and go back to what was working just fine until the expansions of executive power.
slow and clumsy on the path to war is not a vice, or a problem. it's plain common sense.
What are the honest goals of the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq? What do we hope to gain, and what do we actually gain? Do we fight to make people free, and what if they refuse the gift?
Good question Ranger. I reckon the reason for invading both countries is one and the same, and it had nothing to do with the plight of the people there. You don't do shock and awe thingys and use 500lbs bombs in populated areas if you are concerned about the folks living there. You wouldn't be using DU ammo, shooting up wedding parties, create Abu Ghraib and 2 million internal refugees.
Bombs and ever increasing troop numbers are not designed to deliver peace, so it can not be the goal, or as MB above so nicely put it,
if you want peace, send the quakers, the hippies, the peace corps. not the marines and the army. they are supposed to be the last option, after all else fails.
In my humble opinion, it’s about having your rook and knight sitting on these two strategically important squares. It’s about expanding the empire and building steps on the path to world domination. Power at this point in time of human evolution revolves largely around who controls the remaining fossil fuel deposits. And Pumpraq and Pipelineistan are two spots anyone who has played Risk or Age of Empires before would identify as must haves. The hegemonic USSR had similar ideas some 20 years back, but was made to leave by US supplied stingers. Our troops over there at the moment can count themselves lucky that Russia seems too lazy to bear a grudge, otherwise it’d be curtains for GI Joe.
But hey, why should Washington and their electoral backers, ie voters, care. Those two allegedly godforsaken places are thousands of miles away, and a little bit of a war going on in the background helps to unify the crowd.
Bush or Obama, makes no difference to Pashtuns and none to the people who get continually fucked over in Gaza. Death merchants the both of them. The US invaded Iraq, causing by conservative estimates at least 100’000 civilian casualties, if you attribute the numbers killed in sectarian attacks to the toppling of the Baath party even many more than that. In 5 years more than one hundred thousand dead. That’s at least on par if not worse than the toll extracted from Iraqis by Saddam. Large parts of the infrastructure are bombed to smithereens, in excess of 4000 young Americans left their lives there, all for what? For the people at home in those countries, its from the frying pan into the fire, at least that’s what it looks like to me.
Apparently in response to 911, which cost the lives of some 3000, Afghanistan gets invaded and multiple times as many of their citizens are slaughtered in return. But ahh, we needed to free them from the Taliban. The same Islamic fundamentalists we supported for years beforehand, are now all with a sudden the bad guys. Pacts are made with the most brutal freaks of the Northern Alliance, torture cells are build in army bases, our most humane values thrown overboard, all in the name of what? Certainly not in order to help the people there.
What are the gifts we are offering? Lukewarm Coca Cola? Computer readable ID Cards? Internal divisions so severe that the country will for decades need an army it can not afford and hence will not ever have enough money to pay for basic social services? Predator drones from which a pimple ridden junior rank somewhere in a bunker in New Mexico with a joystick fires a hellfire missile on a group of people making their way up a mountain or gather around a coffin? Would anyone in their right mind accept these gifts?
The US has nothing to offer those people, while in the scheme of things their land means so much to western interests. On the right is the only Muslim nuclear power, to the left the “axis of coz we said so” country Iran. That is one fantastic offer, two for the price of one. But wait there is more, conveniently located to the north via the more and more interesting Something’stans, the red arch enemies Russia and China. Bingo. That’s where you want a foothold. Put 100’000 troops there and get comfy boys, we’ll be stayin a while.
In ending a quick note in regards to those countries apparently prefering to “remain pre-literate”. From my understanding writing and reading originated in the middle east, from early signs and markings drawn by the Sumerians, to the East Semitic peoples of Mesopotamia who adopted their letters and order of writing, to the Assyrians and Babylonians, right to the Egyptians who came up with the first pure alphabet some 3000 BC, reading and writing was an art form practised in those parts of the world when our European ancestors where still pointing and meaningfully grunting. The people there have a culture that is as ancient as it is different from ours.
Best Wishes J.
MB,
You give them the lie, nicely. If it's peace and equality for the sexes you're after, you send in the civil workers aimed at reeducation and reformation.
Juan,
Very nice dissection. Re. learning, yes, they were the cradle of civilization. People and cultures do get in ruts, but that is their right to do so. Some feel they have reached their apex -- what need have they of "progress"?
This thought has been bothering me, so I may write something on it. It will not sit well with the p.c. crowd, though.
I can't do better than copy my comment over at "Armchair Generalist":
"I do know that nothing happens unless we get the flexibility to operate that comes with having more troops on the ground." (This was the money quote from the article summarized there)
I remember hearing this every year between 1964 and 1972. It was bullshit then. I have no idea whether it's bullshit now. But I do know that if we haven't managed to find a genuinely national leadership and an effective national army in a land famous for its ruthless fighters and cunning leaders I have to wonder how throwing twenty brigades of foreign troops is gonna help. What the hell have we been doing for the LAST seven years?
One of the reasons we failed in the RVN is that we shoved an assload of GIs incountry while "building" an ARVN that was essentially a parody of the WW2 U.S. Army, and all for a Vietnamese leadership that varied between corrupt kleptocracy and incompetent expatriots. The "leaders" never led, and the Marvins who wanted to follow (and not much of a majority, if any) couldn't duplicate our methods without our air and artillery support.
The big question here seems to me: what the hell are we doing there? If we're supposedly creating a stand-alone Afghan state, flooding foreign troops into it seems intuitively counterproductive. If we want a sock-puppet, though, it might work. We just need to be willing to ass around in Central Asia for the next decade or so.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
Ranger,
I cannot add to the fine words already poured out here by you, MB, Juan and FDChief. The only pointer I can give is simply this, there is no such thing as Afghanistan anyways. Pat Lang describes the problem much more eloquently than I could here: The US Government and "Afghan Man."
Our collective inability to recognize that fractured piece of territory where dozens of unconnected but long-lived tribes lives as anything other than the "butthole" of the world then, now and (probably) forevermore, is the root of why we remain there today.
We actually had the right idea back in 91 when we pulled up stakes and moved on from the Great Game in the Hindu Kush. Our mistake was pulling out any observers as well, observers who could have helped us protect the homeland by keeping an eye out for the violent jihadis who made the place home because it IS the global "butthole."
The best strategy we can pursue there now is to again pull up stakes, but leave behind the observers we need to give advanced warning when the jihadis (again) decide to take their fight to the "far enemy" in NYC, LA and DC.
SP
The Taliban were just the latest in the line of assassins, conmen, hucksters, fanatics, intriguers, conquerers, madmen and puppets to sit on the qadi in Kabul. They won't be the last. In the late 90s and early Oughts they had the fortunate combination of the world's inattention and clever strategists. Between them they created a black swan - 9/11. The likelihood of that happening again are miniscule, even if the Taliban retakes Kabul and runs it for a generation. They also have (as we discovered in 2002) many internal enemies, just like any and every Afghan faction.
The British managed just fine living next door to these sonsofbitches with an adept combination of bribery, chicanery, influence and threat. And there was always the occasional column to kill some Afridis or Hazaras or Waziris if the wogs got uppity. In our typical American fashion we've taken the British hammer - cheap, nasty and effective - tarted it up, contracted it out, added a 100% depreciation allowance and created a freaking mechanical monster that does the same thing for lots more money and worse.
We need to get a huge dose of commonsense unless we want to end up like 16th Century Spain, draining our treasury and losing our empire sending our tercios to chase nasty little heretic fanatics through the polders and canals of Afghanistan.
MB,
The Air Force started the ball rolling with -PEACE IS OUR PROFESSION.Then they added Warrior to the lexicon with their WARRIOR TRAINING CENTERS.This was the first I ever heard the word used officially. REALLY STRANGE- Peace was their profession but they morphed into warriors.This is insane ideation-and that's only the Air Force!
The current crop of military seems to be clueless.
jim
Juan,
Excellent rundown and my comments cannot add anything further.
It's a sad state of affairs.
jim
Post a Comment
<< Home