Pain

As I sit in Kabul on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I’m filled with a sense of despondency.  One might think this a normal reaction to the anniversary of an event that has become seared in the memory of my generation.  However, it is not 9/11 per se that causes this feeling – although it is certainly related to it.  At the time of the event that cast aside notions of law and order, justice and righteousness, I was in a courtroom.  My second thought was one of irony for I innately felt the dichotomy between the events occurring in New York, Arlington, and Shanksville and those happening in my courtroom.  One set of events encapsulated all that is wrong with the world while the other captures the dreams of men like Voltaire and Locke.  My first thought, however, ruled that day and continues to do so to this day.

On seeing the second plane rip through tower two, I knew it was no accident; I knew we were going to war.  It was not fear that gripped me, it was vengeance.  I knew enough of American history to know that the same feeling would permeate every line of thinking and every suggested course of action for most Americans, particularly our leaders.  Events such as 9/11, like Pearl Harbor in WWII, unrestricted U-Boat warfare in WWI and the sinking of the USS Maine in the Spanish-American war before it, awake the demons in the American psyche.  America tends to have a visceral reaction to attacks on it.   

Although somewhat isolationist by default (recent history notwithstanding; indeed we even see the reemergence of this now), America is, as Winton Churchill once said, like a teapot – once a fire is lit under it, there is no limit to the power it can produce.  This is certainly true in the military realm.  In response to the sinking of the USS Maine (history debates the actual cause), the US ended Spanish imperialism.  After Germany began unrestricted attacks on American maritime commerce, the US joined Britain and France in so thoroughly defeating the Central Powers that two of the Empires ceased to exist and one, Germany, was humiliated as no nation had been before.  Pearl Harbor brought a level of death and destruction that the world had never seen.  Entire cities were razed and fire bombed, nuclear power was employed and the three main enemy powers remain militarily hobbled and occupied to this very day. 

In recent history, however, we have gotten away from this method of warfare.  Notions of limited war, wherein the means of warfare are constricted not by law but by choice, are the order of the day in the employment of American military power.  Perhaps it is the legacy of Vietnam; I leave others to debate its origin as I simply wish to acknowledge its presence.  Today, we attempt to combine the application of military might with means of persuasion, economic in particular, in order to get our enemy to do our bidding.  With the one hand we strike while the other offers money to rebuild.  Imagine if you will, a confrontation with your nemesis wherein he slaps you and then offers you a bit of money.  Do you forgive the slap and attempt to forge a friendship with him because has offered money?  Or do you simply take the money, feign friendship, and plot your revenge?  Most of our adversaries choose some form of the latter course of action.  However, we continue to try purchasing friendship despite the mounting evidence that it simply does not work and a realization that the coffers are getting a bit low.

Our primary mistake in the aftermath of 9/11, one perpetrated by the Bush Administration, was to broaden our adversary base.  Rather than assess our enemy as encompassing the entity that actually attacked us, we declared war on terrorism.  Think about this for a moment: for the first time in history (at least that I am aware of) a nation declared war on a tactic, on a method of waging war.  How do you defeat such a thing?  In Afghanistan, this line of approach metastasized into a refocus from Al Qaeda (the primary threat) to the Taliban (the secondary threat).  This occurred because we moved from a strategy of coercion to a strategy of persuasion.  Rather than simply employ military power to eliminate the threat posed by Al Qaeda we now seek to persuade a populace, including the Taliban, to do as we wish.  In this respect, we have forgotten Clausewitz, who is viewed as the backbone of western military thinking.  Clausewitz says that we should “pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination.”  We have strayed from this thinking in Afghanistan by simultaneously trying to defeat an enemy and build a nation (notice I say build rather than rebuild, if you’ve been here you’ll know why).  Rather than doggedly pursue the objective of eliminating the threat posed by Al Qaeda, we’ve become bogged down in an effort to get Afghans to like us (through a method known as COIN, or counterinsurgency).  We Americans seem to have some form of psychosis wherein we crave approval, even from those we fight or who, if we truly admit it, don’t really matter.  This is why we’ve spent so much money here in a wasted effort.

This psychosis has permeated our method of warfare to the extent that we have forgotten another Clausewitz lesson: “war therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.”  Thus, war is not about buying favor, it is about violence.  Although some readers may feel discomfort at this notion, it has been true since man first picked up a club to defend his procurement of the carcass of some dead animal.  When all other means fail, man must commit acts of violence to compel another to do his bidding.  Like it or not, it is the nature of man.  This violence entails the imposition of death and destruction.  The enemy must be put to the sword; his means of livelihood must be extinguished; he must, in the words of William Tecumseh Sherman, be made to “howl” for war on the enemy must be made “as severe as possible, and show no symptoms of tiring till the [enemy] begs for mercy.”

In today’s instant media world, politicians shirk at the concept of war as it is and seek to develop a more genteel method of waging war.  Despite the lessons of history, they strive for bloodless war.  This is an imaginative concept that resides in the realm of utopianism.  Indeed, this fallacy presents not an opportunity for success against an enemy, but failure.  Consider the massive amount of money spent delivering modernity to Afghanistan.  We have built dams, constructed various buildings, and installed an electrical power grid in a country in which much of the population resides in the 17^th century vis-à-vis technology and mindset.  Thus, we’ve generated expectations of modernity in a society that had no previous expectations of it in a war in which the enemy can expend little energy in thwarting our efforts at meeting those expectations.  Moreover, by doing so, we’ve added another dimension in the fight for legitimacy (the Holy Grail of a counterinsurgency effort).  Typically, a counterinsurgency seeks to establish legitimacy through effective governance.  In trying to buy loyalty through the provision of modernity, the ability to supply that modernity becomes a subcomponent of legitimacy – fail to provide it and you are deemed illegitimate.  Thus, having determined to buy legitimacy, we lose not by being defeated militarily or by failing to establish governance, but by failing to keep the lights on.

In seeking to refine warfare, counterinsurgency, as employed today, generates the conditions necessary to defeat it.  It creates a vicious circle wherein the enemy is hunted down (killing civilians in the process), surviving civilians are mollified with development projects at huge expense, while the enemy simply attacks those projects to demonstrate the illegitimacy of the counterinsurgent.  Moreover, the byzantine process of engaging in development exacerbates the situation since repairs in combat areas are delayed for too long to have an immediate impact, assuming that they could have a desired impact.  Thus, by the time a project is begun in an effort to “win over” the local population that has been disrupted by the fighting, they’ve already chosen the other side or committed to a policy of ambivalence in the absence of a clear winner. 

Some may argue that COIN can indeed work if given enough time.  This argument is often heard from chicken-hawk politicians whose war zone tours consist of the social circuit in Kabul, or perhaps a heavily guarded foray to a forward operating base for an hour or so.  They, and like-minded individuals, often point to the British counterinsurgency operation in Malaysia as support, conveniently forgetting the forced relocation of civilians that permitted success there.  False comparison aside, however, this argument appears to have merit.  Almost anything, if given enough time, has the potential for success.  This argument, however, is specious and misses the point.  Those making this argument view the end state from a COIN perspective rather than a threat perspective.  They argue that we can convert the populace to our side if given enough time and money.  But the threat did not emanate from the Afghan population.  It came from Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda is defeated.  Just this morning, on a cable news show, terrorism expert Peter Bergen said that Al Qaeda’s last significant attack was the London attack on 7 July 2007.   Shortly after taking office, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said that Al Qaeda’s key leadership had been reduced to less than two-dozen people, most of whom are no longer in Afghanistan.  Yet we remain.

Why is it that we are still here when the entity that posed the threat has been defeated and scattered?  Some say inertia, others claim some conspiracy between the military, hawkish politicians, and defense contractors.  The real reason though has to do with the initial mistake made by the Bush Administration.  By declaring war on terrorism, we lost sight of the fact that war simply entails using violence to inflict such a degree of pain upon the enemy that he determines that the end he sought is not worth the pain being inflicted.  In other words, violence is used to alter his cost-benefit analysis; it becomes worth more to him to stop the pain than to do that which you do not want him to do.  But if we pull out of Afghanistan, might Al Qaeda reconstitute and pose a threat again?  Sure, this is always a possibility.  We may miscalculate the degree of pain needed.  When that occurs, however, more pain can be inflicted.  It is much cheaper, in both blood and treasure, to revisit the situation as needed than to remain mired in an effort that is so costly and has so little chance of ultimate success.  Our strategy in any war should be to inflict as much pain as possible on the enemy.  Instead, we’ve pursued a strategy of persuasion and we’re the only one feeling the pain. 

We would do well to recall Clausewitz's warning on this topic:  "We are not interested in generals who win victories without bloodshed.  The fact that slaughter is a horrifying spectacle must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity.  Sooner or later someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off our arms."