Posted on July 27, 2010 - by Venik

The Biggest Secret

While the US Army is revving up its investigation of Bradley Manning, those of us with a gift for diagonal reading are sure to be very busy for the next couple of weeks. However, I think it is safe to say that the Afghan war’s two biggest “secrets” have been sufficiently exposed. And they are (drum roll and fanfares): the US military is killing too many unarmed civilians and Pakistan is not a friend of Washington. I feel like a great weight has been lifted off my shoulders – keeping such secrets is absolutely unbearable.

Winning hearts and minds of Afghanistan’s peaceful residents does not necessarily require having those parts of the body probed with bullets and shrapnel on an individual basis. Since English is a second language to so many American soldiers, perhaps something just got lost in translation. Quite possibly all the Army needs to do is to hold a quick five-minute mission briefing just to explain that “winning hearts and minds” does not refer to war trophies. Or, maybe, the Army should further elaborate to its staff the familiar “ready, aim, fire” adage with an emphasis on the second step. Think about this: we can win this whole war with one well-worded memo.

As far as I can remember, not once in the entire recorded history of warfare did any military commander ever say or was ever suspected of saying that he had sufficient resources at his disposal. Regardless of where a war is fought and who is doing the fighting, according to their respective commanders, all warring sides are critically undermanned, ill-trained, and poorly equipped. It is entirely conceivable (and, as a matter of fact, has been known to happen) that a general may complain about the lack of helicopters with advanced thermal vision equipment, even when the chief threat to the general’s aviation assets comes primarily from several donkey-mounted machine guns.

The British have tried to make Afghanistan a loyal part of the Empire; the Soviets spared no effort or air-fuel explosives attempting to turn the country into an idyllic Communist oasis; and Americans are throwing billions of dollars into the hot Afghani wind (mostly in the form of GPS-guided gliding bombs) hoping to style Afghanistan’s cratered political landscape into a democratic banana republic. Perhaps the problem with all these robust efforts is not shortage of resources or determination, but excess of optimism. Maybe the solution to all our Afghani problems is not to do more but to wish for less. We just need to lower our expectations.

A pow wow of the great chiefs in Washington may be in order to decide on the bare minimum of accomplishments that would allow the US and its reluctant NATO allies to get the hell out of Afghanistan and stop embarrassing themselves. If they want, they can even do what the Soviets did in 1989 and have a little victory parade with medals all around, while the heavy bombers covered their exit. Unfortunately, there is a deeply held belief among many senior military commanders – be they Russian or American – that the best way to get out of quicksand is to stomp around angrily.

I have no particular talent for sports (although I do play ping-pong rather well); I like photography, but you won’t see my photos on the cover of National Geographic any time soon; I play piano and even write music, but I am not exactly Rachmaninov.  Ability to read fast is one of my more marketable skills. In the past couple of days, when the WikiLeaks servers were not completely hosed, I’ve been reading until my eyes started moving in opposing directions. One inescapable conclusion is that, while the US military has an obvious edge in terms of manpower and advanced weaponry, resourcefulness and the ability to improvise are clearly on the side of the enemy. Taliban commanders have substantially more relevant combat experience than most of their American counterparts. And experience is hard to beat.

The US is the proverbial bull in Afghanistan’s social and political china shop. From Pakistan’s perspective, Taliban is not a fairytale from the Thousand and One Nights, but a formidable and aggressive neighbor. Dealings with the US and Taliban have once brought Pakistan to the brink of extinction – an error in judgment Islamabad is not willing to repeat. A special kind of fatheadedness is required to imagine Pakistan as a US ally in this war. The realities of Pakistan’s existence are such that a dedicated alliance with either warring party would be like a hangman’s noose. Naturally, the US reciprocates by violating Pakistan’s sovereignty almost on a daily basis without as much as an email to explain its reasons. Pakistan does not wish for the US to lose in Afghanistan, nor does Pakistan desire to see the US win. It just wants the US to carry on. This is one objective Pakistan and Russia have in common.

Take the fact of Taliban’s access to advanced heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles, for example. Many naturally assume that the mujaheddins are still using the old Stinger missiles generously supplied by the US in the 1980s. However, the Stingers were equipped with IFF electronics to prevent them from locking onto friendly targets, be they CIA spy planes or Pakistani F-16s. Taliban certainly has the money to buy the expertise needed to circumvent this safety feature. But it is much more likely that buying new, more advanced SAMs without any built-in dislike for American-made aircraft is a more cost-effective solution. Additionally, Stingers were designed not to target “friendly” heat signatures and they used finicky chemical power cells known for their sensitivity to the elements and lack of proper maintenance. Oh how I would like to know exactly what SAMs Taliban uses so effectively against US aircraft. Why couldn’t WikiLeaks publish some classified documents from that country?

This war is not the Battle of Britain and it will not be won in the sky. The biggest problems faced by the US military in Afghanistan are those of logistics and coordination. In comparison, the Soviets had it easy: they had a border with Afghanistan. If they needed, say, more APCs, they could just drive. Americans have to fly everything in all the way from Delaware. That must be quite a fuel bill. Coordination is another matter altogether. NATO’s fighting style is war by committee and the US military likes to do things its own way. As a result, the US is bombing NATO allies and NATO is bombing the Americans. And then both bomb civilians, giving Taliban much needed respite. A strange problem indeed for an alliance so proud of its hi-tech communication capabilities.

The problem at the core of this entire campaign is that of cash flow.  Aside from its thriving heroine trade, Taliban has no significant internal sources of income. The generous inflow of cash comes from Taliban’s anonymous benefactors primarily from America’s Middle Eastern “allies”. The same sources provide funding to the Iraqi insurgents. The US is unable to interfere on any significant scale, as doing so will damage its own economic interests, especially since drilling for oil in its own backyard is not working out too well for the US. My point here is that neither warring side is likely to run out of money any time soon. The only way this war would ever end, is if one of the combatants left the country. Since most Taliban fighters are native Afghans and have nowhere else to go, this would have to be the US. I am hopeful that the war would finally come to an end a couple of years after Osama dies of old age.  But I am an optimist.

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