Bilow on the Art of War
Message 16509404
To:Carolyn who started this subject From: Bilow Top of Form 1 Tuesday, Oct 16, 2001 8:07 AM View Replies (3) | Respond to of 6988 Bottom of Form 1
Hi all; Taliban loses state in brawl over lunch bill:
Lunch bill brawl that turned civil war
Ian Traynor, Guardian Unlimited, October 16, 2001
It was around four in the afternoon one sunny day last month when a brawl in a bazaar escalated out of control in a small town in central Afghanistan. When the dust settled and the Kalashnikovs fell silent two hours later, two Taliban corpses lay on the street, as well as the bodies of two local fighters. Two more charred Taliban bodies sat incinerated inside their Japanese pick-up vans.
But the cost of the gun battle to the Taliban extended well beyond their four dead. The impact of the two-hour shootout is still resonating across Afghanistan. The Taleh-Barfak teahouse brawl may have changed the course of the seven-year civil war.
The Taliban loyalists were driven out of town, and 30 regional field commanders defected to the enemy, running down the white flag of the Taliban and hoisting the green, white and black of the opposition Northern Alliance forces.
...
guardian.co.uk
I had the sudden realization, while reading this article, that the Afghanis really don't fight in the Western way, but instead in a more ancient and natural way.
There are four basic human responses to the threat of an enemy. (1) Threaten reprisal, make noise, demonstrate strength, etc.; (2) Run away; (3) Surrender, swear allegiance; (4) Fight. The vast majority of human conflict is ended with the first three techniques, the last is avoided. And when it does come to fighting, the fighting is done in such a way that the odds of anyone actually getting seriously hurt is relatively low. As long as your opponent plays by the same rules, this sort of fighting is sufficient. But it fails miserably against professional armies.
Traditional war is more about display, intimidation and honor, while modern war is more about efficiently breaking things and killing people.
The only way that the Afghans have been able to carry on a civil war for 23 years without killing every man in the country is by arranging for the fighting to be largely non fatal. That is, most of the fighting is symbolic only. The two sides sit in trenches and fire artillery at each other, like on the India / Pakistan border. This is posturing, it is not real fighting, at least not in the way that the western nations fight. When the Western nations go at it the soldiers kill each other so efficiently that it simply isn't possible to go on fighting for more than a few years. The West has to wait 30 years between these short wars so that they can grow another crop of soldiers.
One difference is that Western armies don't (usually) kill their prisoners, but they also tend to try to kill or capture as many of the enemy as possible when they have an advantage. As an example, when Iraq's Republican Guard was in disarray retreating from Kuwait, the U.S. Army killed as many of the retreating soldiers as they could, until the politicians called it off. This action, (taking advantage of a victory by killing or capturing as many of the retreating enemy as possible), sounds pretty bad to civilians, but it is a very successful and established military doctrine in the West since Greek Hoplites fought off the Persians. This is basic military theory on how you win wars.
It's not simply the fact that this is a civil war rather than a war between two states. The U.S. used the Western techniques of war in its own Civil war. Families were split between the North and the South with brothers and cousins enlisting on opposite sides. But it was unheard of for soldiers to transfer allegiance once that allegiance was chosen.
This makes it more clear to me what is going on in Afghanistan. The Pentagon has suggested that the Afghans didn't seem to learn anything from the Iraq conflict. (That is, they didn't realize that they would have to dig very deep, and use lots of decoys to keep equipment intact.) This is consistent with an unprofessional army.
The Taliban took over military units by enlisting the commanders. Any Western army would have disarmed them, and if they absolutely had to have the manpower they would disperse the individual soldiers to new units far from their home town. Instead the Taliban left large chunks of their forces subject to easy defection.
Jane's briefing on Afghanistan's military said that the Taliban was the most professional army in the country, and that is how they were able to capture most of the country. In addition, the Pentagon said that they were going to target the most professional part of the Taliban, something called "Brigade 55". This is similar to how the Republican Guard was targeted in Iraq.
-- Carl |
