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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SirRealist who wrote (5139)	10/15/2001 1:42:50 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi SirRealist; Re the article by Evan Thomas and John Barry: Re: "American Special Forces may indeed stage a commando raid inside Afghanistan as early as this week, NEWSWEEK has learned. It would, however, likely be limited to gathering intelligence, not trying to kill or capture bin Laden. To military minds, hunting guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan, a country that has long swallowed armies whole, is a chancy proposition. America’s Special Forces are superbly equipped and trained, but the mountains of Central Asia are an easy place to get lost. The history of military manhunts is not encouraging: in 1916, Gen. John (Black Jack) Pershing took 6,000 U.S. soldiers into Mexico to track down an outlaw named Pancho Villa. The Americans returned empty-handed 10 months later; they succeeded only in making Villa a Mexican national hero." Here's an interesting thought on Pancho Villa, as it applies to the objective of keeping America safe: "The Punitive Expedition was now considered to be a failure since they never caught Villa. However, it could also be considered a success if the aim was to keep Villa away from the U.S. border and not allow him to invade America again." sp.utexas.edu The end result was that Pancho wasn't caught, but neither was the U.S. bothered by him again, and he was assasinated 7 years later. Now we all know that the war on terror is a multi-year, maybe even multi-decade thing. So whether we get bin Laden this year or in 2008 doesn't matter that much. And there are some significant differences between bin Laden and Pancho Villa, besides the great marketing opportunity that the name Pancho Villa later provided to Mexican restaurants throughout the SouthWest US: (1) Pancho Villa was a Mexican native, bin Laden is an Arab operating in a non Arab nation. (2) Pancho Villa seemed to get a lot more support from the locals, without the need for guns. (3) The locals never got to experience a totalitarian Fundamentalist regime under Pancho Villa. (4) The technology for hiding in the desert hasn't changed much in 100 years, but the technology for finding people hiding in the desert has improved immensely. (5) The United States has the removal of the Taliban government as its (real) objective. That alone will eventually get bin Laden. [Humans are famous for turning in deposed rulers. When the man on the horse is unable to protect his people from the outlanders many of his people are disillusioned and are willing to turn him in. The other example they gave is similarly flawed: Re: "More recently, American Special Forces tried to snatch Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid in a lightning raid in Mogadishu in 1993. The Rangers and Delta Force failed at the cost of 73 wounded and 18 dead (with one American corpse dragged through the streets)." Again this is an example where it was not the objective of the United States to topple the government. And there are a lot of other differences. For one thing, the American people are resigned to seeing their soldiers killed, but they want action anyway. Another difference between this and the Sudan is that despite all the crap given out by the government, I doubt that a very high percent of the population really cares about how many Afghanistani civilians we "collateralize". In fact, it would be difficult to think of something a militarily reasonable action you could do to Afghanistan that would leave fewer people alive 10 years from now than the simple (and vicious) act of leaving them to stew in their own juices. Every Afghanistani must personally know of hundreds of people killed in fighting over the past 30 years, anything we do is going to be negligible. Let's put this in perspective: ARMED CONFLICTS REPORT 2000 Project Ploughshares, November 2000 Afghanistan 1978 - 2000 ... Number of Deaths: Total: As many as one-and-a-half million people, two-thirds of them civilian, have died since 1978. Some 400,000 Afghans have been killed or wounded by landmines alone, up to half of whom were women and children. ... ploughshares.ca The bloodiest wars are the ones that go on for long times between equally matched opponents. There's nothing like the application of overwhelming force (or complete peace) to reduce total fatalities in war. That's why I advocate a foreign policy of either war or peace, with less stuff going on like what we do to Iraq. -- Carl