bout de papier, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2011) — Fall/Winter 2011 // Automne/Hiver 2011, pp. 39–41
THE LONGEST WAR: THE
ENDURING CONFLICT BETWEEN
AMERICA AND AL-QAEDA, by Peter
L. Bergen, Free Press, New York, 2011,
473 pp., $32.00; THE WRONG WAR:
GRIT, STRATEGY, AND THE WAY
OUT OF AFGHANISTAN, by Bing
West, Random House, New York, 2011,
Without a doubt future historians will label the first decade of the 21st millennium as one of war and violence, global in its scope and effect. The 2001 attacks in New York and northern Virginia, and the sadly flawed response both by the Americans and their world-wide supporters, will be added to the list of historical “follies” that were documented so well by Barbara Tuchman some years ago.
There is no indication that the two authors, Bing West and Peter Bergen, collaborated or knew of the other’s work as they wrote their books. It is one of those serendipitous and fortuitous events that they were published within weeks of each other. Although different in intent, The Wrong War and The Longest War deal with the same set of issues. The war in Afghanistan and the war with Al-Qaeda are part of the same tapestry and, as both books demonstrate, the failure of one war has meant the failure of the other.
It has now been ten years since those searing pictures of aircraft slamming into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York and the disappearance of one side of the Pentagon in fire, smoke, injury and death. The subsequent collapse of both towers will stand for all time as iconic depictions of the birth of the new millennium.
The crash of the fourth aircraft in the fields of central Pennsylvania was only marginally less searing in comparison with the immediacy of the other events. The decision by some of the passengers on the fourth aircraft to attack the hijackers, knowing that sure death would follow, in some ways presaged subsequent American policies. As both of these books demonstrate, those policies prolonged the tragedy, saw the deaths of tens of thousands (only a few of which could be directly associated with the 9/11 tragedy), and cost trillions of dollars. Today, with no success in sight, those policies continue to drain American resources — ethically, spiritually and financially — to the point where the firmament of the “city upon a hill” is in danger of sliding into irrelevancy.
These are American-centric books. Canada and other allies of the Americans in both of these wars are not included, even incidentally. While allies have paid significantly in lives and money for their involvement, central to both is the knowledge that the United States sets the stage, directs all actors, and will decide when these wars come to an end and on what terms. Allies are bit players and are expected to play roles until such time as Washington concludes that continuing the wars will not further American aims either domestic or foreign. These books demonstrate that there are times when it is wiser and, certainly less costly, to stay out of American adventures as we did in 2003 in Iraq.
Peter Bergen is an experienced print and television journalist. He has long been on the terrorism trail and was one of the first western journalists to interview Osama bin Laden back in 1997. Early in his narrative Bergen makes the central point of his book: not only were the policies of the Americans wrong in the aftermath of 9/11, we have been lucky that Al-Qaeda has been equally ham-fisted. Its efforts to provoke regime change in the Middle East, to get western troops and influence out of the region, and the expectation that attacks on the United States (the “far enemy”) will cause US-backed Arab regimes (the “near enemy”) to crumble, have been an abject failure. While both books were written before the current turmoil in the region, it is safe to say that the latter have little to do with the exhortations of Osama bin Laden, nor do we know where this struggle for the heart and soul of the Middle East will lead in coming years. The only thing certain is that justice, civility, and neighbourly friendliness will not be its main features.
Bergen details bin Laden’s belief that the United States was a “paper tiger” (based on American decisions to withdraw from Lebanon in 1983, Somalia a decade later, and the unwillingness to “stay the course” in Vietnam even earlier). As with acolytes everywhere, there were those around bin Laden who confirmed “his delusions.” Even the collapse of the Soviet Union and its defeat in Afghanistan fed into bin Laden’s belief that the United States, like the former Soviet Union, was weak and ripe for attack. In his cosmology, an attack would remove the one prop ensuring the survival of his “near enemies” in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia. Bergen tracks the fact that bin Laden had his detractors in the movement who understood the folly of a large scale attack on the US. Some thought that it would provide the motivation for a strong American response while others saw it as undermining the comfortable and safe relationship with Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. None foresaw the swiftness of the American response with its invasion of Afghanistan within a month of the airplane attacks in the United States.
Bergen writes that bin Laden was able to keep his planning for the 9/11 attacks secret through subterfuge. Partly on the basis of religion, bin Laden also was able to convince Mullah Omar, who styled himself as “Commander of the Faithful’, to provide protection. Even after the 9/11 attack, when asked about turning bin Laden over to the Americans, Mullah Omar was compelled to say in “cosmic” terms, “we cannot do that. If we did, it means we are not Muslims; that Islam is finished’. As well, bin Laden and his followers were able to give Mullah Omar the one person who stood in the way of the Taliban’s complete dominance over Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the coalition of anti-Taliban groups known as the Northern Alliance. Two days before the 9/11 attacks, Al-Qaeda successfully killed Massoud. Ironically, the assassination provided the Americans with firm allies in the north once it was decided in early October 2001 to invade Afghanistan and begin the process of defeating the Taliban and driving Al-Qaeda into hiding in Pakistan.
Bergen also approvingly quotes Napoleon’s advice “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”, noting that in the subsequent decade the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and the Americans were guilty of ignoring such advice. For the Americans there were two major blunders. The first was its inability or unwillingness to provide sufficient force to capture bin Laden in the Tora Bora area of eastern Afghanistan. In November-December 2001, bin Laden and many of his supporters had narrowly escaped from Kabul and were only a few days and even hours ahead of American troops.
The American military commander General Tommy Franks subsequently explained his refusal to send in more troops when there was good evidence that bin Laden was in the region:
“My decision not to add American troops to the Tora Bora region was influenced…by several factors: The comparative light footprint of coalition troops in theatre, and the fact that these troops were committed to operations ongoing across Afghanistan; the amount of time it would take to deploy additional troops would likely create a ‘tactical pause’ which would run the risk of losing the momentum our forces were enjoying across Afghanistan [and] uncertainty as to whether bin Laden was in fact in Tora Bora. Intelligence suggested that he was, but conflicting intelligence also reported that he was in Kashmir… NW of Kandahar [and] at a stronghold on the Iranian border.”
However appropriate in military terms General Frank’s decision might have been, it set the stage for the failure to achieve the major goal for the war in Afghanistan — to decapitate Al-Qaeda and eliminate it as the inspirational force for terrorism in many parts of the world. Bergen disagrees with General Frank, detailing the troops that were available to quickly deploy into the Tora Bora region. He highlights this as one of the earliest blunders of the fight against terrorism and in the war with the Taliban. Dejectedly, Bergen notes that at the end there were “probably more journalists at Tora Bora than there were Western soldiers.”
The second blunder, only four months later, was the decision to take the American “eye” off Al-Qaeda (and the war in Afghanistan) and begin preparations for the invasion of Iraq. Bergen records that in late November 2001 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told General Franks that President Bush “wants us to look for options in Iraq.” He notes (and others have confirmed) that this detracted enormously and tragically from fighting the war in Afghanistan. Western euphoria following the early successes in Afghanistan, despite the escape of bin Laden, was overwhelming and misplaced — especially in Washington as subsequent events bore out. While it took two plus years for the Taliban to rejuvenate it now did so in an environment where there were few if any constraints.
Half defeated enemies are the worse kind, as the world has come to know. When bin Laden retreated into the wilds of tribal Pakistan he was only 44 years old, and the nature of his organization and his appeal throughout the world actually became stronger after his escape from Tora Bora. As the war in Afghanistan and the war against terrorism live on, original objectives disappear and are replaced by the need for exit strategies. Today the Americans have come to realize once again that wars are easy to start but satisfactory conclusions are increasingly elusive when 50 dollars of explosive can decimate a million dollar machine and maim lives. Moreover, we now realize that there may be more danger to the welfare of your citizens from your own bankers than from religious fanatics in a distant corner of the world!
Bergen’s book is a worthy addendum to Lawrence Wright’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 911. He picks up and finishes the story that Wright so magnificently wrote of the beginnings of our modern age of terrorism (largely associated with the Middle East). Bergen writes with knowledge and understanding of the past decade’s war against terrorism and is not shy in identifying the policy faults of the American government. Al-Qaeda has been successful thanks to the attraction of its message in many parts of the world. While it has been severely weakened in the past decade and by bin Laden’s death, its “franchises” in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa — along with “home grown” terrorists in many western countries — means that this war will remain a prominent and serious feature of our world. Bergen concludes: “Bin Laden’s ideas have circulated widely and will continue to attract adherents for years to come. Arresting people is generally a relatively simple matter. Arresting ideas is another thing entirely…The Longest War continues.”
Bing West is a rare writer. He writes about war and insurgencies based on extensive military (Marine) experience both on the ground and from within the Pentagon; he was an Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Reagan years. The Wrong War reflects his numerous visits to Afghanistan where he was embedded with military units in the middle of some of the fiercest fighting American troops have experienced. His reflections on the Afghan war are those of the grunts on the ground (West has been called “the grunt’s Homer”) but his conclusions are those of a man who has thought deeply about war in our age and especially when the objectives are more than war itself can deliver.
Central to West’s conclusions is the failure of American strategy in Afghanistan from early days to the present. As Peter Bergen demonstrated, the failure to capture Osama bin Laden and the inability to do anything to prevent the rebuilding of the Taliban in tribal Pakistan were such foreboding events that the military mission in Afghanistan was effectively doomed. The failure of American strategy became most apparent after 2005 when the Taliban had reorganized making it all but impossible to establish an Afghan government in Kabul whose writ ran further than its suburbs.
West was embedded with American troops in two of the “most violent provinces — Konar in the northeast, and Helmand in the south…where more coalition troops were killed…than anywhere else.” Central to the book’s success is the easy manner in which West tracks American strategy over the ten years of war, especially the on again-off again idea that counterinsurgency (COIN) was central to victory. There were six American commanders between 2002 and 2009 who, in West’s view, “followed no single strategy.” Early on, the “emphasis was upon chasing down Al-Qaeda fighters” followed by two years of counterinsurgency with emphasis on convincing “village elders to support the occasional forays of Afghan officials into the countryside.” When this failed there were vain efforts urging “Karzai to adopt reforms rather than assigning provincial posts based on tribal and crony patronage.” The Taliban came back with a vengeance in 2006 and western troops “shifted back to raids and gunfights” as the Taliban “assumed shadow control because they hadn’t been defeated in 2001.”
By 2008 the American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was worried enough to say publicly that “I’m not convinced we’re winning in Afghanistan. [am convinced we can. That is why I…am looking at a new, more comprehensive strategy for the region.” West comments, “Seven years of failure before looking at a new strategy was an indictment of military as well as political leadership. By the time Bush left office, the Taliban resurgence had spread widely.”
President Obama, while clear-headed on the war in Iraq, was less so on Afghanistan from the beginning. As others have written (see Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars), Obama succumbed to the standard advice of his military advisers who saw “more boots on the ground” as the road to success in Afghanistan. To disguise that this was only milk in new bottles, there were numerous reports that the additional troops would be able to focus on counterinsurgency, conveniently forgetting that it had been tried a few years earlier.
West examines the application of counterinsurgency ideas in Afghanistan. He compares it to “the ‘old’ counterinsurgency theory” used in the Philippines, Malaya, Algeria and Vietnam stressing that in those countries military activities were “focused against the enemy.” However, the ‘new’ counterinsurgency, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, “stressed services and protection to the people, while downgrading killing or capturing the enemy.” West emphasises that “beating the Taliban” was no longer part of the American lexicon. Secretary of Defense Gates, in a speech at the National Defense University in 2006, declared that, “Where possible, kinetic [force] operations should be subordinate to measures to promote better governance, economic programs to spur development, and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented.” In the same year a new COIN manual was released (supervised by General David Petraeus). It stressed that “revolutionary war was 80 percent political and 20 percent military. Political factors have primacy in COIN.” The turnabout could not be more dramatic: in the previous manual (written in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam) the strategy was to “Concentrate on destruction or neutralization of the enemy force, not on terrain.”
The war in Afghanistan has become a lesson on how to negotiate out of a bad situation with little expectation that it can become better. Perhaps it was to be expected: in 2009 Secretary Gates said that “If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of central Asian ‘Valhalla’ over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money.” That same year
President Obama is quoted as saying that Afghanistan would not be a “Jeffersonian democracy.” Hence, once it became clear that the central concept of counterinsurgency to “clear, hold and build” in the contested areas would prove unachievable over any reasonable period (many military personnel sarcastically described their activities as “mowing grass’), the American military added a fourth element to its counterinsurgency strategy. They called it “transition”.
The new element appears to be the initial step in disengagement and negotiation. It seems rooted in comments made by Vice President Joe Biden: “the president has made something exquisitely clear to each of the generals: He said, ‘Do not occupy any portion of that country that you are not confident within 18 months you’re going to be able to turn over to the Afghans.’” Transitions have been announced in three provinces where the insurgency has had little impact. It suggests that the American timetable in Afghanistan is little influenced by Afghans but rather is dictated by the need to start withdrawing as the presidential election approaches.
West’s descriptions of the problems with the war in Afghanistan are nuanced, based on experience and knowledge that only a thoughtful soldier would have. Unfortunately, his prescriptions are flawed by those same factors. He sees the answer as staying in Afghanistan with fewer conventional forces by building “an adviser task force.” He suggests that the American military should hand off “nation building” to the State Department and de-emphasize population protection. West, ever the warrior, sees current policy as enfeebling “our warrior ethos and has not led to victory.” As others have found over the years that a “warrior ethos” has little to do with winning wars in complex places where foreigners are given a wary eye. Despite the national pain that will follow, the Americans now need another “Vietnam” moment when disengagement and withdrawal is more honourable than soldiering on in a place where, as Kipling wrote over a hundred years ago, “the arithmetic of the frontier” is insurmountable.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2011) — Fall/Winter 2011 // Automne/Hiver 2011, pp. 39–41. Read the rest of this issue →
