Doing the Opposite of What Works

What happened to General Petraeus on his way to the war zone? From having written a textbook on the importance of negotiation over battle, from writing a textbook on the diversion of our energies into diplomacy in order to defeat an insurgency, this person has been turned into yet another administration sockpuppet.

The actual truth of the misguided nature of our war keeps leaking out through the mindlessness.

On a highway north of Kabul last month, an American soldier aimed a machine gun at my car from the turret of his armored Humvee. In the split second for which our eyes locked, I had a revelation: To a man with a weapon, everything looks like a threat.

I had served as an infantry officer in Afghanistan in 2001-02 and in Iraq in 2003, but this was my first time on the other end of an American machine gun. It's not something I'll forget. It's not the sort of thing ordinary Afghans forget, either, and it reminded me that heavy-handed military tactics can alienate the people we're trying to help while playing into the hands of the people we're trying to defeat.


Welcome to the paradoxical world of counterinsurgency warfare -- the kind of war you win by not shooting.

The objective in fighting insurgents isn't to kill every enemy fighter -- you simply can't -- but to persuade the population to abandon the insurgents' cause. The laws of these campaigns seem topsy-turvy by conventional military standards: Money is more decisive than bullets; protecting our own forces undermines the U.S. mission; heavy firepower is counterproductive; and winning battles guarantees nothing.

My unnerving encounter on the highway was particularly ironic since I was there at the invitation of the U.S. Army to help teach these very principles at the Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy. The grandly misnamed "academy" is a tiny collection of huts and tents on Kabul's dusty southern outskirts. Since May, motley classes of several dozen Afghan army officers, Afghan policemen, NATO officers, American officers and civilians have been learning and living side by side there for a week at a time.
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On the last afternoon of the course, I asked my students to define victory in Afghanistan. We'd talked about this earlier in the week, and most of their answers had focused on militarily defeating the Taliban or killing Osama bin Laden. Now the Afghan officers took the lead in a spirited discussion with their U.S. and NATO classmates. Finally the group agreed on a unanimous result, which neatly expresses the prize we're striving for: "Victory is achieved when the people of Afghanistan consent to the legitimacy of their government and stop actively and passively supporting the insurgency."

Winning that consent will require doing some difficult and uncomfortable things: de-escalating military force, boosting the capacities of the Karzai government, accelerating reconstruction, getting real with Pakistan. It won't be easy. But the alternative, which I glimpsed while staring down the barrel of that machine gun, is our nation going zero for two in its first wars of the new century.

There you go, winning minds and hearts rears its head again. Not an ugly head, and it's that ugly head that's losing us the war in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Killing people isn't the way to set up a healthy relationship, which is all that is going to make the war 'succeed', in the terminology of the cretin in chief. Sadly, his 'success' concept stands firmly in the way of achieving anything positive. All it can do is keep the battle raging, while we continue to lose the war.

It does keep Carlyle in sales. In the area of bolstering the military industrial complex at the expense of this country and all the countries it is occupying, and its allies, the present war is a 'success'.