by John Sherry on Huffington Post
Circa 2000: You've joined one of the groups that align with the network calling itself Al Qaeda. You're incensed over many past wrongs, what you perceive as injustices and atrocities going back a long time, but the most immediate, galling, and unacceptable indignity has been the lingering presence of Western military powers in Muslim lands, particularly the Middle East (to use that colonial British term). You'd like to rid these lands of Western influences, but that really means challenging U.S. domination in the region, along with their allies and surrogates. In your wildest geo-strategic fantasy, you'd love to humiliate, if not destroy the United States.
But there's a big problem with that ambitious goal: Al Qaeda has no standing army. You have no tanks. No jet fighters. No submarines. No ICBMs. You have neither the manpower nor the material with which to fight the United States on military terms, and you certainly have no way to subdue the American population were you somehow, miraculously, to prevail in a conventional battlefield showdown.
There's no way you can accomplish your goals in the short term -- thus you have to calibrate your strategy for the long haul. You need to prepare for warfare spanning not just several years, but rather a protracted, potentially intergenerational struggle that could last decades or even centuries. Bleed the enemy to death through a thousand cuts over time rather than one big blow. It worked with the Soviet Union. Get them bogged down in Afghanistan, until they were brought to their knees. That former superpower, by the way, is no more. Remember that your advantage is a potentially limitless supply of jihadist recruits willing to commit the ultimate personal sacrifice via suicide. But to take full advantage of that comparative advantage, you can't fight them "over there"; you need to fight them "over here."
There's a little more ...
The jingoistic, macho, chest-thumping, right wing-nut Neocons who trumpet "victory at any cost" don't bother to read history.
Historically, most battles and wars have been lost by underestimating the enemy. Hitler underestimated the Soviet Union and lost. Japan underestimated the United States during the Second World War and lost. The Soviet union underestimated the mujahadin in Afghanistan and had their a$$es handed to them. Egypt, Syria and Jordan underestimated Israel when they attacked from three directions during the Yom Kippur War and got clobbered. The United States underestimated the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong and was forced to retreat.
It's not superior technology that wins wars. If that were the case, we'd probably be speaking German. Hitler had better tanks, better airplanes, better trained soldiers, developed the jet fighter sooner, and excelled in the development of the rocket as a weapon of war but the technology didn't save him or the Thousand Year Reich.
The single most decisive factor in winning wars is knowing the enemy. By knowing the enemy, one can develop strategies that play to the enemies weaknesses and smaller forces can thereby use those weaknesses as leverage against larger forces.
The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army lost every major battle during the Vietnam War, yet, in the end, they prevailed.
Right wing-nut Neocons try to frame the debate by saying those who oppose "staying the course" hate America and want America to loose. That's not the case by a long shot. It's a mis-direction. Most of those who oppose the "surge strategy" recognize that it is based on brute force and not on a knowledge of the enemy, his strengths and weaknesses, the "lay of the land", and the historical context. If the "surge strategy" is a strategy at all, it's a "
Tar Baby" Strategy; a strategy that results in worsening the situation the more one struggles against it.
To say that those who oppose the current approach to fighting terrorism either don't understand the threat or want to loose to terrorism is absurd in the extreme. Those who oppose the manner in which the war on terrorism is being conducted recognize that to continue doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results is a good definition of insanity.
Knowing the enemy is key and the United States bungled into this war in Iraq based on faulty assumptions.
It assumed there was a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam. There wasn't. Al Qaeda is a religious movement bent on establishing a Pan Arabic state based on Islamic law and is opposed to ANY secular government in the Middle East. Saddam was a meglamaniacal, secular despot with no interest sharing power with anyone and saw the accumulation of power in the hands by anyone in Iraq other than himself as a threat. Assuming there was a connection between two natural enemies was a mistake and a stunning case of not knowing the enemy.
It was assumed that Islam was a monolith; that all Muslims were the same. We are rapidly learning that's not the case. There are Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims and they hate each other to death, literally. Then there are the Kurds who, though they are predominantly Sunni, are a different ethnic group who have their own culture and no love for the desert Sunni. Our so called planners were unaware of the depth of the divides between these groups and that's another case of not knowing the enemy.
Al Qaeda, on the other hand, is very much aware of the divisions between these groups and is using the divisions to lubricate what we are calling "sectarian" infighting to destabilize the region.
Denying that we are caught in the middle of a multi-party civil war is silly. Pretending that we can somehow resolve thousand year old animosities and unite thousand year old enemies with a couple purple thumbs is absurd. Failure to recognize and learn from our mistakes (those above and a myriad of others) is counter productive and ensures defeat ... not unlike the soviets experienced at the hands of the mujahadin over the course of ten years in Afghanistan.
But, if you don't read history, how would you know?
As a side note, strategy is a wonderful thing and you can't win much of anything without one. Sun Tzu's "
The Art of War" is a classic written some 2,400 years ago. It's easy to read and pretty straight forward. It's not overly long or unintelligibly complicated. However, it does take some focused thought and study to understand it.
After 2,400 years it is still recognized as the single most comprehensive and authoritative treaties on strategy ... unrivaled in scope and insight. Incidentally, it talks a lot about how a small army can trash a large army.
