Generals’ Anonymous: “Why we Lost” by Lt. Gen. Daniel Bolger

I read a large amount of material for which I have neither the time nor the inclination to write full-length reviews. However, that does not preclude me from sketching brief thoughts on a topic, such as an abstract, synopsis, memorable quote, etc. I will pretentiously refer to these posts as “epitomes” and categorize them as such. This post is the first of that content stream.

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About 15 years ago I read a book by then-Colonel Daniel Bolger titled Death Ground. The subject of the book was America’s infantry forces, their current status and possible futures, circa 1999. It was interesting enough, but it reeked of elitist chest-thumping as Bolger extolled the virtues of active duty soldiers and marines and disparaged the National Guard. The complexities of modern warfare, he argued, had made citizen-soldiers anachronisms.

Fifteen years, two wars and three stars later, Lt. Gen. Daniel Bolger’s latest book, Why We Lost,  open with a very different tone:

I am a United States Army general, and I lost the Global War on Terrorism. It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous; step one is admitting you have a problem. Well, I have a problem. So do my peers. And thanks to our problem, now all of America has a problem, to wit: two lost campaigns and a war gone awry.

The book itself is a narrative history of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, structured around vignettes of particular battles or key events that illustrate the course of the campaign. Bolger commanded a division in Baghdad in 2009-10 and advisory operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but he never had theater-level command. He was senior enough that he was exposed to the inner machinations of both wars, but he has no personal “legacy” to defend with optimistic spin and revisionism. His account in unvarnished and credible. And he pulls no punches:

Our primary failing in the war involved generalship. If you prefer the war-college lexicon, we – guys like me – demonstrated poor strategic and operational leadership. For soldiers, strategy and operational art translate to “the big picture” (your goal) and “the plan” (how you get there). We got both wrong, the latter more than the former. Some might blame the elected and appointed civilian leaders. There’s enough fault to go around, and in this telling, the suits will get their share. But I know better, and so the rest of the generals. We have been trained and educated all our lives on how to fight and win. This was our war to lose, and we did.

Bolger’s central argument is that America failed at the most basic level of strategy by ignoring Sun Tzu’s dictum to “know the enemy, know thyself.” After 9/11, the U.S. had a choice on the nature of the upcoming campaign: a narrowly-defined effort against a small number of targets amenable to kinetic action, or a broad set of maximalist objectives with the ultimate goal of somehow eradicating terrorism. The U.S. selected the latter option, thus committing the U.S. military – trained and equipped for high-intensity regular warfare – into two long-term counterinsurgencies, in fractured Islamic societies, with no clear objectives or understanding of the enemy.

Master Sun put it simply: “Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.” We failed on both counts. I know I sure did. As generals, we did not know our enemy – never pinned him down, never focused our efforts, and got all too good at making new opponents before we’d handled the old ones…

Time after time, despite the fact that I and my fellow generals saw it wasn’t working, we failed to reconsider our basic assumptions. We failed to question our flawed understanding of our foe or ourselves. We simply asked for more time. Given enough months, then years, then decades – always just a few more, please – we trusted that our great men and women would pull it out. In the end, all the courage and skill in the world could not overcome ignorance and arrogance. As a general, I got it wrong. And I did so in the company of my peers.

This criticism of American strategy is very common, but not from the pen of a retired general who took part in the war, making it all the more trenchant.

However, this line of analysis is a thin thread through the entirety of the book, which is overwhelmingly a narrative history. Isolated from the vignettes, Bolger’s explanation of “why we lost” could fit in a lengthy newspaper op-ed. My impression is that he originally intended the book to be a straight history and that the publisher recommended the title to give it pertinence in light of the deteriorating situation in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Bolger obliged by bracketing the work with elaboration on a theme that otherwise exists thinly in the body of the text.

Still, Bolger is a gifted writer, and his book is worth reading as one of the first narrative histories of the “Global War on Terror.”

“Hi. My name’s Daniel, and I have a problem…”

 

 

 

COIN for the Coinless: Portugal in Africa

By the end of next year, America’s 13-year war in Afghanistan will officially come to a close, notwithstanding a smaller residual force that might remain to conduct training and counter-terrorism operations to keep the fledgling Afghan government afloat. Including the war in Iraq, the U.S, has lost about 6,775 personnel killed in action, tens of thousands more seriously wounded, and has incurred financial obligations that will eventually total between $4 and $6 trillion. The strategic payoff of these sacrifices is rapidly evaporating as Iraq slides back toward sectarian warfare and Afghanistan continues to be…well, Afghanistan: a failed state with a central government unable to project power beyond a few urban areas, completely dependent on foreign financial support. With this kind of return on investment, it is not hard to fathom why isolationism is finding flavor among the American people.

Sustained counterinsurgency operations do not have to be this expensive. Between 1961 and 1974 – a length of time similar to America’s presence in Afghanistan – Portugal simultaneously waged colonial wars in three widely separated theaters of operation – Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique – and achieved relative military success in all. At the outset of hostilities, Portugal was clinging to the fringes of Western civilization, having fallen so far from its imperial heyday that it was barely considered a First World state. It’s GDP was $2.5 billion and the military numbered only about 80,000 with a budget of $93 million (for comparison, U.S. GDP was $509 billion). How did such a European backwater sustain three different colonial wars so effectively?

Clausewitz on Vietnam: The Summers Thesis

With all the current debate about U.S. military strategy, the nature of warfare, counterinsurgency, U.S. policy in Afghanistan, etcetera, I am surprised by the near-total lack of attention given to the work of Col. Harry G. Summers. Reading the current discussions, in the blogosphere and elsewhere, it seems as if the man and his writings have been completely forgotten. This is worse than unfortunate because Summers is just as relevant today as he was two decades ago when he was at the height of his influence.

Col. Summers was a Vietnam veteran who spent several years after the war researching the causes of the American failure. The result of this study was published in 1982 as On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, a hugely influential book that helped guide the U.S. Army’s post-Vietnam reconstruction. It has become cliche to to ascribe the American defeat to deficient counterinsurgency techniques, but this explanation is just as shallow as blaming the media or the American people for losing the will to continue the war. As Summers writes in his foreword:

One of the anomalies of the Vietnam War is that until recently most of the literature and almost all the thinking about the war ended with the Tet Offensive of 1968. As a result, the common knowledge was that America had lost a guerrilla war in Asia, a loss caused by failure to appreciate the nuances of counterinsurgency war.

But the truth was that the war continued for seven years after the Tet Offensive, and that latter phase had almost nothing to do with counterinsurgency or guerrilla war. The threat came from the North Vietnamese regular forces in the hinterlands.

The final North Vietnamese blitzkrieg in April 1975 had more to do with the fall of France in 1940 than it did with guerrilla war.

Ventriloquizing Clausewitz

Despite the continued efforts of critics such as John Keegan and Martin Van Creveld, it is safe to say that Clausewitz’s legacy has enjoyed such a dramatic rehabilitation that people now [once again] feign adherence to his teachings when advocating a particular policy or strategy, even if they have to put words in his mouth – or silence inconvenient ones – to make their arguments work. For example, in chapter 2 of John Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, the author discusses the theoretical underpinnings of counterinsurgency doctrine, and argues that Clausewitz has much to say about insurgency and irregular warfare, but that the principle of destruction has corrupted our understanding of revolutionary war. Comparing the lasting influences of both Clausewitz and Jomini on this point, he writes:

Jomini is important because of his prescription of the annihilation of the opponent’s force as the best route to victory, a sentiment often and mistakenly attributed to Clausewitz. The Prussian was actually much too subtle to say that anything was always the best route to victory – except the accomplishment of the political objectives for which the war was being fought. That Jomini’s most famous prescription is misattributed to Clausewitz, who disliked Jomini personally and thought his ideas rubbish, is more than ironic; as John Shy says in Makers of Modern Strategy, “If there can be such a thing as a joke in military history, surely this is it.” (18)

The Empire Has No Brains

America is missing something in its foreign policy…something very important. I am not referring to a unified grand strategic vision; we certainly don’t have one of those, but as I’ve commented elsewhere, that is to be expected in a democracy and its absence is not fatal to American statecraft. Nor am I referring to the ability to actually conduct strategy; that isn’t our strong suit either, but when we put our minds to it we’re able to muddle on through well enough. What is missing is something much more basic…much more elemental. I will let Bernard Brodie explain:

It is the conception simply of reasonable price, and of its being applied to strategy and national policy – the idea that some ends or objectives are worth paying a good deal for and others are not. The latter include ends that are no doubt desirable but which are worth attempting to achieve only if the price can with confidence be kept relatively low. Can it really by that such a simple and obvious idea is often neglected or overlooked? The answer is, most decidedly, yes.

Brodie was writing in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, but his point remains just as relevant today: the U.S. is apparently incapable of conducting a simple cost-benefit analysis. At least not until the American public realize that they’ve been incurring significant costs but experiencing few benefits. Unfortunately, nearly nine years after the Afghan war began, U.S. policymakers have still not faced the blunt question of whether the return is worth the investment, and if not, how to bring costs and benefits back into equilibrium. The need to combat terrorists is not in dispute. What should be debated is the current strategy to pursue this objective.

Afghanistan, Democracy, and Strategy

Progress?

Yesterday, Afghans defied Taliban threats and endured a number of attacks across the country as they lined up to vote in Afghanistan’s third major election since the Taliban regime was overthrown in 2001. Apparently, several hundred polling stations had to close due to security concerns, but there were no spectacular attacks that succeeded in derailing the election. Overall, this was a successful election for an underdeveloped and war-torn country.

It was also an expensive and misguided exercise in futility.

The notion that a stable and centralized democratic state can survive in Afghanistan is one of the more egregious examples of the hubris underneath Western political idealism. And yet, it has been one of the central pillars of the strategy that has guided operations in Afghanistan for the past 8 years, burdening the U.S. and its allies with an impossible goal. As the West continues to learn quite painfully, democracy is a final product; not a precursor. Economic development, political stability, military security, and a political culture that values individual liberty must exist before democracy can take root; not the other way around. An op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor summarized the problem well:

Democracy is not a coat of paint. A feudal society in which women are still treated as property and literacy hovers below 10 percent in rural areas does not magically shortcut 400 years of political development and morph into a democracy in a decade. The current government of Afghanistan’s claim to legitimacy is based entirely on a legal source – winning an election. Yet this has no historical basis for legitimizing Afghan rule. The winner of today’s election will largely be seen as illegitimate because he is elected.

The much-hyped “new” counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan (which is in fact a classic counterinsurgency strategy) seeks to rob the Taliban of  legitimacy by protecting the population from their intimidation. According to this plan, the Taliban would eventually lose the support and acquiescence of the population, leaving them to wither on the vine. That is all well and good, but it presumes that the Afghan government will be strong enough to develop a higher quality of life for its people. And therein lies the flaw of the strategy; the U.S. and its allies – along with the Afghan National Army, the only strong institution in the country – is creating the security shield for political and economic development that will not be occurring, because a centralized Afghan government is an oxymoron. Development that does occur will be done by the U.S. and Co., and even this effort will be hobbled by the decrease in political control caused by the pretense of an effective government in Kabul; the U.S. has shackled itself to a rock.

This is not to sound defeatist. If the U.S. is willing to expend sufficient blood and treasure on its present strategy, then victory is eventually assured, though it will be a hard slog. Building a state is not cheap, and that is what the current strategy requires.

However, a much simpler and inexpensive strategy has always been available. It is past time that we embrace it. Why exert ourselves for decades as we defy the currents of a tribal society when going with the current is so much easier?

There is only one vital U.S. interest in Afghanistan: prevent terrorist elements from basing there. A feudal society is perfectly compatible with this objective. Instead of hopelessly campaigning to expand Kabul’s writ across the country, allow the local warlords and tribal leaders to exercise the power accorded them by the tradition and religion that has governed Afghan society for millennia. The U.S. merely needs to set down a  simple list of conditions for these political entrepreneurs: (1) Do not allow Taliban or Al Qaeda to base in the regions they control; (2) acknowledge a symbol of Afghan national unity, perhaps the president and the ANA; (3) rule well. Let it be known that the U.S. will support those that meet these conditions, and it will remove those that don’t. The Afghan National Army could serve as the one national institution that binds the many local power centers together and dampens the centrifugal forces that decentralization would create.

This strategy might appear cynical for the U.S., which has expended so much prestige on a crusade to bring democracy to the Middle East. But it has the benefit of harnessing Afghan society as an ally in the struggle. Transforming Afghan society is as impossible as it is unnecessary.

So much for Plan A...

In the 19th century, the British Empire sought a stable and allied Afghan state as a political buffer to keep Russian influence out of India. When Dost Muhammad – the Afghan regent – began tilting toward the Russians, the British targeted him for removal in order to demonstrate British power and deter the Russians and any other wayward states. So they replaced him with a more compliant ruler, Shah Shuja. The British did not allow Shuja to rule in the necessary fashion, however. They were confident that their passive garrisons would be effective symbols of power and Shuja’s rivals would be duly intimidated into submission. The British were wrong, and their garrisons were annihilated in a calamity that became known as the First Afghan War. It was a traumatic lesson for the Empire, but they absorbed it well: Afghans respected the action of power, not the symbol of it. After the “Army of Retribution” marched through Afghanistan and exacted revenge for the humiliation, Afghanistan came firmly back into the British orbit. The preferred client ruler may not have survived, but the key objective of keeping Russian influence at bay was accomplished. As Edward Ingram writes in Great Powers and Little Wars:

Short, sharp, punitive raids were the most effective way to stabilize Afghanistan, as the Army of Retribution showed. There was no need of friendship; stable disorder was enough. Afghan rulers would learn that the British might not be able to set anyone up but certainly could knock anyone down. As Palmerston put it, they could beat up a few natives once in a while to remind them that they had not lost the knack.

The U.S. need not suffer a similar calamity before it learns the same thing: a centralized democratic Afghanistan is a fantasy. A stable feudal system is adequate, both for the U.S. and the Afghan people.