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by lmm
1759 days ago
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> When I went to Afghanistan I cannot tell you how many times we ran into bad intel on the ground. This makes operations run inefficiently, it causes accidents, it affects morale, etc... This literally because the military had a very difficult time, even then, understanding multi-celled non-central organizations like terrorist cells who were smart enough to insert bad intel where it needed to be. > I don't have any concrete thoughts on who to blame, be it generals, Presidents, or government officials. Maybe there is no blame. There's also room in my mind that the Taliban and other terrorist organizations are just formidable, well-equipped, and well-educated foes who use ideology as a viral weapon in areas that lack the defensive resources of opportunity and education to combat them. This feels like a cop-out. If the wealthiest nation with the most powerful military in the world wasn't able to achieve the outcome they wanted, something's gone wrong somewhere. I'm happy to entertain a theory like, maybe the DoD put yes-men at the top, but that still begs the question of what went wrong and why that didn't happen in previous wars. Is our state capacity actually much weaker than it was in previous decades? Is the real problem that the public wasn't committed to the war? Maybe - but in that case why weren't we able to realise that earlier? Ultimately this shouldn't have happened the way it did. I'm sure there are multiple causes rather than a neat single reason, but something is rotten in the US. |
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Specifically, I'm talking about the challenges faced by a wealthy, technologically superior nation-state seeking to subdue a remote, decentralized coalition of irregular military forces whose fighters can blend in with the general populace when needed.
The birth of the USA was something somewhat similar, with the colonies' "ragtag" army defeating the British.
It's also something the Roman Empire struggled with. They conquered city-states with relative ease, rolling them into their empire with a combination of carrot and stick. Decentralized peoples were often another story.
It's also not like there's a shortage of writings about how Afghanistan is essentially unconquerable, thanks to geography and culture. "Graveyard of empires," indeed.
https://thediplomat.com/2017/06/why-is-afghanistan-the-grave...