[Mb-civic] (no subject)

[Hawaiipolo at cs.com]

Pretty compelling analysis.....Iraq is not another Vietnam..rather it is the 
USA's Afghanistan....MD> 
>  The December Decision 
> By Stirling Newberry 
> t r u t h o u t | Perspective 
> 
> Thursday 30 June 2005 
> 
> On October 9th 2001, in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks and as part of the 
> preparations for going to war in Afghanistan, a series of essays were prepared 
> on previous involvements in that country. One of documents prepared, edited 
> by Svetlana Savranskaya, was on the lessons of the Soviet invasion and 
> occupation from 1979 until 1988. Afghanistan has a long history of foreign 
> intervention, having been one of the key squares in the "Great Game" between Russia 
> and England. 
> 
> In dry national security prose, the report noted that "the last war of the 
> Soviet Union created or aggravated the internal dynamics that eventually 
> culminated in the dissolution of the country itself." This is, perhaps, too strong 
> a phrasing, but it certainly didn't help. Moreover, the ease of the invasion 
> and the failure of the occupation created certain sharp lessons for other 
> powers that seek to impose their will by direct force. 
> 
> The first lesson was the invasion itself: in the run-up to the invasion, the 
> USSR General Staff objected to the small size of the force and the rather 
> broad objectives. The USSR wanted to root out those who had crossed it and 
> impose a Soviet-style government on Afghanistan, not merely fulfill some simple 
> regime change or removal of particular leadership. 
> 
> The second lesson followed from the first: the USSR had limited intelligence 
> about the political make-up of the factions in Afghanistan, and they 
> expected it to be like other poor peripheral countries, for example, Mongolia. This 
> lack of clear information and willingness to "form a picture" were mistakes 
> that compounded the lack of force commitment. The Soviet Union expected to be 
> seen as liberators, or at least as an improvement, bringing with them 
> technology, teaching and training. Instead they found that the populace rejected 
> them as "infidels," and instead of being able to secure the cooperation of the 
> local power centers, they found little immediate resistance, but also no 
> reconciliation. Even their own friends on the ground were divided along ethnic and 
> religious lines. 
> 
> This much became clear rather early, and the military leadership pressed for 
> either withdrawal of the "Limited Contingent" or some clearly defined goal 
> or exit strategy. Neither was accomplished, because of the political 
> centralization and rot within the Soviet Politburo itself. In 1985, the Politburo 
> decided to decide, but it would wait until 13 November 1986, when there would be 
> a full discussion of how to exit from Afghanistan. By this point, Gorbachev 
> accuses their allies of "walking like a pretzel" - meaning weaving around 
> every issue and being disingenuous - and warns that unless some important change 
> of policy is undertaken, that Afghanistan will continue for another 20 or 30 
> years of fighting. It is now 20 years from the time of that meeting, and the 
> fighting has continued, even if the USSR is now a motif for t-shirts, and not 
> a government. 
> 
> But it is Gromyko who argues for realpolitik in the meeting: that there are 
> still political options, even though military ones have failed. He argues 
> that an attempt to modernize Afghanistan is not realistic, that the USSR will 
> have to accept Afghanistan as a neutral country, and he notes there is no 
> internal support: the USSR has lost as many men from Afghanistan as it drafted. 
> The politburo called for a hard exit date, a withdrawal of troops within two 
> years. But it would not save the USSR or its political allies in Afghanistan. 
> 
> By 1988, the Soviet military and political establishment were busy doing a 
> post-mortem on Afghanistan. The political leadership agreed that going in had 
> been a mistake, but argued that there had been repeated requests from a 
> fellow Soviet bloc government - and thus a legitimate use of military power. The 
> military assessment was far harsher and far more direct, as expressed in a 
> CPSU letter of 10 May 1988. 
> 
> The lessons the Soviet military drew were concise: 
> 
> 
> Insufficient intelligence; 
> The ability of small units to use terrain against large formations; 
> "Complete disregard" for the local populace and its reactions; 
> Failure to win the populace over to the regime; 
> Placing all reliance on a "military solution"; 
> Long term combat operations degrading the military. From the US side, the 
> lessons to be drawn from the Soviet invasion were a complementary image: 
> political failure combined with loss of control of the road network, which led to 
> an increasing reliance on helicopters, which were vulnerable to anti-aircraft 
> missiles. 
> 
> And now we have reached that most dangerous of mileposts: the transportation 
> network that the military relies on in Afghanistan and Iraq. Amateurs talk 
> strategy, professionals talk logistics. Strategy is what you can do with what 
> you can get there. The gem of the Cold War military system was not the 
> fighter bombers, the aircraft carriers, or even the ICBM deterrent, instead it was 
> the logistical network that allowed the US to project force farther and 
> faster than any other nation, such that no nation felt itself too far out of 
> American reach for too long. 
> 
> The indications in the run-up to the invasion of Afghanistan were that 
> American logistical capability was stretched, that there had been failures of new 
> software and shortages of needed equipment. This failure becomes more visible 
> with time: the lack of armored HumVees and flack jackets were the flesh 
> wounds, caught by IED shrapnel. The loss of the ability to truck material and the 
> reliance on rotary wing aircraft is a more dangerous failure, and a more 
> militarily grievous loss, because it costs that which is very expensive to 
> replace: pilots, specialists and commanding officers. The kind of people of which 
> there is a limited supply, and which take years to fully replace. 
> 
> It is this same attrition of valuable personnel which ended up being the 
> death knell for Soviet occupation. It could no longer staff its chain of 
> command, coordinate or control defense missions, nor could it reliably move people 
> from one place to another. This undercut the political objectives of "national 
> reconciliation," because reconciliation is dependent on a clear and imposing 
> presence which cannot be delayed, denied or defeated. 
> 
> The harsh conclusion is that the very documents being read in the Pentagon 
> in the days after 9/11 provided clear warnings not to go into a nation without 
> intelligence, not to go in with a "limited contingent," not to set large and 
> sweeping goals of political transformation, and not to rely on an 
> increasingly fragile military instrument to effect change. The Downing Street Memos 
> show how, systematically, these points were ignored by key US envoys to Great 
> Britain, and the final invasion of Iraq ended up looking like the invasion of 
> Afghanistan by the USSR. That is, politically compelled for ideological 
> reasons, but constrained by economic and military shortages. 
> 
> With the crash of a Chinook troop transport helicopter, lost, in all 
> probability, to hostile fire, the parallels between the Soviet invasion and 
> occupation of Afghanistan and the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq should be held 
> to closer parallel. Consider that, from the point of invasion to the 10 May 
> letter, the Soviets had suffered, on average, 5 killed per day of 
> involvement, and 13 wounded. The United States has suffered only 2.3 killed, but 16 
> wounded. In other words, the intensity of American combat in Iraq differs from 
> the Soviet presence in Afghanistan only in that better American evacuation and 
> medical technology, plus better armor, saves 3 people every day who otherwise 
> would have died. 
> 
> In short, the United States is fighting its own version of the war that, 
> according to the the foreign policy intellectual establishment, either brought 
> down or hastened the fall of the USSR. We have engaged in the same mistakes: 
> the Downing Street Memos of March 2002 show a determination to invade but an 
> admission that there is poor intelligence on troops, deployment of Weapons of 
> Mass Destruction and the state of Saddam's air force. There is no mention 
> made of non-conventional or guerrilla warfare, just as the planning documents of 
> the Soviet invasion do not once mention the possibility of a resistence 
> developing. There is a reliance on an outside trained elite that, it is admitted, 
> has no credibility on the ground. 
> 
> It was a Soviet politician who reminded his fellow politburo members that 
> with each person's death and closing of the eyes, a unique world comes to an 
> end. It might also be added that when a nation closes its eyes to the lessons 
> of the past, it too sets itself on a course toward its own death, a journey to 
> that country "from which no traveler returns." 
> 
> 
> 
> Stirling Newberry is an internet business and strategy consultant, with 
> experience in international telecom, consumer marketing, e-commerce and forensic 
> database analysis. He has acted as an advisor to Democratic political 
> campaigns and organizations and is the the co-founder, along with Christopher Lydon, 
> Jay Rosen and Matt Stoller, of BopNews, as well as being the military 
> affairs editor of The Agonist. -------
> 
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