President Obama on Tuesday declared Iraq a done deal. Okay, he didn’t support the surge, back in the Bush days. He and his anti-war pals in the Senate declared the war lost years ago. His progressive world-view won’t allow him to admit that a Republican president could possibly have been right. And yet, the architect of the surge, and stability, as it is, in Iraq, is now Obama’s uniform in chief in the “Good War.”
If one believed in omens, the future of our involvement in Afghanistan would not bode well. General David Petraeus, before he was demoted to replace General Stanley McChrystal, collapsed during Congressional testimony on the Obama strategy. Then General McChrystal was surgically removed by a left-wing media strike. If it was his campaign, Alexander the Great might have reconsidered his course, and visited the Oracle in Siwa again.
The President and his Progressive handlers declared our military efforts in Afghanistan “the Good War” to differentiate it from that numbskull Bush’s “Bad War” in Iraq. After playing his anti-Bush card in the first weeks of his administration, Obama then called together all his geniuses to devise his Good War strategy.
Obama’s geniuses developed a strategy that looks a lot like the Bush/Rumsfeld surge in Iraq. Except the geniuses revealed their end game before they even sat down to begin playing. Obama announced the target date for withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan, in the same teleprompted address that he announced the deployment.
The Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and their allies must have been confused. They surely must have thought this was some sort of elaborate ruse on the part of the geniuses. It didn’t take them long to figure out, however, that the geniuses were not very good poker players. They actually had revealed their final plan. At least it appears so, up to today. Maybe the good general collapsed after contemplating the lack of exits in the rat hole in which he is trapped.
Obama’s genius seminar on Afghanistan strategy was described by a White House aide as an attempt to avoid a “rush to war.” Maybe the geniuses didn’t notice that we had been at war in Afghanistan for more than half a decade before the thinker-in-chief was inaugurated.
As the afterglow of the media’s near-orgasmic lovefest with Obama fades, it’s time for an honest consideration of our Afghanistan policy and strategy. We are past the hunt for Osama. We are past the point of destroying Al-Qaeda’s strongholds in the Hindu Kush. The Obama genius cabal has announced its goals as: “reverse the Taliban’s gains, and promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government.”
In layman’s terms, what they plan is counter-insurgency and nation-building. Setting aside the difficulty of building a cohesive nation from the troubled ethnic mix within Afghanistan’s present borders, let’s just look at counter-insurgency.
There are many examples of previous successful, and unsuccessful attempts at counter-insurgency. An honest consideration of our current goal in Afghanistan requires a review of both the successes and failures. Let’s examine the common features of the successful counter-insurgencies, and the common features of the counter-insurgency failures. There may well be lessons for our efforts in Afghanistan. Southeast Asia offers a student of counter-insurgency at least three object lessons.
The United States’ most striking success in counter-insurgency was the Moro Rebellion in the Philippines. The US’s only long-term foreign colony was the island nation of the Philippines, seized from Spain after the Spanish-American war. We occupied and ruled the Philippines as a colony from 1898 until after World War II.
The Muslim population in the Southern Philippines (the Moros) rebelled against American colonial authority. The Moro Rebellion was a classic counter-insurgency, with native fighters fading into the local population, and into the jungle, emerging to terrorize civilians and American soldiers alike. The American army, steeled by the Indian wars in the western US, was familiar with this style of warfare. They crushed the rebellion. During the counter-insurgency, the Moro territory was ruled by American military governors and their staff. Locals elders and chiefs were consulted and brought into the government under the Americans’ direct rule.
Total control of the civil, military, and economic reins of the Philippines set the stage for effective counter-insurgency operations. Total control, with relatively benign colonial rule, combined with harsh and punitive military attacks against insurgents, combined to convince the Moros to capitulate. After more than 12 years of insurgency, the American military turned over control of Moroland to a civilian US colonial government. And within a few decades, American colonial government came to a peaceful end, with an orderly transition to Philippine independence.
A solid counter-insurgency drove communists from Malaya, a British colony now independent Malaysia, in the years after WWII. Known in Britain and Malaysia as “The Emergency,” a Chinese-led communist insurgency threatened the soon-to-be-independent colony.
The communists mostly ethnic Chinese were supported by Red China. They operated from bases within the impenetrable jungles down the spine of the Malay peninsula. They had scant support from the populace, and waged a terror campaign against the British and innocent civilians.
The British colonial governing infrastructure permeated Malayan society down to the smallest village. Courts, police, governors, mayors, and all other reins of power were firmly in the hands of experienced British colonial administrators. Fair and just, but firm and swift, British justice permeated the colony. Military units, a mixture of British and locals, as well as units from other colonies, like the Ghurkas from Nepal, operated from colonial garrisons.
At the height of the insurgency, British and Malayan military units perfected the Special Forces model of operations the US military uses today. Targeted by aggressive intelligence operations, quick strikes on unsuspecting rebels devastated the communists. With total control of the country, the British colonials were able to stamp out any hint of localized support for the rebels. Within twelve years, the communists were routed and soundly defeated. The British turned over the colony to self-rule near the end of the Emergency. (See Part 2 tomorrow.)
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