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When the United States was preparing to invade Afgahnistan, reports were compiled based on previous involvements in that region. Of course, it had been the site of numerous brush wars between the British and the Russians - or their proxies - during what was called "The Great Game". Of course the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was looked at.
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There were some harsh lessons for the USSR in Afgahnistan, and an objective reading of American involvement in Iraq is that we decided to confirm everyone of them by repeating each and every one of the mistakes that the USSR made.
What leaps out looking at the documents available from the USSR and its invasion and occupation in Afghanistan, are the eerie parallels to the Downing Street Memos. In both cases the picture emerges of an ideologically rigid hierarchy committed to particular end states, regardless of whether they had the means to achieve them. To go even farther, in both cases there was an obsession with how the action would be framed, and with managing the proxies and internal bureaucracy - instead of facing the facts on the mission.
Afghanistan is a Russian Word, it Means "Iraq".
From the date of invasion in December of 1979 until the Politburo approved a pull out of Soviet forces some 7 years later the Soviet forces in Afghanistan suffered, on average 5 fatalities per day, and some 13 wounded of all kinds. In the involvement in Iraq from the invasion until today, the United States has suffered 2.3 fatalities per day, and an average of 15 wounded. In short, the difference in intensity of combat between the Soviet invasion of Afghaninstan and the US invasion of Iraq is that, on average, 2.7 people per day who would have died before are, instead, saved by better armor and better medical facilities. An analysis of medical casualties confirms this.
It is widely held in the Sovietology community that the USSR's involvement in Afghanistan was the "straw that broke the camel's back", that it launched, or dramatically accelerated, the death spiral of that regime, because it placed a constant drain on legitimacy and resources that could not be plugged. The USSR had been seen either fought long defensive struggles (such as the "Great Patriotic War" as they call their involvement in World War II), or short and successful invasions. In fact it is notable how often the Russians had avoided placing their own troops in harms way when the United States had committed them.
And yet the Soviet Union remained in Afghanistan, because a pull out was "unthinkable". At each stage of the war, the Soviet Union denied the parallels to the American experience in Vietnam. They saw their intervention as aid to the legitimat government of Afghanistan, and an attempt to produce "national reconciliation". Where as they saw the US as engaging in a war of Imperialism.
The United States is currently fighting a war of similar intensity to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and faces the same political quagmire: pulling out is unthinkable, and yet, the US military is ill suited to the very role which it has been thrust into. As with the Soviet Ground Forces, the successor to the "Red Army", the US military is designed to enter with overwhelming force and crush the military capability of the population, and control the vital population centers.
Moreover, American foreign policy architects see their role in terms strikingly similar to the Soviet view of Afghanistan, namely that there was an overwhelming threat to the State from a relentless outside force, and the invasion was seen entirely in terms of protecting the state from that outside force. For the USSR it was the West, for Bush, it is "terrorism". This created an ideologically rigid climate where intervention would go forward.
"The Briar Patch"
In both cases a parallel failure of political planning occured. In the December 1979 meetings which finally determined invasion as the course for the Soviet Union, rather than some indirect course, what is notable is the admitted lack of intelligence about potential enemies, the admitted difficulties of understanding the terrain, and the lack of trust that the Soviet leadership placed in the local proxies that it had in place. It is also notable that there was a failure to account for the ethnic divisions even within their own allies.
Looking at the March 1982 Downing Street Memos the same failures are evident. Blair's government did not trust the INC or INA, and yet the Americans had selected them as the new governing class of Iraq. The British admited poor intelligence, and made assertions that made it clear that they did not understand the shape of the ground. For example, the Kurds and Arab Sunnis were lumped together to be the "sunni majority", an almost sophmoric boner.
In particular the March letter from Christopher Meyer to David Manning on his meeting with Wolfowitz is filled with parallels to the Soviet era thinking. There is a focus on non-threats, attempts to connect the proposed enemy with historical enemies, reliance on politically unreliable proxies who have no credibility on the ground, and an enormous misconception as to what the military instrument can, and cannot, accomplish.
Beneath both of these is the ideological determination to go to war at whatever the cost, and a feeling by the drivers of policy that because their position is just - they see themselves as liberators of a nation under a backwards order - that failure is impossible.
The Tar Baby
In both cases military leadership objected to the plans put forward. In the case of the Soviet Union the Marshall of the General Staff objected to the small size of the force, labelled the "Limited Contingent", and the lack of a clear political objective. Where the forces there to protect the regime? Were they there to pacify the country, what was "National Reconciliation?" anyway?
In the United States General Tommy Franks put forward a deployment plan that involved a two prong assault and over 300,000 troops. This was rejected by Rumsfeld - a member of the American cabinet, the equivalent to the USSR's politburo. Instead an invasion with half that number went forward. Rumsfeld, like his Soviet predecessors, argued that the superiority of military hardware would make this number sufficient for the mission.
The same objections that the Soviet General Staff raised to the Afghanistan mission were raised by the British military directory - the troops were insufficient for the "total victory" endstate envisioned - that is installation of a compliant and stable regime. The British pointed out that inferior endstates might have to be accepted. It is interesting that in a 1986 meeting of the politburo, the same realization was reached by Andrei Gromyko - that total victory was outside of Soviet grasp given the resources.
Once in Afghanistan the Soviet Ground Forces took their heaviest casualties keeping the road network open. They found that they were not fighting set piece battles against a military that drew its strength from a working economy, but a military that drew its strength from a militia reserve of un and underemployed. Unlike fighting a state actor - which is easier to defeat as its economy gets worse, fighting a guerilla war is the reverse, the guerilla movement gets stronger as the economy worsens.
Looking at the location of US military fatalities since the war, the same pattern emerges - the US takes its deaths trying to maintain order in the cities, and in trying to hold the roads. The interior areas of the country are virtually ceded to the insurgency. The insurgency does not draw its strength from towns that produce a surplus to be used in fighting, but from the destruction of the economic system from before.
It should be noted that the planning documents of both invasions ignored the possibility that local political entities would be able to mount guerilla campaigns, and wildly underestimated the difficulty in producing a unified national government among all the factions.
In both cases this lead to an increasing reliance on rotary winged transport - helicopters. This lead to a vulnerability - to attacks by cheap Surface to Air missiles. This lead to casualties of hard to replace pilots and commanders, since command and control personnel were aboard the helicopters used in moving forces in and out of the combat area.
We Are Not WinningThis War, Because We Cannot Win It.
Victory is the accomplishment of an end state that is better than what would have happened without using the military. By this standard most wars are mistakes, they do not lead to better end states. In fact, most wars are fought as the result of failure: a failure of deterence or compellence that ends with military intervention being used simply to prove that one was not bluffing all along.
A war which is winnable is one where the better end states can still be reached with the available resources. It was General Eisenhower who warned that the problem of military spending was "to avoid destroying from within what you were trying to defend from without." General Wesley Clark did an analysis of troops required for Afghanistan and concluded that the United States could not both maintain an occupation, and the economy needed to have military superiority.
In the Soviet invovlement in Afghanistan, the critical documents that flew in the Gorbacheve regime about the Breshnev era decision to invade point the finger at the failures of intelligence and the reliance on a military instrument to secure a political victory. The same reliance on a military instrument is visible in the US. Soviet leadership lamented that their proxies were unable to produce benefits for the local population that would have won support. The levels of water, electricity and oil output from Iraq have not returned to their pre-invasion levels, and the public is growing restive - our proxies cannot run a reconstruction.
This problem - that the forces involved were not large enough to force a military victory, but they were too expensive to allow a full scale reconstruction - haunted Soviet post-mortems in 1986 and 1987. These failures are already being admitted by American planners and internal critics of the war in Iraq. The conclusion of the USSR's policy elite was that invasion was a mistake, and that the invasion was a lost cause long before withdrawal was considered.
What was missing from both the Soviet and American pre-war planning was the most basic reqirement of any military action: the vital interest being defended. In both cases war was waged out of an ideological committment to installation of a regime of a particular kind. That is, it was an attempt to use tanks to garden the political landscape. There was not, in either case, a vital national interest at stake that could not have been met with other means.
This lead to the converse problem of withdrawal: after invasion and full strategic committment, the vital national interest was political victory itself. This is why, in 1986, the politburo was still worried about who would be in charge of this or that function, who would visit Moscow, who would get how much policy freedom. There was no concern about what interest was at stake, because the sunk political capital became too valuable to lose.
The Bush speech this week shows that the United States is in the same position. There was no vital interest at stake, because Bush could not state one in a sentence. The rationale was purely for political hegemony, and a view to the "justness" of the Bush executive's intentions.
We Will Be Fighting for 20 More Years
The documentary history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the emerging documentary history of the American invasion of Iraq show important parallels. The wars are of approximately equal intensity. They show the same failures of purpose, intelligence, planning, objective, means and execution. The failures, in the case of the USSR, were sufficient to bring down a political order that had stood for 70 years, through, it should be noted, much worse objective material problems. The Russian Revolution, the Stalinist purges and the Second World War were all much worse.
However, it was the destruction of political legitimacy that was, in the end, fatal. An order which had set itself up as a progressive and liberating force was shown to be merely a brute imperium using slaughter of civilians, torture, and blunt military tactics to achieve a political end.
It is amusing to note that up until the end, the USSR asserted that it was right to invade Afgahnistan, and that their invovlement there was nothing like American invovlement in Vietnam.
The military instrument is meant to defeat and destroy the will of a nation to fight, and the war material it uses to fight with. A military instrument in combat stance cannot win a political endstate. It is not a failure of troops to fail to secure a politcal victory, because it is not their mission to do so, nor are they trained or equipped to do so. One might as well criticise them for not being able to launch a manned probe to Mars.
In the end, Iraq cannot be won, because there is nothing there to win. It was a move made to reduce the command and control stress - to remove a bullet point from the daily agenda, "contain Saddam's latest bonehead attempt to get WMD".
Soviet withdrawal was, in fact, the fatal blow to the USSR. It cost them irreplacable political capital. American withdrawal will cost at least as much. And while the United States is not in a position of using force to occupy large sections of the world, its military prestige is essential for its central economic role. Iraq is now a matter of confidence, and its resolution by cutting and running will entail a massive drop in American standards of living, the post-war recession alone will be a brutal shock to the American economy, as the some 200 billion dollars a year of war spending dries up, and the internal GDP that this spending drives dries up with it.
In short, Iraq has become a crisis, simply because the present leadership, as with the Breshnev politburo, has bet the farm on it. It is not likely that the US will suffer as much as the USSR did, because the internal contradictions are not as great. But it is highly likely that the costs will be far greater - and from more different quarters - than is currently expected.
In 1986 Gorbachev said that the war in Afghanistan could go on for 20 more years. It is now 19 years from when he said this, and the war there, indeed, goes on. In fact, it is a historical note that Usama bin Laden got his start in the Soviet invasion, and remains at large to this day.