CNN On Winning Hearts And Minds In Afghanistan

Years ago, when we first invaded Afghanistan I was sitting at the dinner table discussing our foreign policy with my parents. Back at the beginning of the whole mess, my father held a very guarded of the whole affair and considered such an invasion a fool's errand. Being young, naive, and perhaps more so foolish than I am today I took the opposite viewpoint: it was necessary to advance our goals in the war on terror. Flash forward to today, and perhaps I am an old and cantankerous man... but very little seems to have changed other than our growing debt.

Winning hearts and minds is a staple of the rather foolish way that Western governments or Western style governments wage war with no clear end in sight or true objective. One of the best minds contrary to this thinking is Martin van Creveld, the most erudite Israeli historian and tactician, who remarked about the IDF fighting Palestinians,

"The same thing has happened to the Israeli army as happened to all the rest that have tried over the last sixty years. Basically it’s always a question of the relationship of forces. If you are strong, and you are fighting the weak for any period of time, you are going to become weak yourself. If you behave like a coward then you are going to become cowardly – it’s only a question of time. The same happened to the British when they were here... the same happened to the French in Algeria... the same happened to the Americans in Vietnam... the same happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan... the same happened to so many people that I can’t even count them."


In essence, he is arguing that modern armies can no longer wage a war with clear victory as any sense of duality or an us/them mentality has been exhausted in the modern era. There is a global consciousness that permeates all conflicts. The under dogs now will always have a sympathetic ear and nation-states are limited in the "acceptable" forms of propaganda. We cannot demonize the Taliban the way we may have demonized Hirohito's empire, such wartime propaganda is considered a relic of a bigoted era by the mainstream media.

It is in this light that I ask readers to view this CNN article.


"The strategy boils down to this: Insurgents rely on the fear and intimidation of local citizens to keep control, so the counterinsurgency focuses on protecting local citizens from the Taliban and rallying them to the Afghan government."


And just how well has this worked for us? At the end of the day, the locals will still view the mujahideen as either native fighters or co-religionists. You're just a pack of kuffar invaders regardless to the average person in Afghanistan. If they kill a shepherd's goats it was native Pashtuns, if YOU kill their goats you're American crusaders. It's a lose/lose scenario for U.S. forces


"Jackson tried to put himself in the Afghans' shoes. He said he can imagine how he would feel if his country were occupied for a decade by a foreign army dressed, as he put it, like "automatons." So he tried to play against it."


"You'd walk up to somebody and say, 'As-salaamu alaykum.' 'Tsenga yee?' It's kind of like 'What's up?' " Jackson said. "It's like 20 different ways of saying hello. I would walk up to an old man, shake his hand, look him straight in the face -- with my sunglasses off, so he could see my eyes -- and we would be shaking hands for probably one or two minutes."


Put yourself in his shoes as long as you want to, you're never going to really be able to sympathize with him and furthermore you're never actually going to be able to make him some little American. It reminds me a bit of the commanding officer's monologue in Full Metal Jacket where he tells Pvt. Joker, 


"Inside every gook there is an American waiting to get out".


Perhaps Hollywood isn't the best representative of American attitudes during Vietnam, but as best as I have read it's quite accurate. It didn't work then, why should we be laboring under the assumption it's going to work today? Has it worked at any point in the past DECADE that we've been in Afghanistan? 


Another interesting tidbit about his interactions with Muslims is that he may, in fact, be getting it all wrong. Muslims are expected to greet one another with as salaamu alaikum or preferably some more formal variant thereof. However, there are numerous hadith which stipulate that Muslims are not supposed to greet non believers with it or return their greeting. His work may be counterproductive, an example of how little he actually knows about interaction with Muslims. 


"Three weeks later, Jackson shipped out of Afghanistan. He said a small part of him wanted to stay to see how it worked out."


Mr. Jackson, I'll give you a clue as to an accurate outcome and I have absolutely no clairvoyance: U.S. forces will eventually leave the Afghan government to its own devices and it will splinter, siding with warlords. Afghanistan will be exactly as it ever was and all of our funding and work will be for naught. Bin Laden may be dead, but that's a non-issue. His ideology is very much alive, Mullah Omar is very much alive. Mullah Omar has declared himself, "commander of the faithful", he's made himself Caliph. Once we leave, and our finances will force our departure sooner rather than later, the whole of the country will completely return to the warlords. 


So cheer up, you and your brothers in arms were sent on a mission for which there will be no grand reward. As you fought, insurgencies grew in Somalia, Yemen, Dagestan, Chechnya etc etc. It's Islamic fundamentalist whack-a-mole and we're out of quarters.