By DANIA KOLEILAT KHATIB
The world stands amazed by the Taliban’s victory. Even the militants themselves did not expect to be in Kabul by mid-August. While analysts scramble to diagnose what went wrong, giving different explanations, the million-dollar question is how an enemy as primitive as the Taliban defeated a superpower? One might think of Vietnam. But unlike the Viet Cong, which had the support of the Soviet Union, a superpower comparable in might to the US, the Taliban had no world power backing them.Actually that they are primitive made them more difficult to defeat, and that the US is so powerful and sophisticated made it more vulnerable. The Taliban pursued a war of attrition against the US. Knowing they couldn’t win in a open fight, they worked on outlasting the enemy. US President Joe Biden, faced with a humiliating defeat, on the one hand praised himself for a successful retreat and on the other blamed his predecessor for boxing the US into a bad deal with the Taliban that the Biden administration had to honor.
For an explanation of this US defeat, we need to define what victory would have looked like. A victory is when you inflict so much damage on your opponent that he calls it quits. But how can you hurt an opponent who needs so little to survive? Do you cut him off from international trade? The Taliban are not connected to the global trade network. Do you cut its energy supplies? The Taliban don’t run factories and don’t depend on a fleet of vehicles. Do you destroy their air force or their tanks? The Taliban have none.
I had this discussion with an American friend. He replied: “You kill them.” But capture and kill does not work. “How can you identify them?” I asked. Would you go to a village and say, “Whoever is Taliban, please raise your hand?” They are enmeshed in the local population. They can benefit from their knowledge of the difficult terrain, which offers them numerous hideouts. Even with the most precise satellite imagery and specialist geologists, the US cannot know the Afghan terrain as well as the sons of the land. Faced with the costly operations the US was leading, the Taliban simply hid in caves and, when the time was right, using the most primitive methods, carried out a suicide bombing in a marketplace or other crowded location and spread terror.
The Taliban are flexible; they know how to run and hide. Mao Zedong, who led the communist guerillas against the American-equipped Chiang Kai-shek’s forces during the Chinese Civil War, relied heavily on running away. Ironically, running away can be an effective offensive tactic. The Taliban ran away from their enemy, distracted him, and exhausted him from the chase, so that he became too tired to fight. And when there was an opportunity and the chances of success were high, they used short, sudden, sharp and painful strikes. For them, the key was to keep the situation as fluid as possible and confuse the enemy, who were static. Additionally, primitive as they are, the Taliban need only the bare minimum to survive. They eat whatever they find in villages, live in caves, and wait for the right time to emerge and strike.
We are in the age of asymmetric warfare, where armies operate on undefined battlegrounds, fighting an undefined enemy.
If anything, 20 years in Afghanistan should have taught the US that their methods of countering terrorism are wrong. They will never be able to kill all the “terrorists” or “extremists.” The key is to dry out the social incubator, offering people a better alternative. In Afghanistan, the US did not deploy somebody like Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who conducted the post-Second World War reconstruction of Japan and had the power to roll out a fully-fledged development plan.
Also, brute military power lo longer works. The nature of warfare is changing. We no longer have conventional armies facing off on a battleground. We are in the age of asymmetric warfare, with armies operating on undefined battlegrounds fighting an undefined enemy. Hence, the chances of success are low and, the more complex an army operation is, the more sluggish its movement becomes and the easier it is for the enemy to strike it.
The US needs to rethink its counterterrorism methods. It cannot kill its way to victory. It needs to understand the culture and the need to work with the international community on development in areas that are a breeding space for extremism. –AN
