Mark Phillips: The American Question

1/25/03: Indian Country.

Today's eyewitness article by Washington Post reporter Marc Newman, "On Afghan Border, War Drags On", is one of the more straightforward statements of U.S. military failure yet published by the mainstream press.

As Newman notes,

At a time when many U.S. officials in Washington and Afghanistan are eager to shift the focus of the U.S. military mission here from combat to the reconstruction of the country, soldiers at isolated U.S. fire bases like the one here at Shkin know firsthand why that has not yet happened. Fifteen months after the start of their campaign to topple the Taliban and destroy al Qaeda, they still face an invisible but determined enemy capable of slipping into Afghanistan from apparent havens in Pakistan to attack those they see as infidels and invaders.

The incidents are instructive:

One day, a U.S. soldier stepped on a newly planted land mine near Khost. Another day, an explosive tied to a bicycle went off as a U.S. convoy passed near Jalalabad. A young man threw a grenade recently at two Americans in a Jeep in Kabul, and unguided, but potentially lethal, rockets are fired toward U.S. bases almost daily. In the past 30 days, one U.S. soldier has been killed in action and 10 wounded.

A U.S. Special Forces soldier notes aptly, "This is an extremely hostile environment." Newman relays this anecdote as illustration:

One of the most telling examples of the resistance faced by U.S. troops was the decision last month to abandon a forward base at Lwara, 50 miles north of Shkin, in the same rugged borderlands that the Americans had held for 10 months.

The Lwara base was abandoned on Dec. 11 after coming under frequent rocket attacks. Several rockets -- which generally carried white phosphorus, which causes a very hot fire when exposed to oxygen -- landed inside or near the U.S. compound. While no U.S. soldiers were killed or injured, several vehicles were destroyed.

When the Americans left, they handed the compound over to a local militia group controlled by Abdul Shah Wazir, an ally from an important Pashtun tribe. But according to his brother, Turan Noorzad Wazir, the militia of 300 men received no support from the Americans, the central government in Kabul or provincial authorities. Wazir said he and his brother went to Kabul to plead for help but got nothing concrete. Men started to melt away from the compound.

Last week, a poster went up threatening the Wazir brothers, telling them and their militia to get out of town. Worried by the threats, lacking supplies and with only questionable support in the area, the last militiamen had left the compound by midweek. The next night, a group described by Wazir as "al Qaeda people" stormed into Lwara, attacked the compound with explosives and burned it. Wazir said it was largely destroyed.

U.S. military officials at Bagram said Monday that they were aware of threats against Wazir's militia at Lwara but unaware of any attack. One official said that a recent overflight revealed the base had been "picked clean."

Readers who remember reportage from the Vietnam era should find this story eerily familiar. This is Indian Country. Specifically, it's the Central Highlands circa 1966, with Abdul Shah Wazir's militia playing the role then played by Montagnard tribesmen. The tactics are the same, right down to Americans' ubiquitous fire bases; the enemy's mysterious, unseen numbers; the semi-reliable locals engaged in traditional tribal disputes; the U.S. military's pervasive lack of on-the-ground intelligence; the enemy's ability to choose when and where to fight, and for how long; and the optimistic spin of American officers' comments to the press, at odds with the known facts.

We know how Vietnam turned out. It'll be the same in Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Iran, and every other nation our military foolishly occupies, in its arrogance and short-sightedness.

Our country cannot win the War on Islam. How many will die before a winnable strategy is adopted? A long-term strategy which attacks the causes of terrorism, rather than the symptoms?

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