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COMMENTARY
December 12, 2001
America's advantage
In a sense Afghanistan has been a "classic" colonial war. The United States has been sparing of its own troops instead taking sides and choosing local allies as its proxies while using its own incontestable technological superiority to help them quickly win. The resemblance to the way the British took India in the 18th and 19th centuries -- one tribal patch or princely state at a time -- ends there. The Americans have no long term plans to rule the place and are happy to let anyone else send "peacekeepers". This is what the Europeans and Canadians turn out to be good for this time around. We have the equipment the manpower and the budgets to do sentry duties. (As a retired Canadian officer told me after the federal budget was tabled Monday It's all very well for the Americans to spend a fortune on defence, they have to defend the free world from terrorism. We only have to defend our own smugness. ) Except for the most elite British special forces -- a small handful of men -- help would just get in the Yankees' way. Moreover the two per cent or less of the West's Afghan campaign that was offloaded on the British (and a few French special forces too) was essentially unnecessary. The help was accepted as a political favour in answer to British and French supplications. This was probably made clear when the British defence secretary the aptly-named Geoff Hoon told BBC breakfast television on Sunday that if Osama bin Laden fell into British hands he would not be turned over to the U.S. for trial -- unless the U.K. first received assurances that Osama would not face the death penalty. I would have liked to be a fly on the line when George Bush called Tony Blair about that one. I doubt we'll be hearing anything so unctuous from Mr. Hoon again. Offers of British and other NATO aircraft were politely declined. They have inferior equipment and pilots and as the U.S. learned over Serbia you can't really fight a war while waiting for 19 different defence ministers to sign off on each target. What has changed in the last decade and especially in the last two years (the technological developments since the Balkan campaign in 1999 were greater than those between that and Desert Storm in 1991) is the status of the United States as a military power. At the beginning of the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union the U.S. emerged as the world's only superpower. Now it has become what the French call a "hyperpower". It is not only at the top of the international "top ten" in military spending. It outspends the other nine combined and can afford to given the present scale of the U.S. economy. Not the British at the height of their empire nor even the Romans contesting with distant Medes and Parthians enjoyed such military predominance. And yet this quantitative comparison actually understates the U.S. advantage. For there is a real qualitative difference not only in American equipment but in the skills of its troops. The Pentagon made use of the contractions in general manpower through the 1990s and applied the "peace dividend" to hone a much more skilled and variously specialized fighting force. The U.S. does not employ "grunts" any more only soldiers who call themselves "grunts" with a certain droll pride. At the officer level Europeans visiting the American military academies have been tremendously impressed by what they have seen over the last decade. And one may see this for oneself by visiting the various institutions on the Internet. Unlike his European or Canadian opposite number the contemporary West Point or Naval War College graduate is familiar with Thucydides Machiavelli Clausewitz Fuller Liddell Hart -- and with Sun Tzu and Mao-tse Tung for that matter. Nor is it just a showy "book-learning" for the courses are designed to make the students apply what they study consistently and imaginatively to the circumstances the U.S. might face today. I have myself been tremendously impressed to read theses posted here and there on the net by young cadets who could obviously skate rings around your average "politically correct" humanities professor. On the ground level in Afghanistan it has become increasingly evident that the U.S. was able to parachute troops who could speak Pashto Persian Arabic Urdu. They needed these both for making contacts with potential allies and for interrogating prisoners who fell into their hands. They could also use translators effectively (this is actually a skill) as well as ride fast horses and put pack mules to work carrying high-tech gear. A remarkable interview which the Washington Post obtained with Capt. Jason Amerine an injured member of the U.S. Army's 5th Special Forces Group on his sickbed in Landstuhl Germany -- gives some hint of the ground capabilities. This was the unit that went into the mountains of Oruzgan to rendezvous with Hamid Karzai now Afghanistan's prime minister-designate. (They didn't need Pashto because he speaks fluent English.) In five short weeks this little vanguard of less than a dozen men mostly in their mid-twenties were able to recruit and organize and (through air drops) equip an Afghan fighting force that liberated the provincial capital then marched on Kandahar. They also ordered and set up distribution for emergency food and medical supplies for the civilian population while calling down airstrikes on a Taliban convoy and other positions almost in their spare time. "We could go in there naked with flip-flops and as long as we have good radios we could do our job Capt. Amerine said of their survival training. His unit made up for unfamiliarity with the local physical and cultural landscape with a crash course in Pashtun anthropology in the days before going in. Hunks, yes, but these are nothing like Europe's idea of G.I."s. Indeed the U.S. Marine general force now camping in the Rigestan desert are probably up to the special forces calibre of a generation ago. Technology plays no small part. Some 91 per cent of munitions the U.S. has dropped in Afghanistan have been pinpoint targeted -- compared with six per cent on Iraq. Even gravity bombs dropped from B-52s can now be placed within a few metres of the crosshair thanks to advances in computer calculation. And yet the "garage workshop" spirit is kept alive with the invention of weapons like the "Daisy Cutter" -- hand-made with old-fashioned welding tools and perhaps the most awkward-looking 15 000-pound explosive we shall ever see (it resembles the water-tanks on the roofs of old New York City apartment buildings). The U.S. armed forces are thus not only strong but extremely adaptable. Yet even this is to understate the U.S. advantage for it is likely to grow in the coming years. Prior to Sept. 11 the U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld was fighting a nearly impossible uphill battle against Congress to transform the whole organizational structure of the U.S. military. His goals are to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy replace surviving conventional with many more special forces and vastly increase the capacity of the military to respond to unexpected threats or recover quickly from unexpected hits. The terrorist strikes on New York and Washington and his performance since have vindicated his position and the overhaul is now proceeding. The French may have to invent a word for what comes after an "hyperpower". David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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