The big mistake made by Western policymakers in the post-colonial era, currently on display in Afghanistan and Libya, as well as lingering in Iraq, is to merge two types of conflict situations.
The two phases of the Iraq War are illustrative. The first phase involved the quick battlefield victory over Iraqi forces, the capture of Baghdad, and the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein. George W. Bush (Doofy) celebrated this victorious sequel to the Gulf War by unfurling the banner 'Mission Accomplished' while he spoke to American troops from the deck of an aircraft carrier.
After the fact, such a celebration became an embarrassment during the second phase of the Iraq War that focused on the political and economic restructuring of the country. It was here that the Vietnam precedent gave a second life to the Vietnam Syndrome suggesting that indigenous resistance to foreign occupation can significantly neutralize the impact of military superiority.
Lost in translation
It is notable that David Petraeus is the most influential American military figure of the past decade despite being associated with essentially losing efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Petraeus rose through the ranks of the military establishment as a result of his role in rewriting the US Army Manual of Counterinsurgency Warfare. This text supposedly applied the lessons of the Vietnam War, not in the Bush I and II senses of fighting conventional wars on battlefields, but in the more challenging manner of uncovering the secret to the use of American military power to overcome nationalist resistance to foreign military occupation.
In the manual Petraeus encouraged sensitivity to the indigenous culture, respect for the human rights, and promotion of economic development, policies that if applied would contrast with American behavior in Vietnam. And yet there is a fallacy: the violent imperial intrusion remains as unpalatable as previously to an occupied non-Western population. When Obama became president in early 2009 Petraeus reportedly persuaded the new American leader to replace the commander in Afghanistan who was oriented toward a conventional war fighting strategy with his handpicked counterinsurgency specialist, General Stanley McChrystal.
When McChrystal was dismissed a year later after talking insultingly about White House (Zero) leadership in the Afghan struggle, Petraeus took over as the commanding general for the next year, gradually expanding the war by means of a surge of troops combined with a ten-fold increase in drone attacks. Such an approach seemed to reenact the Vietnam Fallacy.
Western interventions in the early 21st century are almost certain to encounter violent and persevering national resistance that must be eliminated if stability is to be restored. To reach such an outcome inevitably alienates a substantial portion of the population being 'liberated', especially as it is unavoidable that the pressure to avoid casualties for the intervening party naturally shifts the human burdens of war, producing civilian deaths, devastation, and massive displacement at the site of struggle. When American forces do eventually depart, or are forced out of Afghanistan, it may provide temporary encouragement if policymakers and their think tanks are inhibited in advocating military intervention by the presence of an 'Afghanistan Syndrome'.
The flawed Libyan intervention under NATO auspices, with strong American participation, again shows how low the learning curve has fallen when it comes to Western reliance on military power. Instead of claiming 'security' or 'democracy promotion' as in Iraq and Afghanistan, the justification in Libya is 'humanitarian.'
The Western led 'coalition of the willing' managed to twist enough arms to win an ambivalent authorisation from the UN Security Council for a narrowly circumscribed use of force to establish a 'no fly zone' to protect Libyan civilian urban centres allegedly under threats of massacre by Qaddafi forces. Almost immediately the intervention, supposedly undertaken primarily for the protection of Libyan civilians (tee hee) entrapped in the city of Benghazi, morphed into a campaign for regime change in Tripoli on behalf of shadowy opposition forces. Whatever the outcome of this civil strife, the experience again shows that military superiority of foreign powers, even if overwhelming, tends to devastate the country being 'saved' without being able to achieve its political goals at acceptable costs. NATO is currently recoiling from its initial enthusiasm for the intervention, and seems to be searching for a diplomatic face-saving escape route from this Libyan quagmire. It has replaced its original martial melody with the now more congenial rhythms of 'compromise'.
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