Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Winning a Battle isn’t the Same as Winning a War

 

Back in last year’s American Presidential Election, Donald Trump famously predicted that the media would stop talking about “COVID-COVID” after the election. Unfortunately for the world, he has finally been proven right. His successor somehow managed to come up with a successful vaccination roll out program that seems to have tamed Covid outbreaks in the USA (which still remains the world leader in Covid infections).

While it was a good move to rush out the vaccine, it was not a good move to rush the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, which America had entered back in 2001 in an effort to catch Osama Bin Ladin and his Al Qaeda gang in revenge for destroying the Twin Towers in New York. The only party which benefited from the move was the Taliban, the religious fundamentalist who ran Afghanistan prior to the American invasion in October 2001 and who had become a by word for stone age treatment of people who didn’t agree with them (This being the group that famously bombed ancient Buddhist statues, banned music and refused to let girls go to school). It took a matter of weeks for the Taliban to recapture the entire nation without much resistance. President Biden’s claim of “America is back,” got a sharp kick in the nuts with pictures of American troops rushing out in helicopters in the same way that American troops had to flee from the top of their embassy in Saigon in 1975.

While Joe Biden will get slapped for the decision to pull the troops out suddenly, the problem was actually started back in 2001, when George W Bush made the decision to invade in order to punish the perpetrators of the 11 September attacks. Back in 2001, the Taliban had run the parts of the country they controlled in such a brutal manner that when the Northern Alliance gained the military capability to drive them from power thanks to support from American air power, the people were happy to see the backs of the Taliban.

The Americans and their allies in the Afghan government had twenty-years to create the conditions in Afghanistan so that the Taliban would never have been able to make a come-back. If you want to look at it from a brand perspective, the American brand of “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” lost the war to the Taliban brand of “death, ignorance, intolerance and destruction.” The American presence in Afghanistan will probably go down as one of the biggest waste of money and life in history – an audit of what the effort costs can be found in the following report by Al-Jazeera:

 https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/8/16/the-us-spent-2-trillion-in-afghanistan-and-for-what

How did the world’s biggest military and economic power end up being humiliated by a rag tag group of religious zealots? Better informed people have given their opinions on how the superpower failed to build a nation. The links can be found at:

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/8/17/the-collapse-of-afghan-military-we-have-seen-this-movie-before;

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/8/16/the-us-the-taliban-and-the-stunning-defeat-in;

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/8/17/why-did-the-afghan-army-disintegrate-so-quickly ; and

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/8/16/what-went-wrong-in-afghanistan

Perhaps the arguments made by these writers can be summed up the military saying that the politicians running the superpower forgot there’s a difference between a battle and a war. One of my former army officers, who was a West Point Graduate made the point that “Americans Always Win the Battle but Never the War.” What’s the difference?

In lay man terms, the battle is a head-to-head confrontation between two opposing forces. As mentioned, in a previous posting, this is usually the fight won by the bigger and more powerful force.

I would sum up a war as a case of ensuring that a given enemy is placed in a situation where they will never entertain the idea of messing with you again.

A single war can have many battles. Both sides will win a certain number of battles. However, the war is only lost when one side capitulates. In World War II the Germans and Japanese won many battles but lost the war. The allied powers rebuilt both Germany and Japan to an extent where nobody considers either a force of disruption. Winning wars is not just about military victories. One of the reasons why Germany and Japan lost was due to an inability to control the supply chain and both nations ran out of resources to wage war. As much as my British friends will object, the war was pretty much won by American money and Russian blood.

In the Korean War, America and her allies won most of the battles. However, technically speaking North Korea never surrendered and nobody gained any territory or advantage other than to agreement that neither Korea should invade the other. In Vietnam, superior American fire power saw US dominance on the battle field but the world remembered American troops fleeing from the top of their embassy.

Wars are inevitably psychological. In Vietnam the US won on the battle field but lost the psychologically.  The lessons from Vietnam were not lost on insurgent groups. Nobody beats the giant elephant when it charges. However, small insects can wear down an elephant on a daily basis over several years. The invasion of Iraq was a classic example. It took a matter of weeks for Saddam’s army to collapse. Years later, the Americans ran away and we got ISIS.

Battles are short and sweet. Wars are long and brutish. Take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example. One side wins all battles because it is the vastly superior force. The other tries to bog them down in a psychological conflict and to waste lives and money to achieve an objective.

If you watch the Israeli series “Fauda,” you’ll notice that this is a long-drawn-out conflict. It’s not about Israeli fire power alone but also about how it turns Palestinians against each other with a combination of strategic brutality and kindness. Israel has special agents who speak fluent Arabic and pass off as Palestinians to the extent that they are perfectly at home praying in mosque and living as Palestinians.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vpZYPsfQ9A

 

This isn’t lost on the Palestinians. In the second season of Fauda, you have an ISIS leader posing as Israeli and telling his men “Speak Hebrew – we are now inside Israel.”

Big powers inevitably get tripped up by the fact that they are big powers and unlikely to be challenged on the battle field. Small powers have to fight very differently in order to make it through the war. In military terms, nobody challenges the USA on the battlefield (As stated in the Newsroom – we spend more on defense than the next 26-nations combined, 25 of whom are allies). However, America has lost wars because it got worn down by enemies who studied them. I think of the scene in Fauda, where the Israelis compliment a Hamas collaborator on his fluent Hebrew, to which the collaborator says, “Got to know your enemy.”

What is true in the military context is also true in other areas. In Singapore politics, we have our ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), which controls all the levers of power. Singapore has never experienced rule by another political party and it’s reached a stage where the political party has used a line from the national anthem as a slogan (Majullah PAP as opposed to Majullah Singapura). This is an unstoppable force on the proverbial battlefield. You have a few opposition parties that rush into the fry and challenge the most powerful beast into battles where they’ll do more than score a few popular points like the debate on CECA (treaty with India).

There is, however, a party that is playing to win a war. This is the Worker’s Party, which remains quiet on many hot button issues. Why is that so? The answer is simple, they understand that in the war, the only thing that matters is seats in parliament. Hence, they focus resources on ensuring they win seats and get the candidates that can win votes. Efforts are focused on showing voters than they can be trusted to look after them rather than on scoring points in cyberspace. The results have been telling. They took a single seat and held onto it for two decades, quietly building up a team and waiting for the ruling party to slip. They took a GRC and the scalp of a respected minister in 2011 and held onto it in 2015. In 2020, they saw to it that their candidates were likeable enough to frustrate ministers (think of Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan’s expression when he was debating Dr. Jamus Lim). They took their second GRC and the scalp of another minister.

In a battle, the bigger force always wins. In a war, it’s the side that has greater resilience and more motivation that wins.

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Maira Gall