Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [2]
After 9/11, Army Special Forces were quickly deployed to Afghanistan. There they executed a classic unconventional-warfare campaign, an astonishing feat of arms in which the Green Berets taught and fought with distinction. The Northern Alliance, with their Army Special Forces mentors and backed by American precision airpower, swept through that feudal nation in only a few months—something the Soviet army couldn’t do in more than a decade of fighting. The invasion of Iraq was a classic exercise in conventional maneuver warfare. The 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, under the superb direction of General Tommy Franks, made short work of Saddam’s army. In both these campaigns, our conventional military and special operations forces were magnificent. Technically and professionally, our forces were overwhelming. In both cases, and unlike previous wars, we took the ground and were able to leave the infrastructure largely intact. But while we won the physical terrain, we didn’t entirely win the human terrain. That’s still being contested. In Afghanistan and Iraq, our enemies learned a great deal about how to fight us. It’s unlikely that they will ever again expose themselves to our conventional military might or our airpower. They’ve gone to ground—deep in the mountains and deep into the local populations.
The enemy has taken up the tools of the insurgent. In doing so, they’ve largely denied us the use of our technology and our conventional military superiority. And now, we must go into the mountains and the cities—among the tribes, the clans, and the urban populations—and find this elusive and deadly foe. To do this, we need the help of the locals. Simply stated, if we lose or fail to gain the popular support of the people, we lose it all. Our initial victories in Afghanistan and Iraq will have been for nothing.
We are currently locked in an insurgent war, one that’s likely to go on for a very long while. Our enemies—al-Qaeda, the Baathists, the Islamists, the Taliban, the Wahhabis, or whatever they may be calling themselves or however they are allied—have perfected the art of insurgency warfare. Their battlefield tactics now include suicide bombers, roadside bombs (called improvised explosive devises, or IEDs), kidnapping, random murder, ritual beheadings, chaos, and terror—all in the name of religious ideology. The insurgency is alive and festering in Baghdad, Kabul, and in the mountains of the Hindu Kush. The enemy of this insurgency is not America, although we are a useful and visible target for these insurgents. Their enemy is democracy, the electoral victory of Hamas by the Palestinians notwithstanding. If the people choose—if there is government by consent of the governed—then the insurgents lose. The fact that Hamas rules by virtue of an election is against Islamic law. Should elections in Beirut or Damascus bring about a secular government, an insurgency will surely follow. Sharia, a strict and fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law, simply cannot allow political freedom. Neither can it allow economic freedom. One reason Islamic nations are so poor is that economic freedom generates wealth, and wealth will lead to political freedom—something these insurgents cannot allow to happen.
Since our enemies have taken up the tools of the insurgent, how do we react? How do we defeat this insurgency? Unfortunately, we’re a lot better at fighting battles against national, conventional armies than insurgent armies. And unless we want the Middle East and Southwest Asia to go the way of Vietnam, we had best perfect the tools of counterinsurgency warfare. There’s a lot at stake here. Our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq will affect the political landscape of the entire region. How