Mazar-i-Sharif. Herat. Kabul. Jalalabad. Kandahar. Faster than you can say "quagmire," the Taliban is fleeing cities across Afghanistan. A week ago, critics of the U.S.-led military campaign were insisting that the Taliban wouldn't budge, that American bombs were only killing civilians, that Ramadan and winter would lock in place the Taliban's advantage on the ground, and that the coalition supporting the war was disintegrating. Now the Taliban is disintegrating. Why? Because the crisis of confidence Osama Bin Laden sought to foment in the West has taken hold in Afghanistan instead. The Taliban's aura of invincibility has burst like a stock bubble. Everyone, including the Taliban, is selling.
Bin Laden's game plan was the opposite. The purpose of the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., wasn't just to kill 5,000 people. It was to intimidate and demoralize 5 billion. That's the point of terrorism. Al-Qaida targeted the most powerful country on Earth and hit it hard enough to send the world a message: Nobody is safe from us. Do as we say.
The videotaped speeches released by al-Qaida over the past month have hammered this theme. "There is America, full of fear," Bin Laden boasted at the beginning of his first speech on Oct. 7. In a tape released two days later, spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith warned, "The Americans must know that the storm of airplanes will not stop, God willing, and there are thousands of young people who are as keen about death as Americans are about life." In a third video, Ghaith proclaimed, "The storms of planes will not stop until you drag your defeated tails from Afghanistan, not until you raise your hands from the Jews in Palestine, not until you lift the embargo on the Iraqi people." He even alluded to the stock market plunge triggered by the Sept. 11 attacks. By supporting Israel, President Bush "has sacrificed his people and his country's economy," said Ghaith. The allusion to the U.S. economic slide, coupled with the use of that slide to undermine Bush's domestic political support, underscored al-Qaida's strategy of magnifying the damage of Sept. 11 through a self-fulfilling cycle of fear, defeatism, and decline.
The same cycle was supposed to undo the military campaign in Afghanistan. In the Oct. 7 video, senior al-Qaida strategist Ayman al-Zawahiri told Americans, "Your government left afraid from Lebanon and from Somalia and from Afghanistan. And today, your government is leading you to another lost battle where you will lose your sons and your money." Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar scoffed that American invaders would "find the same destiny as the communists." Taliban spokesman Abdul Salam Zaeef told reporters that the regime had a waiting list of volunteers and was ready for "a long war." He boasted that the Taliban had shot down U.S. aircraft and killed supporters of a southern rebellion. The message to domestic opponents was to lie low. The message to the United States was to give up.
It almost worked. In the north, the Taliban's enemies failed to advance. In the south, they failed to speak up. The American press suggested that the war had "bogged down," that the United States had "underestimated" the Taliban, and that the U.S.-led coalition was "falling apart." Complaints of futility and pointless bloodshed grew into an outcry to halt the bombing.
Then, last Friday, Mazar-i-Sharif fell. The Taliban's aura was punctured. In accelerating succession, other cities fell. War can't move that fast. It takes days to move your own tanks and troops, much less to push back the enemy's. But even in Afghanistan, the information age has arrived. What traveled from city to city in minutes wasn't the armies of the Northern Alliance, but the news of the Taliban's defeat. Civilians and Taliban soldiers who had resented the regime lost their fear of it. Those who had supported the regime lost their confidence in it. Taliban armies didn't lose their cities in battle; they defected or fled. Each flight or defection, in turn, provoked others. Sell, sell, sell.
Now the rout has turned south. Pashtun warlords who refused to stand up to the Taliban a week ago are rushing to claim pieces of its carcass. Some Taliban troops fleeing cities are being wiped out by U.S. bombers. Others are regrouping in the mountains, forgetting that they lack the supply lines and popular support to win the kind of guerrilla war they waged against the Soviets. The rest, according to today's New York Times and Washington Post, are "fading away," "disappearing," "vanishing," "dissipating," "becoming phantoms," and "returning to their home villages."
Morale matters. The army that loses self-confidence and the confidence of its people loses the war. Slobodan Milosevic used that weapon against us in Kosovo. Bin Laden and the Taliban tried the same thing in Afghanistan. In Kosovo, we refused to buckle, and the Serbs gave way. The same is now happening in Afghanistan. "I'm not a psychiatrist," U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shrugged yesterday when asked about the enemy's flight. Maybe not, but the Taliban is definitely getting shrunk.
Notes From The Fray Editor:
Nice analysis from Randy Khan; BML provoked an interesting thread (his title was 'this post is sure to come under attack'); and Arthur Stock wasn't the only one to make his point--the word 'toast' came up a lot--but (of course) his take was the funniest.
Comments:
There's a pretty boring lesson here, in the end: If you have overwhelming force and you're patient, eventually you'll win. This is not news. It's how Grant won the Civil War, how the U.S. won the Pacific Theater in WWII and how the coalition won the Gulf War. (It's also a principle used in a fair number of combat simulation games.) Probably the only significant innovation in this area is that, in the Gulf War and this one, somebody figured out that you can use heavy air attacks over a prolonged period (about the same amount of time in Iraq as in Afghanistan) to soften things up before you send in the ground troops.
So why didn't the Soviets win? (1) The force was not as significant, even though they had a lot of troops on the ground. I'd say the evidence is pretty strong that enough bombing and cruise missiles can more than make up for not committing troops early, especially if there isn't good air defense. (2) As may now be very obvious, pretty much all of Afghanistan hated the Soviets, so the forces were much closer to balanced than it might have appeared (and much closer than to balanced than they are today, as the Taliban don't appear to have much firm support even among the Pashtun).
We seem to have been lucky so far in that the country as a whole doesn't view this as a foreign [invasion]. That has, among other things, allowed for people to switch sides from the Taliban to the rebels, something that wasn't really a possibility when the Soviets came into the picture.
--Randy Khan
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
The collapse of the Taliban is heartening, but it hasn't produced bin Laden's corpse, which is why we're fighting in the first place. Everyone loves watching the end of a thuggish regime -- it certainly shows the price of harboring terrorists--but they've still got an army in the field and, momentarily at least, a safe haven for the butcher.
And it's great the Northern Alliance is making progress. How 'bout our progress against Al-Qaeda? We've frozen assets; we've bombed training camps; supposedly a meeting of their leaders was attacked this morning. Great. What's the network look like now? Is bombing a training camp equal to the fall of Kabul, or Mazar-e-Sharif?
I worry that Al-Qaeda might be more resilient than the Taliban. They have no capital, no front to hold, and no subjects holding them accountable. As distasteful as it is, Al-Qaeda's followers may hold considerably more loyalty to their leaders than Afghanis did to the Taliban, and may be harder to dislodge than Mullah Omar's conscripts.
I support the war and will support it for however long it takes. But the fight against the Taliban was, at best, tangential to the fight against terrorism. We're doing great on latter; I'd like to hear more about the former.
--BML
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
Deep in their caves, Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden find little reason for optimism. No cities, not much of an army, their own people turning against them. Out of ideas, they turn to the internet for some kind of sign from Allah.
Vindication at last! Slate columnist Saletan publishes a brief article interpreting their own words, how the world sees them, how communications have destroyed them. Saletan is predicting the future, claiming that the Taliban is over, will never have any power again. Only once since the beginning of time has Saletan made a similar prediction, last year, when his topic was an obscure Texas governor with a presidential campaign in about the condition the Taliban is today. Two months later, the governor was President, and a year after that, he had a 90% approval rating from New York to Kandahar.
Saletan isn't quite as certain about the Taliban as he was about Bush, but he has made most of the same points. Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden smile. This is surely a sign that the future will smile on them.
--Arthur Stock
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
(11/16)
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Notes From The Fray Editor:
Nice analysis from Randy Khan; BML provoked an interesting thread (his title was 'this post is sure to come under attack'); and Arthur Stock wasn't the only one to make his point--the word 'toast' came up a lot--but (of course) his take was the funniest.
Comments:
There's a pretty boring lesson here, in the end: If you have overwhelming force and you're patient, eventually you'll win. This is not news. It's how Grant won the Civil War, how the U.S. won the Pacific Theater in WWII and how the coalition won the Gulf War. (It's also a principle used in a fair number of combat simulation games.) Probably the only significant innovation in this area is that, in the Gulf War and this one, somebody figured out that you can use heavy air attacks over a prolonged period (about the same amount of time in Iraq as in Afghanistan) to soften things up before you send in the ground troops.
So why didn't the Soviets win? (1) The force was not as significant, even though they had a lot of troops on the ground. I'd say the evidence is pretty strong that enough bombing and cruise missiles can more than make up for not committing troops early, especially if there isn't good air defense. (2) As may now be very obvious, pretty much all of Afghanistan hated the Soviets, so the forces were much closer to balanced than it might have appeared (and much closer than to balanced than they are today, as the Taliban don't appear to have much firm support even among the Pashtun).
We seem to have been lucky so far in that the country as a whole doesn't view this as a foreign [invasion]. That has, among other things, allowed for people to switch sides from the Taliban to the rebels, something that wasn't really a possibility when the Soviets came into the picture.
--Randy Khan
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
The collapse of the Taliban is heartening, but it hasn't produced bin Laden's corpse, which is why we're fighting in the first place. Everyone loves watching the end of a thuggish regime -- it certainly shows the price of harboring terrorists--but they've still got an army in the field and, momentarily at least, a safe haven for the butcher.
And it's great the Northern Alliance is making progress. How 'bout our progress against Al-Qaeda? We've frozen assets; we've bombed training camps; supposedly a meeting of their leaders was attacked this morning. Great. What's the network look like now? Is bombing a training camp equal to the fall of Kabul, or Mazar-e-Sharif?
I worry that Al-Qaeda might be more resilient than the Taliban. They have no capital, no front to hold, and no subjects holding them accountable. As distasteful as it is, Al-Qaeda's followers may hold considerably more loyalty to their leaders than Afghanis did to the Taliban, and may be harder to dislodge than Mullah Omar's conscripts.
I support the war and will support it for however long it takes. But the fight against the Taliban was, at best, tangential to the fight against terrorism. We're doing great on latter; I'd like to hear more about the former.
--BML
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
Deep in their caves, Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden find little reason for optimism. No cities, not much of an army, their own people turning against them. Out of ideas, they turn to the internet for some kind of sign from Allah.
Vindication at last! Slate columnist Saletan publishes a brief article interpreting their own words, how the world sees them, how communications have destroyed them. Saletan is predicting the future, claiming that the Taliban is over, will never have any power again. Only once since the beginning of time has Saletan made a similar prediction, last year, when his topic was an obscure Texas governor with a presidential campaign in about the condition the Taliban is today. Two months later, the governor was President, and a year after that, he had a 90% approval rating from New York to Kandahar.
Saletan isn't quite as certain about the Taliban as he was about Bush, but he has made most of the same points. Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden smile. This is surely a sign that the future will smile on them.
--Arthur Stock
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
(11/16)