Wednesday 27th of November 2024
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winning battles, loosing the war...

winning battles losing wars

 

As I mentioned in "of our empty brains" in the history of invasion, not just Afghanistan, despite the devastating impact from the fighting, the result on the general populace is only a gradual shift, never an immediate change of beliefs nor direct change of allegiances, despite the new pressures, dangers, torture and deaths. Even the Romans, during the Pax Romana, had to fight against insurgencies. Insurgencies and invasions from Huns and other tribes that eventually led to the downfall of Rome, rather than its debauchery...

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But Agincourt’s status as perhaps the greatest victory against overwhelming odds in military history — and a keystone of the English self-image — has been called into doubt by a group of historians in Britain and France who have painstakingly combed an array of military and tax records from that time and now take a skeptical view of the figures handed down by medieval chroniclers.

The historians have concluded that the English could not have been outnumbered by more than about two to one. And depending on how the math is carried out, Henry may well have faced something closer to an even fight, said Anne Curry, a professor at the University of Southampton who is leading the study.

Those cold figures threaten an image of the battle that even professional researchers and academics have been reluctant to challenge in the face of Shakespearean prose and centuries of English pride, Ms. Curry said.

“It’s just a myth, but it’s a myth that’s part of the British psyche,” Ms. Curry said.

 The work, which has received both glowing praise and sharp criticism from other historians in the United States and Europe, is the most striking of the revisionist accounts to emerge from a new science of military history. The new accounts tend to be not only more quantitative but also more attuned to political, cultural and technological factors, and focus more on the experience of the common soldier than on grand strategies and heroic deeds.

The approach has drastically changed views on everything from Roman battles with Germanic tribes, to Napoleon’s disastrous occupation of Spain, to the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War. But the most telling gauge of the respect being given to the new historians and their penchant for tearing down established wisdom is that it has now become almost routine for American commanders to call on them for advice on strategy and tactics in Afghanistan, Iraq and other present-day conflicts.

The most influential example is the “Counterinsurgency Field Manual” adopted in 2006 by the United States Army and Marines and smack in the middle of the debate over whether to increase troop levels in Afghanistan.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the head of the United States Central Command, drew on dozens of academic historians and other experts to create the manual. And he named Conrad Crane, director of the United States Army Military History Institute at the Army War College, as the lead writer.

Drawing on dozens of historical conflicts, the manual’s prime conclusion is the assertion that insurgencies cannot be defeated without protecting and winning over the general population, regardless of how effective direct strikes on enemy fighters may be.


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From Chris Floyd


COIN Machine Out of Change
Nick Turse examines the effectiveness of the "counterinsurgency doctrine" so beloved by the Pentagon and eagerly embraced by Barack Obama. Turse begins with the stellar success of American COIN operations in the Philippines – still going strong after more than 100 years. It certainly bodes well for Barack's big adventure in Bactria and environs, doesn't it?

Pumping (Blood and) Iron
Another venerable tradition of our militarist state is "rolling out the product" – i.e., playing the "free press" like a pump organ to sing the siren song of war.  David Bromwich admires the masterclass in this pernicious process put on by the New York Times in a recent five-day blitz to push a "counterinsurgency" escalation on the Af-Pak front.

Class Warfare
The Bush-minted, Petraeus-stamped COIN in Iraq is now regarded by some poor fools (i.e., 97 percent of the political and media establishments) as an "extraordinary achievement," to use Obama's preferred term for the "surge." That's not true, of course; the "surge" was actually a partially successful intervention on the part of one faction in the multi-sided civil war set off by the American military aggression.
(Much as the American military aggression in Cambodia destroyed that society and led directly to the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge – who were, in any case, later backed by the Americans when Vietnam launched a "humanitarian intervention" to kick them out. Yes, it's very confusing, isn't it, these questions of when an invasion is "humanitarian" or not, and under what circumstances you should support genocidal berserkers. Such a tricky business; that's why we leave it to our wise leaders, like Nixon, Bush and Obama, to figure it all out for us.)

In any case, the armed extremist factions that America empowered are now putting their stamp on the "democracy" in Iraq. And here's what your tax dollars – and the blood of your compatriots (not to mention the blood of more than a million innocent Iraqis; but then, who does mention them?) – has paid for: Iraqi Campus Is Under Gang’s Sway.  This is from the NY Times -- which, when not obliged to do its civic duty as a pipeline for war propaganda, can sometimes actually dig up a few useful facts:


Mustansiriya University, one of Iraq’s most prestigious universities, was temporarily closed this month by the prime minister in an effort to rid it of a shadowy student gang accused of murdering, torturing and raping fellow students, and killing professors and administrators....

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 Winning the battle, losing the war?


I see that senior U.S. counterterrorism officials are bragging to NPR that al Qaeda is getting whipped in the rural wilds of Pakistan:
CIA-directed airstrikes against al-Qaida leaders and facilities in Pakistan over the past six to nine months have been so successful, according to senior U.S. officials, that it is now possible to foresee a "complete al-Qaida defeat" in the mountainous region along the border with Afghanistan.

The officials say the terrorist network's leadership cadre has been "decimated," with up to a dozen senior and midlevel operatives killed as a result of the strikes and the remaining leaders reeling from the repeated attacks.

"The enemy is really, really struggling," says one senior U.S. counterterrorism official. "These attacks have produced the broadest, deepest and most rapid reduction in al-Qaida senior leadership that we've seen in several years." [...]

"In the past, you could take out the No. 3 al-Qaida leader, and No. 4 just moved up to take his place," says one official. "Well, if you take out No. 3, No. 4 and then 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, it suddenly becomes a lot more difficult to revive the leadership cadre."

If you take these claims at face value, it's a pretty impressive achievement.

But here's the problem: At the same time as al Qaeda appears to be getting its collective ass kicked, native Pakistani and Afghan militants appear to be getting stronger, not weaker, just as Pakistani analysts have been warning for months.

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he died of dysentery...

 When the heavily armored French men-at-arms fell wounded, many could not get up and simply drowned in the mud as other men stumbled over them. And as order on the French lines broke down completely and panic set in, the much nimbler archers ran forward, killing thousands by stabbing them in the neck, eyes, armpits and groin through gaps in the armor, or simply ganged up and bludgeoned the Frenchmen to death.

“The situation was beyond grisly; it was horrific in the extreme,” Mr. Rogers wrote in his paper.

King Henry V had emerged victorious, and as some historians see it, the English crown then mounted a public relations effort to magnify the victory by exaggerating the disparity in numbers.

Whatever the magnitude of the victory, it would not last. The French populace gradually soured on the English occupation as the fighting continued and the civil war remained unresolved in the decades after Henry’s death in 1422, Mr. Schnerb said.

“They came into France saying, ‘You Frenchmen have civil war, and now our king is coming to give you peace,’ ” Mr. Schnerb said. “It was a failure.”

Unwilling to blame a failed counterinsurgency strategy, Shakespeare pinned the loss on poor Henry VI:

“Whose state so many had the managing, That they lost France and made his England bleed.”

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The catastrophic defeat that the French suffered at the Battle of Agincourt allowed Henry to fulfill all his campaign objectives. He was recognised by the French in the Treaty of Troyes (1420) as regent and heir to the French throne. This was cemented by his marriage to Catherine of Valois, the daughter of King Charles VI.

Henry V did not live to inherit the throne of France. In 1422, while securing his position against further French opposition, he died of dysentery at the age 34, two months before the death of Charles VI. He was succeeded by his young son, Henry VI, during whose reign the English were expelled from all of France except Calais by French military successes, encouraged by Joan of Arc, under the new French king, Charles VII

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see toon at top...

lingering legacy of war...

From Robert Fisk

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But I'm worried about the "heritage" bit, with its corny linguistic inheritance. There might be a site museum on a 5,000-year old Canaanite wall, but no one's going to dress up in Roman uniform or Crusader armour. It's true that there have been so many political assassinations in Beirut that one group of students has also cruelly suggested an "assassination trail" for tourists. I think "history trail" might be better for Solidere. Even a "memory trail" – but which of Lebanon's religious communities will then try to lay claim to the largest memory?

And there's one other problem – and I'm setting aside a main road with Lebanon's homicidal drivers that bisects the two-mile trail – and that's the Berri militia. To be fair, it's a car park of trucks belonging to Beirut's parliament police force whose boss is the Shia speaker, Nabih Berri. He is one of Lebanon's smartest politicians – he also once helped to save my life during the civil war – but he really should move his lads off the site, which contains another part of Roman-Persian Beirut. The only alternative – an exclusively Fisk idea, I have to admit – is to incorporate these armed men as antiquities themselves, so that tourists can take pictures of their clapped-out vehicles and exotic grey camouflage uniforms and poppy-red hats. Then you really could use the word "heritage".

war games...

U.S. tested 2 Afghan scenarios in war game
Obama and advisers evaluating exercise that used different troop levels

By Greg Jaffe and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 26, 2009

 

The Pentagon's top military officer oversaw a secret war game this month to evaluate the two primary military options that have been put forward by the Pentagon and are being weighed by the Obama administration as part of a broad-based review of the faltering Afghanistan war, senior military officials said.

The exercise, led by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, examined the likely outcome of inserting 44,000 more troops into the country to conduct a full-scale counterinsurgency effort aimed at building a stable Afghan government that can control most of the country. It also examined adding 10,000 to 15,000 more soldiers and Marines as part of an approach that the military has dubbed "counterterrorism plus."

Both options were drawn from a detailed analysis prepared by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the senior commander in Afghanistan, and were forwarded to President Obama in recent weeks by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

The Pentagon war game did not formally endorse either course; rather, it tried to gauge how Taliban fighters, the Afghan and Pakistani governments and NATO allies might react to either of the scenarios. Mullen, a key player in the game, has discussed its conclusions with senior White House officials involved in the discussions over the new strategy.

One of the exercise's key assumptions is that an increase of 10,000 to 15,000 troops would not in the near future give U.S. commanders the forces they need to take back havens from the Taliban commanders in southern and western Afghanistan, where shadow insurgent governors collect taxes and run court systems based on Islamic sharia law.

"We were running out the options and trying to understand the implications from many different perspectives, including the enemy and the Afghan people," said a senior military official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the classified game.

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see toon at top. Could they have tested 3 or 4 more scenarios?.

for history-revisited buffs...

Historians recognize three great battles fought around Poitiers, all commonly referred to as the battle of Poitiers, but all occurring in different locations in the vicinity of Poitiers, spread out over 600 years. Poitiers I was fought between Clovis and the Huns in 507 at Vouillé (west of Poitiers), Poitiers II was fought in 732 between Charles Martel and Eudes of Aquitaine against Abd. er-Rahman at Moussais (north of Poitiers) and Poitiers III was fought between Jean le Bon and Edward the Black Prince in 1356 at Nouaillé (south of Poitiers). Many historians agree that Poitiers II was the most significant of the three. It has been described in epic terms. Guizot (I:154) observes "It is quite certain that neither Franks nor Arabs, neither Charles nor Abd. er-Rahman themselves, took any account ... of the importance of the struggle in which they were on the point of engaging; it was a struggle between East and West, South and North, Asia and Europe, the Gospel and the Koran; and we now say, on the general consideration off events, people and ages, that the civilization of the world depended upon it." Kitchen (106) observes that here "the young civilizations of Europe and Asia stood face to face, there the horsemen of the East met the footmen of the West." Even those who saw the battle in less grandiose terms recognized its importance. Fouracre (in McKitterick CMH 88) notes; "Though not quite of the importance often still accorded to it, this Frankish victory did force the Arabs to retreat southwards ..."  On the other hand. Lewis downplays the significance of this battle. In a footnote (p22)  he observes "The advance north to Poitiers was a raid or razzia, not a Moslem attempt to conquer this part of France. Thus some historians have tended to overestimate the importance of Charles Martel's victory."

This second battle of Poitiers is also referred to as the battle of Tours, although it was not fought at a locale at all close to Tours.

See toon at top and go to lie to me...

take a bow...

A warship built with steel salvaged from the World Trade Center has been put into service in New York.

Hundreds of US Navy officers and sailors and also families of 9/11 victims attended the commissioning of the USS New York in Manhattan.

"No matter how many times you attack us, we always come back," US Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus said.

The bow of amphibious assault ship has 7.5 tonnes of melted steel from the debris of the World Trade Center.

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This must the biggest load of expectation placed on the smallest amount of weight ratio... A ship like the "New York" would be at least 30,000 tonnes... to carry 7.5 tonnes of salvaged remembrance steel is quite insignificant, except for the importance attached to it by the US patriot propagandists — on a ship that looks like a war machine, a mean obsolete war machine full of future deaths...

no connection between narcotics and insurgency...

Report Says Afghan Drug Effort Lacks Strategy

By BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON — The United States-led counternarcotics effort in Afghanistan, viewed as critical to halting the flow of funds to the Taliban and curtailing corruption, lacks a long-term strategy, clear objectives and a plan for handing over responsibility to Afghans, the State Department inspector general said in a report released Wednesday.

“The department has not clarified an end state for counternarcotics efforts, engaged in long-term planning or established performance measures,” said the 63-page report, which evaluates work done by the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs of the State Department.

The report said that military and civilian antidrug programs lacked clearly delineated roles, and that civilian contracts for counternarcotics work were poorly written and largely supervised from thousands of miles away. It also said that cooperation between the United States Embassies in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Islamabad, Pakistan, was limited, adding, “This lack of cooperation is due, in part, to Embassy Islamabad’s conclusion that there is no connection between illicit narcotics and the insurgency in Pakistan.”

see toon at top.