American officials grudgingly acknowledge the Taliban’s skill at using guerrilla-style attacks to manipulate public impressions of the insurgency. “We assess that the primary focus of attacks in northern provinces such as Kunduz is to create a perception that the insurgency is spreading like wildfire,” the American official in Afghanistan said. “But I think it’s more of an ‘information operations’ success than a substantive one of holding any territory.”Well, no fucking shit. Part of what a successful insurgency will do is convince the people that the government cannot do anything for them, that the government cannot provide a measure of security. (I've written a bit about this before.) When government officials, military officers and politicians from the party of Clowns blather on about "we haven't been defeated on the battlefield", all that they are doing is betraying their own ignorance.
The history of both conventional and irregular warfare is full of examples of combatants that lost battles and yet won their wars and vice versa. Even one battle can be a military victory when one looks at the butcher's bill and yet a loss when one looks at the objectives of the combatants. The Japanese Navy technically won the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, fought during the Guadalcanal Campaign, but as the objective of the Japanese Navy was to support their forces ashore and the objective of the U.S. Navy was to prevent that, the Japanese lost the battle. It is worth keeping in mind that George Washington lost almost every battle he fought with the British Army. [1]
Military power is used to further a national objective. Military power is not the end-all and be-all. Any fool can count forces and the dead on either side, but that is not the measure of who the victor is in a battle or a war. If the people running our government in the agencies involved with the fight in Afghanistan do not understand that, then they are fools, we are truly screwed and we are tromping down the path towards another defeat.
[1] Old story: A Marine officer was a guest at a formal dinner thrown by the officers of a British
Army regiment at their headquarters. Before the dinner, the Marine was given a tour of the regimental museum, which included a display of enemy flags captured on the field of battle. One of the flags was an American Colonial flag, which was taken at the Battle of Bunker Hill. One of the British officers observed: "As you can see, we still have the flag."
The Marine grunted and then replied: "We still have the hill."
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