Unfortunately for al-Qaeda, these are conflicting situations; the less likely the US was to go nuclear against civilians, the more likely those civilians were to turn on the sociopaths in al-Qaeda.
I'm not sure I track this line of reasoning. If Al Qaeda had not pursued a strategy of terror against the civilians, its not clear to me that the civilians would have ceased their natural cultural support against the foreign invader (i.e. Americans). In battle terms, Al Qaeda opened another front in their war -- against the very people they needed to provide a supply chain; looked at this way - they sowed the seeds of their own defeat rather than through any master strategy from the USA. Had they not run around kidnapping and chopping off peoples heads willy-nilly; especially tribal leaders, its hard for me to see the persuasive reason why the civilians would have turned against them.
Insurgency CAN work if the local population remains on your side, or at least doesn't turn on you. See Vietnam, Ireland, et al. The core problem with Al Qaeda is that rather than defeat their 'enemies' piecemeal, they attacked every target of opportunity they could.
# Diminsh fighting strength -- Or, kill the grunts. Messy and usually costly in term of friendly forces' lives.
# Target the supply chain -- Armies without bullets can't shoot, armies without fuel doesn't move.
# Disrupt command and control -- Without effective orders, armies sit around with their collective thumbs up their asses.
This brings me to the current situation in Afghanistan where the Taleban is drawing its support from the local population and is using selective murder and violence to intimidate the populace. Like the Irish who practiced a Sinn Fein/IRA division, the Taleban are not merely killing and destroying, but bringing a version of 'street' justice to a region where anarchy co-exists tribalism. Unlike Al Qaeda in Iraq where many of the commanders/leaders were drawn from outside of Iraq, the Taleban are an evolution from the pre-existing tribal conflicts.
Key point being, a pyramid of skulls might indeed be whats necessary to break the back of the Afghan insurgency because the entire culture (at a tribal level) is intent on overthrowing the US backed government.
Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.
26
 6
|
Re: Why Did Iraq Violence Fall?
Thu Sep 11, 2008 at 07:01:12 PM EST
|
If Al Qaeda had not pursued a strategy of terror against the civilians, its not clear to me that the civilians would have ceased their natural cultural support against the foreign invader (i.e. Americans).
I think it would have been harder to change Iraqis minds had al-Qaeda refrained from targeting civilian allies, but at some level, facts speak for themselves. The Sunni in Anbar and elsewhere had already been subject to propaganda about the horrible behavior to be expected of US forces back in Saddam's day. What actually happened was that US forces, even when using the earlier failing tactics, were far more likely to respect civilians lives and rights than the Iraqis had even seen displayed by their own government. Certainly there were some well-reported failures of US troops to abide by a high standard of battlefield ethics, but there were plenty of examples of US troops going above and beyond to save civilians, too -- many more than failures, I would argue.
Re: Afghanistan and the pyramid of skulls technique, maybe. I think the real problem is that there is an entire area Coalition troops can't touch for political reasons. To my mind, this is ultimately why the US lost in Vietnam. There, we had to deal with Vietcong training holidays in Cambodia; in Afghanistan, the same kind of support arises from Pakistan. The trouble with the pyramid of skulls in this case is that it's a temporary solution if the conqueror doesn't keep the field or extinguish the entire population. With Taliban-friendly tribes just across the border, the latter won't happen, and I don't exactly see much call for re-opening the frontier half a world away.
