07/03/12 – William S. Lind – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is William S.
Lind, former director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation, and he used to write quite regularly for luerockwell.com and for antiwar.com.
Here he is now at the American Conservative Magazine.
Their website is theamericanconservative.com.
His recent piece here is called Unfriendly Fire, How the Taliban Mastered the Operational Art of Modern War.
Welcome back to the show, William.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
It's a pleasure to be back.
It's been a while.
Yeah, many years.
In fact, five or six or something, I guess.
Well, I stopped doing the column, the on war column as a weekly when I left Free Congress Foundation after Paul Weirich's death, but I am now writing it on a monthly basis for the American conservative.
Oh, okay, great.
Well, we always keep our eye on the American conservative anyway, so I'll be looking forward to many more like this.
So, first of all, kind of as background to the piece, you make an allusion right there in the beginning to modern war and what's so different about it compared to, you know, I think you're referring to pretty recent history.
Well, recent to me because I'm an historian, but modern war begins essentially with 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia.
And what that marked was the assertion by the state of a monopoly on war.
Previously, many different entities had fought wars, cities fought wars, tribes fought wars, religions fought wars, families fought wars, business enterprises fought wars.
And at the Peace of Westphalia, the European powers said not anymore.
From now on, only the state can legitimately wage war.
And anyone else who wants to wage war outside the framework of war is a criminal to be executed.
If you look at woodcuts of Germany after the Thirty Years War, the trees are festooned with corpses.
Those were men who belonged to militaries that weren't part of state armies.
The state armies went out, rounded them up and hanged them to the universal applause of everybody, by the way, because when they weren't hired to be soldiers, they just took whatever they wanted from anyone too weak to resist.
So that's really the beginning of modern war.
What characterizes it is the state's monopoly on war.
And I guess what I was thinking of was this 21st century version where we go back to the pre state days.
And that's right.
The Taliban, what the Taliban has mastered is the art, not so much of being a government of Afghanistan, but the art of fighting to be the government of Afghanistan.
Right.
What's happening is that this is what I call the fourth generation of modern war.
The first the fourth big transformation in the modern period in how war is fought and what characterizes it, as you just said, is the state is now losing the monopoly on war that it established was with Westphalia.
This is the biggest change in war, by the way, for 350 years.
And now all over the world, non state organizations are fighting wars.
And when they fight states, they almost always win.
This is an enormous change in virtually everything.
State militaries are increasingly obsolete.
Well, and I guess I wasn't alive for Vietnam, but I've read a lot about it.
And we were talking earlier on the show about how people who are armed with, I guess, you know, for a while, the North, the North Vietnamese army was supplied by the Russians and the Chinese to some degree.
But mostly it was just natives with AKs and black pajamas, bogged down and defeated the world's greatest empire, you know, just on the eve of my being born there and in the mid 1970s.
And it seems like they might have learned a little bit of the lesson then, I guess, in the Middle East, they just thought, as long as there's no jungle, we'll be OK over here.
Well, what happened actually, is after the Vietnam War, the US military said, we are never going to fight that kind of war again, and refocused on fighting Soviet tank corps in Central Europe.
And they threw away all their expertise learned from the Vietnam War, they got rid of all the people, guys like Colonel Dave Hackworth, who were extremely good at that kind of warfare and said, we're never going to do that again.
Well, guess what some of us, including myself, said before the Iraq War started, that if and when we take Baghdad, that's not when the war will end, that's when the real war will start.
And that's exactly what happened.
And we proved once again, incapable of it.
That's exactly what Hackworth said at a time you're contemporary is, huh?
Yes, I knew Dave Hackworth pretty well.
We got together for dinner at Washington most times when he'd come down there.
Wow.
Well, yeah, he was basically the only guy allowed on right wing talk radio to say anti war things in the run up to the Iraq War at all.
And I, I told a story on the show before I remember him telling Sean Hannity, now you shut up, boy, and let me finish and explain exactly what you just said.
You don't know, you know, he said to Hannity, you don't know anything about the Middle East.
And I'm about to tell you, and he explained, once you take Baghdad, then the war starts, correct.
And then our guys will lose, they're stuck in the sand trap.
And the reason he cared so much was because he cared about the enlisted men.
And he always talked about the officers like it was this class war against the enlisted men, and they'll throw you away.
And so he was sticking up for them by arguing against that they ought to go have to fight this stupid war.
Right?
I mean, everybody says support the troops, support the troops, which is fine.
But the way you one of the ways you support the troops is by avoiding unnecessary wars, because it's the troops who get killed and and mutilated for life.
So unfortunately, we've done a rather poor job of giving the troops real support in that sense.
And Hackworth very much cared about that.
But what's going on now, as I said, is a much broader phenomenon, the Vietnam War doesn't really is still a war between states.
But what is going on now, again, is that states find themselves fighting a wide variety of non state entities, gangs, drug gangs are part of this.
Religious cults can be part of this.
And some religions, by the way, are very much religions of war, and that includes Islam.
So you've got a wide variety of actors fighting for a wide variety of causes, not just political results.
This, this is this war is no longer in Clausewitz's Trinity, it's no longer within his definition of wars politics carried on by other means.
And all over the world, state armed forces are doing poorly against the Israelis did very poorly against Hezbollah, which is probably militarily the most competent of the fourth generation organizations.
And we have done very poorly, obviously, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
All right, now, well, we don't have too much time to get into this.
But I guess before we get into the green on blue attacks and, and the situation in Afghanistan, as it is now, can you talk a little bit about what you mean by the operational art?
Why do you distinguish that in the article between tactics, strategy, and this is the gray area in between somewhere?
It's not a gray area.
It is, although none of these have have clear cut exact boundaries.
It is a level of war between tactics and strategy.
It was developed by the Prussians.
Naturally, they were generally the the people who were most forward thinking about war in the 19th century.
And it's the linkage between tactics and strategy.
It is essentially how you try to use tactical events, which may be battles or refusals to give battle victories and sometimes even defeat to strike as directly as possible at the enemy's strategic center of gravity.
The problem is that fourth generation warfare is very difficult to fight on the operational level.
The Soviet Army was far better than our own at the operational level.
They were by 4445, as good as the Germans, never true of the Western allies.
And they couldn't do it in Afghanistan.
And a friend of mine over there, by the way, found the Soviet war plan for Afghanistan, he said, it's identical to our own.
So we win tactical victories here and there, but we can't link them to winning strategically.
It's exactly what happened to every country that has invaded Afghanistan.
The Taliban have figured out how to do this.
This is, of course, not good news.
But the fact is they have and it's the so called green on blue attacks, where members of the Afton army or police forces just in the paper this morning, three British soldiers just killed by an African policeman.
They strike right at the heart of our strategy, because our strategy says we're going to train up these Afton forces, so that when we leave, we can we can, the government there can keep going.
All right, now I'm sorry, we have to hold it right there, Bill.
It's William S. Lynn, unfriendly fire is the piece in the American conservative, the American conservative.com.
Talking about the green on blue attacks, and the Taliban's master plan for the NATO occupation there.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking to William S. Lynn.
His piece in the American conservative magazine, the American conservative.com is unfriendly fire how the Taliban mastered the operational art of modern war.
America's plan is to train up the Northern Alliance army basically to be big and powerful enough to be that Westphalian nation state you refer to there.
And yet they can't win because as you say, their opponents, the Taliban have mastered the art of frustrating the West's plans there in Afghanistan, and particularly with the tactic of the green on blue attack.
So elaborate about that for us, please.
Again, what the what operational art does is it connects the tactical to the strategic.
And again, we have failed to be able to figure out how to do that in Afghanistan.
The Taliban have figured it out with the green on blue attacks, because the heart of our strategy is this training mission.
And it makes the training mission impossible because there's no trust between the Western forces who are doing the training and the Afghans they're supposed to train.
And every new green on blue incident makes the Westerners get farther and farther away from the people are supposed to be training, living separately blast walls, all kinds of regulations about the Afghans not being armed and near the Westerners stuff like that.
Well, you can't do an effective training mission when you're trying when you're telling the people you're trying to train that we don't trust you, we don't like you and when and we don't want you around.
So the Taliban in this case have with this technique, linked the tactical and the strategic and the Americans, they've really been fighting a ridiculous uphill battle that they could have never won in the first place.
I'm sure you know, you talked about how you warned against invading Iraq, I'm sure you weren't against sacking Kabul and regime change in the Taliban in the first place, right?
Well, the the everything that an outside power can do in intervening in Afghanistan, we accomplished in the first 30 days, you can take Kabul, you can toss out the government you don't like, and you can put in a government you like, but the Afghan government's authority never goes beyond Kabul.
It's a very decentralized state.
So if you try to do more than that, then you just end up bogged down forever in a quagmire, which is what we are now because you're fighting the poshman and the poshman have no need for closure.
What a poshman does that defines him as poshman is he fights and all he has to do is fight in his generation and make sure the next generation does the same happy to keep it up forever.
So we have essentially done everything we could do in the first 30 days.
And beyond that, we've sat there 10 years achieving precisely nothing.
I wonder if you could maybe help.
I remember you talking this way back years ago when we spoke before about some jihadis and in Saudi Arabia, I think you wrote an article called through our enemy's eyes.
I wonder if you could maybe help to portray what the night raid is like for an Afghan family to Americans in this audience in a way that they can understand this and maybe whether or not I guess I'm assuming you don't think that's a productive tactic.
Maybe I don't, I doubt that's assuming too much.
It's a counterproductive tactic, because war as Colonel John Boyd, America's greatest military theorist argued is fought at three levels, the physical, the mental and the moral.
The physical where we focus with things like drone attacks and night raids is the least powerful, the moral is the most powerful.
So things like the night raids are effective tactically, and they're effective at the physical level, but they are counterproductive strategically and at the moral level.
And we can't seem to grasp that because that's all we know how to do.
It's very easy to make it to make it real to the average American.
Just think of these cases all too many where police in this country have raided the wrong house.
Okay, you're a normal law abiding family.
And suddenly in the middle of the night, a bunch of guys in in face masks, heavily armed are breaking your door down and coming into your house screaming at you.
Ah, what's your reaction?
Your reaction is simultaneously terror and anger.
And that's exactly how the Afghans respond.
So it's, it's, it's quite imaginable what this is like, because of these cases, again, they happen all too often where the where the cop SWAT team gets the wrong house.
Well, and yeah, and it's the Delta Force, which makes your local SWAT team look like Barney five, right?
No, that's a misconception.
I've actually spent some time with Delta.
And with all of our special operations forces, they actually did a competition a few years ago, where they pitted them against police SWAT teams, and the cops always won.
Because the cops do free play training and our most of our special operations forces do not.
And so the cops were light years ahead of them.
Well, I remember them at Waco.
Well, that's, that's federal forces.
Okay.
Well, that was Delta too.
Beg your pardon?
Yeah, that was the combat applications group, the Clinton's private army.
That's right.
And but that's federal forces.
The cops I'm talking about the SWAT teams are local guys.
Sure.
And, and but I'm talking about the guys that did the Waco fire, right?
The guys that were sticking on the Afghans in the middle of the night.
Well, again, those actually are two different groups of people.
But the but that the night raids, once again, are massively counterproductive, because the survivors and all of their friends and all of their relatives and all their clansmen and it's a clan and tribal based society are now obligated to take revenge by fighting us.
So it becomes a huge recruiting tool for the Taliban.
Yeah, um, you know, we talked with Michael Hastings on the show.
He's the reporter for the Rolling Stone who his article about McChrystal got him fired for Yeah, unfortunately, because McChrystal was by far and away the best guy we had over there.
And the only guy who understood how to fight this kind of war.
Well, that was the thing is, he did seem to understand what he was doing, then he was doing the wrong thing.
Anyway, he said, you know, these night raids, every time we do this, we kill one, we create 10 more, but then what do you do?
The same damn thing every night, he was cutting back on all that stuff as much as he could.
He was hated, by the way, by our troops, because he said no more airstrikes.
And the airstrikes are even worse than the night raids.
And of course, they're very often part of the night raids, if we get resistance, we call it an airstrike.
And he had stopped that.
And his firing was whatever slim hope that it was very slim, we had of coming out of Afghanistan, with any with a with some tail feathers intact, essentially was lost when he was fired.
Petraeus immediately went back to the airstrikes and all the rest of it.
Well, and that really is what counts in DC, right?
It's tail feathers, they have to have something to claim before they leave, they have to call it some kind of victory.
Meanwhile, they're agreeing to stay till 2024.
Because I guess they don't see victory on the horizon any better than you or I do.
Right.
And nobody can nobody's got the guts politically to pull the plug is what it comes down to.
Again, we've stayed there 10 years after we achieved everything we could possibly achieve, which is putting the northern alliance in power in Kabul, give them some money, give them some weapons, and that's it.
That's about all you can do.
But we've stayed for 10 years bleeding through the whole period.
Because nobody in Washington has the guts to pull the plug.
No one in Washington dares says, we've done everything we can from here on out.
It's just wasted effort.
Well, and you know, to be very specific, there was just that piece in foreign policy, what a week and a half ago or something where maybe two weeks ago, where, you know, sources close to Obama say that with the whole getting out of Iraq on the Bush timetable there, he couldn't possibly end the war in Afghanistan, too, because politically, the Republicans would just destroy him.
And he's got midterm elections coming up after all.
And so geez, he better do the surge like Petraeus wants.
And that's all it comes down to is the President's own personal ambition.
He'll prolong a war for years.
Well, there's all of this election stuff is just Kabuki for the rubes out in flyover land.
There's one party, it's the establishment party, doesn't matter which party wins the election, what you're going to get is more of the same.
Because they're both part of the same crew.
I said to my old boss, Gary Hart, a couple years ago over breakfast, that if you're a member of the establishment, and you propose any thing more than 5% rudder degrees rudder change from current policy, you instantly cease to be a member of the establishment.
And he said, I'm exhibit a.
So regardless of who's in, regardless of what power all other what, what party, all of the rest of it, you're just going to get more of the same because that's all the establishment is capable of doing.
It's a consensus, but it's a consensus for everything that doesn't make sense to anybody but them.
Correct.
And they insulate themselves from reality by making sure that no one is ever heard in their circles who has a contrary opinion.
Yeah, it's a closed system.
And Colonel Boyd also warned that all closed systems collapse.
Yeah, well, and that's the warning that we're always getting from the people who know economics best is that we're in danger of destroying our currency paying for this world empire.
That is, you know, where everything goes out, nothing comes back.
It's a very old story.
We've seen country after country follow this path.
I call it the Spanish road.
It was Spain in the 17th century.
And we're doing exactly the same stuff.overextension leads to bankruptcy and ruin and leads to collapse.
There you have it.
William S. Lynn unfriendly fire at the American conservative.com.
Thanks very much for your time.
My pleasure.
Good to talk to you again.