The last week began with Jinnah International Airport at Karachi and the Al Murtaza Hotel at Taftan running awash with Pakistani blood, with twenty-six of our fellow citizens massacred at Karachi and twenty-three at Taftan. This week has seen our armed forces finally retaliating by launching Operation Zarb-e-Azb against the insurgents in FATA. This is the first such operation to target North Waziristan and the first anywhere for the last five years. Thus, we seem to be entering a new phase in the ongoing war being waged on Pakistani soil against Pakistani citizens, about which some elements continue to bleat on about it not being “our war”.
But such pseudo-patriots, and what should be done about them, are not the subject of this piece. My topic today continues the theme I have been examining over my last couple of pieces: the evolution of warfare.
My readers will, I trust, bear with me as I wind the calendar back to August 1914, when the nations of Europe – not for the first time, or the last – went to war against each other. In Britain, the young gallants of the time, fresh from their public schools and elite universities, trotted off to the Great War, filled with patriotic zeal and the kind of sentiments trilled by the young Rupert Brooke:
“If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is forever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;”
etc.
But the mud and the blood of the trenches at Verdun and Ypres soon inspired a qualitatively different kind of poetic voice, that of Wilfred Owen:
“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle...
...No prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells…”
Brooke died in 1916 in a hospital ship near Greece and Owen was killed in action in France in 1918. They were victims of a new kind of warfare: where the cavalry now rode tanks instead of horses; where machine guns replaced sabres and revolvers; where U-Boats and destroyers decimated the frigates of yore; and air war and chemical weapons began to be used. The age of Modern Warfare had come.
[quote]The war that began in Afghanistan in 1978 had no pro-people ideological basis[/quote]
In an earlier article in these pages, I pointed out that the consequences of modern warfare can be dreadful in the extreme. Nations, economies, roads, factories, homes and lives are destroyed; the ranks of the jobless, the homeless, the destitute multiply until they embrace almost the whole of civilian society. Modern warfare causes massive devastation. And this is without even considering the extraordinary horrors of nuclear war. Moreover, modern armies and weaponry are extremely expensive, requiring large portions of a nation’s GNP to sustain. Even the mighty USSR crumbled, unable to support the military expenditure necessitated by its superpower status.
As an antithesis, a relatively lower cost means of fighting developed, which I have previously characterized as Mountain Nettle warfare. This kind of guerrilla warfare was used to stunning success by Mao Zedong against the Japanese occupation and by the brilliant Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, successively against the Japanese, the French and the American armies.
It was this kind of warfare that was used in the 1980s by the Afghan Mujahedeen and is since being successfully employed by the Taliban, as Al Qaeda franchisees, both against the US, on the one hand, and against Pakistan on the other.
Now, when the methodology of this kind of warfare was devised by such giant historical figures as Mao, Giap and Ho Chi-Minh (and by their counterparts among the Palestinians, the Indian Naxalites, the Irish Sinn Fein, and elsewhere), it was clear that, in each case, there was an over-riding ideology of political liberation and/or social emancipation that the military campaigns of the guerrillas sought to establish and thereafter defend. Thus, the armed struggle was a means towards the revolutionary establishment of a new political order. Its nexus with this promised order brought about public enthusiasm for these various insurrections, i.e. the sea of people welcomed the revolutionary fish who swam within.
[quote]Few rebel groups in the last fifty years have actually achieved victory[/quote]
The war that began in Afghanistan in 1978 had no such pro-people ideological basis, only faux Islamist posturing under the tutelage of US and Pakistani Intelligence operatives. Far from being torch-bearers of a new political revolution, these bands of warriors were mobilised, armed, trained and financed by the CIA and the satanic Ziaul Haq regime in Pakistan, for reasons that were entirely cynical and self-serving.
So far, so bad. But there was worse to come. With such massive armaments and hordes of trained warriors injected into a society, the inevitable result is state collapse. This kind of collapse is a necessary precondition for a political vanguard intent on the building of a new revolutionary order. In the absence of a dominant political organisation and guiding ideology, this collapse becomes mere social anarchy, the “war of each against all” of Thomas Hobbes.
Soldiers secure a mountain top in South Waziristan
And this is precisely what happened in Afghanistan. After the Soviet retreat in 1990, the various Mujahedeen factions battled it out between themselves over a completely devastated landscape. The Taliban, newly manufactured, trained and armed in Pakistani Madrassas, also entered the free-for-all, forming an alliance with the multinational Al Qaeda terror franchise. They introduced a new element, by using a hitherto unprecedented degree of violence and oppression to terrify the populations under their control into subjugation.
And, as we know, the anarchy and violence has spread back, through our tribal areas, right into our cities.
Let’s face it. The present Operation is no quick-fix solution for ending this war. Major insurgencies can be exceedingly stubborn and prolonged. While we can take heart from the historic fact that few rebel groups in the last fifty years have actually achieved victory and all insurgencies do eventually end, this can take a long time to happen...more so where confused (or culpable?) leaderships have allowed rebels the time, space and voice to accumulate weaponry and strengthen their ideological bases. Military force may not be the sole reason for the end of an insurgency. But the sensible use of military strength is obviously the first essential step and its continued, consistent use the necessary accompaniment to all other steps.
There needs to be a holistic process, comprising military, political, administrative, economic, judicial and ideological measures. It also requires patience and clear-headed determination...not the kind of apologetic dithering we have witnessed.
