If You Give a Man a Boat

The tribe was poor and hungry, but we knew that if you give a man a fish, he will eat today and be hungry again tomorrow. So we gave them modern fishing boats and taught them how to use them.

The boats needed gasoline, their engines needed maintenance, and their sonar fish finders needed software troubleshooting. Those were beyond this primitive tribe’s knowledge horizon, so we furnished them.

The day came when we could no longer afford to support the boats, or perhaps we just didn’t want to. Whatever was the reason, we left. We had never bothered to give lessons on how to fish with rods and lines and hooks and nets.

Now the tribe is starving again.

This morning Instapundit published a lament from a serving U.S. general (anonymous for obvious reasons) who assigns a large share of the blame for America’s defeat in Afghanistan to the failure of our military leaders to convince the political leadership that counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan were a mistake that distracted the Armed Forces from their essential mission of being ready to win a major war.

Let’s accept arguendo that the military should focus more sharply on World War III. The corollary that the general derives seems to be that we ought to take no, or at most very little, interest in lesser conflicts. We spent 20 years in Afghanistan and didn’t win. Therefore, we should have stayed away and been unconcerned if the country fell into the hands of our enemies.

Let’s look at what really happened in Afghanistan, disregarding Joe Biden’s Vietnamish fantasy of endless gravestones of “our daughters and sons”. At the beginning of 2015, the U.S. switched from active combat to a support role, transforming “Operation Enduring Freedom” (1,833 soldiers KIA from 2001 through 2014) to “Operation Freedom’s Sentinel” (64 KIA from 2015 through last Saturday). The latter’s minimal toll in blood wasn’t because Afghanistan has been peaceful for the past seven years. The Afghan government that we supported fought the Taliban during that time. Its army suffered thousands of casualties. The war was a stalemate, it is true, but not a debacle.

The U.S. military trained and equipped the Afghan forces, but it trained and equipped them for lavishly supported operations that made extensive use of air power and modern weaponry. That worked fine so long as American personnel maintained the planes, drones, tanks and artillery on which the Afghans relied. The Wall Street Journal described what happened when the symbiosis broke down:

The Afghan army fighting alongside American troops was molded to match the way the Americans operate. The U.S. military, the world’s most advanced, relies heavily on combining ground operations with air power, using aircraft to resupply outposts, strike targets, ferry the wounded, and collect reconnaissance and intelligence.

In the wake of President Biden’s withdrawal decision, the U.S. pulled its air support, intelligence and contractors servicing Afghanistan’s planes and helicopters. That meant the Afghan military simply couldn’t operate anymore. The same happened with another failed American effort, the South Vietnamese army in the 1970s, said retired Lt. Gen. Daniel Bolger, who commanded the U.S.-led coalition’s mission to train Afghan forces in 2011-2013.

“There is always a tendency to use the model you know, which is your own model,” said Gen. Bolger, who now teaches history at North Carolina State University. “When you build an army like that, and it’s meant to be a partner with a sophisticated force like the Americans, you can’t pull the Americans out all of a sudden, because then they lose the day-to-day assistance that they need,” he said.

That was the real U.S. military failure in Afghanistan. If Afghan soldiers had been trained to fight a lower-tech war, one that matched the skills available locally, the American presence would eventually have become superfluous. When the Soviet Union tried to control Afghanistan, it didn’t create a technologically sophisticated local ally. As a result, its puppet regime, despite its massive unpopularity, was able to last three years before finally collapsing. Its troops could fight with rifles. Our allies depended on helicopters and gunships.

If our generals deserve blame in Afghanistan, it is for giving our allies fishing boats when they needed rods and reels.

Further reading: Noah Rothman, “The Magical, Self-Justifying Afghanistan Debacle”
Austin Bay, “Biden’s Afghanistan Disaster Didn’t Have To Happen”

 

Comments

[seePea]

Never got the analogy of teaching to fish, if it was something that was worthwhile to do the people themselves would have figured it out instead of starving.