In 1917, a set of 27 maxims written by the great soldier T.E. Lawrence — Lawrence of Arabia — advised British forces on how to influence Bedouin peoples. Lawrence noted, “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.”
Today, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Western military and strategic thinkers hoping to reshape unstable lands to their advantage have taken to quoting these 96-year-old words while substituting “Afghans” for “Arabs,” reports RAND international policy analyst Linda Robinson in her new study, “One Hundred Victories.”
Robinson has spent much of the last 12 years on the ground with Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Her thesis is that SOF team members must learn to be diplomats, sociologists and community builders in addition to killing machines, and that gently steering one village at a time on a path to stability and security (as we have been doing in Afghanistan since 2010) is a better goal than what we spent years doing there — hunting down bad guys and killing them.
While our involvement in Afghanistan is winding down frustratingly, the lessons learned there (and in the Iraq War) may be applicable to future hot zones and civil wars where, at the moment, the US is too exhausted and demoralized to attempt to exert much influence. Think northern Africa and the Middle East.
Adapting SOF in such a way wouldn’t be easy. Circumstances would be different on every mission and there would be a steep learning curve each time. Village elders are more complicated to master than weaponry. But America’s overwhelming military advantage over any foe no longer has much relevance.
In Afghanistan’s eastern province of Paktika, one of the most terrorism-plagued parts of the country, Robinson explains how SOF discovered that erecting cheap observation posts — fashioned from collapsible metal boxes that, when filled with dirt, were safe from small-arms fire — and manning them with newly trained Afghan police made a huge improvement in security. Then the SOF pushed for cellphone towers to remain working at night (previously they’d been shut down by the Taliban, which realized they were being tracked by their phones).
With the Taliban frozen out, the bazaar in the town of Orgun grew from five shops to 1,500. Complaints about shootouts gave way to complaints about inadequate parking.
“You can’t succeed by doing firebase diplomacy,” Capt. Michael “Hutch” Hutchinson told the author. “You have to establish your street cred.”
In the province, members of different, traditionally clashing, tribes who staffed the observation posts realized their interests were aligned and began aiding one another.
“Although Hutch’s sergeants would much rather be out hunting bad guys,” Robinson writes, “they set to the tasks they were given. One sergeant was assigned to help draw up a city management plant for Orgun.”
Hutchinson believed that $5 million would be plenty to fund development, governance and security in eastern Paktika. The cost of a single US brigade? One billion dollars. Teaching a man to fish beats giving a man a fish. It’s cheaper too.
Special Operations Gen. Scott Miller, who along with Gen. David Petraeus implemented the pivot to a bottom-up strategy in Afghanistan in 2010, is a veteran of the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” battle in Somalia who tore down walls between rival military commands and became a focused student of local politics. He broke his forces into small units scattered in hostile zones where they were much more vulnerable to attack, but also much more organic to the landscape and responsive to the needs of the locals. Their first line of defense became knowledge of their neighbors (though they retained the ability to call in air strikes when things got dicey).
“It took a black-ops guy to understand the limits of kill and capture,” his command sergeant major said.
Instead of the temporary application of overwhelming force, Robinson envisions a future of “go small, go long.” Firepower would be used as a last resort as long-serving military commanders with deep knowledge of the politics of their regions gradually won over hearts and minds. Missions would be far less expensive in terms of blood and treasure but would also require vast patience.
The title of Robinson’s book is ironic: It is taken from an epigram by ancient Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu, who noted that the acme of skill is not “to win one hundred victories.” It is “to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
And as T.E. Lawrence noted in another of his maxims, that requires “unremitting study . . . Your success will be proportioned to the amount of mental effort you devote to it.” Stabilizing troubled nations is not something that can be taught on an artillery range at Fort Bragg.