Somewhere in the mountain fastness of Afghanistan or in the remote wilds of northwestern Pakistan, leaders of the Taliban insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists have been poring over US President Barack Obama’s speech on the Afghan war and the statements of his advisers this week to determine their own strategy for the next 18 months.
It’s a good bet they will decide to fade into the hills or to disappear into the 40,000 villages spread across a land larger than Texas. There they will heal their wounds, retrain guerrillas and wait until the Yankees begin to go home as Obama has promised.
For that is what the president has decreed despite the hedging language in his speech and subsequent statements from advisers about depending on conditions in Afghanistan. US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was explicit in testimony before a congressional committee, asserting that in July 2011 there would begin “a gradual — but inexorable — process” of withdrawing US troops.
The July 2011 date is roughly halfway between today and the elections of November 2012 when the voters and taxpayers, already weary of the Iraq and Afghan wars, will surely be demanding that the troops be withdrawn — and will vote for whoever agrees. That will set the deadline in political concrete.
The strategy outlined by the president at the US Military Academy at West Point had many audiences — the US public, Democrats to the left and Republicans to the right of the president, military men and women who must fight the war, the rulers and peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan, allies in NATO and elsewhere.
Everyone, however, seems to have ignored the Taliban insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists who have a say in how the conflict in Afghanistan plays out. Neither Obama nor Gates nor the others in the national security team appear to have taken them into account.
Only an unidentified “senior administration official” briefing the press addressed this issue — and he brushed it aside.
“If the Taliban think they can wait us out, I think that they’re misjudging the president’s approach,” he said.
“It may be misinterpreted, but the Taliban will do that at its own risk,” he said.
That official, however, did not explain what the administration would do if, indeed, the Taliban laid low and enticed the US into believing it was successful by reducing attacks on US, allied and Afghan government forces. History is on the side of the Taliban as Sun Tzu (孫子), the Chinese strategist, wrote 2,500 years ago that the warrior “skilled in defense hides in the most secret recesses of the earth.”
More recently, General Vo Nguyen Giap, who led North Vietnamese forces during the Vietnam War, said a key to their success was to “refuse to give battle likely to incur losses to us.”
Colonel Harry Summers, a US pioneer in assessing US mistakes in Vietnam, said the North Vietnamese saw US public support evaporating: “Now all they had to do was wait us out.”
Going underground has many precedents among the Muslims of Central Asia. A Pakistani who has written widely on that region, Ahmed Rashid, has pointed out that many Muslims sought to escape Soviet repression by going underground not only in Afghanistan but in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and other Soviet-controlled states.
Greg Mortenson, a US activist who has built schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, said people there and Americans have different senses of time. Once he grumbled when things didn’t move fast enough. A friend wrote: “Haji Ali put his hand on Mortenson’s shoulder, and gave his impatient American a fatherly squeeze.”
“I thank all-merciful Allah for all you have done,” the friend wrote. “But the people of Korphe have been here without a school for six hundred years. What is one winter more?”
Richard Halloran is a freelance writer based in Hawaii.
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS