Isegoria

Foseti opens his review of The Last Lion by Paul Reid with this quote from the book, which is a biography of Winston Churchill:

Given their distrust of Stalin, why did two such brilliant politicians as Churchill and Roosevelt remain so loyal to an ideological enemy who for almost twenty years had terrorized his own people while declaring capitalism to be his mortal foe?

Good question!

Churchill fought the war to save the empire. Alas, his only strategy for winning the war consisted in getting the US to join the war on his side. The price the US would ultimately demand was the end of the empire.

Churchill once said that if hell would fight Hitler, he’d find something nice to say about the devil. I’m sure he meant it in jest — but it ended up being all too true. A fact Churchill saw well before the war ended and decades before the most brilliant minds in US diplomacy figured it out.

In the end, the story of Churchill is a tragedy. The very values he fought for were compromised by the Allies he ultimately chose. Far from delivering the world into the sun-lit uplands of liberty, his victory delivered most of the world into hands of horrors at least bad — likely worse — than the ones he fought.

I suspect we all have trouble seeing the war through the eyes of the people who hadn’t fought it yet, and they had trouble seeing the war playing out so differently from the previous war.

The Russians needed all the help they could get, because they were obviously going to get knocked out of the war by the Germans.

When France fell almost overnight, they interpreted that as not as this is a very different war but as Germany is even stronger this time around.

I think. I’m no expert, and, as I’ve said before, this all makes less sense the more I learn.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of The Battle of Mogadishu, and Benjamin Runkle shares some of the lost lessons of “Black Hawk Down”:

Technology Does Not Guarantee Success

The Centra Spike signals-intelligence team was pulled off the hunt for Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in order to assist the search for Aideed.

These highly sophisticated technological assets were ultimately ineffective because they could not pick up the lower-level technology used by the Somalis. Aideed communicated with his militia with couriers and dated walkie-talkies too low-powered to be detected by America’s sophisticated electronic eavesdropping equipment.

In Manhunts, the Decisive Terrain is the Human Terrain

The original plan had called for the CIA’s top Somali informant — a minor warlord loosely affiliated with Aideed — to present the warlord with an elegant hand-carved cane with a homing beacon embedded in the head. The plan seemed foolproof, until LTC Danny McKnight — commander of the 3/75th Ranger battalion and the task force’s intelligence chief — burst into Garrison’s headquarters at the Mogadishu airport on their first day and exclaimed: “Main source shot in the head. He’s not dead yet, but we’re fucked!” The top Somali CIA informant had apparently been mortally wounded in a game of Russian roulette. By the time Task Force Ranger arrived in Mogadishu in August 1993, the Intelligence Support Activity (Delta Force’s special intelligence cell) and the CIA had completely lost track of the warlord, who had not been seen for a whole month.

If the targeted individual is perceived as a hero or a “Robin Hood” figure, the protection offered by the local population will thwart almost any number of satellites or elite troops. Somalia’s social fabric of interwoven clans, tribes, and warlords proved a particularly formidable intelligence-gathering challenge. Somalia’s racial heterogeneity made it impossible for Task Force Ranger elements to freely collect HUMINT: using an agent outside his own clan territory rendered him suspect, and using an agent from within his own clan risked disinformation.

The Importance of Perseverance

Tactically and operationally, the Battle of Mogadishu was a victory for Task Force Ranger, which had raided into the heart of the adversary’s stronghold in broad daylight and seized 24 prisoners, including the two HVTs they were after. Although the cost was steep, the Somalis had fared much worse, suffering an estimated 500-1,000 fatalities. Many families aligned with Aideed had suffered casualties, and local spies reported some of Aideed’s strongest clan allies had fled Mogadishu fearing the seemingly inevitable American retribution. Others were sending peace feelers, offering to dump Aideed to avoid further bloodshed. Both General Garrison and UN envoy Jonathan Howe believed Aideed had been struck a mortal blow and pressed their respective superiors to finish the campaign.

But back home, the perception in Washington was shaped by the horrifying television images of dead and naked bodies of U.S. soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. President Clinton asked his staff, “How could this happen?” and many in Congress demanded an immediate withdrawal from Somalia.

What Happens in Mogadishu Does Not Stay in Mogadishu

A week after “The Battle of Mogadishu,” the USS Harlan County withdrew from the Haitian harbor of Port-au-Prince due to an orchestrated riot by fewer than 200 hundred lightly armed demonstrators. The Clinton administration later declined to intervene to prevent repeated atrocities in Bosnia and genocide in Rwanda due to its experiences in Somalia. In a Pentagon study of why America did not seriously pursue Osama Bin Laden prior to 9/11, Professor Richard Schultz concluded: “The Mogadishu disaster spooked the Clinton administration as well as the brass.”

Sometimes the Least Bad Option is Good Enough

There was somebody America could have theoretically backed in Somalia, but it was the man we wound up hunting. Mohammed Farah Aideed was Western-educated and had the most viable claim to post-Barre rule, having held senior positions in the government (when Barre was not throwing him in jail out of paranoia). He led the alliance that overthrew the dictator and retained the most powerful militia, had children living in the United States (including a son who deployed as a Marine reservist during Operation Restore Hope), and was sympathetic to U.S. strategic interests in the region. Aideed offered to help eliminate Somalia’s Islamist militias, who over the next decade-and-a-half would evolve into al-Shabaab. Was Aideed brutal in the internecine warfare within Somalia? Yes, but his brutality was not exceptional in Somali terms (a point thrown into sharp relief by al-Shabaab’s unmitigated barbarism during the recent Westgate Mall attack). Moreover, Aideed’s brutality only began with the civil war, which would have ended much more quickly and to the benefit of the Somalis if the United States had conditioned its support for him delivery of all food shipments, and made future economic aid contingent on human rights observance and gradual political liberalization.

Razmak, the largest garrison in the Tribal Territory, bristled with all the panoply of war, but its inhabitants spent their time waiting for something to happen:

The political officers would have liked us to stay behind our barbed wire for ever. All Pathans are at all times in need of rifles and ammunition to carry on their private wars and blood feuds. The temptation to steal them from us was great, and the easiest way to get a soldier’s rifle was to shoot the soldier when he was on training manoeuvres. On the other hand, the generals knew that the soldiers would go mad if they were cooped up for two years on end in the monastic wilderness. They therefore insisted that we be allowed to take periodic walks through the countryside to admire the views, smell the rare flowers, and keep fit.

Another compromise was reached. Once every two or three months the politicals thought hard, and went on thinking until they had thought of a headman whom they suspected of intrigue or harbouring outlaws or hatching embarrassments to the Afghan Government, and in whose back yard a display of force might therefore be salutary. Then we got ready. Leaving two of its six battalions in Razmak to guard the fort, the brigade gathered its guns and paraphernalia and marched out of the main gate to spend a week or ten days stamping noisily around in the suspected headman’s section of country. Then it marched home again. This excursion was called a column because it usually was just that — a double string of men and animals defiling down the narrow valleys and stony passes.

From John Masters’ Bugles and a Tiger.

After graduating from Sandhurst in 1933, John Masters spent a year on the North-West Frontier with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. In Bugles and a Tiger, he describes the region:

As the conquering British, more than a hundred years ago, moved diagonally north-westward across India from their original trading-posts in Surat, Calcutta, and Madras, they eventually reached the mountains that separate the subcontinent from Afghanistan. These mountains extend four hundred miles from the Khyber Pass in the north to the Bolan Pass in the deserts of Baluchistan to the south. They are raw and bare, and a proudly independent people live in them. These people, Semitic in origin, Moslem in religion, Pushtu in speech, are the Pathans. (The name is pronounced ‘P’tahn,’ except by British soldiers, who use ‘Paythan.’)

The Pathans, subdivided into various tribes, live astride the Indo-Afghan border, which runs roughly down the middle of the mountain chain. Not only do different members of the same tribe live on opposite sides of the international boundary, but the same family or sub-tribe may own winter fields on the Indian side and summer grazing on the Afghan side. In all historical time the Pathans have kept themselves alive by a combination of nomad life, half-hearted tillage of the barren earth, armed raids into the settled farmlands of the plains, and levying tolls on the commercial traffic that must use the few routes through their hills. The principal routes are via the Kabul River, the Khyber Pass, the Kurram River, the Tochi River, the Gomal River, and the Bolan Pass.

Well armed, owning no king or central authority, loosely organized into soviets of tribes, sub-tribes, and families, fanatically adhering to the Moslem law, addicted to blood feuds and vendettas, the Pathans gave the oncoming British serious pause. And in addition the Indian and Afghan Governments could not for a long time agree on the international boundary and thus make it possible even to define responsibilities.

There seemed to be two possible solutions to this nightmare problem. The Government of India could push its powers right up to some putative boundary, disarm the tribesmen on its own side, and introduce full-scale administration as it was known throughout the rest of India — the law, the lawyers, the taxes, the police, and the rest, all entirely alien to Pathan tradition and spirit.

This solution would have left the tribesmen on the Indian side of the boundary at the mercy of their still armed cousins across the Afghan border; the Afghan Government has not for centuries been strong enough to disarm its tribes even if it wanted to. The Government of India would thus have had to keep a large army in this inhospitable border country, first to keep order among its Pathans and, second, to protect those same Pathans against the Afghans. The task of disarming the tribes might have cost about twenty thousands lives and taken ten years of all-out campaigning.

The second possible solution was for the Government of India to wash its hands of the whole area, retire to the settled agricultural line of the River Indus, and let the tribesmen rule themselves according to their old traditions. But the tribes could not exist without their periodic raids into the farmlands, so this solution would have led, again, to a larger standing army and annual punitive operations. It would also have left in the unreliable hands of the tribes those few and vital passes through which ‘A Foreign Power’ — which meant Russia — must advance if it was to attack India.

Since the Government of India was, until 1947, entirely controlled by the British it is hardly necessary to say that a third or compromise solution was adopted. The Government actually administered the country as far as a line known as the Administrative Border. West of this, in a belt varying from ten to a hundred miles in width, was Tribal Territory. Here the Pathans could govern themselves as they pleased, provided they did not raid into Afghanistan or into the settled Indian districts.

To enable punishments to be meted out quickly if the Pathans broke the rules, and to hold the strategic passes, the Government built forts and stationed soldiers at a few places of particular importance inside Tribal Territory. It also built roads linking the forts and decreed that Pax Britannica should apply on the roads and for a hundred yard on each side of them. A man with a blood feud on his head would build a tunnel from his house to the road so that he could take the air there in safety under the eyes of his armed enemy, and when he had had enough fresh air he would crawl back down the tunnel to his fortress-house.

Finally, the glint of steel was tactfully hidden behind the glitter of gold. The Government gave the tribal heads large annual allowances, but these could be withheld at the discretion of the resident British political officers, and were dependent on the good behaviour of the tribe.

The Government also tried to remove the conditions that made the Pathan such an awkward element in the Indian pattern. Its efforts never met with much success. Consent is part of democracy, and it was neither easy nor, perhaps, right to force the Pathans to attend school, give up vendettas, and become peaceful farmers, when the old bloodthirsty ways constituted for them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Pathans preferred to keep to the ancient traditions and take the consequences; that is, to be left in peace — to fight.

Not much has changed.