Lately I have heard quite a bit about the problems that the British and Soviets (at the time) had with their invasions of Afghanistan. In addition, I had read a bit about the history of the region (I can suggest The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk as one good book on the subject) and IMHO the military precedent cited is interesting and somewhat illustrative but not binding for one basic reason:
Previous military incursions in Afghanistan (and with only a few other exceptions previous military operations throughout history) have been centered on the goal of obtaining and securing or defending land. This military operation would be focused on getting rid of terrorists and facilities but we would not want to maintain a military presence in the region.
Is this a distinction without a difference? Is the assumption that we don’t care about maintaining positions in Afghanistan or other nations valid?
RickJay made an excellent analogy in the thread listed below. He compared terroriusm to piracy. Pirates would move fluidly from base to base, so any attempt to stop them had to be built around hunting them down rather than taking territory.
Same situation here. We don’t want territory in Afghanistan (or any other nation); we want to eliminate terrorists and terrorist bases. Trying to take and hold territory would only be a distraction.
But that’s the main criticism of our Vietnam policy: we didn’t have the clear objective of raising the flag in Hanoi, just a murky hope that if we killed enough people in black pajamas, they’d finally chicken-out.
Just because you’re not holding terrain doesn’t mean you don’t have an objective. The objectives are to destroy, disrupt, or infiltrate all terrorist organizations hostile to the US. Taking and holding terrain is a best incidental to those objectives. It’s a lot more like fighting, say, the Mafia than fighting a conventional war.
The Piracy analogy is an interesting one but one that is also problematic. The difficulty presented by Pirates was largely economic. Granted they were sometimes used to further the political goals of one group or another but they still were rooted largely in economics. That may have (and I stress MAY because I am no expert on Piracy or Terrorism) made it an easier problem to address than the one currently presented.
Modern terrorism as practiced by OBL has a definite grounding in muslim nations (identifiable pieces of land). To call these people Muslims does Islam an injustice IMHO, but the breeding ground for these terrorists is still found largely in poorer areas of specific nations. That may make the ability to hold a certain area more important in this case than it did in the case of Pirates.
Then again, these terrorists can be found everywhere and frequently travel. I still believe that the Piracy analogy is good and that securing property for longer than a few days will not be neccesary in OIJ, thus relieving some of the problems experienced by the Soviets and the British, but I would be interested in other opinions.