Posted on: 05-03-2019

By Aziz Koshan

A 2500 years old book roughly fifty pages is missing from President Ashraf Ghani’s seven thousand book collection. It is called ‘The Art of War’ written by the Chinese philosopher and military strategist Sun Tzu. Many academicians considers the book as the “best work on war ever”, and it is being taught at the most prestigious military and war colleges around the world, including the West Point.

The book has been a bedside read for the emperors, kings and other revolutionary leaders for centuries. But due to its profound insights on military strategies, the book was kept away from the general public till the 8^th century[1]. Sun Tzu has been considered to be the earliest proponent of guerrilla Warfare and many of his principles have been adopted by the practitioners of guerrilla warfare even today.[2] The Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro, the Vietnamese communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, the Afghan Mujahiddin, and Mao Tse Tung are some of the well know followers of Sun Tzu principles. General David Petraeus who led the American troops both in Iraq and Afghanistan to counter the insurgents praised the book and called the book “as relevant now as when it was written”, he also said that the book “has rightly become one of the world’s most influential books on military strategy”.

“Afghanistan’s Theorist-in-Chief”

In 2014 when Ashraf Ghani was “elected” as the President of Afghanistan, hopes were high that him as an academician and former professor at the most prestigious universities and being the new Commander-in-Chief of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) or the “General” as Sun Tzu describes, that he will change the course of war and peace in favour of the Afghan People, and he will direct the forces on how to fight and how to win this war. But, since the beginning of his presidency, security situation deteriorated, insurgency expanded from its stronghold in the South to the north, and threaten 70% of the Afghan territory including the recent attacks on central Afghanistan which has been relatively peaceful for the last 17 years. Although, the Afghan government has been reluctant on revealing the Afghan Forces causalities, but recently the president admitted that Since 2014, 45,000 security forces have lost their lives, and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reports that 8,085 civilians were killed or wounded in the first nine months of 2018 only.  Studies on the national mood in 2018 by the Asia Foundation reveals that 61% of the Afghans believes that the country is moving in the wrong direction, while only 33% believes otherwise.

The president links deterioration of security situation during his presidency to the withdrawal of large portion of the international combat troops from the country in 2014, but he never reflects on the workability of his defence and security strategies. Though he oversaw the transfer of security responsibilities from the International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) to the ANSF, which is believed to educated him to know enemy capabilities, points of strength, and weakness, and the ANSF, but the clarity both in his order and the strategy is missing.

Blame The General

The Afghan state is fighting a protracted and confusing war against the Taliban and other terrorist organizations for the past 17 years, where the image of the enemy is blur. This blurness of the image is due to the two main reasons. Firstly, it is because of the nature of the warfare which is unconventional warfare, where the enemy is avoiding force-on-force battle, but pursuing guerrilla tactics, which is difficult for a conventional army to pin-point the enemy and to launch attacks. The same tactic as the “Lawrence of Arabia” advised the Arab Rebels against the Ottoman Empire, to hide in sands like a snake, wait for the right time, raise out of the sand and strike the enemy forces like a thunderbolt, and dissolve back in the sand like the water, and let the enemy search for you like a blind boxer. Secondly, it is due to the Afghan government’s behaviour against the enemy which has added an extra layer of sand to this venomous snake to hide, and the ANSF to search for them like a blind boxer.  It was only few months after President Ghani occupied the office, he defined Taliban as a “Political Opposition”, while his predecessor Hamid Karzai called them “angry brothers.” The behaviour of the Afghan government towards the enemy and the definitions issued by the Afghan Government has created outcry among Afghan people, while an absolute majority of them opposes the Taliban and treats them as the enemy. This perception gap between the government and the people are against the Sun Tzu principle which says the general must possess the way (the general and people must share the same line of thinking) in order to be victorious in war.[3]

Based on the contested narratives of the enemy issued by the Afghan Government and the unconventional nature of warfare, the ANSF are left in a state of confusion on whom to attack and whom to defend. While Sun Tzu says if the words of the command are not clear and distinct, the General is to blame. But if orders are clear, it’s the fault of the soldiers and their officers.[4] The Afghan General has to be blamed for not portraying a clear portrait of the enemy. Though it was only recently when Hamdullah Mohib Afghanistan’s National Security Advisor who said that there won’t be distinction between the “bad enemy” and “the good enemy”, whoever stands against the sovereignty of Afghanistan, won’t be tolerated by the ANSF, and will be perished.

Ask Sun Tzu

The Prussian General and military theorist Carls von Clausewitz in his book “On War”, writes that at first "no one starts a war – or rather, no one in his [right] senses ought to do so – without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”  When assessing the state of war in Afghanistan, two conclusion is being made, at first for the Afghan state it is not a war out choice, rather the country is caught up in an imposed war which is being fuelled by the countries in the region and beyond, but the Afghan Government strategy on how to “conduct” the war is misleading and still the Afghan Government haven’t understood the nature of this war.

It’s an asymmetric unconventional war where the insurgents are avoiding force-on-force battle with ANSF, and launches all variations of “uncommon manoeuvres” of guerrilla tactics to engage with the ANSF, but the Afghan Generals perceives their move as a defeat when saying “they are defeated in face-to-face battle and that’s why they use terror tactics”, without realizing that the insurgents follow the very basic Sun Tzu principle which says “attack what is weak, avoid what’s strong”. Though its only after the security transfer from ISAF to ANSF that they have launched major attacks on the provincial centres of Ghazni, Farah, and Kunduz while blocking the routes of reinforcement with ambush attacks, laying booby traps, and the destruction of roads to slow down the arrival of reinforcement and to “achieve a withdrawal that cannot be pursued, and to depart with superior speed”[5] as Sun Tzu suggested. In this situation where the insurgents are following Sun Tzu principles, in order counter this strategy the ANSF has to utilize another Sun Tzu principle which says “the army has to be as flexible and swift as a snake, when head is being hit the tail has to reinforce, when the tail is hit, it’s the head that should reinforce, and when the middle is hit its both the head and the tail that has to reinforce”.[6] Contrary to this principle a senior official[7] at the Ministry of Defence pointed that currently, command and control structure is highly centralised, reinforcement, deployment of additional troops has a time-consuming and long bureaucratic process takes at least a week and often longer. On August 12, 2018, Taliban attacked the city of Ghazni which is roughly 150 km south of Kabul the Capital, it took more than three days for the Afghan Government to supply the reinforcement to push back the Taliban.

Insurgents successfully implemented another Sun Tzu principle which says “If his forces are united, separate them” in their favour, while using their infiltrators to launched the “green on blue attacks”. This tactic really served them, while separating the International Troops from the ANSF, while disrupting communication, coordination, and among all trust. In the absence of all these the effectiveness of conducting counter-insurgency has been halted.

Taliban has successfully expanded the battle ground while threatening 70% of the Afghan territory. This expansionist strategy is to achieve another Sun Tzu principle which says “make the enemy to defend on several fronts, if he prepares to defends several fronts, then the forces will be few in number”.[8]  This principle has pushed the ANSF to defend every village and district across the country, which also help the enemy to discover points of weakness and to attack. Both theoretically and the data coming out from the ground reveals the inappropriateness of the current strategy, it lacks the “containment” component which is key to counter-insurgency.

No easy Peace

In Arab Emirates the Afghan negotiators patiently waited for 3 long days behind closed doors to talk with the Taliban representatives for peace in Afghanistan, but they refused to meet them, and the Helmand Peace Marchers who walked bare foot to Kabul for 38 days and night to campaign for peace, reveals the zealous quest for peace and to end this war. Contrary to this the Afghan Government has made little efforts to understand the presence of great potential for this war to continue despite any peace agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan which are great hindrance to the “sustainable peace” and would be difficult to achieve with any “sense of urgency” and requires to address the root causes of conflict.

In the late 1990s a new study emerged which suggests societies having large number of youth population are more likely to experience civil conflicts. Social scientists label this demographic profile “youth bulge”, the theory contends that societies with rapidly growing young populations often end up with rampant unemployment and large pools of disaffected youths who are more susceptible to recruitment into rebel or terrorist groups. While the youth consists 63% of the population in Afghanistan and recent surveys shows record high in unemployment rate of 40%. Based on the “youth bulge” theory the Afghan society is more prone to civil conflicts, and the current war is being fuelled by it, and the Afghan Government has failed to address this issue.

The other potential of war is the war economy which is fuelling insurgency, and the insurgent are benefiting only if the war continues. Despite almost continuous combat since the invasion of October 2001, pacification efforts have failed to curtail the Taliban insurgency, largely because the Afghan Government simply could not control the swelling surplus from the country’s drug trade, and illegal mining. Afghanistan produces around 90% of the world opium, while 90% of which is being cultivated in the territories controlled by the insurgents.

The Missing Temple

The legendary Japanese Samurai Miyamoto Musashi, once said that strategy doesn’t come from the tip of a sword in the battlefield, rather it comes from days of deep thinking in silence of the temple. Sun Tzu goes much further and says “before doing battle, in the temple if [the General] does lots of calculations, he will win, because many calculations were made.”[9] The protracted war in Afghanistan which has blunted swords and dampened ardor, is due to the absence of a temple and the long days of calculation in the temple. Officials[10] at the Ministry of Defence revealed that until now the ministry doesn’t have a library, and he/she admitted that after being in uniform for almost 50 years, he has never heard of “the Art of War.” Another lecturer[11] at the Marshal Fahim National Defence University confirmed the non-existence of a research centre in the university, and he admitted that the “best book on war ever” is not in the university’s syllabus.

After billions of investment by the US and NATO on the ANSF in the last 17 years, still the Afghan National Army doesn’t possess a temple, where the Generals should sit for long days to think, think, and think, and to calculate, calculate and calculate in order to find the right formula to win the war. Although the academician Ashraf Ghani, before being “elected” as the president, was the head of Security Transition Commission, where he transferred the security responsibility of the battlefield from the ISAF to the ANSF, but he was too ignorant to transfer the most important component of warfare which is the art of thinking and the temple, while Sun Tzu believed that warfare is a battle of mind and victory and loss will be decided in the temple not in the battlefield, and Lawrence of Arabia says “guerrilla warfare is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.”[12]

President Ghani should have built a temple with doors open to the academicians of all backgrounds to a study a wide range of issues which effects the status of war and peace, and to contribute to the formulation of Afghanistan Security Doctrine. In the “five thousand years of history”, civilizations, and empires flourished and were destroyed. What remained from it, is a ‘history of incidents’, and false narration of it. In order to take the country forward or to sustain, it needs ideas to act like the backbone. Civilizations and empires were founded based on ideas, not on the basis of swords only. The temple will enable the academicians to reread the history and to formulate the “history of ideas”, which is an inseparable component of any security doctrine. Currently all moves of the state is reactionary to the enemy’s manoeuvres, it’s not being drawn from well-established ideas and a comprehensive security doctrine. Despite the continuous war in the last 40 years, the Afghan Statesmen has never taken issues of warfare as a great matter to a nation, which is the ground of death and of life, and it is the way of survival and of destruction, and must be examined.[13]

Aziz Koshan is a Kabul based columnist and researcher, he has a M.A in Peace and Conflict Studies from Jamia Millia Islamia University, India.