Broken Bodies, Shattered Minds by Ronald Glasser M.D

Author:Ronald Glasser M.D.
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: History Publishing Company, LLC
Published: 2011-02-07T10:00:00+00:00

13.

THE BLEEDING WARS

In its view, the “bleeding wars” offer the best opportunity to defeat the United States. Enlarging the war in Afghanistan is exactly what Al Qaeda wants, just as it wants the conflict in Iraq to continue …

—The Search For Al Qaeda/Its Leadership, Ideology and Future,

Brookings Institutional Press (2009)

There was clearly no thought on the part of those who launched the attack in Afghanistan in 2001 and on Iraq in April of 2003 of our being bled to death, or that the Army and Marines would be stretched to the breaking point, and our National Guard pushed to the very edge of the cliff.

Iraq was to be a war waged on the cheap. As for Afghanistan, well, we did succeed in destroying the Taliban once and forced Al Qaeda out of the country, somewhat evening up the score for 9/11. If necessary, we could always go back and fix whatever was left to fix. Some ten years later, we still have over 50,000 troops in Iraq, with sectarian violence once again increasing throughout the major cities even as we begin to send more troops back into Afghanistan. Over the last ten years, the Taliban have returned to the mountains and plains of Afghanistan and hold more than half of that country, while the leadership of Al Qaeda remains intact in the mountainous tribal areas that border an uncooperative Pakistan. What is clear today is that “Mission Accomplished” was no more than a snappy slogan.

Military histories written in the midst of the conflicts are notoriously incomplete compared to the less emotional, betterresearched, and more-documented later efforts. But you don’t have to wait to understand what went so wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan. Beginning after World War II, the military implemented what are called “After Action Reports” or AARs. These are the immediate and for the most part on-site interviews with the combatants and commanding officers following a battle in order to evaluate in a strictly tactical sense, leaving aside egos and politics, the conduct of a battle in terms of both the immediate successes and obvious failures.

AARs may be long or short, depending on the length and importance of the battle, but they are always informative. They act as a post-mortem, hopefully to serve as a future template to fix what went wrong and improve on what was done right. They are basically the authentic, unadorned, unrevised, and unedited history of what actually did happen.

Recently, a number of monographs based on AARs involving both Iraq and Afghanistan have been published in the military and foreign policy press. The most direct, learned, and unblinking of these evaluations were published in the Journal of Foreign Policy in the Fall 2008, under the bland and rather innocuous title, “Learning From Contemporary Conflicts to Prepare for Future War.”

It was written by Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, who in the fall of 2008, as the Regimental Commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry, finally retook the Iraqi town of Tal Afar, near the Syrian border, from Al Qaeda after three years of occupation by the terrorists.

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