Friday, September 24, 2021

Recommended: Our Revels Now Are Ended

Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and author of a number of nonfiction and military fiction books, many of which have won prizes, is a pretty straight-talking guy. His 1999 book Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? is a pretty blunt, clear-eyed  assessment of current US military tactics and strategy.

He has just written a piece in Strategica entitled Our Revels Now Are Ended, and I highly recommend it. It is a blunt, unsparing assessment of our Afghanistan adventure, and it meshes perfectly with Sarah Chayes's lessons about corruption that I wrote about recently. Let me quote the first paragraph, just to get you interested:

It’s hard to win a war when you refuse to understand your enemy. It’s harder still when you cannot realistically define your strategic mission. You lame yourself further when you reduce a complex history to a single inaccurate cliché; i.e., “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires.” If you lack the will to win at all costs and—out of moral cowardice—allow critics to dictate your operational parameters, you might as well stay home. And if you ignore the lessons of your last war—lost barely a generation earlier—you are, no matter your fantastic wealth and inherent power, doomed.'

"The Taliban just had to show up for roll-call.