French troops on their way to Mali: Are Western nations resorting
to
armed force because they are too weak politically to do anything
else?
Making Sense of the
West's Pointless Reliance on War (Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy)
"The more
we have become aware of the insufficient effectiveness of the military
instrument, the more we have relied upon it, partly because the circumstances have
allowed us to do so by virtue of our extraordinary logistical and technological
superiority, and partly because in the absence of a just as outsized political
superiority, we haven't known what else to do."
A British soldier stands outside a British C17 cargo aircraft at the Mali Air Force base near Bamako, Mali. Britain is providing logistical suppport - but no 'boots on the ground,' to France's anti-Islamist intervention in the country.
In Mali, what awaits the French, who since January 16 have been
involved in ground clashes with rebels, is far from a triumphal march. So far,
the only certain outcome of this new transalpine African military expedition consists
of two tragic spin-offs: the kidnapping and killing of an uncertain number of
Western workers at a mining plant in Algeria, and the killing of a French agent
in Somalia (who has long been the hands of his captors).
The danger that the incision of the al-Qaeda blight in Mali will
cause the infection to spread to large parts of the Islamic Ummah is without doubt clear to the French authorities, and to all the other nations
that have agreed to support the effort: from the United States to Nigeria, from
Denmark to Italy, from Great Britain to Germany. After all, there are many and detailed
clues suggesting that much of the panoply of weapons available to the Malian
rebels came from the looting of Colonel Qaddafi's stockpiles: once again, a
negative spin-off of the last military campaign aimed at guaranteeing safety in
Europe's near abroad. Just looking at the outcome of the war in Libya - the
last "victory" achieved by Western weapons - reinforces the feeling
that the use of military force in war, just to call things by their names, is
less and less capable of achieving its predetermined policy objectives.
The paradox is that the last war to achieve its objective was
the one which was never really fought: the Cold War. That was the one against
the Soviet opponent, which without a shadow of doubt was indeed "won,"
despite the many defeats suffered by the West in peripheral theaters (from
Indochina to southern Africa) where it fed or took sides in local disputes.
Since then, with the exception of campaigns with limited objectives (the
liberation of Kuwait, 1990-91) or at the cost of a set of huge compromises and
prolonged occupations (such as in the Balkans) things have gone wrong. Just
think about the current situations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A second paradox is that the more we have become aware of
the insufficient effectiveness of the military instrument, the more we have relied
upon it, partly because the circumstances have allowed us to do so by virtue of
our extraordinary logistical and technological superiority, and partly because in
the absence of a just as outsized political superiority, we haven't known what
else to do.
We could even put forward the hypothesis that the erosion of
Western political supremacy over the international system has encouraged us to
push confrontation on the ground, where we continue to possess a (deceptively)
comforting supremacy: the military, of course. Faced with difficulties on the
ground, and the weakness or the actual impossibility of realizing the strategic
doctrines it has elaborated (preventive war), we have even tried to convince
ourselves that tactical concepts, like the wars of "counter-insurgency"
developed by General Petraeus, could be the philosopher's stone
capable of reconnecting war and politics. This, however, is to ignore the timeless
lesson of Clausewitz on the instrumental relationship between the former and latter.
[Carl von Clausewitz:
War is the continuation of politics by other means].
It would be reassuring to confine our discussion to such academic
considerations, if it wasn't that the link between military superiority,
political supremacy and economic centrality has so obviously been crucial to
establishing and determining the West's position in the world. Finally there is
a third paradox to all of this, which is that when it comes to the asset of the
military, however indecisive it has proven, the West has no substantial rivals;
while when it comes to political and economic assets, things are very
different. There is little to be happy about, then, when one realizes that while
war is losing its effectiveness in protecting or imposing order, it retains all
of its capacity to create chaos. What makes it so difficult to defeat jihadism or prevail in the various frequent forms of
asymmetric warfare is much more in the nature of the relationship between
political, economic and military resources available to our enemies than the
tactical doctrines with which they fight.
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Worldmeets.US
So, rather than chase after or perfect strategies or the way
tactics are processed - a task that soldiers carry out with greater creativity
and less conservatism than many intellectuals demonstrate in their own fields
of research - it would be more appropriate to try and work on the political and
economic assets at our disposal. This is something we should do before finding
ourselves engaged in yet another "war against terrorism" from which we
would then ask our militaries to get us out of, thanks to our failure to state perusable
objectives, find adequate tools and procure sufficient resources.
