The Politics of Winning Wars by Fareed Zakaria

November 19, 2001, U.S. Edition

The Politics of Winning Wars
Critics carp at Bush for politicizing the war on terror. Tell that to FDR, Churchill and Lincoln.
By Fareed Zakaria

The Pentagon will have to take note of the new rule for fighting America's wars--you have to win in one month. Actually three weeks. Last week, about 25 days into the campaign, Washington's punditocracy decided that America was losing the war. (This bold conclusion was based on virtually no evidence, but that didn't stop anyone.) The liberal New Republic and the conservative Weekly Standard--which seem interchangeable these days--argued that the military operation was obviously doomed and that the only way to salvage it was an invasion of Afghanistan with U.S. ground forces. All this because three weeks into the war the Taliban had not collapsed!

In fact, the military operations in Afghanistan are going reasonably well, as the fall of Mazar-e Sharif highlights. Of course it's an uphill struggle but mostly because of a difficult assignment coupled with hellish logistics. Remember that the war against Iraq in 1991 was preceded by a six-month-long buildup, using state-of-the-art military bases in neighboring Saudi Arabia, and was fought over flat land against an identifiable foe. Kosovo was in NATO's backyard. Both places had military and industrial targets that could be bombed. We have become conditioned to believe that American military operations should have amazing, instant success--and if not, something must have gone terribly wrong.

For the critics, it was our diplomacy that was all wrong. A week into the war they began complaining that Secretary of State Colin Powell's coalition-building was crippling the campaign, forcing us to make bad military decisions for political reasons. In fact, the diplomats have no incentive to slow down the military operations. "Powell understands that nothing would help our diplomatic efforts more than military success," a senior American official told me. "It would encourage coalition members to support us more strongly and produce defections from within the Taliban. The war began slowly because we first went after air defenses, then bombed other strategic targets and finally closed in on troops. The real problem is that we have no bases close by from which to fly and our allies on the ground are weak."

A retired military officer with ties to the Pentagon was more blunt: "All these guys claiming we should have been bombing more from the start haven't a clue what they're talking about. Our aircraft are flying for several hours before they bomb, often being refueled twice in the air. That's why we're flying fewer sorties than we did in Kosovo or the Persian Gulf."

More important, the idea that political considerations should be excluded from military strategy is absurd. The central insight of Clausewitz's "On War"--perhaps the most influential book on the subject--is that war is an extension of politics by other means. The great wartime statesmen like Churchill, Roosevelt and Lincoln understood that they had to introduce the political dimension into all of military strategy. Consider, for example, Roosevelt's decision to enter World War II with the campaign against the Nazis in North Africa. FDR did it--partly in deference to the British--but mostly because he wanted to get U.S. troops bloodied fighting against Germans. It was a political decision that had little military logic. Churchill spent much of the end of World War II making military choices largely to shape the postwar political settlement.

Consider our political concerns in the current war. We need the support, intelligence, troops or bases of key Muslim states in the region--Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey--and these regimes are all fearful of public unrest. So we have been careful to minimize civilian casualties, launched a humanitarian effort and are drawing a sharp distinction between Islam and terrorism. Is this so stupid?

Or take our efforts to help create a post-Taliban regime. It may look like altruistic nation-building but in fact it's smart strategy. The nightmare scenario for Washington is that the Pashtuns--who make up 40 percent of the country, dominate the south and don't like the Northern Alliance--coalesce around the Taliban to prevent an alliance victory. If the Taliban stays strong in the south, Al Qaeda will stay hidden and America will be in Afghanistan for a long time. So we are encouraging the Northern Alliance to adopt a "no reprisals" policy against the Pashtuns and other Taliban supporters. We are also trying--with some success--to persuade the Pashtuns that they will have an important place in a post-Taliban regime, as well as offering up some economic aid. "We would be crazy not to worry about all these political considerations," the American official told me. "If we help on the political front it makes our military strategy easier."

Getting this mix right in the middle of the fog of information and misinformation is difficult and takes time. If our pundits don't recognize that, Clausewitz did. "A general in time of war is constantly bombarded by reports both true and false," he wrote. "He is exposed to countless impressions, most of them disturbing, few of them encouraging... If a man were to yield to these pressures, he would never complete the operation. Perseverance in the chosen course is the essential counterweight... It is steadfastness that will earn the admiration of the world and of posterity." I think that means not losing faith in the third week.