Photo: map section
The country of Afghanistan consists of about 40 million people who live on a good 650 square kilometers. For comparison, we live in Germany on about 000 square kilometers. But that means nothing at all, especially if you want to move militarily in Afghanistan!
Then things just look different and you also have to face reality. When the US government decided a good 20 years ago to hunt down criminals and terrorists within Afghanistan's borders, this was originally done as a small war with secret services and small warfare forces - and surprisingly for everyone, it was also very successful!
One should have foreseen that this would provoke a turnaround in US politics. Without going into detail, there was an internal dispute in the US about billion-euro budgets and the reputation of the individual branches of the army. The success of the "special forces" at that time would have brought about a huge shift within the US armed forces and, as a result, also in industry. From an economic point of view, Afghanistan, a small theater of war, had to become a theater of war, and the so-called "mission creep" took its course unchecked.
mistake number one
None of those involved (apart from the military — and as is well known, their opinion doesn't count) has ever given any thought to the size of the Afghanistan theater of war. Without having examined the whole thing more closely themselves, at least Pakistan, parts of Iran and parts of former Soviet republics are included.
Without limiting the theater of war and all of them — directly or indirectly — to involve those involved (e.g. China), it was never possible to achieve success — of any kind — right from the start.
The whole thing had already been practiced in Korea and later in Vietnam, and at least the military part of NATO had drawn its conclusions from it. The fact that this was again not taken into account must be attributed to the primacy of politics.
Mistake number two
The theater of war was released to the "Lords of War" — arms dealers and aid organizations — without objection or resistance, adding another dimension to the conflict that has hardly been considered to this day, but whose effects on the conflict are serious.
This error has probably never occurred in this size before and must be analyzed very carefully for future conflicts.
Mistake number three
There were individual interests from the start — you can read yesterday's statement by Joe Biden as proof - but never a coordinated political and certainly not a military-political strategy. From the beginning it was not clear and not documented what they wanted to achieve together in the Afghan theater of war.
To disappoint my idealistic readers: drilling wells and opening schools for girls are not part of it. This could only be the case if they were listed as sub-items in an overall operational concept as necessary for overall military success.
So there was a bombastic mission creep in Afghanistan, where anyone who wanted could set their own goals, which mostly had nothing to do with the war situation or the situation, let alone with the interests of the Afghan people.
The tragedy here is that achieving the goals of these mostly completely superfluous and often fatal ideas and fantasies was the sole burden of the armed forces on the ground, and they had to misappropriate the resources and time necessary for the mission.
In short: without a strategy, it cannot be operationalized for a theater of war and therefore cannot be implemented for the tactical levels. It was therefore clear from the outset that all the soldiers deployed there were “only being burned” and that the responsible military leaders — since there was no order, political babbling doesn’t count in an “emergency” — would do everything possible to ensure that as many of their own soldiers as possible went home safely came.
Mistake number four
As there was no strategy yet — let's take yesterday's statement from Joe Biden again as proof — you don't actually know when you've "won" or "lost", nor how best to get back home after that. And certainly not what will become of the populations that have been harassed, lied to or even fought over for years.
The insane idea of wanting to relocate them to Europe or the USA for their inconvenience is another sign that after a good 20 years you still don't know what you're doing, let alone what you want!
Mistake number five
We, especially our politicians, are still firmly convinced that we have done everything right and are doing it right. The world will continue to heal because of the German character.
We will never analyze or even work through the whole thing. All those involved are heroes and the victims are simply "superfluous" people who are responsible for their own fate.
And if someone should ever be held responsible - which would be desirable given all the dead and maimed people as well as the enormous amounts of wasted taxpayers' money - then it is already clear that the guilty come from abroad - that's what the Basic Law says and must not be doubted will!
(I'm curious to see who's checking now.)
"The greatest achievement is to defeat the enemy without a fight."
sunzi, The Art of War
