The Taliban's Mao-inspired return to power in Afghanistan shows the US is failing to heed the lessons of history
By Stan Grant
The ABC
August 19, 2021
The Taliban blitzkrieg victory made the US look like a paper tiger
Who wrote the playbook for the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan? Some might be surprised by the answer: Mao Zedong.
Yes, the Chinese Communist revolutionary leader casts a long shadow over Afghanistan. He can be seen as the father of modern insurgencies: his teachings inspiring the FARC movement in Colombia, Al Qaeda and Islamic State, among others.
In 2004, the Islamist strategist Abu Bakr Naji released a document he called the "Management of Savagery" — a template for endless warfare. It became a go-to text for Islamist insurgency but it borrows from Mao Zedong.
Guillaume Beaurpere, a US Army lieutenant colonel who served in Iraq and studied al-Qaeda ideology, has joined the dots between Islamist strategy and Maoist doctrine.
He says that while the "circumstances and motives" of the Chinese Communist Revolution were different to those of Islamist terrorism, it is "most evident" that the strategy is Mao's.
In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh drew on his years in China, advising and working for Mao's Communist Party, to orchestrate the defeat of the US.
Indeed, Mao has written the script for American defeat from the fall of Saigon to the fall of Kabul. He claimed his own victory over America in the decisive battle of Ch'ongch'on in the Korean War — when his forces prevailed over General Douglas MacArthur's eighth army and sparked the biggest retreat in US military history.
That clash — in a war described in the US as the "forgotten war" — stands in hindsight as one of the most influential battles of the 20th century. It is still celebrated in China today, as warnings sound of an approaching conflict between the US and China.
What did Mao teach the Taliban?
Mao honed his military instincts on the frontline in wars against Japanese occupation and a civil war for control of China against American-gubacked Nationalist forces.
He set out his ideas of guerrilla war and, later, the "people's war".
Expert in Maoist insurgency, Dr Thomas Marks, says: "Mao was to irregular war what Napoleon and Clausewitz were to regular warfare."
In 2009, writing for the Combatting Terrorism Centre at West Point, Marks declared: "The writings of Mao, however, are essential to achieving and maintaining success in the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan."
What did Mao say about guerrilla war, and what did it teach the Taliban? He showed them how a smaller force can defeat a larger one. In his book, On Guerrilla Warfare, Mao said insurgencies must be agile, they must adapt and use local knowledge and populations to their advantage. Mao wrote:
"Guerrilla strategy must be based primarily on alertness, mobility, and attack. It must be adjusted to the enemy situation, the terrain, the existing lines of communication, the relative strengths, the weather and the situation of the people."
It is essential, he said, to have a clear objective: "Without a political goal, guerrilla warfare must fail."
To Mao, this was a people's war: the farmer today is the soldier tomorrow. And above all this must be what he called a "protracted war" — a long, hard grind to wear down and drive out the enemy.
Mao set out a three-stage strategy that the Taliban has followed to the letter. The first stage is the initial invasion and enemy offensive. Stage two is the enemy's consolidation. Stage three is the counter offensive and the enemy's retreat.
As Mao said, facing the invading Japanese: "The war between China and Japan is not just any war, it is specifically a war of life and death between semi-colonial and semi-feudal China and imperialist Japan..."
The Taliban would have said the same of the invading Americans.
'Revolution is not a dinner party'
Mao's forces were often underestimated, particularly by the US as it later lent its support to Mao's rival Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists. So, too, America has failed to see what was in front of them, despite battling the Taliban for two decades.
This isn't to deny the brutality of Mao or the Taliban. Indeed, brutality is at the heart of the Maoist doctrine, as he famously said, revolution is not a dinner party. But there is no refuting the success of the strategy Mao adapted and the Taliban refined.
A decade ago, in a paper for the Carnegie Institute, political scientist and Afghanistan specialist Gilles Dorronsoro set out what the US was doing wrong and why the Taliban would prevail.
The Taliban, he wrote, "have a strategy and a coherent organisation to implement it. To believe otherwise, as some US analysts do, is to dangerously underestimate the adversary."
Dorronsoro set out the Taliban's roadmap back to power based around resilience and an ability to regroup from tactical setbacks. Crucially, he said, the Taliban exploited government weakness and corruption and the Afghans' lack of trust or faith in government officials.
As Mao said, people were more important than weapons and the Taliban had spent years building connections beyond its traditional ethnic Pashtun base.
As Dorronsoro, wrote, the Taliban had a "coherent strategy" to "subvert the traditional structures [notably tribal structures]".
Dorronsoro warned then that the US lacked a cause and a strategy to defeat the Taliban. Weak, corrupt Afghan government, he said, was only making it easier for the Taliban to maintain a foothold and widen its support base.
The Taliban's return is history repeating
The Taliban's return to power should be no surprise to anyone who was paying attention. It is history repeating — and the failure of the US to heed the lessons of that history.
The most powerful military in the world spent 20 years, trillions of dollars and lost thousands of lives and could not beat the Taliban.
Just as it left a divided Korea, retreated from Vietnam and pulled out of Iraq only to open the door to Islamic State.
After Vietnam, American experienced a crisis of confidence and a loss of prestige. After Afghanistan, do we believe Joe Biden when he says it is a bad idea to bet against America? I think the Taliban just did.
There is an even bigger battle ahead; Joe Biden has identified it: democracy versus autocracy. Recent evidence shows democracy is in retreat. The lowering of the American flag in Kabul only underlines it.
China is watching. It is already moving to build closer ties with Afghanistan, exploiting the space America has left behind. It has a close relationship with Pakistan, historically the great enabler of the Taliban.
We have already heard warnings of the "drumbeats of war" between the US and China.
One can only imagine Xi Jinping thinking of the US: You could not conquer the Taliban Mao inspired, how will you defeat the nation Mao created?
1 comment:
There was no big invasion of the Taliban. They never left. They were even in the Afghan Army. This lunacy was kept alive by the US. Money was being made with weapons and technology and payoffs. I wonder how many Foreign Contractors were supported by this war. No more kick backs to the string pullers? We hadn't lost a US Soldier in almost 2 years. That's no longer a war. That's an occupation for personal gain.
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