Robowar in Pashtunistan

So there is as yet no indication that a fundamental change in military strategy is in the works. Indeed, the attack Mr. Obama authorized on Pakistan suggests we can expect more of the same tactical and operational-level ideas that have failed to produce any strategic or grand-strategic progress.

The tactical pinpricks of America's robotic attacks in the Pashtun territories of Pakistan have been justified by the same flawed argument that President Nixon used to justify what he euphemistically called "protective reaction strikes" into Cambodia: namely that our adversaries are using cross border regions as sanctuaries to rest, retrain, and resupply. To be sure, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were using border regions to hide in but the larger, more strategically important sanctuary was provided by a sea of increasingly popular support (or acquiescence) provided by the mass of people living throughout the entire region — and that sea of support was made far wider, far deeper and far murkier by the "unintended" effects of our bombing and ground incursions into Cambodia. Not only were the "protective reaction strikes" tactically and operationally ineffective, they planted the seeds of strategic and grand-strategic disasters by further isolating the United States and its South Vietnamese puppets in the moral court of world opinion, sowing dissension at home, and accidentally creating the conditions for the rise of one of the most murderous, pathologically dysfunctional regimes of the 20th Century — the Khmer Rouge. No one will ever know how many innocent Cambodians eventually died because of this debacle but it was probably in the millions.

Notwithstanding the clear lessons of Cambodia the theoretical effectiveness of bombing sanctuaries remains deeply entrenched in the mirror-imaging psychology of the American military mind, which is heavily addicted to the gargantuan logistics pipelines needed to support the increasingly robotic American way of war. The American ideology of technowar posits that complex, expensive technology can be a substitute for blood and manpower (and thinking). Yet history shows clearly that this mindset presumes a dependence that is of no relevance whatsoever to guerrilla fighters, who travel light and live off the land. And, paradoxically, it is equally clear that bombing the sanctuaries increases the strength of the guerrillas because the unintended killing and material destruction attending to the futile bombing of supposed sanctuaries actually increases the depth of the guerrillas' popular support.

Thanks to the non-thinking of Mr. Bush and his neocon henchmen, what was true in Vietnam is doubly true in the fiercely independent Pashtun regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the same kind of grand-strategic evolutionary spiral that eventually produced the Cambodian monster may be about to unwind. What began in Afghanistan as an effort to destroy Al Qaeda in Mr. Bush's so-called global war on terror quickly mutated into an anti-Taliban war, and is now mutating insensibly into an anti-Pashtun war. While the level of unintended destruction and killing (220+ people) caused by 30 or so robot-controlled "precision strikes" since September in the border regions, more appropriately called Pashtunistan, is far less than that of the B-52 strikes in Cambodia, the collateral damage of robowar in Pashtunistan is already showing warning signs of a perverse grand-strategic effect that might even evolve into a disaster that outweighs the Cambodian nightmare — namely the collapse of nuclear armed Pakistan and/or yet another, this time possibly nuclear, Indo-Paki war.

The leaders of Pakistan, and even the American puppet leader of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, have been calling for a cessation of these strikes, saying that the destabilizing effects of killing civilians have greater negative strategic effects than the positive tactical effects of killing a few militants. Although Mr. Obama is an innocent party to this evolution, he has inherited it, and his early moves may be sucking him into and making him complicit in the vortex created by Mr. Bush, the high-spending generals, and their profitable partners in the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC).

Chuck Spinney is a former Pentagon analyst.