The Strategic Lessons Unlearned from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold, and the Implications for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan
Carlisle, PA: United States Army War College Press, 2015. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Trade paperback. x, 222 pages. Map. Illustrations. Endnotes. Appendices. Ink marks to text noted. Dr. M. Chris Mason joined the faculty at the Strategic Studies Institute as a Professor of National Security Affairs in June 2014. He has worked in and on Afghanistan for the past 15 years. He retired from the Foreign Service in 2005 and worked as the South Asia desk officer for the Marine Corps’ Center for Advanced Operational Culture and Language for several years, where he wrote the Marine Corps deployer’s guide to Afghan culture and the guide to Operational Pashtunwali. He has deployed to and traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan numerous times, serving as the political officer on the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Paktika in 2005. Dr. Mason authored the first paper in the U.S. Government on the Afghan National Army (ANA) in October 2001, and worked for 5 years on ANA, Afghan National Police, and other security issues as the representative of the Bureau of Political Military Affairs to the Afghan Interagency Operations Group. Dr. Mason trained tens of thousands of deploying American and North Atlantic Treaty Organization military personnel on military and cultural aspects of the war in Afghanistan, and has published widely on Afghanistan and Pakistan in numerous publications over the past 10 years. Dr. Mason graduated with Distinction from the resident Command and General Staff College course at the Marine Corps University, Quantico, VA; holds a Ph.D. in military and Central Asian history from The George Washington University, Washington, DC. The wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were lost before they began, not on the battlefields, where the United States won every tactical engagement, but at the strategic level of war. In each case, the U.S. Government attempted to create a Western-style democracy in countries which were decades at least away from being nations with the sociopolitical capital necessary to sustain democracy and, most importantly, accept it as a legitimate source of governance. The expensive indigenous armies created in the image of the U.S. Army lacked both the motivation to fight for illegitimate governments in Saigon, Baghdad, and Kabul and a cause that they believed was worth dying for, while their enemies in the field clearly did. This book examines the Afghan National Security Forces in historical and political contexts, explains why they will fail at the tactical, operational and strategic levels of war, why they cannot and will not succeed in holding the southern half of the country, and what will happen in Afghanistan year-by-year from 2015 to 2019. Finally, it examines what the critical lessons unlearned of these conflicts are for U.S. military leaders, why these fundamental political lessons seem to remain unlearned, and how the strategic mistakes of the past can be avoided in the future. Condition: Good / No DJ issued.
Keywords: Afghanistan, Afghan National Security Forces, Paramilitary, Irregular Forces, Civil War, Attrition, Nation-Building, Insurgency, Wargaming, Military Strategy
ISBN: 1584876832
[Book #84494]
Price: $45.00