14 May 2007
Asymmetric
Mullah Dadullah is dead, and that is a good thing. His corpse was on display for the journalists over the weekend, his thick beard making him look a little like Che, laid out in Bolivia forty years ago.
Che was a loser in asymmetric warfare. Insurgent struggles can succeed against overwhelmingly superior military forces if the combatants can, in Mao's words, “Swim in the sea of the people.”
Che could not swim in that pool. He was a foreigner, and in the end the Bolivian peasants found him to be an irritant.
That is the hope of the new strategy in Iraq, that the Sunni combatants, some of them out-of-towners, will become an irritant to their co-religionists, who are beginning to realize that the continued conflict will only bring down their collective destruction at the hands of the numerically superior Shias.
With three American troops possibly in the hands of the Bad Guys this morning, taken in the wake of a successful IED attack south of Baghdad, it is cold comfort that things may be changing.
Dadullah was the victim of the imbalance of asymmetric resources. The Americans have aerial robots that can stay aloft for days, silent to the ground, and equipped with sensors to whom the night is day.
He was the senior Taliban commander in Afghanistan, second only to Mullah Omar, who is wisely staying out of town. Dadullah escaped capture in the war we won quickly and which caused such a burst of hubris in Washington.
“Heck,” went the thinking. “If we can take over a country that beat the Soviets in a month, why not fix Saddam's little green wagon, too?”
Dadullah was an ethnic Kuchi, a tribe whose business model is to move across southern Afghanistan with the seasonal forage for their sheep. That accounts for his detailed knowledge of the terrain, and his close contacts in the Tribal areas of Pakistan to the south.
There is no border, not the way we understand it, so the niceties of international law that must be followed gave him safe haven there, and the ability to pop in and out of the war zone with fresh stock of fighters, ammunition and rage.
He was a singularly bloody figure, and quite focused on what he was doing. With the resurgence of the Taliban as a fighting force last year, he tried to take Kandahar, and had NATO forces squarely in his sights. This Spring campaign was focused on Helmand Province, next door.
It did not work out as a success for him. His body was transported for display to Kandahar, which he had failed to take. Details are sketchy on the terms of his death, since sources-and-methods must be protected, and that is the symmetrical power of the Allies. A long intelligence collection campaign was waged to gain continuity on his movements, and to find a way to insert a decisive special operations force at the precise moment of advantage.
Aerial robots were part of it. The professionals will snort, saying these unmanned aircraft are completely controlled by humans from the ground. They are not robots; they are simply autonomous unmanned flying vehicles.
That is true, but I maintain that we should recognize them for what they are: Robots. They come in many shapes and capabilities, but they share a common concept. They are linked to operators on the ground, some of them very far away. For some of the platforms, like the Global Hawk, the link is by satellite and the people are at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
The operators are linked to the sensors, and connected through the web to airborne radar and forces on the ground. It is quite remarkable, this web-centric sensor net, which can provide precision targeting just about anywhere.
They say it was a quick helicopter-borne assault that got him, Americans appearing suddenly and engaging Dadullah with his personal escort. You can imagine the jolt of adrenaline that must have coursed through the veins of everyone concerned.
The Authorities say that Dadullah was responsible for many civilian deaths, and personal terror. The Americans have been under pressure for the same reasons of late, and that is part of the reason that this is such good news.
Dadullah's terror was personal. The Americans have been accused of causing inadvertent civilian casualties, but in a highly impersonal way, through mis-identification of ground targets from the air.
I am not an advocate of equivalency. I am happy Dadullah is dead. Had he had not decided to murder his countrymen and wage war, he would have been left in peace. He did not, and the war of his making is responsible for the inadvertent deaths of non-combatants.
One of the Global Hawk aerial robots just returned to Edwards AFB in California from Iraq. It did not come dissembled in a cargo plane or on a ship. It flew home on its own power, returning on command to its operators. It can stay aloft for as much as 48 hours, and patrol at an altitude of 60,000 feet.
It needed scheduled maintenance, and so it was summoned back to America. This particular robot has flown over 250 missions, all of them controlled from the environmentally friendly control pod in the Mohave Desert.
It is quite remarkable, and in the asymmetric quadrant of the great power. There is a downside, though, as you might expect. There is no way to check an ID card or divine intent from the heavens. To stop a man like Dadullah, your must still meet him on the ground.
That is where all the symmetries come together, forming a unified whole.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com