1:44AM
Column 125
Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 1:44AM Heroes and villains according to Woodward
There is an old Washington saying that "where you stand depends on where you sit," meaning policy views correlate to bureaucratic position.
This is worth remembering as General David Petraeus begins his strategy review of Afghanistan. Those looking for an instant replay of his counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq will be disappointed.
Read on at KnoxNews.
Read on at Scripps Howard.
Reader Comments (2)
Lawrence of Arabia developed a 'new' political-military strategy that fit the Arab MidEast situation in his time and got the best of Turks and their German backers. Then Brit government failed to accept his proposals for some postwar voluntary Arab political, economic and social modernization. Instead they returned to earlier colonization focus that had fake modernization features and artificial national boundaries. Result: Intensive, long term anger and distrust of Anglo type interference in Arab world.
Afghanistan has another type of tribal culture and heritage, and a memory that their ancestors had eventually beat out successive foreign occupiers using terrain, geography and tribal culture. You can see equivalent of today's situation reading the background portions of Rudyard Kipling's sories or the more recent Charlie Wilson's War story.
A good general deals with the reality of situations and people involved in a conflict, not reusing an earlier solution exactly because it worked 'back then.' Of course the bureaucrat and egg head theorists in the military spend a lot of time refining old 'doctrine' like their ideologue counterparts in politics. Remember how FDR had to clean house of military bureaucracy and pull up the lower rank realists? Those realistics used many different approches in WW II based on realistic situations.