Sangin, COIN, Serbia, and an angry Beth

This is the part of writing these books that hurts the hardest: the research on Afghanistan, and particularly the research into Sangin.

I've done these same searches now at least three different times. They take days and days, and they always leave a massive pit in my stomach. Maybe that was why, before, I preferred to leave most of the details on the screen; why I only jotted the occasional note about the rough current of the Helmand River, the RPG rounds and pot-shots that hit FOB Jackson hourly in 2010, and a handful of crappy, hand-drawn maps onto one of five messy, scribbled sheets of notebook paper in my binder of research. Every time I come back to those notes, it's harder to match up my facts with their origin on the ever-evolving internet. Whenever I search, I lose something else - some small detail around which I built a scene or a character I don't want to lose. When delving into my research this time around, I printed everything out: five years of news articles and lists of the dead and studies in counterinsurgency and the two-hundred page book that the families of the dead from Darkhorse assembled about their lost boys, and about how and where and when they were lost. Slowly but surely, I'm making my way through it again, ripping through stacks of post-it notes in the process of coming to terms with the same emotions that I struggle with every time I confront these facts and figures and faces. Sure, I feel an undercurrent of love and respect and encouragement, but mostly, I'm just bitterly, bitterly angry.

I have been fairly lucky that basic information on Sangin is easy to find. It's a place where, due to the number of deaths there (some of which were extremely high-profile), there has been a great deal of media coverage. There's even a good amount of military strategy scholarship done on the fighting in the area, given that British troops struggled there for three years attempting population-centric warfare before the Marines of Darkhorse came in and forged their "3rd Way of COIN", taking it to the enemy in their "leader-centric" counterinsurgency for several months before finally making headway against the Taliban at the expense of twenty-five lives, and two-hundred additional casualties. People are fascinated by Sangin, so it's now featured in plenty of case studies, which are all colored by when they were conducted, anywhere between 2010 and 2015. It never ceases to amaze me how, in just those five years, the situation there and the feelings about Sangin have changed so drastically. Early on, everything was pumped up with heavy braggadocio and well-propagandized "facts" about the state of affairs and the lasting changes taking place in Sangin. That sense of righteousness and permanence was gone four years later, when the quiet retrograde took place. By the time the Taliban recaptured much of Sangin in late 2015, disinterest had crept into the reporting. After all those losses, it is as if everyone has forgotten how many gallons of Coalition Forces' blood had been spilled to clear, hold, and build in the area in the first place.

Most people probably don't notice, or care about, what's happening in Sangin now, but some won't forget. The families and loved ones of the fifty Marines and one-hundred-and-six British troops who died in Sangin in the course of seven years must feel, I imagine, devastated at the latest news. Additionally, to borrow the words of Marine Corps Times' Dan Lamothe, "half of a batallion in amputees has been created [in Sangin.]" Those five hundred Marines will never forget the region that deprived them of their limbs; the region the Taliban now owns. Their friends and cohorts have scars both mental and physical from having seen the horrors of battle in Sangin. We owe them better than to watch the area they fought so hard for retaken by the enemy. (And if they are not our enemy, a truth Washington increasingly tries to force down our throats, then why were we fighting them originally? A few basic questions come to mind: have the Taliban suddenly decided to treat women as equal human beings? Have they disavowed their ties with the extremist organizations who would like nothing more than to see many more of our American people dead, our country obliterated from the map? If those very basic concerns aren't dealt with, then there can be no moving forward, in my opinion. And yet, the plug-n-play Washington bureaucrats want to reconcile with the Taliban. I've spoken with the survivors, the men who were told that the Taliban would have no quarter, and I can tell you that they are looking on now in shock. I am, too, and I lost nothing there, aside from my faith in politicians.) 


This is an aside, but my secondary point is buried within, I swear. I wrote my honors thesis at William and Mary on the implications of Hitler's strategy in World War II Serbia for future counterinsurgency operations. Long story short and colloquial (and details probably mangled, I apologize), Hitler was pissed that some Serbians revolted against him after Yugoslavia signing off on his Tripartite Pact to join the Axis alliance. Hitler needed Croatia and Serbia for many of the materials that fueled his war machine, so he postponed his impending Russian campaign (Op. Barbarossa) to bomb the shit out of Yugoslavia, and afterwards, to invade it. Yugoslavia was defeated militarily in less than two weeks. Croatia was given pretty wide latitude under German control, but in Serbia, the new government was harsher, out of Hitler's vengeance towards the Serbs for both their role in the First World War and for leading the coup that had led to his invasion. The new German-backed government was filled with ethnic German Serbs, who had been disenfranchised for the last decades. While the Germans were setting up and empowering their wartime command, a number of elements of the Serbian military were coalescing in the mountains, where they recuperated and began to plan their revenge. They blew up German supply lines to make sure that Hitler's trains of bauxite and copper and other supplies couldn't reach Berlin. Wherever they could, they killed German soldiers. Reprisals (a body for a body) were pretty immediate, though the ratios were low at first. The activity from the "partisans" continued, at little cost to their own numbers. Hitler was incensed. He threw in a military commander, Boehme, who, from his service in the First World War and his Austrian background, had very emotional ties to the region. Boehme made the existing reprisal policy harsher: for every German soldier killed by a Serb, one hundred Serbs would be shot dead. Many of the suspected partisans and other enemies of the state had already been rounded up, and were being held in camps around the country, as were almost all of the country's Jews. The Jews went first. The partisans and other enemies of the German state went next. Thousands upon thousands of Serb men were killed via reprisals. As they massacred the Serbian civilians, the Germans considered themselves untouchable. They figured that the Serbs would see the senselessness of revolt, and acquiesce to their rule. Instead, the numbers of partisans grew. In the hillside towns where the unrest was fomented and partisans were being sheltered, the Germans sent Panzer tanks to literally mow over hundreds of civilian residents. After years of this harsh treatment, during which time the Germans continued to believe that they were rooting out all of the dissidents, Tito arrived with the horde of angry partisans he'd been amassing, and they drove the militarily-superior Germans out of the country.

Obviously, there are many points on which Serbian problem set doesn't equate to the American invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11. (Will there ever be a case study in any type of warfare that gives exact and perfect instruction on another military situation?) Additionally, the German reaction to the Serbs isn't well documented or thought of as COIN or lack thereof, and wasn't conducted by the Americans, so there's likely little American military scholarship on the topic. (To that end, we waited years to use our own scholarship on previous COIN applications. It took far too long to look back to Vietnam (another failed application of COIN) for ways forward in Afghanistan and Iraq. (Much of the PRT and S/CRS concepts were adopted from CORDS.)) I also concede that I'm very biased in my interest in WWII Serbia and the failed application of COIN there, given that I spent something like eighteen months tied up in research on the topic. However, it stands that there are parallels that would have informed on our current situation. A look back at Serbia in WWII - and at hundreds of other applicable COIN situations - would have been a great reminder that revenge politics are no good; that shock and awe may be a fabulous way to gain control for a time, but that they don't instill lasting change; that counterinsurgencies are hard, long fights, not to be undertaken lightly, and never to be completed cheaply. By treating COIN in Afghanistan like a passing fad, and by taking years to reinvent the COIN wheel there, we have cheapened the lives of the men we've lost. By leaving a horribly-trained ANSF presence in Afghanistan, we've allowed hard-won territory to revert back to a ruthless enemy. We've been playing whack-a-mole with the insurgents, and while we've helped many of them to meet their makers, there are still many, many more hiding out in the mountains. Now, they're coming for Afghanistan - not just Sangin - and our politicians seem eager to work with them to invalidate all our lost treasure and human capital.

And that's why I have such strong, gut-aching feelings when I'm doing this research. I love to remember these brave men who gave so much to a cause, but I hate knowing that so much of this was in vain. It makes me angry, ceaselessly so, knowing that we could and should have done so much better. We owed our men and women serving in harms way that much. 

Rant over. Beth out.