Afghanistan: Hybrid Warfare Victorious

Absztrakt

The victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan in August 2021 marked the end of an extended and successful exercise in hybrid warfare by the Taliban and by its Pakistani mentors. Their strategy provides an example of Sun Tzu’s ideal of “winning a war without fighting”. The Taliban outlasted their opponents politically and psychologically, while avoiding battle with the U.S. and Coalition forces and refraining from terrorist attacks abroad. Their task was facilitated by the absence of a clear U.S. strategy, intelligence failures, by the misguided order of battle of government forces, and by the chronic corruption at all levels of Afghan officialdom.
More significant in terms of Asian geopolitics was Pakistan’s involvement in Afghanistan, a complex and successful hybrid warfare operation in pursuit of Islamabad’s strategic objectives. The key question – what is America’s objective in Afghanistan, how does its military go about reaching it, and how does it measure success or failure in doing so – remained unanswered until the end. Finally, the end-game in Kabul in August 2021 also illustrates the gap between the desire of a segment of America’s elites to promote “progressive” social and moral norms around the world, and the reality of the Muslim world which, overwhelmingly, finds those norms unacceptable.