Afghani citizens are key to defeating Taliban
In July 1963, as an Army captain, I took command of a battery of heavy artillery, stationed in a dusty compound enclosed by barbed wire five miles from the Demilitarized Zone between South and North Korea.
My 120 soldiers lived austerely, in concrete-floored metal Quonset huts. But their lifestyle was luxurious compared with that of the local villagers, whose awful poverty was reflected in their mud-wattle houses heated (in the brutal winter that was to come) only by rice and barley straw saved after barely adequate harvests. The terrain was equally harsh — narrow valleys in which every square meter of arable land was exhaustively cultivated, flanked by precipitous mountainsides dotted with sapling trees, planted by order of the ruling military dictatorship and protected (under pain of death) to prevent recurrence of disastrous floods that had followed the decade-earlier war.
“Your unit has a few problems,” the battalion commander told me the night before the change-of-command ceremony. It seemed that my predecessor, a “tough as nails” combat veteran, had been relieved from command after a mu-tiny of the Korean contingent within the battery.
Though reputedly a superb tactician, in matters of cultural sensitivity he’d been an abysmal failure. Apparently thinking that his 85 Korean troops—more than two-thirds of the unit’s manpower— spoke little or no English, he referred to them as “gooks” and treated them, including their lieutenant (a graduate of Seoul University with a degree in economics) and his noncommissioned officers, with undisguised disdain.
The climax occurred when the American captain celebrated the Fourth of July with a festive barbecue, with only Korean soldiers assigned to that day’s KP duty, including waiting on tables for American soldiers and their local-prostitute girlfriends.
In the middle of the dinner, on command from their lieutenant, the Koreans walked to the compound’s gate, formed into ranks and marched up the valley to the U. S. battalion headquarters. There they sat down in the road, refusing to budge until the captain had been fired.
A week after taking command, I called a special formation of the battery — in which every gun section, survey crew, ammunition detail, etc., was a mix of the two nationalities — and delivered a speech. I began by reading — in Korean, expertly phoneticized by the lieutenant — a government proclamation heralding the 18th anniversary of the formal ending of Japanese colonial rule. I followed with remarks in English (translated by that able young man) explaining the mission of American troops in South Korea, our alliance with the Korean Army and the American manpower shortages that had led to the integration of KATUSAs (officially, “Korean Augmentations To U. S. Army”) into so sensitive a unit as a nuclear-armed battery aimed at Communist forces to our north.
Unmentioned, but understood by all, was my role as the Korean soldiers’ temporary commander until the battery would someday become (with American-retained control of its nuclear ammunition) a full-fledged unit of the Korean Army.
For nine months, I commanded that battery in fairly standard fashion, except for one practice that might be regarded as atypical. Whenever a member of my unit received a promotion, or suffered a death or birth in his family, or received any sort of honor, I wrote a letter (in the appropriate language) to his wife or parents extolling his performance of duty. Gradually, during the mundane routine of inspecting barracks, I began to find those letters taped to the insides of foot lockers, with handwritten marginal notes from proud family members.
When I moved on to serve as an operations officer in battalion headquarters, the Korean soldiers paid me a special honor. After marching up the valley, they asked that I come before them. They saluted me, sang “Arirang,” the traditional Korean song of farewell and marched back to serve loyally under my successor.
Given our country’s current and predictable involvement in many turbulent parts of the world — Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, maybe someday Yemen and even Jordan — it occurs to me that the solution we chose in Korea in the 1960s might be applicable.
It would require substantial amounts of U. S. national treasure, but far less than that consumed by massive American forces. And far, far less shedding of American blood.
Turning specifically to Afghanistan, that country is four times the size of South Korea, with half again the area and population of Iraq. It has incredibly rugged terrain, a preindustrial and criminalized economy, and a volatile mix of dialects, mutually hostile ethnic groups, xenophobic tribes, autonomous warlords and permeable borders, across which wily insurgents move with relative impunity.
The United States, along with its dwindling NATO allies, will never have enough troops — barring national mobilization and resumption of a draft — to stabilize this “graveyard of empires.” There is, indeed, the prospect of vastly increasing the size of an American-advised Afghan Army, but not possibly in time — particularly in terms of developing reliable officers and noncommissioned officers — to break the momentum of the insurgency.
The temporary creation of American-led and provisioned units, manned largely by Afghani citizens, would be a daring but practicable solution. If necessary to salve national pride, labeling each unit’s U. S. officers and NCOs as “advisers” would not at all limit their effectiveness.
Alexander the Great, when faced with the near-impossibility of pacifying this fractious land, is said to have been presented with an intricately knotted rope as a symbol of his task. “No man can untie this knot!” he was told.
So he cut it.
William L. Hauser is a retired Army colonel and prior News contributor. His essay, “Bring Back the Draft: A Call for Universal National Service,” co-authored with professor Jerome Slater of the University at Buffalo, will appear in the winter issue of the journal World Affairs.
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