Quote:
Originally Posted by jbour13
What do you say of a country that is predominately defined by violence as a means to gain access to power and is not full of Jihadis? What about just those choosing to utilize the aforementioned violence to gain something that resembles law and order? Pashtun Wali is a bitch, especially when you are not Pashtun.
You'll soon find out that everything in this country (Afghanistan) has a political motive, and violence is the cohesive bond that brought it to fruition.
A better quote that would summarize and make sense of this article (given the highlight of the 9 year long war itself) is the following:
"It can be argued that changing strategy every six to twelve months is tantamount to having no strategy whatsoever, particularly if that is not justified by changes in the insurgents own strategy"
Antonio Guistozzi - Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan 2002-2007
Something to think about.
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Thank you for your input. I will admit, I am ignorant in the ways of the Afghan people. I would say that that country is ruled by short-sighted fools, if you wanted my frank opinion. The violence has to end at some point, maybe not in the next few years (or decades), but at some time law and order must prevail. I understand that this has been the way of these people for quite some time and some idealistic lout such as myself isn't going to change anything, however, if we continue to deal with problems there as they do, what does that say of us? Of the West?
My opinions, however, are born of ignorance. This in itself invalidates them. Thank you again for your input, you've given me much to think about.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sigaba
Jack--
Out of intellectual curiosity, I have three questions.
First, if you feel comfortable doing so, could you provide the professor's name and the title of the class he taught? (Was the course offered by your school's history department or another department?)
Second, when he offered his definition of strategy, did he ever discuss the relationships among strategy, operations, and tactics?
Third, did he differentiate among different types of wars?
To be clear--these questions are offered out of curiosity, not criticism of your professor nor your POV. I simply have a long standing interest in how "strategy" gets discussed in contemporary America.
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He explicitly told us to not give his name or his information without his written permission. The course was titled "Modern Military History."
From what I gleaned of his lectures: he defined strategy as the 'why,' operations as the 'what,' and tactics as the 'how.' He also put emphasis on the fact that a true plan would need a balance of all of these things. My interpretation of his saying: 'managing violence,' is having the 'what' and the 'how' without the 'why.' Tactics cannot be implemented without operational context, and operational context cannot be obtained without a reason, or strategy.
We mainly covered conventional wars. He didn't discuss unconventional warfare too much. He argued that there wasn't enough historical data to give a proper conceptual presentation on UW without missing something important. We covered Vietnam, Korea and Desert Storm only very briefly. We spent most of class time on both world wars and the political, economic, and social circumstances that led to them.