T. Belman. The same goes for Israel. Israel has lost every war because in all cases they sought approval by the international community which demanded a ceasefire and the return of their hard won gains e.g. Golan, Sinai, and Judea and Samaria. Could Israel have ignored Res 242 or American demands for ceasefires in Gaza or for a ceasefire in Beirut (to save Arafat). One could argue they couldn’t.
On the other hand, Dayan didn’t have to give the Temple Mount to the Muslims after the ’67 victory, Sharon didn’t have to give Gaza to the Arabs, Rabin didn’t have to agree to the Oslo Accords, Israel doesn’t have to give concessions to the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, or the Bedouin in the Negev. These concessions have never made Israel stronger. Always weaker. Israel cannot buy its way to peace. Only total victory will achieve that. Israel must stop being the nice guy and forget the purity of arms bullshit.
by Daniel Greenfield Aug 15, 2021
“Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.”
General George S. Patton
“It’s our belief that one day mujahideen will have victory, and Islamic law will come not to just Afghanistan, but all over the world. We are not in a hurry. We believe it will come one day. Jihad will not end until the last day.”
Taliban commander to CNN
Why can’t America win wars?
You’ve gotta fight a war to win a war. And we don’t fight wars. In my upcoming article on the disaster in Afghanistan, I warn that we’ve lost the ability to define what a war is and why we fight them.
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“If we can’t go to war for ourselves, not for democracy, human rights, or so that Afghan girls can go to school, then we will lose soldiers, lose wars, and lose our nation,” I write.
The average American spent the last decade wondering what the hell we were doing in Afghanistan.
It’s a good question with all the usual bad answers. We were propping up a government that wouldn’t exist without us. We were exporting our ideals. We were trying to win hearts and minds. We were trying to stabilize an inherently unstable part of the world. What we weren’t doing was fighting and winning.
Wars, like stories, are simple things if you define a goal that can be achieved by military means.
Few of our goals could be achieved by military means and certainly not by the ones we were using.
The Taliban know what they’re fighting for. Not only don’t we know what we’re fighting for, but we couldn’t define victory except in terms of Afghanistan turning into San Francisco with coffee shops, courses on feminism, and LGBT parades. The Taliban are fighting a culture war by military means. Our elites tried to do the same thing in Afghanistan without being able to define an enemy or victory.
The same establishment that excels at fighting culture wars against Americans keeps discovering that its toolbox of activism, media bias, and victimhood fails miserably outside the western world.
You can’t win a culture war if you don’t understand a culture.
The Russian and Chinese Communists understood that they were out to suppress Islam. The Chinese Communists are still doing it. Compare their tactics of forcing Uighur men to shave their beards and drink alcohol to America funding feminism and democracy in Afghanistan. Undermining traditional culture worked in America, they assumed that it would work in Afghanistan. They assumed that they could co-opt Islam the way they have elements of Christianity and Judaism into their woke project.
Their repeat failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Europe should be a wake-up call to their bright future in Little Mogadishu and all the Islamic enclaves that they’ve created in America.
But it won’t be.
Up until the very last moment, the State Department believed that it could co-opt the Taliban into the political system they had set up in Afghanistan. Elements of it still seem to believe that they can even as the Jihadists advance into Kabul. Victory, such as it was, had come to be defined as the Taliban seeing reason and deciding to stop being Jihadists. Three administrations bought into this dumb fantasy.
Jihadists who believe that “Islamic law will come not to just Afghanistan, but all over the world” are not interested in playing Let’s Make a Deal except as Taqiyya to keep the infidels off-balance.
The Taliban play to win. We don’t.
That’s the simple answer to why we haven’t won wars in a long time and aren’t about to start.
American soldiers are the best. They win battles all the time. When faced against an enemy that will stand and fight, our men roll over them. We aren’t losing those kinds of battles: we keep losing wars in which the leaders can’t define what a war is or what victory looks like in military terms.
Let’s get back to Patton for a moment. “Sure, we all want to go home. We want to get this war over with. But you can’t win a war lying down. The quickest way to get it over with is to get the bastards who started it” and “I don’t want any messages saying ‘I’m holding my position.’ We’re not holding a goddamned thing. We’re advancing constantly.”
What were we doing in Afghanistan for 15 years? Were we getting anything over it? Were we getting anyone? Were we winning a war so we could go home or were we holding our positions?
Wars can be won when you’re out to defeat the enemy.
When you’re not out to defeat the enemy, you never win the war and you never go home until you get tired of holding your position and waiting for the culture to change.
The inability to define war or victory isn’t a military problem: it’s a cultural problem.
We can’t win wars because while Patton’s “Americans play to win all the time. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war” may still ring true in parts of the country, it’s as alien to the elites who run the country as the Taliban are. It’s a strange species of exotica for people who drink organic seltzer, hand out participation trophies, and spend all their time worrying about victimhood.
They view the military as a means to a non-military end. That’s how we ended up in Afghanistan.
Stability, cultural transformation, and all the rest of it are non-military ends. If you want to use the military to achieve a non-military end, you have to engage in conquest and then use force to transform a region or a society. That’s what the Taliban did and that’s what they’ll be doing again.
After successfully using the military for a military end, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, defeating our named enemies, our elites embarked on an impotent program of cultural change in which they couldn’t tell themselves the truth about what they were doing or even explain why the military was there.
They assumed that they were liberating the innate forces of progress and civilization which would thrive if we just had some soldiers there to protect them. No wonder the non-European parts of the world were laughing at us. What the hell were we doing in Afghanistan? That’s what we were doing in Afghanistan.
And so many places before it. We were trying to protect client states that couldn’t stand on their own. We were practicing imperialism without the empire and it was always bound to fall apart on us.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
Sun Tzu
Americans don’t know the enemy. And increasingly our elites don’t know ourselves.
They can’t define what a war is or how to win it. And they sure as hell can’t define the enemy, let alone know the enemy.
They’ve lost the cultural skills to understand what war is and what victory looks like.
And they’re the ones calling the shots.
@Michael S.
I just carefully looked over my post again, not that I needed to, and fail to see any reference to Canadian troops at all. I was decrying the lack of spirit to win, that lack of understanding that Americans have, certainly the politicians, that being the only superpower (which is now debateable) that they have the responsibility of bringing the “American Way of Life” to the whole of the undeveloped planet.
That those benighted people just don’t want the American way of life is beside the point, and completely ignored by US political and military leaders.
So O.K. Michael, Kol Beseder. !
The West, including Israel, “simply” doesn’t have what it takes anymore to attain complete victory. As soldiers we all know what we signed up for, albeit trusting in both our civilian and military leadership to use us wisely. But do you think that Normandy would have happened had CNN been embedded with them? Thousands of GI’s killed in hours taking those beaches. How about the firestorms in Dresden killing hundreds of thousands as we destroyed Nazi ball bearing factories, among other targets. In Israel we don’t have the stomach anymore to send our boys in so we drop bombs from the air. We will never attain real victory that way.
Losing brothers, fathers, sons and daughters is excruciating. I know up close and intimately the pain of losing best friends, but how else can we defeat evil if not making an all out commitment to its eradication….. and if the Taliban for example are not the essence of evil, than the word no longer has meaning. In WWII the Peoples of the free world understood that there would inherently be a price to be paid. In ‘48, ‘67, and ‘73 we had our backs to the wall with no other option. Is that what it will take for us to do what needs to be done, regardless of the price?
Edgar, I don’t dance. I’m sorry I insulted the Canadian troops, whom I thought you were holding up as superior to US troops. They are all fighting together right now, trying to keep order at the airport. Both our countries have fallen prey to the most corrupt generation of politicians the world has ever seen. Australia and UK are in a similar place. May God help us.
@ Michael S.
So glad to see that you have re-surfaced, I was afraid that you were floating….face down. I’ll never be out of BS as long as I have YOU to call on for materiel.
What have the Canadian troops to do with me. The Mounties with their red coats and funny Smokey Bear hats and shiny riding boots. When I arrived here that’s the way they regularly dressed. Now only a few do, for ceremonial purposes. ………
I just live here, and don’t vote, am not a citizen. They elected a cunning moron in Trudeau…twice, and have no organised and ready opposition to him and his handlers. They outed a great statesman Stephen Harper , and replaced him with a part time acting teacher who counts on his fingers..
So he can dance the kazatzka…so what…?? Maybe he can’t even do that.
Can you..??
I thought you might have a comment on how Israel suddenly found itself in possession of YESHA/ It is 100% true, every word I posted, and it’s like you to dispute truth so where are your denials….???
Israel and the U.S. do not want to win wars. They do not want peace. War is big money, therefore they play the game and keep them going form one generation to another. Like a yo yo…… up / down, speed up / slow down. truce/ pretext to start it backup
If you want to win here is how you do it.
1) Call for a peace. That means the greater power sets the terms. During this short time of discussion – 2/3 weeks all women and children allowed to leave.
2) If the terms are not met then place a circle(noose) around the enemy and cut off all supply lines. Anyone or country that breaks the supply line will be killed if caught or bombed 2 miles back form the point of incursion.
3) Plead for a peace agreement again. Continue to allow civilians to leave the encircled area. another 2/3 weeks.
4) If terms are not excepted then tighten the noose and kill everything in side of the noose.
5) In relation to Islamic countries and Afghanistan in particular—– Outlaw the destructive religion of Islam. All teachers are to be deported or killed. No! on second thought, they knew what they are teaching just kill them. Anyone caught with Islamic material or teaching material are to be shot on site. END of DISCUSSION.
6) move to the next area where the enemy is hold up and then repeat the process until there is true peace and the “Swords are beaten into plowshares”.
If you don’ want to fight a war to win the conflict—- then stay the hell home and play with momma.
Politicians have never won a war they just call for a cease fire and started it back up at a later date to be determined.
“When you’re not out to defeat the enemy, you never win the war and you never go home until you get tired of holding your position and waiting for the culture to change.”
Of course, this was true in the Korean War, the Vietnam War and elsewhere. It is also true of all of Israel’s wars. Daniel Pipes has been calling upon the Israelis, for years, to accept this. They haven’t.
When Saigon fell, the US still had a secure border. It no longer does, and we can expect both the refugees and the Taliban to flow into the US. This does not look to be pretty.
Edgar,
You are all BS. Where are your pussy Canadian troops right now? They are being protected by us “deplorable” Yanks. Tell me that Canadians do a better job of winning than Americans, and I will spit you off Israpundit. Your gung-ho Mounties are great at arresting pastors, but not much else.
Very good and incisive article.
THe Americans, brought up on Political Correctnes, Rah Rah, Army versus Navy (football game) cheer leaders, pompoms, have forgotteb how to win.
The Israeli High Water Mark was in 1967, when a well documented report was sent from the IDF units who happened to have found themselves in the “West Bank”, because they were in close, ongoing contact with the enemy, . They asked what to do, They wanted to get back to “Israel”.but it would be dangerous to break of fcontact. and and were then ordered to stay. They suddenly found they had unexpectedly captured the “West Bank”.
THAT was the high point of Israel’s power and (dubious) desire to win.
Both Israel and the US have lost the “call to conquer”, the win at all costs.
Israel cannot make a clearly defined foreign policy nor a proper military goal, except through the filter “Is it agreeable to the Goyim”…
A “” dirge for doom”. Their best efforts are phoning Gazans to get to safety and knocking on roof tops, making sure that nobody is hurt, whilst making a huge noise to frighten the kiddies. going to the utmost of ridiculousness to avoid the accusations
which will be thrown at them ANYWAY.
There was amove a few years ago for all citizens to move away and abandon those towns around Gaza. It petered out-like lots of Israeli plans and projections. .
There must surely by now be a shortage of empty buildings in Gaza..
Look at AreaC. They are afraid to kick out the Arb infiltrators. I recall a couple of years ago there were less than 20,000 there all illegally aided by the UN who were not shy about having their logo on the illegal muildings.
Yet….they are champions at one certain skill…”Snatching defeat from the
jaws of victory.”