The NATO Campaign in Afghanistan: Comparisons with the Experience in Colombia

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Just days after 9/11, Congress authorized the use of force against al Qaeda and those who harbored them – an authorization that continues to this day. The vote in the Senate was 98 to nothing. The vote in the House was 420 to 1. For the first time in its history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked Article 5 – the commitment that says an attack on one member nation is an attack on all. And the United Nations Security Council endorsed the use of all necessary steps to respond to the 9/11 attacks. America, our allies and the world were acting as one to destroy al-Qaeda’s terrorist network and to protect our common security.

– President Barack Obama, West Point, December 1, 2009

In June 2014 I accompanied a field trip organised by the Brenthurst Foundation, a South African non-governmental organization, to Colombia. The aim of the trip was to look at what lessons could be learned from the Colombian Government’s successful campaign against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Having developed, over the last 10 years, an in depth knowledge of the war in Afghanistan since 2001 I was struck by both some of the simi-larities and differences between the two countries, and the attempts by the international com-munity to help. This article looks at the campaign in Afghanistan as the NATO mission comes to a close, drawing comparisons with the Colombian experience as appropriate. It focuses on five areas: campaign goals and the linkages to values and culture; campaign ownership; corruption; troop numbers; and military capacity building.

When the U.S.-led coalition launched Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in 2001, its aim was the defeat of terrorist elements operating from Afghanistan. It sought to achieve this by defeating Taliban military forces, removing their government from power and destroying those elements of al-Qaeda operating in Afghanistan. The longer-term aim of the coalition was to create a stable, democratic Afghanistan that would no longer be a safe haven for terrorists. OEF started as a conventional warfighting operation that used air power, Special Forces, and troops from the Northern Alliance to defeat the Taliban, and this phase was very successful. However, many key Taliban government members and military commanders escaped. An end to combat operations was declared by OEF in May 2003, and at this point the operation focused on stabilizing the country.

While there had been tactical engagements with small numbers of the Taliban in the south and east of the country ever since their fall, by 2005 the numbers and size of these engagements increased considerably. In effect, during the period from 2001 to the start of 2005, the Taliban achieved strategic survival and then began to run an offensive campaign in Afghanistan, which they hoped to grow from guerrilla warfare to conventional war fighting.

The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), as approved in the Bonn Agreement of December 2001, deployed under a UN man-date as soon as the agreement was signed. Initially, ISAF was deployed to Kabul, thus securing the new government’s seat of power. However, the mandate included assistance in the training of Afghanistan’s armed forces, assistance in reconstruction and, most importantly, for expansion of ISAF throughout Afghanistan. The ISAF mission was formally taken over by NATO in August 2003, and expansion, initially to the north of the country, was started in December 2003 and completed with the inclusion of the east of the country in October 2006. Until the expansion of the mission to southern Afghanistan in July 2006 the majority of NATO force-contributing nations regarded the operation as a peacekeeping mission. Thus, with OEF seeing Afghanistan as being at the end of a conventional war and ISAF initially viewing Afghanistan as a peace-keeping operation, it was not until the completion of ISAF expansion that the whole international military effort could be put on a common doctrinal footing: that of counter-insurgency.

Throughout the period 2007 – 2009, the Taliban-led insurgency grew in intensity, par-ticularly in the South and the East of the country, and ISAF and Afghan commanders made repeated requests for more forces and an expansion in the planned size of the Afghan Army. President Obama agreed to a troop increase in March 2009. In autumn, 2009 the President led a review of the Afghan mission, which resulted in an agreement to surge both U.S. and international forces for an 18-month period. Beyond this period there was a clearly-stated intent by the ISAF nations to disengage from combat operations, the date for which was subsequently set as the end of 2014. During the London Conference in January 2010 it was announced that the Afghan Army would be increased in strength to 171,600 and the Police to 134,000 by October 2011, thus providing the scale of forces necessary to enable an international troop drawdown. The hard fighting that followed over the course of 2010 changed the dynamic of the campaign and another U.S. review in December of that year confirmed the start of the drawdown as July 2011, with the end of 2014 set as the date for the end of the NATO mission. The exit strategy was confirmed at the Chicago NATO summit of May 2012.

The UN has been present in Afghanistan since October 1988 with a limited purpose of assistance and co-ordination, and as a result its footprint has always been relatively small. Following the war in 2001, the UN role in Afghanistan remained one of assistance. In particular, it was felt that the mission needed to operate with a light footprint, in order to prevent it from being seen as yet another occupying power, and that an Afghan interim administration should quickly take the lead.

President Karzai formed the Interim Afghan Administration after the signing of the Bonn Agreement in December 2001. It was drawn from key members of the Northern Alliance and other important groups who had been driven from power by the Taliban. However, very few members of the interim administration and subsequent government had lengthy experience in running a country, and the civil service, almost destroyed by over 20 years of war and limited formal government, was ineffective. Furthermore, a democratically elected government had never governed Afghanistan; rather, traditional tribal structures had dominated, and these were based on patronage rather than on a culture of service provision to the electorate. As a result, warlordism remained a feature of Afghan politics.

Given the broad international consensus behind the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, there was much support for the new government of the country from the international community. Lead nations were appointed to help rebuild key elements of the state and support the government in difficult areas. Nations and international organizations offered donations, although many did not want to pass their money through the Government and thus funded the projects directly. This approach gave the Government of Afghanistan some considerable co-ordination challenges.

Issue 1: The Linkage between the Goals of an Intervention and Values and Culture

No longer is our existence as states under threat. Now our actions are guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self-interest and moral purpose in defending the values we cherish. In the end, values and interests merge. If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society then that is in our national interests too. The spread of our values makes us safer. As John Kennedy put it, “Freedom is indivisible and when one man is enslaved who is free?”

– Prime Minister Tony Blair, Chicago, April 1999

When Prime Minister Blair made his Chicago speech in April 1999, Europe was in the middle of the Kosovo crisis. For the UK, this was followed by intervention in May 2000 in Sierra Leone. In fact, the overseas interventions of the 1990’s involving British Forces were relatively short, self-contained, and largely successful. Thus by 2001 the UK had a doctrine for intervention and ten years of relatively successful practice as the backdrop for the interventions of the first decade of the 21^st century. As Rob Fry remarks: “Wars in defence of liberal values are what the British people fought throughout the twentieth century, and these wars were wars of unnegotiable necessity. Wars in promo-tion of liberal values are what the British armed forces have fought for since 1991 and, by their very nature, they have been discretion-ary.”[i] Looking back it is clear that “Chicago Doctrine” thinking had a huge influence on the conduct of the international community in Afghanistan and on the early stages of the campaign. After the initial defeat of the Taliban in 2001, in an unstated way, it underpinned our plans to help put the country back on its feet. Yet the culture of the population, the very fabric of the nation, and the nature of its traditional systems of governance were so far removed from those of the Western countries involved, and the timescales involved so short, that there was bound to be disappointment and recalibration. The assumption that under-pinned the Western approach was that for Afghanistan to be stable it needed a democratically-elected government based in Kabul that was accountable to, and delivered services to, the people. This had not been the Afghan way. When governance had been delivered it had been through traditional, family, village, and tribal structures, and through patronage. There was no deeply embedded culture of paying taxes to a central government or of that government delivering effective services.[ii]

This issue has been at the heart of the debate between coalition members about whether the campaign was just about the defeat of al-Qaeda and the denial of safe havens, or whether it was about the much bigger task of nation-building in order to create a stable Afghanistan that was resilient to the return of such an organization. At the beginning of the campaign ambitions were high. For example, the official end-state for the UK engagement in Afghanistan, as written in 2003, included phrases such as “broad based, multi ethnic administration;” “reducing poverty; respecting human rights.” [iii] By 2006 how-ever, people were beginning to talk in terms of “Afghan good enough” and by the time of President Obama’s West Point speech of December 2009, the objectives were much more specific and limited: “To meet that goal, we will pursue the following objectives within Afghanistan. We must deny al-Qaeda a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban’s momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan’s security forces and government so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan’s future.”[iv] The order of the words “security forces” and then “government” in the speech is significant. As the true scale and costs of the challenge of deliver-ing against a Chicago Doctrine – a compliant end-state in Afghanistan – became apparent, the countries involved began to curtail their ambitions and time-limit their engagement. What made getting Afghanistan back on its feet such a difficult task was not just the fight with the Taliban, the lack of Afghan human capacity,and the endemic poverty; it was that the whole society operated in a completely different way to those of its helpers.

This is not a circumstance unique to Afghanistan. Sir Andrew Green, writing in August 2014 about British recent engagements in the Middle East, commented: “The fundamental reason for our failure is that democracy, as we understand it, simply doesn’t work in Middle Eastern countries where family, tribe, sect and personal friendships trump the apparatus of the state. These are certainly not societies governed by the rule of law. On the contrary, they are better described as “favor for favor” societies. When you have a problem of any kind, you look for someone related to you by family, tribe or region to help you out and requests are most unlikely to be refused since these ties are especially powerful.”[v] I would venture that he might have gone too far in saying that “democracy as we understand it” does not work; but rather that to get it to work in a way that the West understands is probably an activity measured in generations.

So what? First, the lesson must be that if we set out to change values as part of an engagement, we need to have a deep cultural understanding of the society in which we are engaging and of what changing values in that society actually means. Second, we need a clear understanding of where we are prepared to compromise our own values in order to enable progress and, where such compromise is unacceptable. There are countless examples of where this issue has impacted on the campaign; perhaps the best is in our approach to dealing with warlords and powerful figures that were suspected of involvement in the drug trade and in wider corruption. Initially, coalition forces worked with them to defeat the Taliban, but following the Bonn peace process the international community became increasingly reluctant to engage them, preferring to deal with government and provincial officials who often had little real power. A short quote from President Karzai in 2008 expressing his frustration over the removal of Shir Muhammad Akhundzada highlights the dilemmas often faced: “We removed Akhundzada on the allegation of drug-running, and delivered the province to drug runners, the Taliban, to terrorists, to a threefold increase of drugs and poppy cultivation.”[vi] It is fair to record that during Akhundzada’s governorship in 2001-2005 Helmand province appeared relatively secure, but it is also fair to note that he was accused of actions that did not accord with a Western value set, to the extent that the UK Government felt uncomfortable/unable to work with him. I am not attempting to pass judgment on whether removing him was the right thing to do, I am merely pointing out the fact that the upholding of values in this case, as in others, had con-sequences for the campaign, and that such decisions must not be taken unconsciously. A case study of international engagement with General Dostum would highlight similar issues.

Third, the challenge will often be com-pounded by the timescales required to effect cultural change when set against the relatively short tenures of western governments. The flip side of this issue is that if the West accepts these limitations, then large scale engagements need to be less about changing values and more about national interests. Tony Blair, speaking again in Chicago, this time in 2009, argues that the doctrine should be unchanged and that what is required is “engagement of a different and more comprehensive kind; and (the struggle) can only be won by the long haul.” [vii] The problem for the West is that in a conflict that is not about a direct threat to one’s nation or national survival, our pain threshold is relatively low and our attention span short.

The danger is that the West will slip into isolationism, ignoring the global challenges of population growth, poverty and youth unem-ployment until they generate issues that are too big to be ignored. In short, if we are to attempt to prevent such scenarios there is a strong case for engagements to be smaller, ear-lier and longer term; in this respect current policy talk of “up stream capacity building” is unsurprising.

Finally, if this challenge exists at a coun-try-to-country level, it also exists at a military-to-military level. The NATO armies engaged in Afghanistan are now much more aware of the importance of cultural training, but we have been here before and let it slip. While researching for this paper I came across an article by Norvell B. De Atkins entitled, “Why Arabs Lose Wars,” written in 1999; it proved to be a fascinating study of both Arab and U.S. military cultures, and the reason this subject is so important if we are to engage successfully. It also points to some of the reasons why the Iraqi Army might be having its current chal-lenges in dealing with the threat posed by ISIS/ IS.[viii]

Issue 2: Ownership of the Campaign

President Obama’s December 2009 statement on his objectives in Afghanistan includes the phrase “so that they can take lead responsibil-ity.” For a campaign that had, by then, been running for just over eight years and during which there have been two Afghan Presidential elections and three administrations, this is a thought-provoking remark. It gets to the heart of the second major issue: whose campaign is it? The contrast with the Colombian experi-ence could not be starker. In 1999 the Colombian Government recognized the seri-ousness of their situation and came up with a national plan to change the situation. This plan has continued through three Colombian presidencies. They have, of course, received international support and assistance, but it was their plan, which they controlled, and through schemes like the one percent wealth tax, they put national weight behind the plan. The bot-tom line is that they owned the campaign.

The start point in Afghanistan in 2001 was very different. Following years of fighting, first against Soviet occupation and then internally, the country was fragmented. Government had broken down and when the Taliban came to power, whilst improving law and order, they did little to aid the country’s recovery. In the process much human capital left the country, and during the conflict in 2001 several key potential leaders were killed: Ahmad Shah Massoud on 9 September, and Abdul Haq on 26 October. By any standards, rebuilding from such a low point was going to be demanding. The first challenge was to produce a peace/ political settlement from which things could move forward. For Afghanistan this was the Bonn Conference of 2001 at which 25 “prom-inent” Afghans met and set out a path for establishing a democratic government in Afghanistan. With the benefit of hindsight the flaw in the process was the exclusion of the Taliban; now, some 13 years, later there is acceptance that for a lasting peace to be built, talking to the Taliban is essential, for such peace needs to be inclusive. In 2001 there was recognition that the Northern Alliance could not be allowed to dominate the country, but many of the politicians who came to represent the Pashtuns in Government had been absent from the country and in exile for many years. It says much about the individuals who gave up comfortable lives in the West and came back to the herculean task of rebuilding their country. Nevertheless, good intentions are not enough and traditional power brokers quickly reasserted themselves, some with the backing of members of the Transitional Government and some with the support of Western forces. As the insurgency gained momentum and the ISAF effort increased, “security” and “govern-ment” became slightly detached, with President Karzai criticizing ISAF and U.S. oper-ations when they caused civilian casualties and, for example, becoming vocal about stop-ping night raids and the use of aircraft near populated areas.

Talking with an experienced Colombian soldier I was struck with his reply to my ques-tion on how he viewed the FARC: after saying that they were good fighters he said “but they share our blood.” Karzai’s approach to the Taliban has always included this sentiment; indeed it is reported that once the Taliban had gained power they asked him to become their ambassador to the United Nations and that he refused. If the Afghan Government had been given a totally free hand in the running of the campaign would they have tried to bring the Taliban into the tent earlier?

With the brief exception of a period in 2006/7, President Karzai did not run a specific “war cabinet” with the aim of taking national control of the war effort and using all the levers of national power. This lack of a formal Afghan Government-led mechanism for run-ning the war has been problematic. Whilst the Afghan Government and ISAF have agreed on much, and in the latter years of the campaign increasingly so, ISAF and the international community have not always deferred to an Afghan lead. As early as 2003 the Afghan Minister for Defence argued for a massive build-up of Afghan Forces to secure the coun-try against the return of the Taliban, for he did not believe that the West had the stomach for a long fight and the casualties that would ensue. It nevertheless took until 2009 to agree to his proposal. If defeating the Taliban mat-tered more to the international community and to the credibility of NATO than it did to the Afghan Government, there were always going to be some potentially uncomfortable adjustments after ISAF left.

I would not wish to pretend that this is easy ground, for any country committing troops and funding to a coalition operation abroad will wish to retain a major say in how the campaign is run. But the lesson is that if responsibility for the conduct of the campaign is not owned by the government of the country in which it is being run, the campaign will not be truly unified across all elements of national power and this will certainly come at a cost and may undermine the whole campaign. It is interesting to reflect upon what might have happened if the Afghan Government had been fully in the lead from the beginning.

Issue 3: Corruption

The touchstone topic that falls out of the first two issues is corruption. While corruption is generally defined as “the use of public office for private gain” there are considerable national variances. For example, the extent of political lobbying that is allowed in the U.S. would, in some countries, be regarded as cor-ruption. But while the margins might be arguable, the core issue in Afghanistan was simple: if a country is going to commit its’ taxpayers money to helping another country, it needs to be sure that the money is going to be spent and accounted for properly. The challenge for the Afghan Government was huge: while the intended method was a democratic government delivering services, in practice in a number of provinces it was power-brokers rather than governors who called the shots. To make matters worse Afghanistan did not possess a working civil service to support the government, and any staff that did exist had generally been trained by the Soviets. Additionally, the illicit economy in Afghanistan was and is huge, largely buoyed by the drug trade. The response to this situation by many governments and donors was to try and channel funds directly to projects, cutting out the Afghan Government. However this undermined the very legitimacy of the Government they sought to support.

By 2010, ISAF had become so concerned with the problem of corruption that it set up an anti-corruption task force to look at the issues surrounding ISAF contracts. As of 2013, Afghanistan sat at 175^th out of 177 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (which defines corruption as the misuse of public power for private benefit). In April 2014 the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, John Sopko, said in a report for the U.S. Government, “If we don’t take advantage of this opportunity and get serious about corruption right now, we are putting all of the fragile gains that we have achieved in this — our longest war — at risk of failure.”

The lesson from the campaign is that this issue cannot be ignored; it is central to the legitimacy of any government and as such has a major bearing on a counter-insurgency cam-paign when, at its core, the government is try-ing to win the support of its people. How could we have done better? I would suggest that the following represent areas for study. First, and this links to Issue 1, it can be argued that corruption had become so embedded as a way of getting things done in Afghanistan that it had become part of the culture. We have to be alert to this from the beginning of an intervention and establish better ground rules at the start. The military and civilian agencies all did things in the early days that enabled corruption in order to get things done quickly, when in hindsight it may have been better to spend less and move more slowly. Second, in Afghanistan we should have put a huge, early effort into training the civil service, thus giving the government the capability to administer the country and deliver services. Third, there must be better ways of applying intelligence and technology to improving our understand-ing of money flows within a country like Afghanistan. When the ISAF anti-corruption task force began to understand part of what was going on the results were illuminating for the campaign as a whole. Ultimately, the gov-ernment of the country needs to take the lead in the anti-corruption fight, for failure to do so undermines their very legitimacy.

In Afghanistan, lack of action has often degenerated into the international community criticizing the Government with little resultant action and consequent damage to the cam-paign as a whole. For too long the military regarded this issue as “not in their lane.”

The contrast with the Colombian approach is huge. Here the Government rec-ognized that this was a key issue that needed to be tackled as part of their overall strategy, and they have actively done so. They have, for example, introduced external oversight of the defense budget and used polygraph testing extensively in their police and customs organi-zations.

Issue 4: The Surge

Now that the surge, and the debates and reviews that led to it, are receding into history, it would be easy to overlook this part of the campaign. But it is worthy of review because it worked; it blunted the momentum of the Taliban campaign, regained lost ground and, importantly, bought the time and space needed to grow the Afghan National Army and Police.

The tension that lay behind the reviews prior to the surge are likely to be ever present: military commanders will want to mitigate risk by ensuring adequate force levels, politicians will want to mitigate risk by limiting exposure and cost. These are, of course, both legitimate concerns. The tension is compounded because this is a problem set to which it is difficult to have a right answer, as there are so many other factors at play; such as the quality of the troops and effectiveness of the plan to which they are being applied . Indeed, the surge in Afghanistan was accompanied by several changes of emphasis in the military approach to the campaign which in themselves pro-duced a real effect: much was done to promote better partnering with Afghan forces and to promote unity of effort across ISAF and coali-tion forces as a whole.

For the military the lesson is that we must get better at explaining the military logic behind the numbers. Unfortunately some of this logic will be country specific and thus learned only during the campaign. For exam-ple, by the time of the surge we had a very good idea of the amount of ground that an ISAF company partnered with equivalent num-bers of Afghan soldiers and Police could secure. We could therefore redraw the bound-aries of Task Force Helmand after it had been reinforced by the surge to match troops to task. In 2006 there was one battle group for the whole province; after Operation Moshtarak, the British brigade size Task Force was focused entirely on central Helmand. This changed the dynamic, for company commanders now had roughly the right force levels to execute their missions in accordance with counterinsur-gency doctrine. The change after that point was dramatic.

Ultimately the lesson of the surge is that numbers of boots on the ground is relevant in a counterinsurgency and, despite technological advances, is likely to remain so for a while yet. Under-investment in troop numbers will have a cost; reviews of the current conflicts in Libya and Syria will be interesting in this respect. The same has been true of the Colombian campaign; growing the Colombian Armed Forces to get the force ratios right, re-equip-ping and re-training them was key in their turnaround of the campaign.

Issue 5: Military Capacity Building

In recent months we have witnessed the col-lapse of the Iraqi Army in Northern Iraq in the face of an ISIS/IS onslaught. After so much engagement and money spent by the U.S. and coalition partners how could this happen par-ticularly when on paper ISIS/IS is much smaller, less well armed, and has received little coherent, external, military capacity-building support?

Napoleon is credited with the remark that “morale is to physical as three is to one.” It is interesting then that military capacity-build-ing, conducted by international forces, tends to focus on the physical component: equip-ment, doctrine, and training. The moral com-ponent is much harder. Ultimately, the force must believe in the society, its leaders and the cause for which it fights; reward, recognition and patronage also have important parts to play for these are tools that bond societies and leaders to the force. It was also Napoleon who said “a soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.” After more than 13 years of fighting, the Taliban have lost virtually every single tactical action. In terms of military capa-bility they are completely outclassed, yet they keep on fighting and have not given up: why?

Commentators are now looking at the Afghan Army and asking: “Post 2014 how will they perform?” History may offer some point-ers: after the Soviet Army pulled out in 1989 the Afghan Army fought on, only fragmenting when the last Soviet advisors left and Najibullah’s regime collapsed. Physically they are in good shape, they have grown in size and capability, particularly over the last six years, and they now have plenty of combat experi-ence. Anyone who has worked with the Afghan Army over the course of the last 13 years can-not fail to be impressed by their progress. While they lack some of the enablers used by ISAF, what they possess physically far out-matches the Taliban. The answer, perhaps uncomfortably for the military, will lie in the politics.

There is a flip side to this equation in that a military that oversteps the mark, does not respect the people it operates amongst, or is controlled for private rather than public gain can become an instrument for repression and ultimately a liability for the politicians. The Colombian experience is very illuminating in this respect, for, as part of their campaign turn-around, they have been very tough on abuses by their security forces and have firmly estab-lished civilian control of the military.

Conclusion

Interventions such as that in Afghanistan are unique to the country, and are a blend of art and science for which the variables are infinite: for every rule there will be exceptions. But for such interventions to stand a chance of success they require a deep understanding of the coun-try, its culture, politics, and the key societal differences; and recognition of the paramount importance of local ownership, leadership, and solutions. Gaining the trust of the people is vital and in the battle for hearts and minds tackling the abuse of public power for private gain is a key factor. Numbers of boots on the ground matter and early under-investment will come at a cost to the campaign.

Physically building a military force is potentially the easy part of capacity building; linking it to its people and government, plac-ing it correctly within its country’s society and culture, and thus giving it a reason to fight is much more challenging yet vital for success. When the counter-insurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Colombia are studied side by side there are some thought-provoking differ-ences in all of these areas.

[i] Wars in Peace, Chapter 7, Strategy and Operations, Rob Fry, RUSI Publications 2014.

[ii] The challenge, in this respect, was much greater than experienced by the international community in the Balkans; where many of the planning the engagement had gained their experience.

[iii] A stable and secure Afghanistan restored to its rightful place in the community of nations and enjoying mature relations with its neighbours; with a self-sustaining economy, strong institutions and a broad-based, multi-ethnic administration committed to eradicating terrorism and eliminating opium production; reducing poverty; respecting human rights, especially those of women and minority groups; and honouring Afghanistan’s other interna-tional obligations.

[iv] http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-address-nation-way-forward-afghanistan-and-pakistan.

[v] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/ middleeast/11037173/Why-Western-democracy-can-never-work-in-the-Middle-East.html.

[vi] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/ afghanistan/6615329/Afghan-governor-turned-3000-men-over-to-Taliban.html.

[vii] http://www.tonyblairoffice.org/speeches/entry/tony-blair-speech-to-chicago-council-on-global-affairs/.

[viii] http://www.meforum.org/441/why-arabs-lose-wars