The Taliban Rope-a-Dope

Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee

By FRANKLIN SPINNEY
(a former military analyst for the Pentagon)
CounterPunch

"On July 7, the Times [UK] carried a remarkable report describing the trials and tribulations of the Welsh Guards, who are now engaged in the ongoing offensive against the Taliban in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. It described in riveting detail how accumulating mental and physical stress are grinding down the bodies and minds of what are clearly highly-motivated, well-trained, and competently-led troops. My aim is to elaborate on the Times report by examining its information from a different perspective. My hope is that this will provide a better appreciation of the Taliban's game. ......

Every conflict, be it conventional or unconventional, embodies an amalgam of physical, mental, and moral effects. The great battlefield commanders have long recognized that strengths and weaknesses in moral and mental effects can be far more influential in shaping outcomes than physical effects. Napoleon, for example, pithily encapsulated this view by saying "the moral is to the material as three to one." Viewed through a moral and mental lens, the Times report contains information that is strongly suggestive of an asymmetry in the opposing strategies that reflects long standing differences the eastern and western approaches to making war.

Without explicitly saying so, the Times report makes it clear that the Taliban's strategic target is the mind of their adversary. Its operational schwerpunkt (i.e., main military effort to which all other efforts are subordinated) is also directly aimed at the mind of their adversaries, both in the field or in London and Washington. It is also pretty clear, that the Taliban's operational schwerpunckt is to use an omnipresent physical menace (manifesting itself through a welter of large and small attacks, and when faced with opposition, running away to fight another day, as well as mine warfare, terror, etc.) is to undermine mental and moral stability of their adversaries. This focus on the mind is a way of war that is entirely consistent with the thinking expressed in the first book ever written on the art war by the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, as well as their modern incarnation in the guerrilla theories of Mao Zedong......"