<Of course The Pentagon learned some lessons from this excercise, but the chief lesson is one they cannot put into practise...........it's the same one the British Army learned in Northern Ireland... and the Israelis are learning on the West Bank..........and the US first learned, but has tried hard to ignore ever since, in Vietnam.

That "Peace through Superior Firepower" is a losing strategy today.



Winning with just superior firepower is easy, if you don't care how many die, or how much damage you do, or how much humanity you walk out with on the other side.

Genocide and scorched earth is a piece of cake, and it wins every war in which it is used. You certainly get "peace," if you define it solely as an absence of war. Graveyards are peaceful.

The proper purpose of military force is not simply to annihilate an enemy, but to accomplish a political end using judicious and precisely-applied destruction.

The Israelis went from building to building on the West Bank, at considerable cost in lives to themselves, to keep the attack directed and focused at the real enemy.

Britain has not used "superior firepower" in Northern Ireland--I don't recall any city being bombed from airplanes--but has attempted to do its best to minimize the destruction.

The United States was unable to pursue the war in Viet Nam effectively because the Cold War constantly brought the Soviet spectre into the picture. Certainly, looked at only from a standpoint of "firepower," and ignoring political reality, it would otherwise have been well within our capacity to invade North Viet Nam and take it over. Eventually, we got sick of the whole thing and went home. As predicted, Southeast Asia collapsed into communism, but the collapse of the Soviet Union helped prevent these places from becoming just another cog in the Soviet Empire. Today, the outlook there seems hopeful. Certainly Viet Nam is light years closer to becoming a free society than North Korea.

Now, on the war in Afghanistan:

Less than 4,000 civilian deaths have been attributed to our war efforts in Afghanistan, and this figure is from an anti-war site.

We have been extraordinarily careful in trying not to hit anyone we don't want to. Our definition of "superior" firepower is "precise" firepower. And while 4,000 non-combatant deaths in a war is certainly nothing to be happy about, one has to put it into perspective.

In WWII, in an age of lower tech war, and considerably less concern about "collateral damage," 20,000 civilians were killed in the London Blitz, 35,000 in the Dresden firebombing, and more than 100,000 died immediately in the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Incidentally, $350 million in aid is not exactly chopped liver either in a nation with a per-capita income about about $300 bucks. There are damn few nations on Earth that would drop food along with bombs on an enemy-occupied nation.