The 33 Strategies of War (35 page)

The Prussian military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz famously argued that war is the continuation of politics by other means. He meant that every nation has goals--security, well-being, prosperity--that it ordinarily pursues through politics, but when another nation or internal force thwarts their achievement through politics, war is the natural result. War is never merely about victory on the battlefield or the simple conquest of land; it is about the pursuit of a policy that cannot be realized in any other way than through force.

When a war is lost, however, all fingers usually point at the military. We may sometimes go over the generals' heads, to the politicians who declared war in the first place; during and after the Vietnam War, for example, some blamed the loss on the government's failure to commit to the war with full effort. More often, though, the postgame analysis is military--we pore over the war's battles, critiquing the officers' moves. And of course it is the military that has planned and fought the war, but even so, the real problem is a problem of grand strategy. According to von Clausewitz, failure in war is a failure of policy. The goals of the war, and the policies that drove it, were unrealistic, inappropriate, blind to other factors.

This idea is the philosophy of the grand strategist. Whenever anything goes wrong, it is human nature to blame this person or that. Let other people engage in such stupidity, led around by their noses, seeing only what is immediately visible to the eye. You see things differently. When an action goes wrong--in business, in politics, in life--trace it back to the policy that inspired it in the first place. The goal was misguided.

This means that you yourself are largely the agent of anything bad that happens to you. With more prudence, wiser policies, and greater vision, you could have avoided the danger. So when something goes wrong, look deep into yourself--not in an emotional way, to blame yourself or indulge your feelings of guilt, but to make sure that you start your next campaign with a firmer step and greater vision.

Authority: It is a common mistake in going to war to begin at the wrong end, to act first and to wait for disaster to discuss the matter.

--Thucydides (between 460 and 455
B.C.
-circa 400
B.C.
)

REVERSAL

Grand strategy involves two dangers that you must consider and combat. First, the successes it brings you in your first campaigns may have the same effect on you that easy victory on the battlefield gives a general: drunk on triumph, you may lose the sense of realism and proportion on which your future moves depend. Even such supreme grand strategists as Julius Caesar and Napoleon eventually fell victim to this dynamic: losing their sense of reality, they began to believe that their instincts were infallible. The greater the victory, the greater the danger. As you get older, as you move to your next campaign, you must retrench, strain doubly hard to rein in your emotions, and maintain a sense of realism.

Second, the detachment necessary to grand strategy can bring you to a point where you find it hard to act. Understanding the world too well, you see too many options and become as indecisive as Hamlet. No matter how far we progress, we remain part animal, and it is the animal in us that fires our strategies, gives them life, animates us to fight. Without the desire to fight, without a capacity for the violence war churns up, we cannot deal with danger.

The prudent Odysseus types are comfortable with both sides of their nature. They plan ahead as best they can, see far and wide, but when it comes time to move ahead, they move. Knowing how to control your emotions means not repressing them completely but using them to their best effect.

The target of your strategies should be less the army you face than the mind of the man or woman who runs it. If you understand how that mind works, you have the key to deceiving and controlling it. Train yourself to read people, picking up the signals they unconsciously send about their innermost thoughts and intentions. A friendly front will let you watch them closely and mine them for information. Beware of projecting your own emotions and mental habits onto them; try to think as they think. By finding your opponents' psychological weaknesses, you can work to unhinge their minds.

THE MIRRORED ENEMY

In June 1838, Lord Auckland, the British governor-general of India, called a meeting of his top officials to discuss a proposed invasion of Afghanistan. Auckland and other British ministers had become increasingly concerned at Russia's growing influence in the area. The Russians had already made an ally of Persia; they were now trying to do the same with Afghanistan, and if they were successful, the British in India would find themselves potentially cut off by land to the west and vulnerable to more incursions by the Russians. Instead of trying to outdo the Russians and negotiate an alliance with the Afghan ruler, Dost Mahomed, Auckland proposed what he thought was a surer solution: invade Afghanistan and install a new ruler--Shah Soojah, a former Afghan leader forced out of power twenty-five years earlier--who would then be indebted to the English.

He who knows the enemy and himself Will never in a hundred battles be at risk.

S
UN-TZU
, F
OURTH CENTURY B.C.

[
As to the second case
]
, that of being drawn into one
[
a trap or ambush
]
...you must be shrewd about not believing easily things not in accord with reason. For example, if the enemy puts some booty before you, you ought to believe that within it there is a hook and that it conceals some trick. If many of the enemy are put to flight by your few, if a few of the enemy assail your many, if the enemy turn in sudden flight,...you ought to fear a trick. And you should never believe that the enemy does not know how to carry on his affairs; rather, if you hope to be less deceived...and...run less risk, in proportion as your enemy is weaker, in proportion as he is less cautious, you should the more respect him.

T
HE
A
RT OF
W
AR
, N
ICCOLO
M
ACHIAVELLI
, 1521

Among the men listening to Auckland that day was William Macnaghten, the forty-five-year-old chief secretary of the Calcutta government. Macnaghten thought the invasion a brilliant idea: a friendly Afghanistan would secure British interests in the area and even help to spread British influence. And the invasion could hardly fail. The British army would have no trouble sweeping away the primitive Afghan tribesmen; they would present themselves as liberators, freeing the Afghans from Russian tyranny and bringing to the country the support and civilizing influence of England. As soon as Shah Soojah was in power, the army would leave, so that British influence over the grateful shah, although powerful, would be invisible to the Afghan public. When it came time for Macnaghten to give his opinion on the proposed invasion, his support of it was so sound and enthusiastic that Lord Auckland not only decided to go ahead, he named Macnaghten the queen's envoy to Kabul, the Afghan capital--the top British representative in Afghanistan.

Meeting little resistance along the way, in August 1839 the British army reached Kabul. Dost Mahomed fled to the mountains, and the shah reentered the city. To the local inhabitants, this was a strange sight: Shah Soojah, whom many could barely remember, looked old and submissive alongside Macnaghten, who rode into Kabul wearing a bright-colored uniform topped by a cocked hat fringed with ostrich feathers. Why had these people come? What were they doing here?

With the shah back in power, Macnaghten had to reassess the situation. Reports came in informing him that Dost Mahomed was building an army in the mountains to the north. Meanwhile, to the south, it seemed that in invading the country the British had insulted some local chieftains by plundering their lands for food. These chiefs were now stirring up trouble. It was also clear that the shah was unpopular with his former subjects, so unpopular that Macnaghten could not leave him and other British interests in the country unprotected. Reluctantly Macnaghten ordered most of the British army to remain in Afghanistan until the situation was stabilized.

Time went by, and eventually Macnaghten decided to allow the officers and soldiers of this increasingly long-standing occupying force to send for their families, so that life would be less harsh for them. Soon the wives and children came, along with their Indian servants. But where Macnaghten had imagined that the arrival of the soldiers' families would have a humanizing, civilizing effect, it only alarmed the Afghans. Were the British planning a permanent occupation? Everywhere the local people looked, there were representatives of British interests, talking loudly in the streets, drinking wine, attending theaters and horse races--strange imported pleasures that they had introduced to the country. Now their families were making themselves at home. A hatred of everything English began to take root.

THE AGING LION AND THE FOX

A lion who was getting old and could no longer obtain his food by force decided that he must resort to trickery instead. So he retired to a cave and lay down pretending to be ill. Thus, whenever any animals came to his cave to visit him, he ate them all as they appeared. When many animals had disappeared, a fox figured out what was happening. He went to see the lion but stood at a safe distance outside the cave and asked him how he was. "Oh, not very well," said the lion. "But why don't you come in?" But the fox said: "I would come inside if I hadn't seen that a lot of footprints are pointing inwards towards your cave but none are pointing out."
Wise men note the indications of dangers and thus avoid them.

F
ABLES
,
A
ESOP
, S
IXTH CENTURY B.C.

There were those who warned Macnaghten about this, and to all of them he had the same answer: everything would be forgotten and forgiven when the army left Afghanistan. The Afghans were childlike, emotional people; once they felt the benefits of English civilization, they would be more than grateful. One matter, however, did worry the envoy: the British government was unhappy about the increasing expense of the occupation. Macnaghten would have to do something to cut costs, and he knew just where to begin.

Most of the mountain passes through which Afghanistan's main trade routes ran were held by the Ghilzye tribes, who for many years, over the lives of many different rulers of the country, had been paid a stipend to keep the passes open. Macnaghten decided to halve this stipend. The Ghilzyes responded by blocking the passes, and elsewhere in the country tribes sympathetic to the Ghilzyes rebelled. Macnaghten, caught off guard, tried to put these rebellions down, but he did not take them too seriously, and worried officers who told him to respond more vigorously were rebuked for overreacting. Now the British army would have to stay indefinitely.

The situation deteriorated quickly. In October 1841 a mob attacked the home of a British official and killed him. In Kabul local chiefs began to conspire to expel their British overlords. Shah Soojah panicked. For months he had begged Macnaghten to let him capture and kill his main rivals, an Afghan ruler's traditional method of securing his position. Macnaghten had told him that a civilized country did not use murder to solve its political problems. The shah knew that the Afghans respected strength and authority, not "civilized" values; to them his failure to deal with his enemies made him look weak and unrulerlike and left him surrounded by enemies. Macnaghten would not listen.

The rebellion spread, and Macnaghten now had to confront the fact that he did not have the manpower to put down a general uprising. But why should he panic? The Afghans and their leaders were naive; he would regain the upper hand through intrigue and cleverness. To that end, Macnaghten publicly negotiated an agreement whereby British troops and citizens would leave Afghanistan, in exchange for which the Afghans would supply the retreating British with food. Privately, though, Macnaghten made it known to a few key chiefs that he was willing to make one of them the country's vizier--and load with him money--in exchange for putting down the rebellion and allowing the English to stay.

Bait.
--
"Everyone has his price"--this is not true. But there surely exists for everyone a bait he cannot help taking. Thus to win many people over to a cause one needs only to put on it a gloss of philanthropy, nobility, charitableness, self-sacrifice--and on to what cause can one not put it?--: these are the sweetmeats and dainties for their soul; others have others.

H
UMAN
, A
LL TOO
H
UMAN
, F
RIEDRICH
N
IETZSCHE
, 1886

The chief of the eastern Ghilzyes, Akbar Khan, responded to this offer, and on December 23, 1841, Macnaghten rode out for a private meeting with him to seal the bargain. After exchanging greetings Akbar asked Macnaghten if he wanted to go ahead with the treachery they were planning. Thrilled to have turned the situation around, Macnaghten cheerily answered that he did. Without a word of explanation, Akbar signaled his men to grab Macnaghten and throw him in prison--he had no intention of betraying the other chiefs. Along the way a mob developed, caught hold of the unfortunate envoy, and with a fury built up over years of humiliation literally tore him to pieces. His limbs and head were paraded through the streets of Kabul, and his torso was hung from a meat hook in the bazaar.

In a matter of days, everything unraveled. The remaining British troops--some 4,500 of them, along with 12,000 camp followers--were forced to agree to an immediate retreat from Afghanistan, despite the bitter winter weather. The Afghans were to keep the retreating army supplied but did not do so. Certain that the British would never leave unless forced to, they harassed them relentlessly in their retreat. Civilians and soldiers alike quickly perished in the snow.

On January 13, British forces at the fort in Jalalabad saw a single horse struggling toward the gates. Its half-dead rider, Dr. William Brydon, was the sole survivor of the British army's doomed invasion of Afghanistan.

Interpretation

The knowledge that would have averted the catastrophe was at Macnaghten's fingertips long before he launched the expedition. Englishmen and Indians who had lived in Afghanistan could have told him that the Afghan people were among the proudest and most independent on the planet. To them the image of foreign troops marching into Kabul would constitute an unforgivable humiliation. On top of that, they were not a people yearning for peace, prosperity, and reconciliation. In fact, they saw strife and confrontation as a healthy way of life.

Macnaghten had the information but refused to see it. Instead he projected onto the Afghans the values of an Englishman, which he mistakenly assumed were universal. Blinded by narcissism, he misread every signal along the way. As a result his strategic moves--leaving the British army occupying Kabul, halving the Ghilzyes' stipend, trying not to overplay his hand in putting down the rebellions--were exactly the opposite of what was needed. And on that fateful day when he literally lost his head, he made the ultimate miscalculation, imagining that money and an appeal to self-interest would buy loyalty among the very people he had so humiliated.

Blindness and narcissism like this are not so rare; we find them every day. Our natural tendency is to see other people as mere reflections of our own desires and values. Failing to understand the ways they are not like us, we are surprised when they do not respond as we had imagined. We unintentionally offend and alienate people, then blame them, not our inability to understand them, for the damage done.

Understand: if you let narcissism act as a screen between you and other people, you will misread them and your strategies will misfire. You must be aware of this and struggle to see others dispassionately. Every individual is like an alien culture. You must get inside his or her way of thinking, not as an exercise in sensitivity but out of strategic necessity. Only by knowing your enemies can you ever hope to vanquish them.

Be submissive so that he will trust you and you will thereby learn about his true situation. Accept his ideas and respond to his affairs as if you were twins. Once you have learned everything, subtly gather in his power. Thus when the ultimate day arrives, it will seem as if Heaven itself destroyed him.

--Tai Kung,
Six Secret Teachings
(circa fourth century
B.C.
)

THE CLOSE EMBRACE

In 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte humiliated the Austrians in the battles of Ulm and Austerlitz. In the subsequent treaty, he carved up the Austrian Empire, taking over its lands in Italy and Germany. For Napoleon all this was one part of a chess game. His ultimate goal was to make Austria an ally--a weak and subordinate ally, but one that would lend him weight in the courts of Europe, since Austria had been a central force in European politics. As part of this overall strategy, Napoleon requested a new Austrian ambassador to France: Prince Klemens von Metternich, at the time the Austrian ambassador to the Prussian court in Berlin.

Confucius's evaluation of Yang Hu, a man who had been forced to flee from one state to another because he proved greedy and disloyal each time he acquired power, provides a simple example of projecting behavior on the basis of constancy. Based upon this repeated behavioral pattern, Confucius accurately predicted that Yang Hu would certainly suffer an ignominious end. More generally, Mencius subsequently stated: "A man who ceases his efforts where he should not will abandon them anywhere. A man who is parsimonious with those with whom he should be generous will be parsimonious everywhere." Granting that people generally acquire fixed habits early in life, a man's end may therefore be foreseen by midlife: "Someone who is still disliked at forty years of age will end by being so."

R
ALPH
D. S
AWYER
,
T
HE
T
AO OF
S
PYCRAFT
, 1998