HOW TO WIN A MODERN WAR
GET THEM “ON EVERYTHING”
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PENTAGON
Last night, my friend, LG, solved a problem in five minutes the Pentagon has been struggling with for decades. How do you win a modern war in full view of the media?
When you go back to World War 2, you find there was an ironclad strategy. Destroy the enemy’s country. Bomb everybody. Level cities. Civilian deaths? Who cares? In classical terms, destroy the enemy’s will to fight. It worked.
But with the rise of television, things changed. People didn’t want to see dead bodies and maimed persons while they were eating dinner every night. Vietnam was a PR disaster. Americans, confronted by the details of combat, were horrified.
And now, skipping ahead, we have Afghanistan, where American soldiers can’t fire a weapon at a suspected Taliban until they see proper ID. They have to radio back to headquarters for permission.
“Got a guy at twenty yards. He’s wearing a stained white robe and a head-thingy. Beard, no shoes. Can’t tell if he’s from a village we’re rehabbing. Requesting okay to blow his head off…”
And the villages. US soldiers are welfare workers. They’re shoring up huts, putting in roads, holding night classes in Principles of Three-Branch Government. A little community sing, a few marshmallows.
So instead, back off. Pull all the troops out. Forget the feel-good strategy. Everybody knows we’d have to stay there forever—kill Taliban, they hide, we leave, they come back. Why go up against that plan? Just vacate the country.
Then…put a winner of a plan into effect. Something that actually makes sense.
Start easy. From hundreds of planes, drop fast food all over Afghanistan. Burgers. Fishsticks. McMuffins. Legs, breasts, wings. It’s a good intro. Lighten everybody up a little. Two weeks of chicken done right.
Then, from those same planes—candy. Fifty thousand tons of gum drops, jelly beans, Almond Joy, Reese. Hell, Reese all by itself is unstoppable.
Sugar! You’re telling me people can resist sugar? Under threat of death, they’ll be scooping that stuff up off the frozen ground. In high mountain areas, tribes live on lichen cooked over yak turds. All of a sudden, here come 20 colors of jelly beans out of the sky!
Give them enough sugar, and they’ll be running in circles one minute and lying back and napping the next. It’s a law of biology.
A month of heavenly candy.
Then next, a million cases of various diet sodas dumped out of our planes. Get it? Aspartame! Weird those dudes out. Three months of diet-everything. They won’t be able to find their way back to their yurts. They’ll be bumping into rocks and trees, howling at the moon.
Now comes the heavy action. Carpet bomb the whole country with little TV sets. Satellite TV! Soaps, Judge Judy, Rachel Ray, Dave and Jay, Oprah, Little House on the Prairie reruns, Law and Order, CSI, and wait for it—sports! Soccer, and, you guessed it, women’s beach volleyball! You kidding me? Amazons wearing almost nothing running on sand, hour after hour. And the NFL! Cowboys, Steelers, Giants, Green Bay, Bears. ESPN.
“Hey, Ahmed, it’s time for the Friday night clan meeting.”
“Shh! Victoria and Billy just adopted a baby. She can’t have kids. Billy paid two million for a little girl. But it’s actually Daisy’s baby. Nobody knows it.”
The fabric of Afghan society comes apart at the seams.
US planes return with a few million cases of Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, and Ritalin. Open the bomb-bay doors. Drop those suckers right down the slot. And tranqs! Valium! Old stocks of Librium.
On the ground, pills and capsules everywhere. You can’t walk by without picking a few up and swallowing them. It’s another law of nature.
So after a few more months, you’ve got the whole country hooked on meds. They’re weaving and wobbling and gnashing their teeth, when they aren’t completely zoned. A suicide problem begins to develop.
And finally, out of those blessed US planes comes the coup de grace. Computers. Wireless. Afghanistan is online, which means—that’s right—porn! Porn and gambling!
This, in a matter of, oh, six months, will totally destroy the Afghan culture, such as it is. You see, my friends, we’ve got weapons we didn’t know we had. Real weapons!
So we let all this simmer for a while. We let things take their natural course. We’re out of there. Not a single US casualty is being sustained.
And then, just to make sure we have the entire country enveloped and warped beyond repair, the CIA begins to beam, through all those TV sets and computers—take a deep breath—ready?—the AFGHAN HOME SHOPPING NETWORK!
Boom!
Oh yes, my friends, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Don’t bother bringing up the fact that the Afghan people don’t have money. They’ll find money! They’ll sell each other if they have to! They’ll pawn their yaks and rifles and take out second mortgages on their shacks and huts and yurts.
The Afghan Home Shopping Network won’t be denied. Shampoos, soap on a string, Kleenex, shower caps, earrings, toe rings, rugs, couches, square-dance instruction CDs, kitchen knives, scarves, fans, belts, undies, shoes, pet food, bird houses, pot holders, battery operated hair dryers, perfume, books on tape, storage containers, stockings, lipstick, eye shadow, bathrobes, self-improvement tapes, bracelets…
Victory.
Absolute conquest.
And not a shot fired.
And when the population begins to develop all sorts of symptoms from this all-out campaign, as they surely will, we send in the doctors and the shrinks, and they diagnose! They diagnose diseases and illnesses and disorders from here to Sunday, and they prescribe more drugs.
It’s a party.
We do to the Afghans what has been done to us.
Because you see, that’s the pattern. We know it intimately, because we’ve bought into it ourselves.
We’re already that kind of society. Who better to impose it on another population?
JON RAPPOPORT