This is particularly difficult for someone like me, who never got over boyhood fantasies about Indians--among my top five favorite movies are Last of the Mohicans (Daniel Day Lewis), Dances with Wolves and Little Big Man. And this book destroys the image of the noble Indian, living in harmony with nature, kind hearted and misunderstood by the white man, who destroyed the Indians in a spasm of arrogance and racism.
Actually, it was worse than that, in one sense: It turns out three of the authentic heroes of the Civil War, Sherman, Sheridan and Grant looked dispassionately at the Comanches (who were the key to the control of the West) and applied the same scorched earth principles to them as these generals applied to the South during the war.
The generals first looked at what made the Indians what they were, how they lived their lives, what they valued and then methodically set about destroying it. It turned out to be not all that complicated: The Indians were nomadic carnivores who depended on the buffalo. Destroy all the buffalo, and you destroy the Indian way of life. So they brought in the most ruthless, pitiless destroyers that century and this continent have ever seen and presided over the destruction of millions of buffalo.
The buffalo hunters got buffalo hides to sell and the white man's government got the great plains rid of Indians who lived on buffalo. It was as effective as burning Atlanta. Only in the case of the plains Indians, there was no city to burn. The plains Indians were nomadic and could pack up their tent cities at a moment's notice and move on. But kill the buffalo and you kill the Comanche way of life.
Not that that way of life was pristine and warm and fuzzy.
Comanches dealt with interlopers into their territory much as the Taliban does today. Cut off noses, scalps, ears. Rape, disembowel. They were most unpleasant. But these depredations had the desired effect--in Texas, the white man retreated back eastward whenever the Comanche went on the war path.
The Comanches were very effective and ruthless terrorists. They actually had no word for "surrender." You got into a fight with Comanches, they took no prisoners. Well, actually, occasionally, they did, but only prisoners who were no threat to them, like women and children.
What Comanches liked were horses. They took lots of horses. They were such good horsemen they put the United States Calvary, the Texas Rangers and every other white man's armed militia to shame. They actually had technological superiority over the white units in plains warfare, until a few white men, like Jack Hays and Ranald Mackensie studied them and figured out the secret of their tactical success.
Which brings me to Afghanistan.
Historical analogies are pretty tenuous, I realize. History is one long argument. On the other hand, history does present lessons, military history in particular.
And this is the lesson I got from reading about the defeat of the Comanches: Unless and until we are willing to do what the generals did to the Comanches, we are not likely to have much success against the Afghan Comanches.
Of course, there are big differences--the Taliban are not quite as willing or able to live on the land as the Comanches were, one suspects.
But, from our point of view there is the major difference: The white Americans were there to stay, when it came to Comanche lands. They wanted to take the land and stay there. But white Americans have no desire to stay on Afghanistan's mountains and dirt plateaus. We want to get the hell out.
And there are no buffalo for us to slaughter in Afghanistan. We can burn poppy fields, but they grow back the next year. Maybe, if we looked for the modern equivalent of the buffalo hunters--men who would swoop in and gather up all the poppy fields and kill anyone who tried to stop them, we might have an effective tactic.
But then we've have to allow these guys the economic incentive the buffalo hunters had: You can sell the cash crop.
Somehow, I just don't see it.
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