Surely bombing does sometimes lead to victory and demoralising of the opponent. Example: Nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Mark DeLucas wrote:
The efficacy of violence is underrated in general.
.....
Yes, bombing does indeed often lead to victory.
Curtis LeMay's incendiary bombing campaign against Japanese cities is a stark example. Of course, the atomic bombings dominate our thinking but the firestorms unleashed by LeMay's B-29's were a lesson in what was to come once fission weapons went online.
Getting back to the Moyers program, I'm sure that Pierre Sprey -- one of Moyers' guests and, as Moyers mentioned at the top of the segment, father of the A-10, co-father of the F-16 and a key member of the 'fighter mafia' (wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighter_mafia) -- is well aware of the effectiveness of air power.
He's also aware of its limits. Sprey's point was that a bombing campaign in Afghanistan has no hope of success because none of the elements which make air power effective are present. Washington's adversary has no ball bearing plants, no large scale basing sites, no airstrips, no radar facilities... In short, there are no fixed, critical targets, no means of production worth destroying.
The USAF realizes this and, following the illogic of the "War on Terror", which creates a new category of untermensch, tries to make the best of it by targeting groups of people and their dwellings. You cannot bomb your way to success by targeting groups of people and their houses because, as Sprey and Marilyn Young sensibly pointed out, even if you hit your intended target you're also very likely to hit others.
And these others -- or those who survive to seek vengeance -- will become your new enemies.
Thus the cycle in Afghanistan of bombings, increased Talib and fellow traveler activity, followed by more bombing. And so on and so on.
If, as Sprey stated, the goal is to pacify Afghanistan (and here I'm following Sprey's way of thinking which is paleocon pragmatic -- more Augustus than Bush style Nero-ism) you certainly won't get there via air power, given the terrain and the circumstances.
It's difficult to see what the victory condition is.
Regarding the underrating of the "efficacy of violence"...
Yes, violence is very often very effective. The question is: are you using the right tool for the job? Robespierre argued that terror was necessary because of the ruling class' immovability ("Citizens, do you want a revolution without a revolution?") I think his logic was impeccable. Still, it doesn't apply in all cases. This is the lesson of Israel's war against the people living in the occupied territories.
By committing acts of extreme violence -- and not just the military campaigns but the segmentation of populations, the check pointing of travel routes, the 'targeted assassinations' and the suppression of economic activity, creating grinding poverty -- Tel Aviv has succeeded in producing an enduring state of emergency.
But it has utterly failed to *pacify* the territory. They've been at it for decades. It isn't sustainable.
Another example of violence eventually failing is Jim Crow. Study that history and learn that blacks in the US -- including many of my still living, though quite old relatives -- endured a state of terror for several generations. The purpose of this violence was to suppress even the hope of a change in power hierarchies. I'm sure the kluxers and the white citizen committees and the rest assumed that as long as they kept shooting, lynching and burning, people would keep quiet.
They were wrong.
So yes, violence does work but only for accomplishing very narrow goals. And it always produces 'black swan' events as the military nerds say. That is, the unexpected.
.d.