Afghanistan spelled out in 16 characters
'By May 1928 the basic principles of guerilla warfare ... had already been evolved; that is, the 16-character formula: the enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.'
Not many of the Taliban guerillas in Afghanistan have read Mao Zedong on guerilla warfare, but then, they knew how to do it anyway. The current crop of officers in the Western armies that are fighting them don't seem to have read their Mao either.
'The ability to run away is the essence of the guerilla,' as Mao put it - and that is why the much-ballyhooed 'battle' for Marjah and Nad Ali, two small towns in Afghanistan's Helmand province, is irrelevant to the outcome of the war.
Breathless reports of the 'battle' by embedded journalists have filled the American and European media for the past two weeks, as if winning it might make a difference.
The truth is that some of the local Taliban fighters have been left to sell their lives as dearly as possible, while most have been pulled back or sent home to await recall.
Guerilla warfare has been the Afghan hill-tribes' style of fighting since time immemorial. The only new element in the equation, since the 1940s, is that these wars have almost all ended in victory for the guerillas.
The war against the French in Algeria in the 1950s; the Vietnam war in the 1960s; the victory of the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet army in the 1980s.
The guerillas always won, in that era, because the Western armies were fighting to retain direct control of developing countries or impose some puppet regime on them, at a time when the people of those countries had already awakened to nationalism. All the guerillas had to do was observe the 16-character formula and stay in business.
The plan, in this 'offensive' in Helmand province, is to capture the towns ('clear and hold'), and then saturate the area with Afghan troops and police and win the locals' hearts and minds by providing better security and public services. It might work if all the people involved on both sides were bland, interchangeable characters from The Sims, but they are not.
The people of Helmand province are Pashtuns, and the Taliban are almost exclusively a Pashtun organisation.
The people that the Western armies are fighting are local men: few Taliban fighters die more than a day's walk from home. Whereas almost none of the 'Afghan' troops and police who are supposed to win local minds and hearts are Pashtuns.
They are mostly Tajiks from the north who speak Dari, not Pashto. Even if these particular Afghan police are better trained and less prone to steal money, do drugs and rape young men at checkpoints than their colleagues elsewhere, they are unwelcome outsiders in Helmand.
This is just another post-imperial guerilla war, and it will almost certainly end the same way as all the others.
Thirty years ago, any Western military officer could have told you that, but large organisations often forget their own history.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries
