Prospectus

Issue date: 3/3/10 Section: Opinion

The war in Afghanistan feels foreign to Americans: a far distant land, a confusing and alien culture, and combat against a shadowy enemy. That feeling is mistaken. America has spent much of its history fighting wars like the one in Afghanistan. So much so, in fact, that Afghanistan would be familiar to an American in 1900, and conventional wars such as World War II would seem strange.

In fact, in many ways the United States was defined by wars like Afghanistan. America created itself in the 18th and 19th centuries in a series of small wars, waged by and against irregular forces in unconventional ways that pushed America's boundaries westward. These were mostly against Indian tribes, but were also against European powers like Spain and France and Britain. Some of the big wars we remember - the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War - were less important to shaping the America we know than the small wars that we have forgotten.

Andrew Jackson might be most famous for his victory at New Orleans in 1815, but at least as important (though much more controversial) was his success in the First Seminole War later that decade, which won Florida for the United States and ended the Spanish presence on the eastern seaboard. The American Civil War, of course, was the most important war in American history, but it was the Indian Wars of the last part of the 19th century that created the western half of the United States and formed the nation we recognize today.

Just as small wars shaped the United States, so too did they shape America's place in the world. This is nowhere more evident than at the end of the 19th century. The big and remembered war then was the Spanish-American War. The people, events and ideas of that war are a common currency in the telling of American history: Remember the Maine! Yellow journalism. The Rough Riders at San Juan Hill. Teddy Roosevelt.

Yet while that struggle is remembered, it was a war that occurred as a result that had longer-lasting repercussions. As part of the peace treaty with Spain, America bought the Philippine Islands in the Pacific for $20 million. We found ourselves embroiled in a war there against the Filipinos themselves, who resented being bought and sold.

That war would be familiar to veterans of Afghanistan. The Filipino revolutionaries, after a brief and unsuccessful conventional phase, resorted to the kind of insurgent tactics that the Taliban now uses. As in Afghanistan, the fractured and ferocious geography and climate in the Philippines were often as much of a challenge as was the combat. Mountains and jungles coexisted in equal profusion and were used by the insurgents for cover and refuge.

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