Guardian

THE military expedition going on in Yobe, Adamawa and Borno states, misnamed declaration of emergency, reminds me of what happened in America in 1910.

The story was better illustrated by the bestseller author, Robert Greene in his book titled “48 laws of Power” on pages 301 and 302 of his 492 page book where he gave a narration of the events of the crisis.

The Mexican rebel leader, Pancho Villa started out as the chief of a gang of bandits, but after revolution broke in Mexico in 1910, he became a kind of folk hero – robbing trains and giving the money to the poor, leading daring raids, and charming the ladies with romantic escapades. His exploits fascinated Americans. He seemed a man from another era, part Robin Hood, part Don Juan. After a few years of bitter fighting, however, General Carranza emerged as the victor in the revolution; the defeated Villa and his troops went back home, to the northern state of Chihuahua. His army dwindled and he turned to banditry again, damaging his popularity. Finally, perhaps out of desperation, he began to rail against the United States, the gringos, whom he blamed for his troubles.

In March of 1916, Panco Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico. Rampaging through the town, he and his gang killed 17 American soldiers and civilians. President Woodrow Wilson, like many Americans, had admired Villa; now, however, the bandit needed to be punished. Wilson’s advisers urged him to send troops into Mexico to capture Villa. For a power as large as the United States, they argued, not to strike back at an army that had invaded its territory would send the worst kind of signal.

Furthermore, they continued, many Americans saw Wilson as pacifist, a principle the public doubted as a response to violence; he needed to prove his mettle and manliness by ordering the use of force.

The pressure on Wilson was strong, and before the month was out, with the approval of the Carranza government, he sent an army of 10,000 soldiers to capture Pancho Villa. The venture was called the Punitive Expedition, and its leader was the dashing General John J. Pershing, who had defeated guerrillas in the Philippines and Native Americans in the American Southwest. Certainly Pershing could find and overpower Pancho Villa.

The Punitive Expedition became a sensational story, and carloads of U.S. reporters followed Pershing into action. The campaign, they wrote, would be a test of American Power. The soldiers carried the latest in weaponry, communicated by radio, and were supported by reconnaissance from the air.

In the first few months, the troops split up into small units to comb the wild of Mexico. The Americans offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to Villa’s capture. But the Mexican people, who had been disillusioned with Villa when he had returned to banditry, now idolised him for facing this mighty American army. They began to give Pershing false leads: Villa had been seen in this village, or in that mountain hideaway, airplanes would be dispatched, troops would scurry after them, and no one would ever see him. The wily bandit seemed to be always one step ahead of the American military.

By the summer of that year, the expedition had swelled to 123,000 men. They suffered through the stultifying heat, the mosquitoes, and the wild terrain. Trudging over a countryside in which they were already resented, they infuriated both the local and the Mexican government. At one point, Pancho Villa hid in a mountain cave to recover from a gunshot wound he received in a skirmish with the Mexican Army; looking down from his aerie, he could watch Pershing lead the exhausted American troops back and forth across the mountain, never getting any closer to their goal.

All the way into winter, Villa played his cat-and-mouse game. Americans came to see the affair as a kind of slapstick farce – in fact they began to admire Villa again, respecting his resourcefulness in eluding a superior force. In January 1917, Wilson finally ordered Pershing’s withdrawal. As the troops made their way back to American territory, rebel forces pursued them, forcing the U.S. Army to use airplanes to protect its rear flanks. The Punitive Expedition was being punished itself-it had turned into a retreat of the most humiliating sort.

Woodrow Wilson organised the Punitive Expedition as a show of force: He would teach Pancho Villa a lesson and in the process show the world that no one, large or small, could attack the Mighty United States and get away with it. The expedition would be over in a few weeks, and Villa would be forgotten.

That was not how it played out. The longer the longer expedition took, the more it focused attention on the Americans’ incompetence and on Villa’s cleverness. Soon what was forgotten was not Villa but the raid that had started it all. As a minor annoyance became an international embarrassment, and the enraged Americans dispatched more troops, the imbalance between the size of the pursuer and the size of the pursued – who still managed to stay free – made the affair a joke. And in the end this white elephant of an army had to lumber out of Mexico, humiliated. The Punitive Expedition did the opposite of what it set out to do: It left Villa not only free but more popular than ever.

In his book, “Hand book of proverbs” Henry George Bohn (1796-1884) wrote “anger begins with folly and ends with repentance.”

In war, there are no winners.

In his words (Lao-Tsu,Tao The King): “The best soldier does not attack. The superior fighter succeeds without violence. The greatest conqueror wins without struggle. The most successful manager leads without dictating. This is called intelligent non-aggressiveness. This is called mastery of men.

• Teniola, a former Director at the Presidency, now lives in Lagos.