Balkhing at Kabul

A short piece in the London Times encapsulates the political dilemma currently facing the U.S. in Afghanistan:

There are few better illustrations of the weakness of the Afghan state than the situation developing in one of its most secure regions. General Atta Mohammad, a powerful Tajik warlord and Governor of Balkh province, has successfully kept the peace — and the Taleban at bay — across a swath of the north of the country since 2004.

However, critics say that he has carved out a mini-state openly defying Kabul, sparking increasingly determined efforts in the capital to unseat him.

By operating under the delusion that a centralized government based in Kabul can rule Afghanistan, the U.S. blinds itself to the successes that can be achieved if we reconcile our strategy to Afghan society. Atta Mohammad may be a warlord who is carving out his own personal fiefdom, but he has kept the peace and kept out the Taliban; in Afghanistan, the U.S. should ask for nothing more. If U.S. strategy embraces feudalism the success of Balkh province could be replicated all across the country.

 

Sailing to Oceania

Aside from this blog, I like to record my thoughts in what I prefer to call a “commonplace book.” Not a “journal,” mind you… Keeping a journal would be a major contravention of my Midwestern sensibilities which regards such things as the province of troubled high school girls. Essentially, a commonplace book is a high-falutent all-purpose notebook. Commonplacing originated back in the day when paper was expensive and authors couldn’t afford many volumes to take notes in, so they often made do with one.

Anyway, I was looking back through some older “entries” and noticed the following comment on the dystopian implications of world government:

If humanity was ever politically united, either here on Earth or among the planets in the far future, the union would be immediately challenged by rebellion and civil war on an epic scale [ note my optimism ]. But the unity would be so profound an achievement, so remarkable an opportunity, and so fragile a dream that the government, in an attempt to keep the dream from fading away, would lapse into a brutal totalitarianism. This would only hasten the dissolution by fuelling rebellions, but humanity would be so desperate to preserve the unity that it would go to any length to keep it from failing. Universal government has been a promise of Western idealism for centuries, and it is considered by realists and idealists alike as the only viable way to preserve peace. The difference is that idealists think it possible and realists do not. If achieved, however, there would be anything but peace. Only permanent war and crisis would be able to maintain the unification, resulting in the ultimate irony: though unification is the long-sought zenith of human affairs – the final condition of an evolved mankind – it will only result in darkness as all the accumulated social capital is wasted away in wars to preserve the union, both to crush actual rebellions and to concentrate the energies of the people on a common goal. Fear world government, for a new darkness follows close behind.

The point I was trying to make was that a universal government would immediately become a colossal tyranny because so many people would be willing to do anything to preserve it, including both liberal idealists and pragmatic realists.

 

Aging in Afghanistan

Remember Forward Operating Base Rhino…the very first piece of Afghan real estate seized by U.S. forces at the beginning of the war? The past eight years have not been kind to this landmark. The paint has been sandblasted from the walls and roofs, part of the main hangar has collapsed, and the north side of the base is completely overwhelmed by dunes. The Registan Desert is rapidly reclaiming the site.

Allegory?

 

Confessions of a Compulsive Book Buyer

Like most wannabe-intellectuals, I buy a lot of books. Rarely a day goes by that I don’t have an open order with one of the major book outlets on the internet (usually Amazon, sometimes Alibris, Barnes & Noble, Half.com, and Ebay). I read about 50% of these acquisitions immediately and the rest get added to my library, where they might remain for several months before I touch them again.

But I have a problem. Occasionally I will hear of a rare out-of-print title that is relevant to my interests and I become absolutely OBSESSED with buying a copy, willing to pay completely unreasonable prices. I’ve had four really bad episodes so far.

The first occurred several years ago when my reading was focused on ancient Rome. I had been studying the role of the Praetorian Guard in Roman politics when I learned of the Scholae Palatinae, which succeeded the Praetorian Guard following the latter’s defeat at Milvian Bridge. Constantine disbanded the Praetorian Guard after his ascension, replacing it with the Scholae which functioned as an elite palace guard that was much more politically reliable than its predecessor. There is one major study of the Scholae in the English language: a 1969 monograph from the American Academy in Rome entitled Scholae Palatinae: The Palace Guards of the Later Roman Empire. I had access to the work via the inter-library loan networks of nearby universities, but that wasn’t enough for me. I had to OWN a copy. So I started watching the major book markets, and finally, after several months, a used copy turned up on Amazon. I snatched it up immediately. I paid way too much, but the copies I’ve noticed for sale since then have been several times more expensive so perhaps it was a good investment after all. And of course, I haven’t read it yet. But it proudly remains on my shelf as a trophy of my indomitable will [or a pathetic token from an undiagnosed case of OCD].

Later on I was exploring the sadly neglected subject of Byzantine military strategy. This is one area of history where there is much work to be done because Byzantine studies generally focuses on society, culture, art, etc. Nevertheless, there are several notable works on the subject, one of which is the unassumingly titled Some Thoughts on Byzantine Military Strategy [which sadly inspires me when I can't think of witty names for my blog posts]. While I was in D.C. I made a visit to the Library of Congress for the sole purpose of reading this book, but the hassle of that experience nixed any subsequent visits. Copies of the book have since appeared for sale on Amazon, but I have resisted the urge to buy one. It’s been difficult.

In related news, this November Harvard University Press will be releasing Edward Luttwak’s long-anticipated Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire. Luttwak previously authored an excellent study of ancient Rome’s grand strategy. Hopefully, his work on Byzantium will fill in many of the holes that have been left by the neglect of this topic.

My next obsession was Brooks Adams’ Law of Civilization and Decay. Adams purportedly had a major influence on Theodore Roosevelt’s worldview. Very briefly, Adams argues that when a civilization divorces itself from challenge and struggle, it loses the martial virtues that hold it together and settles into commercial patterns of existence that will ultimately corrode it. The book is still in print, but I spent quite some time searching for a 1st edition before I settled for a 2nd edition from 1896.

Lastly, Sir Charles Gwynn’s Imperial Policing. With the possible exception of C.E. Callwell’s Small Wars (which I also own), this is the most famous manual for colonial warfare ever written during Britain’s age of imperialism. After months of searching through every book outlet I could think of, I recently found a tolerably priced copy on Ebay from a seller in the U.K. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this book has reportedly become a must-have for counterinsurgency specialists, explaining its relative scarcity on the internet. I’m not aware of a recent edition, but with its current popularity a new printing run would be a profitable venture. Thankfully I have a legitimate excuse for buying this one because it’s relevant to a project I’m currently working on.

So…of all the hundreds of books that I’ve purchased, why did I become so obsessed over these four? I have no idea.

 

The Benefits of Stupidity

Joseph Fouche over at the Committee of Public Safety brings us George Friedman’s (founder of stratfor.com) ridiculous prescription for American grand strategy:

America’s grand strategy is to be so big and so powerful that it escapes the consequences of its own stupidity.

Laughable though it may seem, this policy has much to recommend it. Edward Luttwak offers the best explanation as to why.

Strategy is an intricately complex exercise, with a multi-layered vertical dimension that consists of the many interacting levels of strategy – from the lowest level of technical competition to the highest level of grand strategy itself – and a horizontal dimension that consists of the enemy’s response. A perfectly optimized strategy requires a policy that is in harmony with all levels of both dimensions. Reaching this harmony would be no small achievement even in the simpler times of antiquity, but in the modern bureaucratic state it is infinitely more difficult. In Luttwak’s own words,

the highly diversified bureaucratic apparatus of modern states is itself a major obstacle to the implementation of any comprehensive scheme of grand strategy. Each civil and military department is structured to pursue its own distinct goals, and each has its own institutional culture. Consciously or not, the separate departments are likely to resist a concerted scheme whenever it clashes with their particular bureaucratic interests, habits, and aims. For the implementation of a normative grand strategy, the organization of modern states is both the essential instrument and a powerful impediment.

Dictatorships obviously have an easier time of it, but for democracies, complex strategy making is all but impossible:

Democracies cannot function as cunning warriors stalking their enemies in the night. Nor can modern pluralist democracies achieve coherence in their foreign policies, shaped as they are by the contending forces of voluntary pressure groups, organized lobbies, contending bureaucracies, and political factions. Yet there is much to be said for the resulting incoherence.

With all the impediments to efficient strategy making in the U.S., we are lucky to reach a consensus on the need to be big and powerful.

But even if we assume that it is realistic – or at least possible – to craft an optimized grand strategy we are still left with a question: is a unified grand strategy even necessary? It can be argued that ad hoc policymaking has produced outcomes only slightly less favorable than those of a universal strategic scheme. American foreign policy might be sloppy and full of mistakes, but it avoids permanently systematizing critical failures, which is a danger inherent in more coordinated strategies:

…while the successful application of a grand strategy should reduce the prevalence of small errors of disharmony, it will do so at the risk of focusing energies to perpetuate much larger errors. That is why the warlike ventures of dictatorships that can impose the tightest policy coordination, exploit the paradoxical logic to the full, and routinely achieve surprise whenever they attack begin well, only to end in utter disaster.

Strategy is a reciprocal enterprise; every action provokes a response from both enemies and allies. Americans look at the overwhelming disparity in military and economic power between the U.S. and the rest of the world and lament their failure to leverage this power toward the creation of a truly American world order. So they gnash their teeth, rend their clothes, and tear out their hair in exasperation of America’s strategic incompetence. Yes, it is true that America has not harnessed its resources in service of a unified grand strategy, but by not doing so, we avoid the inevitable counter-strategy from the rest of the world:

There is now a multidimensional American supremacy that is quite unprecedented in all of human history and that awaits only the determined pursuit of a power-maximizing global strategy to become fully effective for the United States, and intolerably oppressive for everyone else. Defensive responses and hostile reactions of widening scope and mounting consequence would inevitably follow…

Whatever added leverage could have been obtained by purposeful coherence in the first stage, thereby evoking coalition building in the second, would be lost in the third and final stage, in which some sort of global equilibrium would be restored once the original enhancement of American power was negated. Even if incidental disasters were avoided along the way, the United States would lose not merely what it would have previously and briefly gained but much more than that, because of the damage inflicted by intra-Western quarrels on multilateral institutions and long-established cooperative practices.

Finally, let us remember that, in the words of Sun Tzu, “the pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless. If it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it or the wise make plans against it.” What strategy could be more formless than no strategy at all?

 

Why War Movies Suck

I recently came across an older piece by Andrew Klavan, “The Lost Art of War,” that explains why Hollywood has been producing such politically confused box office catastrophes. Essentially, producers are infected with a cosmopolitanism that refuses to acknowledge the reality of the nation as the principle unit of human organization; the universal metaphysical values of their worldview do not involve the defense of territory, hence the incessant depiction of the U.S. military – which does have to defend territory – as a collection of murderous thugs and PTSD-plagued simpletons. Also has some interesting comments on the politicization of art and the implication this has on public discourse. Definitely worth a read. The last couple paragraphs deserve to be quoted:

Locked in an echo chamber of fashionable leftism, our filmmakers have lost the ability to question discredited assumptions. Only in fantasy war films – films like Spielberg’s undervalued War of the Worlds, Michael Bay’s amusing Transformers, or Peter Jackson’s wonderful Lord of the Rings trilogy – does the truth of our present situation emerge. Here filmmakers don’t have to confront the deathblow that radical Islam deals to the logic of leftist ideology. They can portray evil without giving it a human face and affirm our values without paying too particular a tribute to the nation in which those values become flesh. The warrior’s sacrifices makes sense again, martial virtues can be openly honored, and those who protect us are given back their glory.

That glory, however, is not the stuff of fantasy alone. The threat of global jihad is all too real, and  the stakes are all too high. Liberty, tolerance, the harmony of conflicting voices – these things didn’t materialize suddenly out of the glowing heart of human decency. People thought of them, fought and died to establish them, not in the ether, but on solid ground. That ground has to be defended or the values themselves will die.

 

Thoughts on Rupert Smith’s “Utility of Force”

Media darling?

Gen. Rupert Smith’s The Utility of Force is one of those enormously popular books that I resist reading exactly because of its popularity. Shortly after its publication I noticed that the media was using it as a cudgel against the Bush administration and I heard that Smith appeared on The Daily Show which made me suspect that it was another opportunistic screed against the Iraq war. I had seen the Book TV interview back in 2008, but since the interview was conducted by a bumbling and incompetent “beltway bandit” eager to score political points, I didn’t learn much about Smith’s ideas, though I was impressed by his performance in the interview. Eventually I acknowledged that not reading the book was intellectually irresponsible so I bought a copy and I’m glad that I did.

Overall I thought it an excellent work: very well-written and well-argued, with points that are manifestly relevant to the current ongoing wars. However, there are a few aspects about it that I was uncomfortable with and which have not received much comment in the other reviews that I’ve read. I’d like to share some of these thoughts. Let me be clear: these comments focus on the critical, but I am not condemning the whole of his work.

 

The Military, the Media, and War

Stars and Stripes reports that the Pentagon has contracted a Washington-based PR firm, the Rendon Group, to analyze the news reports of embedded journalists and rate their coverage according to the categories of “positive,” “neutral” or “negative”:

Rendon examines individual reporters’ recent work and determines whether the coverage was “positive,” “negative” or “neutral” compared to mission objectives, according to Rendon officials. It conducts similar analysis of general reporting trends about the war for the military and has been contracted for such work since 2005, according to the company.

Apparently, the end result of these analyses includes pie charts like this:

And of course this has unleashed the mandatory tantrum that occurs whenever there is a hint of the military manipulating information, complete with the normal platitudes about the First Amendment, journalistic integrity, and the vital role of an independent media in a healthy democracy:

Professional groups representing journalists are decrying the Pentagon’s screening of reporters.

That’s the government doing things to put out the message they want to hear and that’s not the way journalism is meant to work in this country,” said Amy Mitchell, deputy director for Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

“The whole concept of doing profiles on reporters who are going to embed with the military is alarming,” said Ron Martz, president of the Military Reporters and Editors association.

It speaks to this whole issue of trying to shape the message and that’s not something the military should be involved with,” he said.

Of course, everyone knows that journalists are immaculate human beings, relentless and wholehearted in their singular pursuit of objective truth, beholden to no law or obstruction in the performance of this righteous duty, the Holy Writ for which having derived from the Constitution itself.

 

War: Ends and Means, Part I

Let us imagine that one day an alien spacecraft crash lands on earth, and there is a single survivor. This alien happens to be of a super-evolved species that has established a civilization where there is no war or hate or fear, and all live together in perfect harmony and happiness. This visitor would naturally be shocked, appalled, and frightened upon witnessing the human phenomenon of war (no doubt I am describing a sci-fi cliche) and would have much to learn to understand this bloody spectacle. There is one book that I would give this alien to get him started. It would not be Thucydides, or On War, or anything by Ken Waltz. It would be an obscure book that was first published in 1989: War: Ends and Means by Paul Seabury and Angelo Codevilla. I cannot recommend this book enough.

Paul Seabury was a political scientist at Berkeley. He died in 1990. Angelo Codevilla has served as a navy officer, a foreign service officer, and a staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He is currently a professor at Boston University, and has become one my favorite writers on international relations and national security issues.

I first discovered this book when I dug it out of the trash bin at my grad school’s library, but despite its relative obscurity and the grungy nature of my own introduction to the work, the book was fairly successful and a revised edition was released a few years ago. I have found no other book that so effectively condenses and introduces such an immense subject. Many authors have written primers on war, but Codevilla and Seabury have succeeded in not only introducing the topic but also inculcating the reader with a meaningful understanding of war’s many facets – from the philosophical nature of war and peace down to the tactical intricacies of waging modern warfare on land, sea, and air – in very readable prose. The authors write in their introduction:

This book means to reintroduce a generation of Americans that has come to think of peace as its birthright to thoughts about war: why nation fight, what happens to them when they do, how they fight, and how they make peace.

This book is not written for strategic theorists, military professionals, or historians who devote themselves to the nature of organized violence and its relations to politics. It is written for a generation of Americans whom the absence of the military draft has trained to live as if military matters were a spectator sport, whose popular culture gives the impression that violence belongs exclusively to the past or to lower forms of life, and whose university curricula make it well-nigh impossible to put one’s self in the shoes of history’s protagonists — or of those caught in the middle.

 

Adventuring Isn’t Dead

 

Hassan Khalil: Pirate's Bane

Some people still have stories to tell their grandchildren. Just take a look at Hassan Khalil, the owner of an Egyptian fishing vessel – the Momtaz 1 – that had been held captive by Somali pirates for 4 months. Khalil grew frustrated after official negotiations went nowhere, so he travelled to Somalia to negotiate in-person the ransom for his ship and a second captive vessel, the Ahmed Samara. These negotiations also bogged down. But instead of paying an exorbitant ransom, pretending that his lawyers could help him, or hoping for the best, Khalil took matters into his own hands. He bought himself some mercenaries in a nearby Somali town, bribed the pirates to let him come aboard to check on his crew, and with the help of his hired guns and the captive fishermen, retook the vessel. Eight pirates were captured and the rest ended up as fish food.

The maritime industry is spending a fortune on insurance premiums and “nonlethal weapons” like squirt guns and sticky glue, not to mention ransom payments. A few hired guns manning the decks while in dangerous waters would solve the problem, but I guess that would be politically incorrect. Instead, we are incessantly reminded of “the need to build institutions of law and order within Somalia to combat the root causes of piracy,” as if that is a realistic option. Good luck with that.