Great Power contentions

[Pannonian]

Apparently Ethiopia's army just got its ass kicked by the Tigray resistance.

It has been pointed out that though Ethiopia is perhaps the longest-lived African polity today, for almost none of its history has it aspired to democracy; it is one of the world's surviving great empires. And modernity shows a poor track record for empires.

China and Russia are doing quite well.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Wiki Source

The US withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan adds another Great Power to the list of those outlasted by the Muslim Tribes of the Afghani mountains. As usual, the Great Power was largely undefeatable by the locals in any conventional way, but susceptible to harassment, guerilla tactics, and ultimately unwilling to continue to pay the cost in blood and treasure of imposing its designs on that polity (term used loosely; the loose political cultural framework of the region is part of its resilience). Persia, Macedon, England, Soviet Russia, and the USA have all failed. Only the Mongols had more than a nominal rule over the area and they did so by nearly depopulating it with a level of brutality seen neither before nor since. Even then, in time, the Mughal were more of its nominal than practical rulers. Nor is it an issue associated with Muslim fanaticism as two of the failed attempts predate that religion.

Yes, I know that my government is currently claiming their belief that the Afghan government will not fall to the Taliban. I suspect that the only substantial difference between this and April 1975 will be the absence of a subsequent musical. I do hope we get the interpreters and their close kin out quickly. It is the least we should do.

[Montmorency]

China and Russia are doing quite well.

China is a solid contender (and the US is something like an - choosing my words carefully here - unusual case), but, ah, Russia's imperial record is not a confident one.

Persia, Macedon, England, Soviet Russia, and the USA have all failed.

The empire-killer sobriquet is at least a little overblown, given that Persian empires have dominated much or all of modern Afghanistan for almost as long as they existed, granting that Afghanistan has always been a political borderland and crossroads of Eurasian trade (even Bronze Age Crete relied on Afghan tin IIRC) and migration of itinerant Denisovans and Aryans and Bactrians and Saka and the like.

But it probably has something to do with the Iranian heartland lying within a thousand miles of what are now Kabul and Kandahar - recurrent campaigning distance, nearer than the Mediterranean in the other direction...

Yes, I know that my government is currently claiming their belief that the Afghan government will not fall to the Taliban. I suspect that the only substantial difference between this and April 1975 will be the absence of a subsequent musical. I do hope we get the interpreters and their close kin out quickly. It is the least we should do.

What we can be sure of is that the Taliban will be forced to moderate its methods if it wishes to hold the rest of the country, just as Hanoi had to. The Taliban reportedly already inversely tailor somewhat the level of repression to the level of resistance by village and province. Most of Afghanistan is way more pissed off at the Taliban than the Vietnamese were with each other (ethnic minorities were more easily marginalized in Vietnam too).


Speaking of Afghanistan, I'd like to take another moment to reflect on the early 2000s as historical era. Holding strong opinions on Iraq's place in foreign policy is a little before my time, but for those - ordinary people I mean - who gratuitously and advisably got wrong almost everything that can be got wrong, what's the retrospective look like? I assume I will one day survive to be similarly wrong about some momentous cycle, a source of great anxiety.

In principle, the (abashed) errant ought to have wanted to outsource their judgement to those who easily and eruditely exposed all the deceits and fallacies of the Criminal Elite and the common-clay currencies (not that erudition was required). Doesn't seem like that took place in practice though? Paul Krugman is one of the few major pundits or commentators writing today, to my limited awareness at least, whose political analyses throughout the 2000s perform as comprehensively prescient at all timescales.

It helps to recall an observation that Gail Sheehy made last year: ''The blind drive to win,'' she wrote, ''is a hallmark of the Bush family clan. One thing that G. W.'s childhood friends told me repeatedly was that he has to win, he absolutely has to win and if he thinks he's going to lose, he will change the rules or extend the play. Or if it really is bad he'll take his bat and ball and go home.''

Now consider this: More than two months ago George W. Bush endorsed a ''stimulus'' bill so tilted toward corporate interests that even many conservatives were startled. This left only two ways a bill could pass the Senate: Either the Democratic leadership would collapse, or Mr. Bush would accept something that didn't look like a personal win. It didn't, and he wouldn't.

Anyway, there are endless discussions to have about "reasons-as-causes" for why Republicans wanted to take down Saddam Hussein, why the Bush administration invaded Iraq, and why most or a plurality of liberals went along with it, but I like the meta sendups in this vein. I'll reprint it in whole.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The second– and third-most downloaded articles at the journal Security Studies both tackle the causes of the Iraq War. This might reflect an imbalance of supply and demand: there aren’t that many articles in leading international-relations journals that focus on the question of why the United States invaded Iraq.

We can find a number of partial explanations. Many believe that American global dominance was at least a permissive condition; the absence of great powers prepared to deter or punish U.S. military action gave Washington a relatively free hand. A more controversial position is that we should basically take the Bush administration at its word – or, at least, once we strip out the hyperbole. In this account, the U.S. invasion was a specific example of the more general logic of preventive war.

… determined to prevent Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from acquiring nuclear weapons, the US administration was unable to prove that Iraq was not, in fact, developing them. Faced with the possibility of a large and rapid power shift in favor of Iraq and operating with imperfect information about Iraq’s militarization decision, the administration of US President George W. Bush opted for a preventive war, which was mistaken because there was no active Iraqi nuclear program.

Given the weakness of the case that Iraq posed an imminent threat of nuclear proliferation, some contend that the war was intended to demonstrate U.S. power: to “shock and awe” the rest of the world. The September 11 attacks made members of the Bush administration particularly anxious to reassert U.S. dominance.

I’ve come to believe that it’s a mistake to focus on any one cause, especially when we’re talking about “reasons as causes.” Different factions within the Bush administration supported the war for different reasons. I also question analysis which assumes that any given member of the Bush administration understood, or cared, how bad the case for war was. The officials who thought Hussein had a non-trivial WMD program, for example, went looking for evidence that he did. If that evidence didn’t exist then, well, he’d hidden an advanced nuclear program before, hadn’t he?

This leads us to a different set of questions: what about the Bush administration led to such collective irrationality? My colleague Elizabeth Saunders argues that the Bush administration was prone to poor decision making because it combined a president who lacked foreign-policy experience with highly experienced senior officials: “Bush’s inexperience led to poor monitoring of his subordinates” and “contributed to an atmosphere in which subordinates” did not see “themselves as accountable to a well-informed leader.”

A senior administration official told Packer in an interview that “no one ever walks into the Oval Office and tells them they’ve got no clothes on—and persists … I think it’s dangerous that we have an environment where our principal leader cannot be well-informed. It’s part and parcel of the office,” but more so in this administration, which was “scary, because of the president and the atmosphere and the people there.”

Many of the explanations floating around – whether in academia or in more general discussion – sideline Bush altogether. As Fred Kaplan notes in his review of Robert Draper’s 2020 book To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq:

Draper’s central insight is to place George W. Bush at the center of the action. When it came to invading Iraq, Bush truly turns out to have been “the decider,” as he once described himself. And in those instances when others took charge, his style of decision-making was to let them, whereas most other presidents would have asked questions, mulled the options, perhaps convened a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) to weigh the pros and cons of a proposal. Draper convincingly shows that, under Bush, there was “no ‘process’ of any kind,” at any stage of the war, from the decision to invade to figuring out how post-Saddam Iraq should be governed.

This tracks with Saunder’s argument: Bush’s total lack of experience – or basic interest – in foreign policy introduced numerous pathologies into what passed for a decision-making process in his administration:

In the weeks after September 11, many of Bush’s underlings were startled to witness this affable but aimless president—uncertain of himself, uneasy with his legitimacy after losing the popular vote and eking out a thin Electoral College edge thanks to a 5–4 Supreme Court ruling, content to spend half of his time away from Washington clearing brush weeds back at his ranch in Texas—suddenly seized with a “piercing clarity of purpose” and an “unchecked self-confidence.” Draper paints a vivid scene of Bush speaking to a group of Asian journalists in the Oval Office, pointing to portraits of Churchill, Lincoln, and Washington, aligning himself as their peer, and viewing himself as “a leader who knew who he was and who knew what was right.” And one thing he knew, being (as Bush himself put it) “a good versus evil guy,” was that “the time had now come to confront Saddam Hussein.”

It is remarkable—and a central theme in the book—how swiftly so many senior officials fell into line, some of them against their better judgment, for reasons of misguided duty, crass cynicism, or converging motives. Wolfowitz, Libby, and a few other neocons had never pushed for an actual invasion—they fantasized about prodding small bands of Iraqi Shias and dissidents to crush Saddam’s army with the help of US air strikes—but they signed on to it, and took part in the cherry-picking of raw intelligence data that seemed to confirm that Saddam had WMDs and was affiliated with al-Qaeda, as the way to fulfill their dream. (WMDs were, as Wolfowitz later put it, “the one issue that everyone could agree on.”)

Draper’s account singles out George “It’s a slam dunk, Mr. President” Tenet for making sure that skepticism from the intelligence community couldn’t derail the war train.

… almost everyone in Bush’s inner circle really believed that Saddam had WMDs—if not nukes, then chemical or biological weapons, which a 1991 UN Security Council resolution banned him from developing. Those types of weapons were certainly within his capacity: he had built them a decade before, even used them in the Iran–Iraq War, but destroyed most of them under UN auspices after the first Gulf War. And there were still widespread suspicions—abetted by Iraq’s efforts to mislead UN weapons inspectors—that some remained hidden and that he could resume production.

But the intelligence analysts who were most expert in the region and in the technology for making and handling WMDs couldn’t find persuasive evidence to make the case that Saddam had any, and Tenet did what he could to suppress their skepticism. A holdover from the previous administration, he had been frustrated by Bill Clinton’s lack of interest in what the CIA had to offer. For any CIA director, the president is the “First Customer”—the sole source of the agency’s power—and under Clinton that power had dissipated. By contrast Bush, especially after September 11, was riveted by the agency’s reports; he had Tenet personally deliver its Presidential Daily Briefing at 8 AM, six days a week. At last, the CIA had a seat at the big table, and Tenet wasn’t going to blow it.

If you can get around the paywall, the review essay is definitely worth reading. Kaplan briefly draws the obvious comparison with Trump, noting that “in Trump, these traits were compounded by a prideful ignorance (Bush at least read books and intelligence reports) but mitigated by a lack of appetite for war.”

We’ve spent twelve of the last 28 years with Republican administrations. Each of the three terms that they served were marked by catastrophic governance failures – Iraq, Katrina, the Great Recession, COVID-19 – that left hundreds of thousands of people dead. Given that record, it makes a certain amount of sense that the party has become subservient to a massive, relatively decentralized disinformation ecosystem. It’s hard to imagine how it could survive without it.

It’s also important to remember that Bush badly botched a critical moment in global history; he left the world a more dangerous place, the country weaker at home and abroad, and his party primed to move in an (even) more toxic direction. Yes, he wasn’t a crypto-fascist. He didn’t seek to profit personally from his position. He did notch a few genuinely good policies. But he was, now matter how you slice, devastatingly bad at his job.

[spmetla]

The empire-killer sobriquet is at least a little overblown, given that Persian empires have dominated much or all of modern Afghanistan for almost as long as they existed, granting that Afghanistan has always been a political borderland and crossroads of Eurasian trade (even Bronze Age Crete relied on Afghan tin IIRC) and migration of itinerant Denisovans and Aryans and Bactrians and Saka and the like.

The graveyard of empires always seemed off when actually looked at, wasn't the graveyard of any empire, it just takes a protracted campaign to actually conquer/suppress/neutralize.

What we can be sure of is that the Taliban will be forced to moderate its methods if it wishes to hold the rest of the country, just as Hanoi had to. The Taliban reportedly already inversely tailor somewhat the level of repression to the level of resistance by village and province. Most of Afghanistan is way more pissed off at the Taliban than the Vietnamese were with each other (ethnic minorities were more easily marginalized in Vietnam too).

Yes, I know that my government is currently claiming their belief that the Afghan government will not fall to the Taliban. I suspect that the only substantial difference between this and April 1975 will be the absence of a subsequent musical. I do hope we get the interpreters and their close kin out quickly. It is the least we should do.

That aspect right there is why I'm confident that there will be an ongoing civil war between the more Dari/turkic plus Hazarra North and the Pashto pro-Taliban South. Just like ISIS seemed on the cusp of victory in Iraq as they neared Baghdad I imagine that the same will happen in Afghanistan as they near Kabul and the North, resistance will harden as they go into territory that is of an 'enemy' ethnicity.

Switching from resistance and terrorism to governance is not easy, the deal with the devil that the Taliban has made with the drug growing and smuggling will be difficult to sustain if they go back to their zero-tolerance attitude of the 90s. Putting the genie in the bottle of connectedness to the rest of the world will cause resistance in the generally pro- Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GiROA) cities.
Moderation will likely cause the more hard-line elements to splinter as reactionary religious movements tend to do as they have to compromise principle for the pragmatism of good governance. ISIS branded groups will likely absorb the more fundamentalist groups too if the Taliban do try to moderate.

There's also the difficulty of having uniformed recognizable militias/military and buildings needed to govern the South. That would give GiROA easily identifiable targets for their limited air force. The Taliban cannot govern from 'within' the population and will need to establish a government with conventional police and so on just like ISIS did as well as the the Tamil had to in Sri Lanka. Attacking a Taliban government is somewhat easier than a Taliban resistance.

I think my major question for the region will be what do Pakistan and China do? Pakistan has always feared a united Afghanistan 'behind' it and China would not be friendly to a Taliban government that would likely export its extremists against the other anti-muslim super power in the region that's currently trying to suppress the Uighurs.

Russia offered U.S. use of Central Asia bases for Afghan intel - paper
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...per/ar-AAMgmki
I find the above link interesting, it was Russian pressure that led to the US having to close down its use of the Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan. I know Russia does fear more Islamic radicals in central asia and the caucasuses and I assume that they'd like US influence in the region to provide some counter to the Chinese silkroad investments that's rapidly eroding Russian influence in Central Asia.

I imagine that with the US out of Afghanistan the threat of a permanent US base in the region is gone which makes courting US influence and money to counter Chinese influence and money as useful.

Russia may be a Chinese 'ally' but I think the Russians see the Chinese as their long term threat that's useful at the moment when Russia is a bit of a pariah in 'The West.' Russia remains the only European colonial power that still has its East Asian territories that were taken at China's expense during the century of humiliation.

[Crandar]

Wiki Source

The US withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan adds another Great Power to the list of those outlasted by the Muslim Tribes of the Afghani mountains. As usual, the Great Power was largely undefeatable by the locals in any conventional way, but susceptible to harassment, guerilla tactics, and ultimately unwilling to continue to pay the cost in blood and treasure of imposing its designs on that polity (term used loosely; the loose political cultural framework of the region is part of its resilience). Persia, Macedon, England, Soviet Russia, and the USA have all failed. Only the Mongols had more than a nominal rule over the area and they did so by nearly depopulating it with a level of brutality seen neither before nor since. Even then, in time, the Mughal were more of its nominal than practical rulers. Nor is it an issue associated with Muslim fanaticism as two of the failed attempts predate that religion.

Yes, I know that my government is currently claiming their belief that the Afghan government will not fall to the Taliban. I suspect that the only substantial difference between this and April 1975 will be the absence of a subsequent musical. I do hope we get the interpreters and their close kin out quickly. It is the least we should do.

A bit irrelevant to current issues, but my question touches the ''graveyard of empires'' slogan, so I will ask it anyway. Why did Persians and Macedonians fail? Bactria remained a Persian satrapy until the end and the Greeks/Macedonians managed to establish a prosperous kingdom that outlasted Greek/Macedonian control over Iran.

[spmetla]

The list of failures in Afghanistan is shorter than successes, every empire that invaded it up to the modern era succeeded. It is rough mountains land so power is decentralized an it takes a concerted effort over time to conquer all the tribes, getting them on side or making them part of the power base like the Persians did in establishing their Satrapies, Alexander did by marrying Roxanne and settling intermarrying his soldiers up to the Mongols that led to the existence of the current Hazarra minority.

The British, Soviets, and US have failed to 'conquer' or pacify Afghanistan though all with caveats. The British failed at conquering the whole of Afghanistan but did succeed at conquered what they considered strategically important and worth conquering ie the Khyber pass and Peshawar. The British and Russians essentially 'created' Afghanistan by drawing lines around what they would both agree not to conquer, it certainly wasn't a unified political concept before.

The Soviets invaded in the middle of a civil war, the extreme policies of Amin after he took over Afghanistan put it into a state of general revolt. The Soviets wanted to impose a more moderate communism on Afghanistan but Amin had already done his damage. Not that the Soviets would have succeeded, outside intervention into a civil war tends to go poorly, especially when the intervention is to take over one side instead of help it.

The US failure can be termed in failing to stop support for the Taliban and failure in stopping the tacet Pakistan support for the Taliban throughout the war. The biggest failure on the US side though has been I think by injecting too much money and material to the Afghan government which has made it incredibly corrupt and by not engaging the countryside. A conservative rural society can't be won over by securing the cities and major highways and building the Afghan Army as only capable of manning checkpoints instead of conducting effective counter insurgency. The failures in Afghanistan parallel a lot of the Nationalist failures in China and South Vietnam's failures too. Both those nations were famously corrupt and inept, letting Afghanistan become corrupt and inept and just accepting it because 'when it Rome' was stupid. Having the equipment to fight and win regular battles but not doing the reforms and engagement necessary to win over the majority rural population will not win a civil war. The US failure has been a failure to win the important battlefield which was the buy-in from rural Afghanistan for the new government. In hind-sight it should have remained a special forces war from the overthrow of the Taliban on, with the US focused on defeating Taliban and Al-Queda, not providing security and governing, with a return of the King for adding some legitimacy to the tribal leaders.

The current Afghan government has the capability to win, but just holding onto the provincial capitals, Kabul, and the highways is not the way how. US and probable Chinese investment may keep the current government from falling but I don't see them winning a civil war soon. The Taliban have to fail at governing and splinter before that could happen and Pakistan would have to stop trying to prevent a united Afghanistan behind them.

[Montmorency]

Cute cartoon from 1878.




Also, I didn't know that Afghan Shah Durrani in the 18th century ruled the combined modern extent of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

[spmetla]

Yeah, the Durrani concept of Afghanistan was forcebly limited to the 'durand' line and adjusted after the Anglo-Afghan wars. Bear in mind the Persians and Russians were threatening Herat at the time too. The tribal regions of Pakistan are all ethnic 'afghans' which is why the Pakistan factor is vital to peace in Afghanistan. It's interesting how Afghanistan has been less a 'graveyard of empires' but a victim of "The Great Game" for the last 200 years. That Afghanistan has a border with China is purely because the British wanted to make sure they shared no common border with the Russian Empire in establishing a buffer state.

The Chinese efforts to gauge if the Taliban will tolerate the Xinjian/Uighur/East Turkestan liberation/terrorist forces will certainly have an impact on the area. If the Taliban say the right things they may get the support the current GiROA doesn't from the PRC though I can imagine that the PRC will hedge all bets.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/...on-2021-07-28/

Wang said the Taliban is expected to "play an important role in the process of peaceful reconciliation and reconstruction in Afghanistan", according to an account of the meeting from the foreign ministry.

He also said that he hoped the Taliban would crack down on the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as it was a "direct threat to China's national security," referring to a group China says is active in the Xinjiang region in China’s far west.

[spmetla]

Chinese Maritime Expansion and Potential Dual-Use Implications on Critical Maritime Chokepoints
https://www.tearline.mil/public_page...-hypothetical/

Overview
Though Chinese "Belt-and-Road Initiative" (BRI) investments and related economic activities abroad have been a touchpoint for international studies, this report poses a hypothetical "what if" scenario and seeks to address one facet of the potential implications if Chinese facilities abroad are used for dual-use military/civilian purposes.

The current strategic environment has placed the United States and its allies on a seemingly inexorable path towards confrontation with the People’s Republic of China. Given the close relationship between Chinese corporations and military entities, based on the concept of Military-Civil Fusion, this report addresses the hypothetical implications of the military use of seventeen civilian (BRI related) ports with respect to eight identified critical maritime chokepoints.
Activity
To accomplish the goals stated above, an analysis of open source imagery to assess the type of threats that could be hosted at seventeen BRI ports utilizing both military and civilian shipping as transport has been conducted. The implications and extent of these threats have been graphically superimposed over maps of strategic sea routes to visually reinforce the extent of the potential future strategic obstacles. Consequently, it is assessed that Chinese BRI developments could theoretically pose a threat to seven of eight identified critical maritime chokepoints. However, as a caveat to this conclusion, there are a multitude of factors that serve as obstacles to the realization of this hypothetical end-state.......

First Taiwan Arms Sale in Biden Administration Is Approved
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...alflow-organic

The Biden administration has approved its first arms sale to the island democracy of Taiwan, a potential $750 million deal, amid rising tensions with China.

It calls for selling Taiwan 40 new M109 self-propelled howitzers and almost 1,700 kits to convert projectiles into more precise GPS-guided munitions, according to a State Department notification to Congress on Wednesday.

The proposed sale must go through a congressional review process and then through negotiations between Taiwan and contractor BAE Systems Plc, which is also providing the U.S. Army with the latest version of the howitzer, before a contract is signed and delivery times are hashed out.

Although the new proposed sale isn’t especially large in scope or ambitious in the weaponry provided, it is certain to be denounced by China..........

The first article by Tearline is an interesting look into the potential use of all of China's Civil-Military infrastructure its buying and building around the world and potential implications for a war between the US and/or NATO and China.