It’s well into the great dissolution. Notions of empire always start their rot in the metropole core but manifest first along the periphery. America’s no different. Every narrative has an arc. There are different scripts. Some end with a retrospectively imposed tangible event. Regardless of what really happened.
Gorbachev back in 1985 detonated a geo-political thermonuclear warhead in a speech labeling Afghanistan a ‘bleeding wound.’ Note this was well before the Stingers went in. Gorbachev’s signal to the Soviet elite? Afghanistan was a mistake.
The US probably spent around $17-20 billion on intelligence in 1985, mostly targeted on the Sovs. We missed it. Sorry Mel. SOVA blew it, too, and you can’t just blame Gates and Casey for ‘stifling the truth’ below.
Did Afghanistan eventually cause the Soviet collapse? A complex socio-political and cultural question. For many Soviets, Neocons, Russians, Milt Beardon and — of course — in the much vaunted but elusive ‘Islamic imagination’ the answer is an uncomplicated yes. (N.B. ‘Islamic imagination’ as meme is as plastic as ‘the Palestinian/Hezbollah/Street’. Both mean anything a Neocon needs at the moment). Here’s a hint: mono-causal explanations for something as complex as Soviet decline and fall are always wrong.
Afghanistan and Iraq so far play the opposite role for the US. Contra the Soviets, US failures there perversely *strengthen* the American so-called National Security State at home.
For all involved in Afghanistan today, it’s traumatic, dangerous and painful. Yet this experience is likely to be catalytic rather than declinist, transmuting US self-image. True, Great Britain lost the Americas and still built their Noontide global empire.
British comparative maritime and industrial advantages then gave London first mover advantages for decades. American withdrawal/retreat from the Kush accompanied by domestic dislocation will occur with rising competitors.
Obama’s deliberations on Afghanistan policy 2009 illustrates the point. Today, the foreign policy and pundit class is rushing to buy and cite a flood of new books on Vietnam and draw simplistic comparisons to Afghanistan. It’s Dada.
Knowingly or not. For the US policy and chattering classes, often it’s the latter. On it’s face a comparison, both geostrategically and specifically are laughable. The divergent linguistic, ethnic, economic, geographic, historical, political development and resource bases are obvious. Structurally, MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) and ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) Afghanistan/NATO are apples and oranges.
Vietnam and Afghanistan have one thing in common: people shooting guns and detonating bombs. The shorthand for that? Killing. But that’s it.
Yet we hear the same arguments Fall 2009: (i) global dominos are at stake; (ii) repeating ‘Afghanistan’ and ‘counterinsurgency’ in the same sentence relentlessly; and (iii) somehow, a Taliban Mayor of Kabul poses an existential security threat to America.
All untrue. Afghanistan is truly a smaller, more containable counter-terrorism environment. Which is why we’re pretty sure Obama is going to blow it and cave to CENTCOM’s escalation.
No global dominos here.
Vietnam played out in a rigid, tectonic, bi-polar world. That rigidity controlled global incineration. Halberstam making it so-obviously-wrong hindsight aside, a SE Asia domino theory in 1961-65 actually was a non-trivial idea, although wrong. America was blind. We had no meaningful strategic political intelligence on any of the actors involved. And area studies as a discipline in the U.S. didn’t really exist yet except in isolated, furtive corners.
Americans could only project what we knew. Three years fighting Chinese, Koreans and Soviets in Korea (yes, those were Soviet pilots). All three closed counter-intelligence States (to use a John Dziak phrase). For Bundy, Ball, McNamara, Johnson, Kennedy, etc. – that entire world generation — WW II? The Berlin Airlift? Munich was alive as living memory (if mis-marketed even then). We had faith. In technology. In empiricism. Operations research.
The Sino-Soviet split over the West and war since Khruschev in the 1950s? Long before we went ashore at Danang in ’65. We were clueless again. We kind of caught on when the Soviets asked us to help them with a nuclear first strike on the Chinese in 1969. DOH!
Those few SE Asia area studies experts we did have at the time? The majority predicted no dominos were at risk outside the American military areas of activity (later under Nixon to include Laos and Cambodia).
Was Rostow right in hindsight that Vietnam was still worthwhile? As a noble ‘holding action’ to allow ASEAN nations to mature successfully? Leonidas with Agent Orange? The Neocons always declaim yes. Gene Rostow, his brother, once graciously submitted a paper to the Stiftung so we’re inclined be gentle. You know where we stand.
Afghanistan is less danger. Next door, the Persians despise the Taliban and are infinitely more powerful. The Indians fear and loath jihadists as much as Neocons. Then there’s Pakistani nukes. Loose Pakistani nukes are a real threat. Clinton tells us they’re secure. Maybe. We must be prepared to secure (or destroy them) — with or without Pakistani assistance. Their real danger is from proliferation.
Counter-insurgency and Afghanistan should not be in the same sentence.
By definition, a political and cultural structure must first exist to subvert. No State? No insurgency. Afghanistan is not a State. That illusion is a purely notional, convenient diplomatic pretense. Always has been.
The Viet Cong were insurgents. Vietnamese are homogenous people with a shared history, language, etc. Vietnamese elites were world class cosmopolitans.
The Vietnamese considered themselves a people and possessed State institutions. The insurgency in the South came with a legitimate aura of authentic nationalism because of the Viet Minh resistance under the pre-war French colonial period, against the Japanese and the French again after ’45. French (Catholic) systematic suppression of post-war nationalist sentiment in the South galvanized a demographic shift to the North.
Authentic political, cultural and intellectual cadres moved North. Ho Chi Minh was an authentic leader from the Viet Minh period. (We’ll skip MacCarthur’s embarrassing orders to cut off OSS relations with then-friendly and prepared-to-be-possibly-pro-American Ho Chi Minh). It wasn’t until Deng visited D.C. in 1978 and China’s calamitous war on Vietnam did the depth of Vietnamese disdain for Chinese vassaldom hit home on the Potomac.
When we stupidly stepped into the French mess, French repression tactics ensured the cadres we inherited in the South were already tainted, weak and thin. We then helped ensure further de-legitimacy with the coup, etc. But even South Vietnamese understood what a political governing structure was. Saigon and the surrounding country had infrastructure corruption aside. Our doomed mission didn’t begin with nothing. We just took over a bad hand and played it like drunk tourists.
You know, Dear Reader, Afghanistan has none of these features. The Soviets discovered this after the Dec. 1979 coup and follow-on invasion. They quickly learned controlling Kabul, appointing ministers, building a national army — all meaningless to the rest of ‘Afghanistan’. No there, there. Never was.
It’s 2009 and still no semblance of an authentic State structure across the country. Controlling Kabul? As meaningless as in 1980. ‘Taking American eyes off Afghanistan for Iraq’ is a good anti-Bush meme. But a focused America after 2001 still couldn’t have built a functioning Afghan State anyway.
We did lose track off UBL and the Taliban. But that’s a counter-terrorism failure. The recent 2009 Afghan election fraud issue? A meaningless canard in the scheme of things. For the medium term, at best our real mission is a tribal policing action.
A shame Obama lacks it in him to pull a Richard Perle trick during Afghan policy deliberations. He should ask each individually — ‘Who has ever built from outside a nation anywhere on Earth with conditions like Afghanistan? In world history, anywhere?’ And make each person answer.
Bueller? Bueller?
CENTCOM, McChystal and Petreaus are providing even worse professional military advice and alarmingly demonstrate worse battlespace awareness than MACV. We see careerists determined not to be left standing when the musical chairs stop.
We do need a persistent intelligence footprint for counter-terrorism operations. To hunt and destroy Al-Qaeda. Obama as we said likely will flinch and escalate for short term political cover. Doomed. American power there wanes by the day given inevitable domestic impatience (per dictum Power = Means x Will).
The Mayor of Kabul does not threaten the Globe.
Pick a tribe. Or ad hoc alliance with any Taliban facton. Put them in Kabul. Call someone the President. Their chum is Foreign Minister and flies places. Doesn’t matter. We just need capacity to deny or destroy Al-Qaeda national sanctuaries. That’s ‘Victory’. To assert we must stay to deny ‘Ismalo-Fascist-Jihadi-Taliban victory in their imaginations is more absurd than dominos falling. The U.S. there forever as their sock puppet trying to out guess and grabble with someone else’s ‘imagination’. Note to CENTCOM: Your own incompetence 2001-2009 already assures lack of awe, respect and deterrence from Arabs, Baluchis, Durranis, the Ghilzai tribe, Tajiks, Uzbeks and possibly now restless Aleuts. That’s not imaginary.
The Taliban have shown no interest in extra-territorial aggression against the U.S. That remains an Al-Qaeda agenda. Gen. Jones proffers the Community’s estimate that only 100 Al-Qaeda fighters are in Afghanistan. Given its abysmal local weatherman-like track record, let’s round up and say 8,000. Still, the point holds. No insurgency by definition. Take them down/barter them in with precision counter-terrorism focus.
Could Petreaus’ FM have worked for MACV? Who knows? It’s not worth spit in Afghanistan.
We used to measure privately D.C.’s intellectual health by the number of good specialized book stores around. Different from nice neighborhood stores crushed by Borders. ‘Politics & Prose’ is not what we mean. Stores for specialist policy, academic press and foreign journals. Where a book’s one footnote could open intellectual arguments spawning PhD theses and whole careers.
Admittedly some – OK alot – of the books were perfunctory graduate serf product. Ground out merely to gain release from doctorate Gitmo. The proof readers probably committed seppuku.
Sidney Kramer was about the last of that breed. It died a long time ago. We used to go there on an afternoon. We’d pick up a title on refining precision nuclear targeting, another on Soviet operational maneuver group (OMG) theory, and maybe a couple on Japanese Sekigahara-era miltary and social structure. Each visit would cost a fortune but worth it. Each book promised years of engagement. None like today’s mass market middle/low brow military pornography.
What does it say when the capital of the at the time undeniable sole Superpower lacked one good specialty policy book store with international and foreign language policy journals? About us? We said at the beginning imperial rot begins at the core. That was a sign for us.
We grew up surrounded by people who cared about ideas, policy and scholarship. That generation built the American Empire in its most recognizable guise. Most of them are gone now. No one is following.
Imperial mere policy process has its place. Look what Cher Condi’s managerial and intellectual incompetence as national security advisor cost us. Orderly process is not an end unto itself contra Wilkerson. Without knowledge first, GIGO, right? We naively used to think so. And still America lurches onwards.
We do have privileges with a specialized international policy library when nostalgia tugs. A visit is suffused with love. We could spend hours just wondering. American intellectual vitality and our imperial trajectory can be traced by what’s on the stacks. Just like geologists measure and study sediment. Layers and then near extinction. And then a new layer. We see books this way. Even this specialized library now has cable/CNBC hyped product displayed upfront.
We’ve always loved libraries. Our undergraduate library had many millions of accessible free stacked books (not Firestone but you get the drift). Another library at a place we spent time had stacks of dead trees as opinions. Some are great and shape our domestic lives. But that library’s tale is wholly different from America’s global narrative.
Why should a journo-lobbyist-staffer-apparatchik at the Barnes & Noble check out counter care? The Stiftung’s pompous, condescending, precious and self-absorbed point of view on book stores and boring times long since gone doesn’t get invites to green rooms. Or parties.
Besides, someone doubtlessly is even now saying — Stiftung you forget about private and classified Intranets. Knowledge is free from print and books. Private lacunae still pool facts. Some are turned into data. Some data becomes information. And then it’s actionable. Not waiting years to sit in some privileged reserve on a shelf. Americans at war require security via action. Look what Michael Scheuer accomplished without your pin head geek knowledge whine.
We still think we’re right. America at her height eschewed direct imperial rule, quixotic, temporary adventures aside. Ironically for Germany’s Leo Strauss (and to his dismay) that may be our most faithful adherence to the Athenian Way (pre-Delian League). America exercised power at her zenith best indirectly via international organizations, structures (like the dollar) and alliances.
Indirect rule is inefficient in the short term. In the medium and long term it allows a people to evolve without imperial self-awareness. Something that once gained merely starts the clock ticking. Same with republics across history but that’s another story. Indirect rule, however, is especially dependent on accumulated knowledge and area studies among the self-conscious power wielding class, even if it’s not immediately ‘actionable’. Or ‘operational’.
In many ways (sorry Old Blighty) the US empire was trickier act to pull off than the British.
Comment says
@Dr Leo Strauss
We recall a Border’s in Rockville and one out on the Lee Hwy – Used to go to Olesson’s in G-town and Bryn Mawr used bookshop. Nothing beast being surrounded by good books – in a good solid room, in comfortable surroundings. Politics and Prose was ok – Good speakers, good selection.
Comment says
@sglover
A few months ago we revisited our old stomping grounds in DC – Following a decades absence – The prosperity is so overwhelming.
Dr Leo Strauss says
@sglover
Yes, SPI games and S&T magazine at several retail venues back then. Found several local players via AH’s mail gaming/moves in sealed envelopes system. They were authentic geniuses.
re D.C. — true, good friends are rare. The Interwebs help maintain friendships beyond location. Otoh, where else can you behold the spectacle of Dan Snyder up close and personal?
sglover says
You used to buy S & T games over the counter?!?! Jeez, that takes me back — but out in the Midwest I had to get them by subscription. Hell, I’ll bet you were even able to find opponents willing to wade through the rules and play a game!
I’ve returned to the Beltway from a two year detail in Detroit — from the prosperity bubble of DC to a whole other kind of bubble, and back. Gotta say the obliviousness in DC borders on the surreal. Over the long haul, 15, 20 years from now, I don’t know that I want to remain in this area. Though I am fortunate to have the best set of friends here that I’ve ever had. Dilemmas….
Dr Leo Strauss says
Politics & Prose has found a buyer, apparently. Cher Condi will still have a place to plug her wares.
Oh stop. We keed. We keed because we really don’t care.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/politics-and-prose-has-found-a-buyer/2011/03/28/AFbNlpoB_story.html
Seriously. We’re a bit down now. All the Borders around the Bunker look like 99 cent stores. When Saville, The Globe and Sidney Kramer were alive this urban blight had real book stores for specialists, academic press and immersed generalists. Brentano’s was a short hop away, where we used to buy SPI wargames designed by a friend, Redmond Simonsen. Red Star/White Star, Phantom vs. Foxbat, Destruction of Army Group Center, etc. Along with the rival Avalon Hill line like PanzerBlitz and PanzerLeader. Those stores are all gone now per post above. Politics & Prose was never in that league.
When the first Borders we became aware of came to D.C. near the then upscale White Flint Mall (now regarded as a backwater), an academic and government area specialist we knew was delighted. Books meant something still. Their degeneration into cheap, blatant content fodder for self promotion years away. Both Borders and Barnes & Noble were exceptions rather than today’s cookie cutter clones in each zip code offering the same bleak piles of neatly arranged crap. Now Borders is toast.
Went to B&N over the weekend just to wander and touch things marketed as books. Some actually were. Most were shovelware junk. Still there’s a tactile beauty to them. Just the illusion of being surrounded by real books is transporting, never to be replicated by a slippery tablet gizmo. Even that luxury of illusion is waning; B&N likely will follow Borders.
We’ll wander over to a specialist library later this week. To dive into the memory pool and swim nostalgia’s waters. Who knows? We may get ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ after all, just by another path.
Comment says
A somewhat sloppy review.
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/client_9_the_rehabilitation_of_eliot_spitzer_20101105/
Comment says
We recall learningshortly after Drudge arrived and he was not invited to read at Politics and Prose – So he complained on DR and the two women at P & P were deluged with massive amounts of very very unhinged hate mail – It was one of the first starts in the modern era of vituperation. Now it is common when people post violent themed comments in defense of SP on her FB page,.
anxiousmodernman says
C-SPAN should buy it.
Dr Leo Strauss says
The local D.C. ‘City Paper’ has an update on the fate of the Politics & Prose bookstore. (And ignited a small controversy by its comparison to the more hip ‘Busboys and Poets’ micro chain). We’ve never been enraptured with its (to us) fairly shallow, generalist product/merchandise. If having an event with Cher Condi peddling her goods is evidence of profundity (Rove did his event last year at Books-A-Million in McLean btw), what’s there to say, really?
None of these independent bookstores could hold a candle for the substantive, specialty depth of Sidney Kramer and others. The capital of the once acknowledged Superpower lacks a significant bookstore of academic rigor, scope and depth. But then that America went away a long time ago.
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/39974/politics-and-proses-social-network/
Frickin coffeeshops and restaurants. Why not mud wrestling?
Dr Leo Strauss says
@Tbilisi
Precisely, plus they cheat and ‘jailbreak’ the iPhones for better data plans.
Tbilisi says
@Dr Leo Strauss
So basically the ability to use small arms while deploying the iPhone 4 with minimal paperwork qualifies one as a “truly…formidable adversary”?
Dr Leo Strauss says
This is either bleakly hilarious ala Dr Strangelove or emblematic of the ‘Jersey Shore Nation’.
http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/08/06/43358-chiarelli-enemy-acquiring-technology-faster/?ref=news-science-link7
One can’t make this stuff up.
Montag says
This is not analysis.
This is not opinion; nor discussion, nor criticism, reflection,…not any of those lofty cogitational pursuits…
This is Art.
This is what Longinus had in mind when he was searching
around for a title for his writing: Peri Hypsous.
We are in your debt.
Comment says
We heard that it is now a sport for columbia and Harvard students to punk wingers by selling fake Obama stuff on ebay (like a bogus honor thesis) – Both Ledeen and Rush fell for it.
Dr Leo Strauss says
Opening for Max Boot is the Glenn Beck Rumor slapstick before WIPO. The actual legal documents filed by Fox and Beck are hilarious. Back in the day when we were involved with ICANN-related matters and enmeshed in the perfidious attempted coup de main by IP holders (who largely got their way, surprise) we never could have imagined this sublime development. These are the moments of twilight to savor.
http://glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com/
Dr Leo Strauss says
@Alex
Many thanks, Alex. Appreciate your thoughtfulness.
Your take on the neurological processes of Movement thought is fascinating. It warrants a re-read and mulling over. The stabilization effect is there, I agree. Therapy or some other reward trigger cycle.
Dr Leo Strauss says
We are perusing tonite the history of the French Expeditionary Force’s failure to understand the Viet Minh and even more ignorant American judgments about the viability of the South in 1952-55. It offers an important refresher given how much our collective memories have been degraded by journo-lobbying-shallow meme pushing pretending to be scholarship and ‘history’. What intrigues is how a ‘fresh American appraisal’ of Vietnam by the American military explicitly designed to prevent stalemate and prolonged American involvement evolved with their appraisal of Diem. Contrary to jaw jawing around DC in 2009, the real lesson of Vietnam as it began? How many crucial decisions were controlled by the U.S. military in Saigon rather than D.C. (Pentagon included).
We’re almost tempted to take a week or two in November and break it all down into individual thematic posts for those readers who might wish to explore detail and actual facts set within a genuine historical background on various specific topics. But we know it’s hopeless.
We are reminded why America deserves its fate perhaps by two things: (i) Richard (I will always advocate the middle ground) Haas runs the Council on Foreign Relations, and (ii) Max Boot is allowed even into the mens room. The utter vapidity featured by C.F.R. says much.
http://www.cfr.org/publication/20437/
The random-typing qua analysis offered. . . well, further proof that the theater of the absurd has festival seating and no refunds.
Alex says
I’ve found the issue with your RSS feed. There’s a character between these two sentences that is XML-invalid.
Ground out merely to gain release from doctorate Gitmo. (invalid entity here) Their proof readers probably committed seppuku. I’ve snipped it so as not to break the comments feed.
Meanwhile, a study in Movement thinking here. Note the radical cognitive break between the first question and the rest. Question 1 involves aktion and tactics; he can respond to that without decompensating. The rest, though, just a primordial soup of delusions and, as always, progressively worse spelling and grammar as the emotional load builds.
He’s internalised a small rule-set for action to a high degree; like drill. Response to effective enemy fire. I think it’s arguable that what happens between questions 1 and 2 is that he starts thinking; before that, he’s on muscle-memory autoland. You can see how conversion narratives and obedience to The Order help stabilise him; in a sense, the Movement is all about a sort of occupational therapy in which the patients do useful tasks for the political leadership.
Dr Leo Strauss says
“There is nothing wrong with such a plurality of perspectives [regarding 1989 and the peaceful revolutions]. Each [argument] illuminates a different part of the elephant, or views the whole beast from a different angle. But whenever an author seizes on a single element and says this is the explanation, the key, you know he is wrong.”
Timothy Garton Ash
He offers a timely synthesis of new works seeking to explain the 1989-1991 historical tide. Recommended. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23232
Comment says
Bet you’re nostalgic for the old days when used bookshops lined w 4th st.
Hunter says
Now tell us truly, dear Doktor, did you make this? The ridiculous music, the absurd length, the laughable talking points, the minute and forty-five second wait to even get a URL onscreen… Looks an awful lot like someone who wasn’t your friend hired you and you had some fun. The artwork on the current page, however, is some of your best.
Dr Leo Strauss says
Hunter, no, our hands are clean for good or ill. We knew – vaguely know now – many in that faction (‘friends’, ‘acquaintances’ and ‘backbiting frenemies’, etc). They’re blessed with one smart angel in particular.
Thanks for the kind words re accidents here.
Alex says
This is why I love ArmsControlWonk. Need to know about trade in enriched uranium between Argentina and Iran? ACW was there before you.
Still, bookshops. Bookshops are good. I also have pleasant memories of the IISS library (need Scott Sagan on nuclear command and control and Anwar Sadat’s memoirs at the same time? no problem)
anxiousmodernman says
You’re really breaking my heart with this one, Doc.
Comment says
We hear that Bundy book is quite the fashion these days in the Imperial City. It’s sort of like derrida at NYU in the earlu 90s