Forever wars and frozen conflicts

“If successful interventions are the exception rather than the rule”

Well, there’s the rub.

“The common feature in all these cases is the attempt by an external (sometimes neighbouring) power to impose and then sustain a government of its choosing, usually in the hope that it will ultimately secure the support of the majority of the population along with international acceptance.”

The prize is large enough that history is littered with the attempts and enough of them have succeeded to make the attempt at the brass ring seem worthwhile. Just to start early, the Assyrians enjoyed their coming down out of the hills, the Hyksos would have claimed success in Egypt for at least a couple of centuries. The Normans did win and we still complain – OK, some do – about Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax with his 3,000 acres of Dorset but largely accept what happened. Ruthenia isn’t going to be part of Czechia or Slovakia again anytime soon. Poland’s not getting the eastern 400 miles back.

We might even claim that the current political geography is entirely the result of such interventions that did succeed. Making a claim of their rarity a little too strong perhaps.

I see no signs that the French are pulling out of Mali. I’d like to believe that Europeans are more sensible than Americans, but I suspect that they’re perfectly willing to send other people’s sons off to die for Uncle Sam.

Incidentally, a more recent example of a successful invasion which didn’t lead to a frozen conflict, albeit a rather more strategically sensible one than Grenada, was the Russian seizure of Crimea. (You can argue that the Donbass war is a frozen conflict, but I really doubt that it was part of the original Russian game-plan.)

“After taking part in centuries of bloody conflict, all around the world, Europeans seem mostly to have tired of war.”

Didn’t Macron take the lead in deposing Qaddafi? My info in this was bad to begin with, and worsened by memory, but I thought that the US was a junior partner on that, and initially a reluctant one.
Corrections more or less welcome, inevitable in any case.

Armies only settle questions for more than a brief moment if the issue that the victors fight for are politically significant enough to keep mobilizing its armies and sending them into battle to enforce. The history of the post-Civil War American South pretty clearly illustrates how limited the reach of military “solutions” really are. Northern armies did put any further attempts at Southern secession off the table, because the Southern resistance realized that if they tried it again, Northern armies would be raised and would march again. An outright return to formal chattel slavery probably would be met by re-invasion as well, as it would imply that the South was still dis-respecting the tokens of Northern domination. On the other hand, political and economic disenfranchisement for former slaves would not be met by re-invasion, so Jim Crow was adopted and perfected over time. In other words, the fear of repeat military activity by the dominant power is limited to a very small number of issues and interests.

Obviously the Taliban were aware of the limited nature of US goals in Afghanistan–which, from the halfassed American program for re-making the country into a stable democracy never included a commitment to as much military force on the ground to enforce desirable but not essential social changes (e.g., liberation of Afghan women, raising the abysmal literary rate of the population). Assuming the Taliban are smart enough to not be seen visibly supporting violent terrorism aimed at US territory, they will no doubt enjoy quiet freedom from American arms in the years to come.

American foreign policy elites and journalists would be well advised to realize, in real time, the actual priorities that are fight-worthy, and to stop bloviating and spending trillions on priorities that are “nice but not really worth fighting over” when the going gets tough. And they should certainly not encourage military “goals” that mostly create welfare for arms manufacturers, who are the only Americans who are emerging from this 20-year debacle with their spoils intact.

(Haven’t read most of the comments, pressed for time.)

C. Murthy @1
As someone who has followed this off and on for a while, w/o claims to deep regional expertise, I think it’s too strong to say the Taliban are creatures of the ISI, even if the latter were in some sense responsible for their creation (or of groups that became the Taliban) in the days of mujahideen fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan (when the U.S. also supported some of the groups fighting the Russians). The ISI continued to support the Taliban, no doubt (though perhaps not so much the Pakistani branch of the Taliban, the TTP if I recall correctly), but again, I think “creature” is a bit too strong.

Peter T @9
Except that territorial conquest of Afghanistan in the conventional meaning of the phrase “territorial conquest” was not the U.S.’s aim, nor was it in Vietnam. Rather the aim was to support a government that in neither case managed to secure the deep loyalty of enough of its population to survive a fight by determined, motivated opponents once the external military support was largely withdrawn.

And in the US, weariness with ‘forever wars’ seems finally to be eroding the belief that armies can solve complex problems in other countries

This seems an overly-0ptimistic interpretation to this US person. Let’s see if the US can go 50 years without one of these adventures before we conclude that.

@4: Way to pick utterly irrelevant examples. The sifting out of consequences of a great general war or series of wars (Poland’s border, Ruthenia/Czechia/Slovakia) are by definition not the same as an interventionist expedition, and bringing the Norman invasion of England into it is just silly.

Peter T. You can add Euro-Americans versus native Americans and Euro-Americans versus native Australians to the list of success via demographics. Han Chinese versus Tibetans and other unwilling border peoples are still in progress, but China is willing to play the long game.

Now Afghanistan is less a case of classic colonialism, which is mainly about the capture of resources and trade, but was instead about solving or at least containing a security problem. As were the post conflict occupations of Germany and Japan. The later show that under the right circumstances the project to reform former enemies can sometimes have a happy ending.

One condition that makes a happy resolution unlikely is if the occupying power is seen either as an unapologetic exploiter, or as an unholy infidel. Then even if the “reforms” are welcomed by the majority of the population, the resentment builds, and the end result is often a hard swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction.

I think Peter T has the nub of it:

“Since modern states rely on the more or less willing cooperation of most of the population to function”

It’s as with conquering an economy these days. It’s not really a matter of just replacing the folks on horses who shout at the peasants on the land any more. Say someone did conquer California. Other than the almond trees what part of that economy would anyone actually retain?

So, fair enough, post- the acreage of land itself being important – roughly coincident with the modern fertiliser industry say, Haber Process really only being properly used for that post 1945 – there aren’t that many examples. 1989 showed that the Soviet thing in Central Europe – heck, in many more places than that – didn’t work long term.

Successful interventions to actually take a place seem thin on the ground since then. How much of this is due to not wanting to bother and how much the meagre rewards of trying it I’m not sure. For, what do you actually get if you do conquer a modern economy?

I do have a soft spot for the Sierra Leone/Liberia thing. But then that was in, get the bad guys, leave. There was actually a withdrawal plan all along.

If successful interventions are the exception rather than the rule, it’s natural to ask why they are so popular?

An illuminating contemporary overview of the arguments for going to war:
https://seis.bristol.ac.uk/~plcdib/imprints/bertram.html

Peter T @ 9

“The only way the US could have held Afghanistan is sending most of Texas to live there.”

I’m not sure that would be the only way – but I am sure there are a non-zero number of USians who would be more than happy to send most of Texas to Afghanistan, regardless of whether that led to the US holding it or not…

The only way the US could have held Afghanistan is sending most of Texas to live there.

Win-win!

Why were conquests often more successful in the past? Because conquering powers had no qualms killing large parts of the civilian population, through a mixture of massacres, disease and starvation, until the remaining survivors finally resigned. I read an estimate that the Roman conquest of Gaul reduced the population to a fourth; when the Frankish empire conquered the Saxon tribe in northern Germany, they massacred pretty much all the nobility; and I don’t really need to make the same argument about colonial empires, I think.

That approach isn’t feasible today, so all those Twitterati who now say “should have stayed until the Taliban are defeated” are deluding themselves. Yes, the Taliban could have been defeated, if the USA were ready to kill several millions of people. But even to a hypothetical leader who has no qualms about genocide that would not have been worth the reputational damage and blow-back.

So, why are “interventions” still so popular? Because the opinion makers and leaders are thinking like the aforementioned Twitterati. They see the successes of the past, have swallowed their own nations’ myth-making about how those were achieved by just being strong instead of woke, and don’t realise that they were achieved through unspeakable atrocities, because the atrocities were swept under the carpet and aren’t mentioned in polite conversation.

Another aspect already mentioned above is to what degree forever wars are caused by external interference. A civil war left to itself is decided within a few years at most. But a civil war where each side is supported by a larger, external power can go on for decades, because neither side will run out of resources. The thirty years war in Germany is the classic historical example, with Denmark, the Hapsburg empire, France, and Sweden variously using Germany as a chess board until an estimated half to two-thirds of the population were dead and everything was in ruins. That may have some relevance to Syria and Afghanistan today.

What are we calling the NATO intervention in the Balkans?

I’m seeing a lot of people (including Biden today) expressing some form of the argument that, because this occupation ended in abject failure, it must have been doomed from the start. Rather than proving the disastrous wrongness of abandoning our allies, this sudden collapse should be seen as a vindication of the withdrawal because the NATO mission had obviously not built a stable government after twenty years and a trillion dollars so there was no point in continuing. In other words, we tried our best, but some people are just beyond helping. That this completely contradicts what the administration had been saying all summer about believing in/supporting the Afghan government is apparently irrelevant. The point is to save face by leveraging American apathy and prejudice about third world Muslims and the general ambivalence we all feel about a war even the neo-cons stopped caring about sixteen years ago.

These arguments that successful interventions are improbable even in theory seem of a piece with that logic. For those of us who have long opposed the war and desired an end to US imperialism, this is a tempting argument, but I can’t accept it. It is entirely too convenient to claim that because the US failed in its mission (and was almost certainly wrong to take it on in the first place), then it must have been impossible. Or if it is possible, it requires a level of wanton cruelty that we’re simply too moral/squeamish to go through with (never mind the midnight kidnappings, torture, and flying death robots). This obviously appeals to those of us who oppose military intervention and imperial “nation building” on principle, but it also ignores the various and manifest ways in which the US and allies sabotaged their own efforts and thwarted the self-determination of the Afghan people through corruption, incompetence, inconsistency, and a persistent willingness to accept easy answers and indefinitely postpone difficult but necessary reforms. Afghanistan can tell us nothing about whether a competent and committed occupation (“humanitarian” or otherwise) can rebuild a nation in its own image simply because we never were competent or committed and we hardly cared about the “new” Afghanistan we were building.

History is inertial. Armies, and the military establishment accreted around them, are not just random assemblages of men (and women); they are cultures, societies, they pass down their tribal rites and beliefs. For most of human history the kind of war we’re talking about here—invading another country and achieving a quick military victory—had a straightforward rationale: plunder. The English marched all over France during the Hundred Years War and carried enormous amounts of wealth back home: Windsor Castle was built with French loot and ransom money. At some point this changed, and the question is, when exactly?

I concede we still talk as if war was a simple loot grab, with oil (let’s say) replacing the neighbouring kingdom’s cattle, or gold, or whatnot. But ‘loot’ in the modern sense is a much more complicated and , and in many cases has been replaced by a series of imponderables that—we could argue—stand-in for the inertial belief that ‘we’ have to profit from our invasion. There’s no oil in Afghanistan and the war there has not profited the US and the UK; on the contrary it has left us trillions out of pocket. Imponderables include things like international standing, the balance of power, opinion poll upticks and the US election cycle and so on; but with each of these the deal now is ‘how much are you prepared to pay for this or that perceived benefit?’ I can imagine future nations doing the hard sums and deciding: $X trillion and a 40% chance it’ll influence Y and Z in a way we consider positive? Not worth it. (Of course there are other entities—the arms industry, most notably—that do profit directly from war, but they’re a small sector in absolute terms.)

I’m not sure when the logic of war changed after this manner. The Boer War started out of a situation in which Rhodes used South African gold straightforwardly to pay the British State for military support—but, significantly, it soon spiralled out of the scope of this simple cost-benefit model and ended up costing the British far more than they gained in loot. World War 1 may be too late to mark the shift; it’s probably earlier.

Peter Liberman, in Does Conquest Pay? argued that many modern states have managed to extract considerable resources through conquest, citing German, French, Japanese and Soviet cases. In the immediate term, he is probably right. But the term is very short – a few years in most cases, two decades at most. Whatever the impetus, it does not arise from national cost-benefit analysis.

My link to Logevall’s NYT review of the Malkasian and Whitlock books apparently didn’t get through moderation, so I’m repeating it without the actual link.

Why even mention Granada? Our military encountered a handful of security guards and still managed to get a bunch of Navy Seals drowned by dropping them in high tide.

America has long practiced sloppy imperialism – unlike colonies, like India or, for the French, Indochina, where a committed group from the homeland went and founded enterprises that were intertwined with the colonizing power, America has relied on the policy of overthrowing whoever it disliked and installing very corrupt client governments -think Iran, think Guatamala, think the Dominican Republic, think Brazil, etc. etc. – to make sure that American predators – oil companies, coffee and fruit companies, etc. – are safe to make money and that’s about it. Sloppy imperialism was a bad fit for Afghanistan, cause the only folks making money, there, were defense industries. Which really didn’t need Afghanistan – I suppose the military did to legitimize spending a trillion or so. But other elements of sloppy imperialism were present – a government devoted to peculation and corruption, a laughable education network in which, after twenty years, America’s client had succeeded in reducing female illiteracy to a mere 72 percent – twice the illiteracy of Sudan – and bringing fifty percent of Afghanis over the poverty line – with 48 percent languishing below. These stats are very like the U.S.’s Central American client states. What the U.S. lacked was a ruthless Afghan dictator, perhaps because there was no incentive – you didn’t need to steal through excessive main force when you could steal a little here and there and it would mount up. I suppose the lack of a ruthless dictator is about the end of the cold war. Too much of a bad look, and creating one from scratch is hard. So here we are.

“Meantime things are going to suck for all females” @21

They already do. While steadily declining since 2000, the maternal mortality rate in Afghanistan 2017 was 638 deaths per 100,000 live births. Afghanistan wasn’t the worst, of course, they were 177th out of 186 countries reported. Look at any other metric, and you’ll find the idea that we’re the “good guys,” vis a vis women and the Taliban are the “bad guys,” pretty difficult to maintain.

I’m pretty sure that “females” don’t like watching their children and other family members rousted, detained and killed by an occupying army. That’s just a guess, of course.

Tariq Ali has an excellent take, notable because it refers to an Afghan feminist:

“As for the status of women, nothing much has changed. There has been little social progress outside the NGO-infested Green Zone. One of the country’s leading feminists in exile remarked that Afghan women had three enemies: the Western occupation, the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. With the departure of the United States, she said, they will have two.”

There are some links in the blogpost you can follow up on: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/debacle-in-afghanistan.

Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman et al. get big Pentagon contracts pretty much irrespective of the armed conflicts the U.S. is or is not engaged in (that’s my impression, at least), so I doubt they needed the war in Afghanistan for their bottom lines.

Nor is Rome running Carthage.

If something which lasts half a millennium counts as a failure, then how long does something have to last to count as a success?

It seems, for instance, that in Britain the conquest of large parts of England became more or less sustainable, and Wales (despite major hiccups) has become pretty much so, whereas Ireland was never sustainable and Scotland is very much up for grabs these days.

So, is the rule supposed to be that lasting half a millennium is not enough to count as a success, but lasting three-quarters of a millennium is enough to count as a success? That would be a weirdly specific rule. The American Revolution, has that succeeded yet? Oh, too soon to tell.

J-D, you of course have a point, and perhaps I shouldn’t have presented opportunities for rather trivial nitpicking by making sarcastic remarks. My point, as I think you actually know, was that some invasions are accepted eventually, others not. The collapse of the Roman empire was not, of course, simply caused by uprisings of the locals. (It was, however, in part caused because the locals ceased to be willing to defend the regime, which is not too dissimilar.) The British departure from southern Ireland, however, was.

Thing is, it’s very unlikely that southern Ireland is going back to England. Or Libya or Tunis back to Italy. Or Afghanistan back to the United States. So even if you stay there a thousand years, if over those thousand years you comprehensively fail to win the hearts and minds of the locals, you will eventually be booted out and when you are booted out, that’s a failure.

A success would be something much more like, say, the French conquest of Aquitaine. As far as I can make out, there are no plans to break up France into its constituent parts. Jury’s still out on Spain, though. I suppose the point would be to see whether a country fragments when it’s attacked externally, like Yugoslavia, or goes through a severe crisis, like Czechoslovakia.

“The right way to look at the question is to ask what happened to German living standards when the Nazis ruled Europe.”

What an odd way to measure success, by comparing general living standards ;-)
Most wars in history have probably caused the living standards of the general populations on both sides to decline, though I wonder whether anybody has attempted to measure this systematically. It is more conceivable that in some cases, the living standards of the ruling class significantly improved as a result of successful warfare, at least short term, but even that was hardly a foregone conclusion, and peaceful economic development seems a far safer bet. But then, in the history of capitalism, it is really hard to distinguish the “peaceful economic development” from violent oppression and colonialist/imperialist enterprises.

@JQ Comments in moderation at https://crookedtimber.org/2021/08/14/twigs-and-branches-13/

My point, as I think you actually know, was that some invasions are accepted eventually, others not.

If you think I know what your actual point is, you think wrong. I don’t know what your actual point is.

Nothing lasts forever. If your definition of a success requires that it be something that does not eventually come to an end, then nothing can be a success. To take an example you mentioned, France has controlled Aquitaine for a long time, but that is not something that will continue to be true forever.

I think J-D has it right. slogans like “no blood for oil” hint at a conceptual understanding of foreign wars as a form of internal class warfare. Not only are the human costs largely bourn by the working class for the political benefit of the elite but the public funds expended are disproportionately recouped in profits for the wealthy. I’m not entirely convinced that the defense industry “needs” these wars to justify itself as much as people sometimes allege — not when peacetime military spending remains high — rather I think spending in war mostly constitutes a tremendous waste from which nobody benefits.

However, the rich history of war profiteering suggests that there’s still ways to make a fortune skimming off the top. That’s not because war is profitable, but rather because it involves the transfers of huge amounts of wealth moving through dark channels in chaotic circumstances where no one is held accountable. Governments don’t usually make a profit on plunder, nor does the general public, but people who steal from them certainly can. The insinuation then (sometimes but not always vindicated) is that that’s who we’re really fighting for.

MFb 50: I have to agree with J-D but I would say that the problem goes even deeper. The territory that we now recognize as France has existed as a political entity for many centuries, but not as the same entity. The French Republic is not the absolutist kingdom France even if it has the same borders. Likewise, and a forteriori, it is hopelessly anachronistic to interpret the modern state of Italy as a continuation of the Roman Empire just because its Capital city is geographically situated at the same place and has the same name. By the third century BC, the city state of Rome had conquered most of the Italian peninsula and thus comprised about the same territory that Italy does today. In the meantime of course quite a few things have happened. One can of course try to narrate a continuous history of the Italian peninsula but that narrative doesn’t refer to the same people, the same culture and the same political entities.

So, did the USA get some advantage in winning WW2? Did the USSR?

France and the UK didn’t get great advantages from winning but it is argueable that while they nominally won, they were so debilitated by the end of the conflict that practically they lost.

The USSR as far as I do understand did really have economic benefits after the war, though perhaps those benefits didn’t equate the cost (both human and economic) of the war itself.

The USA did in fact have a very good economic period after the war, but so did the defeated countries (the axis and, in my book, France and the UK).

In a parallel universe where the axis won, would Germany, Italy and Japan be richer than they are in our world? I think not, because I envision this as the axis powers having just another version of the usual european colonial empires, but then if say Germany could get the same level of dominance the USA got in the real world (eg. controlling the whole northern eurasia), who knows?

It is difficult to say because it depends very much on the explanation we give for the very fast economic growth of the postwar years.

@51
‘nastywoman (who may be being sarcastic, it’s always hard to tell) and LFC both appear to be saying the same thing, namely that if you invade a country, destroy its government, take control of its administration and kill large numbers of its inhabitants over a long period of time, that’s OK so long as you mean well’.

Now? –
how in the world??
can somebody??? –
anybody???? –
write something like that after having read:
‘my fellow Americans just haven’t understood yet that you can’t win such (‘cultural’) wars anymore with stupid weapons.
Europeans win them much easier with Tourism -(and Bikinis – Flip-Flops and T-Shirts which say: I went to Kabul and changed Afghanistan)
So –
in other words –
and if it sounds terribly cynical – remember I’m a ‘nasty’ woman –
KABUL should have been made THE MAIN American destination for Spring Break
and ‘the problem’ would have been solved a long time ago.

AND:
‘which could bring US back again to the point that ‘war’ is really a very ineffective and old-fashioned way of ‘conquering’ -(as anybody knows who drives a German Luxury Car)
Or as the old German Saying says:
Heute gehört uns Deutschland
und
Morgen
die ganze Welt!

with very PEACEFUL – BIKINIS – FLIP-FLOPS – T-SHIRTS and FERRARI’S
and
NOT with
stupid weapons!

Understood – MFB?
(and ‘PEACE’ – out)

AND if you guys don’t believe me:
Let’s built a luxury resort in the middle of Kabul – and let’s have the next birthday of Obama with ALL of his 500 invited guests there –

And then let’s see if the Taliban –
from then on – would dare to stop a George Clooney
or
a freed Britney in their Aldiletten!

If successful interventions are the exception rather than the rule, it’s natural to ask why they are so popular?

Everyone here seems to be equating ‘intervention’ with ‘indefinite occupation’ but that’s hardly required. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Gulf War I in 1991, Haiti in 1994, Kosovo in 1999, Libya in 2013 did not result in long-term occupation by foreigners.

Dude, where’s my country?’ was the cry of Arafat and the Mid East nationalists.

The US and Israel contrived to replace them with Islamic fundamentalists such as Hamas and the Taliban who now ask, ‘Dude, where’s my kingdom of God on earth?’

This passes for progress in our faith-based era.

nastywoman @ 65–right on in every sense–Trump set this stage for player Biden and now wants to portray him as producer and director–no actor can take all the blame for a bad show he’s cast in from the start.

That’s an empirical question. Where did the big defense industry lobbying money flow? Did their profit line, in the Clinton years, soar? did the GWOT, which includes Afghanistan and Iraq, both part of the package, end up profiting them or not? Did Halliburton in particular, with the best lobbying presence in D.C., end up recovering from its asbestos disaster? This article helps on the latter, and I’m going to leave it to the reader to discover whether the defense industries profited or not from Afghan and Iraq. https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/04/18/8257012/index.htm I will hazard a guess that if you were an exec at Lockheed pushing the – oh, we’ll profit whether we do Afghan or not – in Dec. 2001, I’m guessing you’d be shoved out.

It makes little sense to compare US occupation of Germany or Japan with Afghanistan. In the former cases, there were deep-rooted liberal and democratic traditions that could be called upon after the fascist elite had been shown that going on with fascism wouldn’t work out. One may have to distinguish different scenarios:

A Western(ised) nation state is occupied by a rival nation state that clearly wants to extract resources for its own benefit or otherwise damage the former. Probably won’t work in the long run without a level brutality that is currently unacceptable.
A Western(ised) nation state is occupied by a rival nation state that merely swaps out one narrowly-on-top elite against another, narrowly-suppressed elite-in-waiting, then takes its hands off again (fascists out, liberals and social democrats from 12 years before back in). High chance of success.
An empire conquers nation states and/or tribal areas and integrates them into its power structure while letting people keep their local traditions, customs, and economic structures, only slowly prodding them towards assimilation with stick-and-carrot. Learn our dominant language, that makes it easier for you to trade; align your interests with ours, and you too can have a career as an officer or bureaucrat; convert to our dominant religion, and you pay less taxes; etc. High chance of success without genocide, although still needs more brutality to establish than currently acceptable; and if the local peoples are not sufficiently assimilated, it will all fall apart again a few hundred years later if the empire shows weakness. Roman empire in Greece, Muslim conquests, Ottoman empire, Austro-Hungary, USSR.
A tribal area is occupied by a colonial power that wants to hand over the land to its own settlers who are coming in in numbers and/or extract resources at the cost of and by destroying the established economic structure of the local population. Probably won’t work in the long run without at least cultural-genocide-level brutality and has, in the past, only worked like that. The model here is the colonial conquest of the Americas, Australia, and much of Africa, but also applies to Roman conquests north of the Alps and perhaps the expansion of the Inca empire, which tried to turn everybody into Quechua and mostly succeeded except with the Aymara.
An area is occupied by a colonial power that is happy to merely swap local leaders who resist them against local leaders who are willing to accept that they will be beholden to the colonial power’s will in foreign policy and have to trade with them as opposed to some other rival colonial power, but otherwise local social structures and traditions remain unchanged. Any threat of future colonial intervention is towards the new local ruler if he doesn’t do as told, but not explicitly towards his rivals or the population, who he is expected to manage himself given perhaps some financial and weapons support. High chance of success if you can find a strong enough local partner, and that approach is what worked for the British Empire in Afghanistan 1880-1919. I would also argue that this is how British meddling in India at least started out, and if one were so inclined one could see the arrangements of the Cold War in a similar light.

The question is, even if none of these scenarios match perfectly, to which of these is the attempt to turn Afghanistan into a “Western” democracy most similar?

MrMister,

WW2 was not a war of conquest from the perspective of the UK, France, USSR, it was a struggle of survival against a conqueror, so it is besides the point to ask if it was economically advantageous for them to win.

As far as I can tell, the relationship between Biden and a large part of the foreign policy community is now broken, perhaps irreparably. The backlash the White House is currently experiencing may end up it much harder for the U.S. to admit defeat and disengage from any conflict on the Eurasian land mass.

@Alex SL “Learn our dominant language, that makes it easier for you to trade; align your interests with ours, and you too can have a career as an officer or bureaucrat; convert to our dominant religion, and you pay less taxes; etc. High chance of success without genocide,…”

This reminds me of a typical (or relatively typical) Soviet official in Central Asia. Communist and atheist during his working years, he would immediately turn into a faithful mosque-going traditional Muslim upon retirement. Maskirovka.

Culture tends to reproduce itself for a long time, even after becomes seemingly disadvantageous. Especially when it’s perceived to be victimized. Irreversible mass-assimilation may take centuries. Anathematized in the 17th century, there are, apparently, still millions of Old Believers in Russia.

Could there be a more damning indictment of that whole bloated idol termed “modern civilization” than this amounts to? Civilization is, then, the big, hollow, resounding, corrupting, sophisticating, confusing of mere brutal momentum and irrationality that brings forth fruits like this! It is safe to say that one Christian missionary, whether primitive, Protestant or Catholic, of the original missionary type, one Buddhist or Mohammedan of a genuine saintly sort, one ethical reformer or philanthropist, or one disciple of Tolstoi would do more real good in these islands than our whole army and navy can possibly effect with our whole civilization at their back. He could build up realities, in however small a degree; we can only destroy the inner realities; and indeed destroy in a year more of them than a generation can make good.
The Philippine Tangle
by William James
Boston Evening Transcript (March 1, 1899)

MrMister,

Of course WW2 ended in occupation of Germany by the USA, UK, France, USSR; but the starting point of the thread was, I quote, “If successful interventions are the exception rather than the rule, it’s natural to ask why they are so popular?” It is NOT the case that WW2 started with the UK saying, hey, let’s intervene in Germany. That particular war was forced onto the victors.

As for cultural differences, it seems fairly clear that it was easier for Ancient Rome to conquer and manage Ancient Greece than Germanic tribes, or for Prussia to annex Saxony than to annex Namibia. Cultural differences or similarities matter because it is more easy to integrate somebody into your power- and economic structure who comes pre-adapted to that structure because their own structure is pretty similar already, than somebody who for example may not even have a monetary economy to pay taxes to your colonial administration with. That is no more “War of Civilisations” than, say, the observation that diplomats need some shared language to negotiate, or that agreed-on terms and standards are beneficial for trade.

@60 “The USSR as far as I do understand did really have economic benefits after the war, though perhaps those benefits didn’t equate the cost (both human and economic) of the war itself.”

The only real benefit there was national security, matters of national survival. Having safe neighbors, economically, military, and politically integrated states along its borders.

For that matter, think of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The US establishment was ready to start a nuclear war over it. Did ‘economic benefits’ even enter the equation?

Why wasn’t it decided [Germany, South Korean, Japan] were “quagmires?”

Because no one in those countries was trying to kill the people at the bases and force them to leave? Because the countries were stable, peaceful, and improving in ways that Afghanistan wasn’t? Is this a real question?

NATO deaths had been quite low (none in the past year afaik)
My understanding is that this is a consequence of the deal reached with Trump – the US agreed to leave, and the Taliban stopped fighting against US troops. Is there any reason to think that if the US had gone back on this deal this situation would have kept going? If not, then again, this isn’t really a good question. You can’t really postulate that the US should get the benefit of an agreement to withdraw and then not actually withdraw.

@Alex Sl

It’s not that clear that the Romans had cultural problems assimilating german tribes: many of the romano-barbaric kingdoms were quite romanized, and for example most of the “barbarians” were already christianized.

Look at Odoacer (the guy who deposed the last western roman emperor) or at his successor Theoderic: they were quite romanized and Theoderic spent his youth in Byzantium:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odoacer

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodoric_the_Great

Theoderic even said something like: “All goths want to live like romans, only poor romans want to live like goths” (from the Wikipedia page).

It is more likely that there was a socio-economic collapse in the roman world, and/or that the roman empire was just too big for roman technology to keep it running.

If we speak of economic structures, this is exactly my point: did “the west” actually try to integrate Afghanistan into world markets?
In my opinion no.

Even for the old colonial systems, european powers didn’t really try to integrate colonies in the world market, the purpose was often to lock in the colonies as captive export market/natural resource exporters, generally preventing them to commerce with other european countries.

‘It occurs to me that the US still has huge military bases is Germany and Japan, but we don’t call that an “occupation.” South Korea as well. Would those governments have become strong and stable and peaceful without them? Why wasn’t it decided those countries were “quagmires?”

some German Neo Nazi Nationalists believe that is a ‘Occupation Force’ and Germany won’t be entirely ‘free’ before the Americans -(and ALL Disney Programming) won’t be gone – that’ why I believe that if you want to conquer a ‘fureign’ country you always have
to start with building some kind of ‘Disneyland’ there –
with the exception of France –
as the French right away understand that you try to conquer their country with the
GREATEST Force of ALL…
as the French right away see your

If the question is, was invading Afghanistan actually a good idea? then then many post WWII comparisons are pertinent.

On the other hand, if the question is, what the hell was Tony Blair thinking? When e.g. deciding to invade Iraq – despite mass protests at the time – then we might need to look to pre WWII examples to understand the motivation.

British politics has a problem that it has failed to come to terms with the end of the British Empire. Post WWII, these kind of imperialist ventures have not had a good record of success. But maybe that has yet to fully enter the political imagination of our leaders.

@92 “… if the question is, what the hell was Tony Blair thinking? When e.g. deciding to invade Iraq – despite mass protests at the time – then we might need to look to pre WWII examples to understand the motivation.”

I disagree. I think Blair was thinking: “military intervention worked in Kosovo in 1999 and Sierra Leone in 2000, and therefore will work in Afghanistan in 2001.”

Why not give the Taliban at least some benefit of the doubt? Lets see if they can turn things around. When things calm down, they’ll need bank clerks and the like. Sure, you don’t want to live under Sharia Law, but that’s the way large numbers of countries in the Middle East work.

It is unclear what point is intended. I know that many people live under conditions that I would not want to live under; many people live under conditions that they do not want to live under. The fact that many people live under conditions X and Y demonstrates no significant conclusion that I can think of, about the conditions or about the people.

But my point is that some members of those societies have figured out how to live in and deal with, the systems there.

The point remains unclear. It’s true that people find ways to live under and deal with many different conditions, but since this includes both good conditions and bad conditions, this leads to no significant conclusion that I can think of. People live under many different conditions; people also die under many different conditions; I don’t know what use can be made of these observations.

I love the way Americans just disregard the fact that 62,000 Afghan soldiers at least have been killed in this war – because they just don’t exist. They didn’t exist for the Afghanistan government, either, since that government refused to pay them or feed them. I wonder what happens to armies that are not fed or paid? It is a mystery!

If the British experience of occupying Germany is pertinent, lets look back and see what that entailed.
There were around 800,000 Commonwealth soldiers in Germany at the end of 1945
vs.
over 100,000 british soldiers PASSED THROUGH afghanistan from 2001 to 2021. For comparison sake, the british had 54,000 people staffing the occupation administration by 1946.
It cost the British 80 million pounds just to maintain the occupation in 1945-1947. That amounts to a good quarter of all tax revenues in the same period. In terms of inflation, that amount is now equal to 3,816,000,000 pounds. By comaprison, the Brits spent 300-400 million pounds in 2001, and their expenditures fell 81 percent afterwards.
The British had no sense whatseoever that Afghanistan had the importance of Germany, nor did the Americans, and to compare the occupations is pure comedy. I guess freedom isn’t free! Where are those 800,000 commonwealth troops, anyway.

I disagree. I think Blair was thinking: “military intervention worked in Kosovo in 1999 and Sierra Leone in 2000, and therefore will work in Afghanistan in 2001.”

‘This hammer worked to drive those nails, therefore it will work to drive this screw.’

Since we like to muse about history: why not compare Western “nation building” in Iraq and Afghanistan with Napoleonic occupations e. g. in Spain, Netherlands, the Rhineland, and Switzerland? Napoleon plundered shamelessly but he also brought progressive political reforms and to some extent freed oppressed populations. The results were very mixed. Occupation was costly and often met with bloody resistance. Some political reforms endured but the more lasting effect of the occupations, especially in Germany, was to taint liberalism as foreign imposed tyranny. Which I have always suspected is precisely the effect of Western efforts in Afghanistan etc.

Alex 82 and MisterMr 88: “it was easier for Ancient Rome to conquer and manage Ancient Greece than Germanic tribes”

To begin with, there wasn’t really anything to “conquer and manage” East of the Rhine. Contrary to the Greeks, the Germanic tribes had no cities, no centralized political structures, and no surplus production. Their interest from Roman perspective was mainly as mercenaries for Roman armies and as border raiders to be defended against. In the case of Odoacer and quite a few other Germanic leaders, it was both. Many were high officers in the service of Roman emperors but when they weren’t paid sufficiently, they could also be raiders. Or conversely, a leader of a sufficiently effective band of “barbaric” border raiders could beome a Roman general and put his unit into the service of Roman border defense. Fascinating.

Sorry about the lack of clarity.

Practically every change of government produces some good consequences for some people and some bad consequences for some people, is welcomed by some people and the reverse by some people. These things are so obviously and so generally true that it’s hard to tell why they would be worth mentioning with reference to this particular case; but if there is supposed to be any point being made beyond those obvious generalities, it remains unclear.

More particularly, your observations don’t justify the conclusion that it is, on balance, a good thing that the Taliban have taken over; but then, it isn’t clear what view (if any) you would take of that conclusion.

Also more particularly, since it isn’t clear what ‘fixing Islam’ could mean, it isn’t clear (a fortiori) how it could be the sort of thing that could be anybody’s job.

If we are to talk of historical parallels, the modern version of the Western Roman experience would be if the Afghans had invaded the US seeking admission as the 51st to 55th states (carved out of a swathe from Texas to South Dakota), been granted their wish but found that in the absence of qualified lawyers they had to make do with a mix of Sharia, AK-47s and a bad translation of the Mexican constitution picked up en route.

Tm @95

Re the three networks’ coverage. They are half-hour evening broadcasts, with ads. So of course they didn’t cover Afghanistan in depth. That wd have been true irrespective of what was happening w the withdrawal, because the networks cover “news” defined in a certain, somewhat sensationalistic way.

However it’s been decades since the three networks defined and exhausted the news “space” in terms of TV and radio in the U.S. (not to mention other media). There’s cable (CNN, MSNBC, etc. et al), which I don’t watch, there’s PBS NewsHour (available both on TV and on radio, at least where I live), which does not a flawless but a much better job than the networks, there’s Pacifica for a more leftish slant, there’s NPR etc. etc.

Something I’ve been thinking about is how this matches the mainstream response to Defunding the Police. To oversimplify one of the issues with police misconduct, it’s that we’re using cops for things which we should most definitely not involve cops. Dealing with homelessness or people undergoing mental health crises. But we use an armed police response because that’s all we know. That’s how these things are done.

Forever wars are just the same thing on a bigger scale. We deploy military forces on humanitarian missions all the time. It’s like we only know how to interact with things through the projection of force. Would we be better served using any other approach than guys with guns? Probably. But we don’t – not at the local level, nor at the international level.

There’s parallels. One reason we use cops instead of anything else is because we fund cops. The only city department that has adequate funding is usually the police. So when things come up, the only people with the capacity to respond is the one service that hasn’t been subject to decades of austerity. Holds true at the national level too – cuts to the military budget are met with the same outraged histrionics as the calls to Defund the Police. I think this is a result of the advocacy you get for various measures. The people who want to cut services always exempt the police and the military. People who want to curb the police and military are people who have less of an issue with government spending. So there’s no real pressure to cut those budgets, and so they grow constantly and voraciously.

The other big parallel is of course the idolatry. The hero worshipping of cops and soldiers. That also likely has a big role in why these government sectors get solid funding as well as why we’re so eager to deploy them whenever and wherever possible.

So I don’t think it has anything to do with results, it’s just our reflex to project power and coerce compliance through the threat (or the actual use) of violence. Through attrition and austerity, the system has made that the only response we can make – and we’ve grown accustomed to ignoring any negative outcomes that it produces.

The odd thing about “defund the police” is the penny-pinching rhetoric it proudly shares with right-wing proponents of starving the beast, a strange kind of left-wing austerity politics.

Defund the Police is a great slogan. The criticisms against it are exactly the same criticisms laid against “Black Lives Matter” six years ago. “But it’s divisive” and “bad faith arguments will be made against it”. Six years ago, BLM polled as well as Defund does now, and now BLM has mainstream acceptance.

Did this take many years to get to? Yes it did. But realistically, actual meaningful police reform is also going to take a LONG time. The need is to push the window on this discussion, and that’s achieved with the Defund slogan.

Here’s why it’s great:

It’s short and simple.
It’s a call to action.
It actually channels the outrage that egregious episodes of police misconduct generate into action. Specifically, Defunding just requires defunding – a simple change to budget allocations – a one and done action. Reform however requires constant vigilance and pressure to prevent police departments from subverting or undermining reform efforts – which is a pattern that has repeated itself countless times.

Too much of police reform is caught up in “but what about the good cops”. Defund takes the focus away from good cops vs bad cops. It reframes the argument as “what are police for anyways?”

Even the strong negative reactions it provokes are a launching point for discussion. Why can’t we defund the police? We defund literally everything else. Does there exist a city without massive backlogs for repair and maintenance of municipal infrastructure? Is a cop’s salary more important than water mains not bursting? Defunding any city service is totally normal, in fact it’s practically a tradition! And yet people freak out at the mere idea of police budget cuts. That’s a great point to hammer – why are police budgets so sacred? Why is it more important than say food safety inspections for local restaurants?

Final point – the reason BLM has become mainstream accepted is because the activists stuck by it, In the face of the pithy “All Lives Matter” crew, they held fast to the “unpopular” and “divisive” slogan. And then cops kept killing Black people for no reason at all. The bad apples kept acting like racist and violent psychopaths who know they are immune to repercussions. Every incident of brutality was punctuated by the words Black Lives Matter. And going forward, every incident of police brutality will be punctuated by the words Defund the Police. That’s how public opinion is going to get shifted.

Hardly. Your assertion begs the question. It assumes that police prevent crime and actually do something positive for public safety. That’s the point of reframing the question – to challenge that assumption. Do police prevent murders? No. They barely solve them after the fact. That’s the fundamental issue here. Police accountability is a farce because cops can rely on scaremongering for support. As if 10% fewer cops will result in The Purge.

AOC had a good take on this – when asked what it would look like if there were far fewer cops, she said it would look like suburbs. Where there are far fewer cops.

As for your comparison of Defund and BLM – I disagree. They are both clear, in fact Defund is clearer since it is an explicit call to action that states exactly what the ask is. You don’t have to interpret or read in anything. It’s just Defund the Police. And yes, people do in fact make it out to mean things it doesn’t, but that isn’t even blunting the message. For any audience that will hear it in good faith, Defund is an excellent message. It lays out the exact parameters of the argument and if one takes it seriously, then we attack the fundamental issue – that police departments are treated as sacred so they never have to worry about accountability. For those who will not engage it in good faith, no slogan is viable, so it doesn’t matter.

Here’s the point – is there anything else that gets the same degree of protection as police budgets? I say no. Nothing is more important than paying cops – that is the number one priority of any local government. Why? Why is that? Why can literally anything else get cut except cops? I think the answer is this unexamined assumption and unproven belief that cops make things safer. And there’s precious little data that even remotely hints that this is the case.

The criticisms against it are exactly the same criticisms laid against “Black Lives Matter” six years ago. “But it’s divisive” and “bad faith arguments will be made against it”. Six years ago, BLM polled as well as Defund does now, and now BLM has mainstream acceptance.

Imho it’s very unlikely to catch on anywhere other than US (part of Corbyn’s general election platform was actually *increased^ police funding!) “Black lives matter” was never “divisive”, it’s stating something that anybody except for extreme racists has to agree with.

That’s a great point to hammer – why are police budgets so sacred? Why is it more important than say food safety inspections for local restaurants?

“Defund” doesn’t mean “reallocate the funding to something nicer”.

From the point of view of the rest of the world I’m pretty sure the best thing Americans could do would be to defund the CIA and/or the Pentagon but some reason that isn’t getting a look-in.

Amid Afghan Chaos, a C.I.A. Mission That Will Persist for Years
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/us/politics/cia-afghanistan.html