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In the New Statesman, George Friedman of Stratfor, uses a geopolitical paradigm for a fascinating review of the history of global powers and a look at the potential rise of new powers.
Japan and Turkey form an alliance to attack the US. Poland becomes America’s closest ally. Mexico makes a bid for global supremacy, and a third world war takes place in space. Sounds strange? It could all happen.
In 1492, Columbus sailed west. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. These two events bracketed the European age. Once, Mayans lived unaware that there were Mongols, who were unaware there were Zulus. From the 15th century onwards, European powers collectively overwhelmed the world, creating the first truly global geopolitical system in human history, to the point where the fate of Australian Aborigines was determined by British policy in Ireland and the price of bread in France turned on the weather in Minnesota.
Europe simultaneously waged a 500-year-long civil war of increasing savagery, until the continent tore itself apart in the 20th century and lost its hold on the world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no longer a single European nation that could be considered a global power of the first rank.
Another unprecedented event took place a decade or so earlier. For 500 years, whoever controlled the North Atlantic controlled Europe’s access to the world and, with it, global trade. By 1980, the geography of trade had shifted, so that the Atlantic and Pacific were equally important, and any power that had direct access to both oceans had profound advantages. North America became the pivot of the global system, and whatever power dominated North America became its centre of gravity. That power is, of course, the United States.
It is geography combined with the ability to exploit it that matters. …
…Geopolitics assumes two things: first, that human beings organise themselves into units larger than families and that they have a natural loyalty to the things they were born into, the people and the places; second, that the character of a nation is determined to a great extent by geography, as is the relationship between nations. We use the term “geography” broadly. It includes the physical characteristics of a location, but it goes beyond that to look at the effects of a place on individuals and communities. These are the foundation of geopolitical forecasting. …
…The world is Americentric. The US marshals the economic resources of North America, controls the world’s oceans and space, projects force where it wishes – wisely or not. The US is to the world what Britain once was to Europe. Both nations depended on control of the sea to secure their interests. Both nations understood that the best way to retain control of the sea was to prevent other nations from building navies. Both understood that the best way to do that was to maintain a balance of power in which potential challengers spent their resources fighting each other on land, rather than building fleets that could challenge their control of the sea. …
Before we get to the main event today, which is George Will’s Afghan bug-out column, we have some business with another of our apostates. So now David Brooks is falling deeply out of ObamaLove. Jonah Goldberg has the story in The Corner.
… According to Brooks, the reason why Obama is falling apart is that he’s married himself to the very liberal Democratic leadership. Brooks thinks this was a horrible tactical and strategic mistake and, he’s right! But why did he make it? Brooks ends his column with this partial explanation: “Events have pushed Barack Obama off to the left. Time to rebalance.”
Oh those horrible events! They make criminals rob liquor stores. John Edwards cheated on his cancer-stricken wife even as he was using her as a campaign issue because of “events.” Larry Craig was driven to that bathroom stall by “events.” I am overserved at open bars because those pernicious events won’t leave me alone.
Maybe, just maybe, Barack Obama wasn’t driven to the left by events but, rather, he was driving them thataway?
Brooks, it seems to me, is still holding out hope for the possibility that if we “let Obama be Obama” he’ll tack to the center because he really is that bipartisan, moderate, Niebuhr-grocking 21st century man that caused so many otherwise sensible conservatives to go off their feed.
That seems highly implausible to me. Obama has been Obama, and that’s why he’s in the predicament he’s in. He is the author of these events, not a victim of them. …
George Will thinks that it’s time to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
…The U.S. strategy is “clear, hold and build.” Clear? Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: The Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state.
Military historian Max Hastings says Kabul controls only about a third of the country — “control” is an elastic concept — and ” ‘our’ Afghans may prove no more viable than were ‘our’ Vietnamese, the Saigon regime.” Just 4,000 Marines are contesting control of Helmand province, which is the size of West Virginia. The New York Times reports a Helmand official saying he has only “police officers who steal and a small group of Afghan soldiers who say they are here for ‘vacation.’ ” Afghanistan’s $23 billion gross domestic product is the size of Boise’s. Counterinsurgency doctrine teaches, not very helpfully, that development depends on security, and that security depends on development. Three-quarters of Afghanistan’s poppy production for opium comes from Helmand. In what should be called Operation Sisyphus, U.S. officials are urging farmers to grow other crops. Endive, perhaps?
Even though violence exploded across Iraq after, and partly because of, three elections, Afghanistan’s recent elections were called “crucial.” To what? They came, they went, they altered no fundamentals, all of which militate against American “success,” whatever that might mean. Creation of an effective central government? Afghanistan has never had one. U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry hopes for a “renewal of trust” of the Afghan people in the government, but the Economist describes President Hamid Karzai’s government — his vice presidential running mate is a drug trafficker — as so “inept, corrupt and predatory” that people sometimes yearn for restoration of the warlords, “who were less venal and less brutal than Mr. Karzai’s lot.” …
…U.S. forces are being increased by 21,000, to 68,000, bringing the coalition total to 110,000. About 9,000 are from Britain, where support for the war is waning. Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable. …
Peter Wehner responds to George Will in Contentions.
…It appears to be Will’s principle that when he signs up and speaks out, when he marshals his eloquent and influential words on behalf of war, he will strongly support that war, but only for a season; only so long as it goes quickly, smoothly, and without complications. If, however, the conflict gets hard — if progress is slow and setbacks are incurred, if lives are lost and the war doesn’t end on his time line — Will is ready to declare, as he does in his column today, that “Genius . . . sometimes consists of knowing when to stop.” Translation: he’s ready to up and quit.
Here is a disturbing fact to ponder: If George Will were commander in chief, we would, under his leadership, have begun and lost two wars of enormous consequence. The damage to America — militarily, geopolitically, and morally — would be staggering. The boon to militant Islam — militarily, geopolitically, and in terms of morale — would be incalculable. Yet nowhere in his most recent column does Will even begin to grapple with what surrender in Afghanistan would mean — to that country, to Pakistan, to jihadists around the world, to confidence in America’s word and will, and to our national-security interests. And while Afghanistan, like Iraq, is a very difficult undertaking, declaring defeat at this stage is unwarranted and terribly unwise. If General David Petraeus thinks the task is hopeless, then I will take a hard second look at the war. But if George Will declares it hopeless, I will simply take a hard second look at his record.
Mr. Will has earned the reputation as one of the finest columnists alive, and one of the better ones our country has ever produced. I have admired him in the past, and I learn from him still. But on Iraq and Afghanistan, he has been wrong, unreliable, and unsteady.
In 1983 the French journalist and intellectual Jean-Francois Revel wrote How Democracies Perish. It was a withering critique of the West’s loss of nerve and will in the face of the totalitarian threat it faced. In his book, Revel wrote, “Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them.” In a column praising Revel’s book, George Will wrote, “Defense of democracy depends on pessimists who are not defeatists. It depends on spirited realists such as Jean-Francois Revel.”
Now, like then, America needs spirited realists, not defeatists. We need individuals who believe a nation must be willing to fight for what is right even when it is hard. We need people who are going to resist the temptation to eagerly support war at the outset and then prematurely give up on it. …
Frederick W. Kagan has a sharply worded reply to some inaccuracies and characterizations in Will’s column.
In response to George Will’s column, “Why are we still in Afghanistan?,” it is worth noting some factual inaccuracies. There are considerably more than 4,000 counterinsurgents in Helmand Province. Will may find the British contribution “risible” — a rather offensive statement considering the number of soldiers Britain has lost in Afghanistan and the size of its military contributions to both Iraq and Afghanistan; others might make various more specific criticisms of the British performance from a technical perspective; but there are still 9,000 British military personnel in Afghanistan — most of them in Helmand, and most of them fighting hard. This misstatement is part of a larger problem summed up in the following two sentences:
Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.
If we are quoting counterinsurgency theory, then we might do well to be specific about it. COIN theory calls for one counterinsurgent for every 50 people in a conflict area (although this is hardly a hard-and-fast law, it turns out to be a reasonably good rule of thumb). There are perhaps 16 million people in the Pashtun belt — the area in which almost all insurgent activity occurs in Afghanistan. The one-to-50 ratio would call for about 320,000 counterinsurgents in that area. But that group would include indigenous forces. Granting Will’s anecdotal observations that the Afghan police are at best ineffective (which is far too sweeping a statement), the Afghan National Army is at least as good as many of the organizations that have functioned as counterinsurgents in Iraq. The ANA numbers about 90,000 right now, and it can be expanded to 134,000 next year, and perhaps 240,000 within a couple of years after that. There are around 100,000 U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan now. So: How inconceivable is it? And for how long?
The surge of forces that some (including me) are proposing is intended to bridge the gap between current Afghan capacity and their future capacity, while simultaneously reducing the insurgency’s capabilities. Whatever may happen in Afghanistan, counterinsurgency theory does not call for the deployment of hundreds of thousands of coalition forces for decades. Lastly, neither waving the bloody shirt nor rudely disparaging the efforts of allies who have shed their own blood alongside our troops is appropriate to this discussion. But doing both in the same column is simply reprehensible.
Also in The Corner, Rich Lowry states that a troop withdrawal will negatively impact Pakistan’s counter-insurgency efforts.
…Will says “Pakistan actually matters.” That’s a very important reason to care about Afghanistan too. For the first time, Pakistan has been undertaking serious counter-insurgency operations in the border areas. And we have been supporting them with counter-insurgency operations in adjacent areas in Afghanistan. Just as Pakistan begins to get serious are we going to pull the rug out from under them? The Durand Line obviously works both ways. Just as Pakistani under-performance over the years has created a haven for fighters to infiltrate into Afghanistan, our under-performance would create a haven in Afghanistan for fighters to infiltrate Pakistan. And there’s no such thing as simply guarding the border since there’s no border to speak of. If you want to control the border you have to control the population near it, which means you can’t just rely on special operations forces and have to undertake counter-insurgency operations that require boots on the ground and, ultimately, a functioning indigenous army and government.
In other words, if you think Afghanistan matters at all, something on the order of what we are attempting there now is necessary. If you think Afghanistan doesn’t matter and should be allowed to fall to hell, that’s another thing. But the problem is that it abuts another country that inarguably matters and whose border regions are a haven to al Qaeda. That’s why there’s no easy escape …
Mark Steyn also responds wondering what our objectives are in Afghanistan.
Rich, Kathryn et al, I’m less hostile to the George Will column. It seems to me we have no very clear war aims in Afghanistan, which is never a good position to be in.
Are we “nation-building”? With US commanders talking about ending Afghanistan’s “culture of poverty”, it sounds like it. Yet, even assuming you could build a nation in any meaningful sense of the word on Afghan soil, such a nation would be profoundly uncongenial to us. …
…The much misunderstood British strategy in Afghanistan was, by contrast, admirably clear-sighted, and worked (for them) for over a century. They took a conscious decision not to incorporate the country formally within the Indian Empire because they didn’t want a direct British land border with Russia. So instead they were content with a highly decentralized semi-client state and a useful buffer between the British Empire and the Tsars, a set-up that worked well (from London’s point of view) for over a century until it all fell apart in the Sixties when Moscow started outbidding the Brits for the loyalty of various factions – or what passes for loyalty in that part of the world.
The British strategy was cold and calculated and, if you care about Afghan child mortality rates and women’s rights, very unprogressive. But it was less deluded than asking western troops to die in pursuit of the chimera of ending a “culture of poverty” while in reality providing multilateral window-dressing for the country’s slippage back to warlordism and Sharia.