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One of my distinguished co-bloggers at Chicago Boyz, John Jay, penned a truly outstanding post on China, incorporating history, culture, economics and linguistics, using the famous  Manchurian warlord and opium addict, ” the Young Marshal ” Chang Hsüeh-liang, as a springboard:

“ Household Armies”

“….China has historically allowed certain social forces to compete with loyalty to the state. Linguistic (and in the cases of the Hui and Uyghur, religious) groups have always retained a large amount of autonomy through the provincial governments, and in some cases provinces such as Guandong can almost be thought of as a separate country within China due to their linguistic (non-Mandarin) identity and economic self sufficiency. But Guandong gets little voice in Beijing relative to the economic might of the Pearl  River Delta. Cantonese don’t care, as long as the kleptocracy in Beijing leaves them alone (after they make their formal obeisance) most of the time, and does not attempt to steal too much wealth. That may change as peasants out West mobilize and force the central government to send more goodies their way. China never hit upon the Anglosphere’s solution of a Republican governmental federation of competing interests akin to either Great Britain or the competing American states – the Imperial authorities always wished to pretend that they were in complete control, while ceding a lot of practical authority to the provinces.  

Conflicts between the linguistic periphery and the Mandarin-speaking center have contributed to the ebb and flow of centralized power in China since even before the Ten kingdoms of the South broke away from the Five Dynasties that succeeded the Tang. The Chinese have historically seen history as cyclical, rather than linear. I think that this at least in part stems from the fact that since the fall of the Tang Dynasty, China has never bitten the bullet to reform itself by completely rethinking its social system. Systems have arisen as kludges to deal with a particular problem, but have never dealt with the fundamental flaws in society, only with their surface manifestations. As James Sheridan wrote in “Chinese Warlord: The Career of Feng Yu-hsiang” :  

Read in full here.

PAKISTAN’S REAL CRISIS

Is not that the military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf has imposed martial law. Much like Poland under Jaruzelski or the recent crackdown in Burma, martial law in Pakistan was not a transition from one kind of state to another but rather a shift from the hypocrisy of a velvet glove to the honesty of an iron fist. Pakistan is no more a dictatorship today than it was a month earlier.

Pakistanis, it must be said, are not universally outraged by dictatorship per se. The wily and ruthless General Zia ul- Haq was a fairly popular figure in his day. Wild-eyed deobandi fanatics, opposed to Musharraf’s regime, long for a Sharia-state tyranny that would be far more brutal and incompetent than is the current government in Islamabad. Nor is the growing corruption of the army in Pakistan the central problem; Benazir Bhutto’s party, the democratic faction, once looted government coffers with gusto while wrecking the economy. Her father, once Prime Minister but later executed by Zia, was a notable menace to the concept of good governance.

Pakistan’s central problem is a crisis of legitimacy. Nationalism is a waning force these days and even anti-Indian feeling is sustained by a marriage of nationalism with Islamist radicalism. Once, a Pakistani leader could declare that Pakistani’s ” would eat grass” to make their country the nuclear equal of Hindu India. No more. Musharraf’s fear of “national suicide” did not rouse his countrymen to his side and there are some, even in the army, who would hold up jihad above the nation. Well above.

Without nationalism or state competence, people fall back on primary loyalties. Pakistan has no intrinsic reason to exist unless it can be welded together in men’s minds.

ARABISM, NATION-STATES AND ISLAM

This should intrigue readers with a range of research interests and disciplinary perspectives. Reading it right now as I post.

Dr. Christine Helms – “Arabism And Islam: Stateless Nations And Nationless States” (PDF)

Hat tip to Colonel Lang.

THE 4GW FESTIVAL OF FABIUS MAXIMUS

” To summarize, we seek to radically change the cultures and political systems for much of the world, to halt foreign revolts and civil wars of which we do not approve, to bring global peace and prosperity, to make friends (even with those states whose rise we seek to restrain), and to “transform” our so far unreformable national security apparatus. Those who thought President Bush was kidding about these learned better in the months following our invasion of Iraq.”

– Fabius Maximus

For some time now, an author whose nom de guerre is “Fabius Maximus”, after the ancient Roman general of the Punic wars, has been a regular and at times, prolific, contributor to the Boydian and 4GW school oriented Defense & the National Interest. Fabius, who comments here at Zenpundit on occasion, also set off one of the most popular, if heated and controversial, threads at The Small Wars Council, catching the attention of noted COIN strategist Col. David Kilcullen. Kilcullen’s theories later became a subject of frequent critique from Fabius in his DNI articles.

While I had hoped to meet Fabius in person at Boyd 2007, he did not attend and I am not privy to his identity or professional background. Fabius’ arguments must rise or fall entirely on their own merit and he has been content to engage his critics on this basis at the SWC and elsewhere. Clearly he is a member of the 4GW school and is an admirer of Col. John Boyd, William Lind, Dr. Martin van Creveld and Dr. Chet Richards but has not shrunk from advancing his own ideas or original criticisms.

Recently, Fabius completed his tenth article in a series on America’s Long War for DNI and, as Fabius has entertained and enraged members of the community of “reform” defense intellectuals and COIN practitioners, it is timely for us to take stock of his strategic argument:

The Long War Series – from DNI’s Fabius Maximus Archive

Part X – One step beyond Lind: what is America’s geopolitical strategy?
Part IX – 4GW at work in a community near you,
Part VIII – How to accurately forecast trends of the Iraq War,
Part VII – Kilcullen explains all you need to know about the Iraq War,
Part VI – The bad news is that Lind’s good news is wrong,
Part V – The Iraq War as a warning for America,
Part IV – Beyond Insurgency: An End to Our War in Iraq,
Part III – Stories or statistics? Read and compare to find the truth!
Part II – News from the Front: America’s military has mastered 4GW!
Part I – America takes another step towards the “Long War,”

I have read the roughly 20,000 words offered here previously and I re-read them for this post. I have also read most of the authors of the original works that Fabius Maximus cites in his series. Therefore, I feel qualified to offer a few observations in regard to the strategic paradigm that this body of work represents and the assumptions, clearly stated as well as implicit, upon which it is built.

Many of the specific analytical criticisms of American policy and performance in Iraq and Afghanistan made by Fabius are incisive, some are rather questionable and a few are brilliant. I encourage you to read his efforts for yourself rather than simply accepting my word for it. What interests me most though, given the scope of the series, are his premises. As I discern them, they are:

That 4GW is the environment in which we find ourselves conducting operations – and doing so quite poorly at that with a military predisposed toward 2GW offensives. Or irrelevantly on the strategic level where we happen to be executing COIN well on the tactical level.

We cannot significantly affect the internal dynamics of alien societies that we understand poorly or not at all, regardless of the carrots or sticks used. We are marginal factors at best.

American war policy is being constructed on the false analogy of the Cold War model.

Al Qaida is more phantom than menace.

War is the wrong conceptual metaphor and the wrong operational-bureaucratic response to the conflict in which we find ourselves.

Our response, which serves bureaucratic and factional interests at homes, undermines our global strategic position and wastes our economic strength.

A better grand strategy for America is nonintervention and reducing friction with the rest of the world. Or failing that, at least bolstering states, any states, rather than collapsing them into failure with military attack or other pressures ( Lind’s “Centers of Order vs. Centers of Disorder”)

If George Kennan argued for “Containment” of Soviet Communism in his “X” article the best descriptor of the grand strategy of Fabius Maximus might be ” Conservancy” – dialing down our kinetic response to terrorism to the surgical level and recognizing this contest as more ideological conflict than war and, in general, recognizing our limitations in attempting to become masters of the universe. Many readers would associate this paradigm with the Left but I believe that to be incorrect. Instead, reflecting a deeply paleoconservative reading of history and American traditions in foreign policy that historian Walter A. McDougal called “Promised Land” and others “city on a hill” and ” isolationism”.

The virtues of “conservancy” as I interpret Fabius is that it minimizes both costs and future commitments for the United States, leaving us better able to afford to deal with strategic threats to vital national interests, when unanticipated threats arise, as they surely will. It would serve as a reality check on statesmen to pursue fewer, more coherent, simpler, more easily realizable and markedly cheaper objectives, which will have far higher probability of success ( as opposed to say, attacking Iran while engaged in Iraq. Or perhaps invading Russia in winter or fighting a land war in Asia. Some folks around PACOM with a few years ago with uber-journalist Robert Kaplan’s ear, thought an unprovoked war with China was a splendid idea). When forced to intervene, our footprint will be light; more like British frontier agents of old or the 55 advisers in El Salvador in the 1980’s than the invasion of Iraq. As a nation, our foreign policy would stay on the good side of the diminishing returns curve.

The drawbacks include, in my view: being flatly incorrect about al Qaida’s potential to initiate attacks on the operational or strategic level specifically, and about the threat of radical Islamist-Mahdist movements in general, when coupled with increasing capacities to leverage against complex systems ( see John Robb’s Brave New War); underestimating the geopolitical ripple effect of the U.S. shifting to a conservancy posture, upending the global security arrangements upon which the calculations of statesmen currently depend. The unanticipated consequences of the latter are large. Within two to three levels of unfolding decision-tree possibilities, any potential response by the U.S. is simply swamped. We benefit by the status quo. Changing our position imposes costs.

I invite Fabius Maximus to respond as he likes and I will publish his remarks here, unedited. Readers are invited to offer their own critique in the comments section.

TRYING TO REOPEN A QUESTION SETTLED IN 1865

American political extremists try to bridge an ideological gulf to hammer out an agenda for secession:

“Tired of foreign wars and what they consider right-wing courts, the Middlebury Institute wants liberal states like Vermont to be able to secede peacefully.

One of the major barriers to gaining momentum toward serious consideration of secession is the inherent lack of political attractiveness of the two groups pushing the idea. They wish a regional audience where their implicit political agenda is less marginalized than the current national one where their philosophy and motives are suspect as…well…tin-foil hat wearing wingnuts.

That being said, most separatist movements probably start that way – with groups trying to leverage relatively greater local acceptance as a wedge to accrue legitimacy vs. the state. For example, the wacky, chauvinistic, quasi-fascist, Pamyat parlayed minor grievances of the Russian majority population into a Russian nationalist wave against the USSR ( and Jews various other ethnic minorities)in the late 1980’s.

Pebbles and avalanches.