zenpundit.com

[defrosted by Lynn C. Rees]

Eleven years ago, on September 9, 2001, the Web rudely informed me that Ahmed Shah Masood had been assassinated.

I was annoyed.

I hated the Taliban. To me, they were the enemy of all mankind. My hate didn’t single them out just for their Third World thuggishness, their seventh century flavored oppression, or their harboring of a declared enemy of my country. No, my hate singled them out for blowing up a few statues that had stood for 1,500 years.

For 1,000 of those years, Islam lived alongside the Buddhas of Bamiyan. During that time, weather, entropy, and sporadic iconoclastic enthusiasm had heavily damaged the Buddhas. But, until March 2001, they still stood, as they had stood for one millennium and a half.

Then the Taliban came. They were different. They had the iconoclast ends of March 622 and the means of March 2001 to carry them out. Dynamite, artillery, and rocketry let the Taliban do in three weeks what history had failed to do in fifteen centuries.

History is fragile. What survives down to us is idiosyncratic. We inherit only a few suggestive piles of rubble from the past. From this debris, numberless castles of the imagination have been conjured. One very insistent ghost of conjured history drove the Taliban to destroy the statues: an idealized vision of the community created by Muhammad in Medina and then Mecca from the hegira in 622 to his death in 632. From an antiseptic remove far from the compromised Islam of March 2001, this phantom umma looked down on the Taliban from the heights of 15 centuries and commanded them to erase the Buddhas of Bamiyan from history. The phantom umma promised that, as each piece of shattered idol fell away, the sacralized community of the Prophet would draw nearer and nearer.

And so the Buddhas of Bamiyan fell.

Since history consumes itself anyway, I oppose those who feel that history needs help swallowing. Human meddling in what survives and what doesn’t is unneeded: accident and negligence will always chew up more history than intention can aspire to. But the Taliban insisted on speeding the work of history along. Furthermore, they figured that they could not only speed it up but make it flip 180° and make it run backwards. And so they declared war on history.

To me, this made the Taliban barbarians. To me, they deserved to be removed from history themselves. The only man who seemed to be actively helping the Taliban out of history was Massood. And now Massood had gone to Allah, assisted by these same barbarians.

Downstairs I went. I ranted in the kitchen about the tragedy of Ahmed Shah Massood and his death to Mom and the occasional passing sibling. They didn’t know who Ahmed Shah Massood was. They didn’t know where Afghanistan was. To them, it was a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom they knew nothing. Massood of Afghanistan might as well have been the Massood in the Moon, fighting to keep one small grubby corner of the lunar surface Space Taliban-free.

Mom patiently listened as dinner was set. Over the years, she’d grown used to my ranting on and on about this or that distant obscurity. She knew that, with time, I’d fulminate my way out of my momentary idée fixe and go back to quietly tending my garden of trivia. The world would go on. Normalcy would flow unvexed to the future.

She was right. Rant mode ran out of steam. I ate dinner. I went back to my lair where my books and my computers would protect me. The sun set on September 9th, 2001. I went to sleep.

Two Buddha statues and the Lion of Panjshir would be only be the first to fall. Unseen in the gathering dark, history, with brutal intent, blatantly ignoring its own death in 1989, crept up the East Coast to be reborn.

[redacted by Lynn C. Rees]

The Modern Traveller

Blood thought he knew the native mind;
He said you must be firm, but kind.
A mutiny resulted.
I shall never forget the way
That Blood stood upon this awful day
Preserved us all from death.
He stood upon a little mound
Cast his lethargic eyes around,
And said beneath his breath:
‘Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.’

– Hilaire Belloc (1898)

One hundred years ago, the West had carved up the world. The carving had been done in a fit of absent mindedness by obscure men under obscure orders in obscure places. Better weaponry let small numbers of Europeans easily and cheaply massacre large numbers of spear wielding savages or traditional infantry levies. Because conquest was so easy and so cheap, more empire could be won with one twitch of miserly inertia than with all of the energy lavished on conquest in prior ages combined.

The world was freed from this New Imperialism after World War II. The West, impressed by the impact of its weapons on the non-West, turned those weapons on each other. Frustrated by the unprofitable impact of their first try, the West tried again twenty years later. Take two left them unable to pay the price of lordship so they abandoned their conquests, one by one. The United States of America, used to an anti-imperialist imperialism of indirect rule in its own half of the world, also discouraged its own clients from holding on to their empires. But the crucial contributor was the Soviet gift of freedom.

That this Soviet gift became a gift of freedom was an accident, an unforeseen consequence of the USSR’s own imperialism. The USSR mass produced cheap weapons. To further the Great Proletarian Revolution (and expand their own imperial sphere of influence), they pumped millions of these weapons to the colonial world. This incentivized casualty-averse Western colonial powers to hasten their exit and let the Soviet-backed rebels outgun the local non-communists.

Unfortunately for the USSR, greased palms undermined the inevitability of revolution. Weapons found their way out of the hands of reliable cadres and into the hands of the anything but reliable, strengthening non-communist resistance. The spread of its own weapons and the local resistance it enabled undermined Soviet imperial efforts, impaled the USSR on its own petard, and helped crumble it into the dustbin of history. The remnants of the USSR were left with a weapons surplus of weapons and little else except the capacity to manufacture more weapons. So weapons were flooded the world and further armed the peoples of the Earth.

The AK-47 assault rifle and its variants were based on a stolen Hun design. Kalashnikov reduced the complex Hun gun to a simple rugged weapon that could be repaired by the village blacksmith and convert any peasant into an instant praying and spraying Rambo. The RPG-7 was also based on a Hun design and provided simple and reliable firepower. Both weapons are well-adapted to simple tactics and simple training regimes.

Western weapons are more mechanically complex and assume greater tactical proficiency from their users than most Third World peasants can readily acquire. My youngest brother spent a lot of time in remote Nicaraguan villages. One local he met told him how the Sandinistas used to wait for the US to airdrop supplies to the contras. Then they’d pick off waiting contras and seize the supplies. They’d always discard the flaky M-16s, which they’d found unreliable for their needs. The beloved AK-47s, on the other hand, could fire until the barrel started to glow red and melt.

Add in a RPG for firepower, throw in an occasional PK machine gun, and you have the Soviet gift of freedom. This is the gift the Spartans sought to bestow in Peloponnesian War II : to “free the Greeks”. This wasn’t a gift of freedom to each individual Greek man, woman, or goat. It was a gift of freedom to each Greek polis: each polis would be freed of interference from other poleis who wanted to intervene in its affairs. This is the freedom local elites sought after World War II: the freedom to oppress their own people without fear of meddling from far off European colonial masters.

The Soviet gift of freedom ensures local oligarchic freedom by denying the option of easy intervention to the West. It allows enough resistance from local gunmen to cause serious political headaches back home. Western militaries have more military power and proficiency but operate under a more restrictive cultural, political, and strategic regime. They have less incentive to keep killing recalcitrant locals than local gunmen.

Spoilers don’t have enough power for hegemonic domination. But they may have enough power to frustrate and attrit a hegemonic power’s freedom to intervene or expand. To do this, gratuitous weapon exports can be a sensible stratagem for spoilers. Ubiquitous modern weaponry helps create heavily armed hedgehogs, turning each individual state into a potential case of hegemonic indigestion and each clump of states int a potential case of hegemonic diarrhea. If, like the USSR, a spoiler’s weapon designs are easily duplicated, others will copy them and spread them further, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of hegemonic frustration and attrition.

Hedgehogs may not directly further the spoiler’s power. Indeed, a spoiler may eventually have to deal with the hedgehogs it created. However, the proliferating effort can deny easy victories to the incumbent hegemons. A heavily armed world requires an expansive and interventionist hegemonic power to expensively and bloodily clear each corner of the globe and then expensively and bloodily patrolled to keep weapons from leaking back in. This Whack-A-Mole can accelerate hegemonic decline by bleeding them of lives, treasure, and, even more precious, attention, since they are constantly putting out fires in distant corners of their domain. While they are dispersed, the spoiler is focused. While their effort is fatally divided, the spoiler gets concentration of force. This creates opportunities for the spoiler.

[by Mark Safranski a.k.a “zen“]

Top Billing! Galrahn If It’s Not “War,” It Sounds Like Checkers

….Words matter, and when they are not allowed to matter in policy, we are not being honest with ourselves. Over the last two days John Kerry described the political object with Syria as “to deter, disrupt, prevent, and degrade the potential for, future uses of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction” by the Assad regime in Syria. The Obama administration has apparently convinced itself that a Desert Fox Part II action in Syria will produce the desired result, apparently ignoring that Desert Fox was in part what led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I do not know any serious expert who believes the Obama administrations military approach to Syria will achieve a positive political object for the US.

The Obama administrations national security leadership, in Congressional testimony, is promoting a delusion regarding the act of war, and is incapable of admitting they are about to start a war. Most troubling, they are intentionally dismissing consequences and the gravity of such action under the assumption that military superiority translates to strategic success. The United States does not have a strategy that political leaders can articulate publicly on Syria, nor is the Obama administrations national security leadership publicly seeking meaningful military objectives of consequence to conditions in Syria. The United States does not have a coalition of support to provide legitimacy for military action, a coalition that protects the US from escalation or retaliation. John Kerry, in front of Congress, described those who believe it unwise for the US to inject our nation into another nations civil war uninvited, as armchair isolationists. No one knew for certain the intelligence cited by Colin Powell was wrong in 2003. Every human being educated on the definition of war knows John Kerry is wrong in 2013, and no one credible on the topic of war will ever be able to argue otherwise.

War on the Rocks (Usha Sahay) –SYRIA, SIGNALING, AND OPERATION INFINITE REACH 

The emphasis on sending a message of resolve may explain why the Clinton administration glossed over spotty intelligence about proposed targets for the cruise missile strikes. The El-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan was targeted because it was thought to be a chemical weapons facility. It soon became clear that El-Shifa was nothing of the sort, and that intelligence reporting had in fact never shown definitively that terrorists were using the plant to manufacture WMDs. Part of the reason for this intelligence oversight was that the administration was searching a priori for targets to strike and, consequently, giving inadequate consideration to their actual relevance. The New Republic later noted that, along with the al-Qaeda training facility in Afghanistan, officials wanted to hit “another country, preferably in Africa, where al Qaeda’s terrorist network enjoyed support. [CIA director George] Tenet’s job was to provide targets” [emphasis added].

The symbolic function of the targets, then, was more important than their strategic relevance. Even the number of targets was determined by aesthetic considerations rather than strategic ones: analysts including Micah Zenko argue that the team wanted to hit exactly two targets in order to mirror the two embassies that al-Qaeda had attacked.

Edward Luttwak – In Syria, America Loses if Either Side Wins

….The war is now being waged by petty warlords and dangerous extremists of every sort: Taliban-style Salafist fanatics who beat and kill even devout Sunnis because they fail to ape their alien ways; Sunni extremists who have been murdering innocent Alawites and Christians merely because of their religion; and jihadis from Iraq and all over the world who have advertised their intention to turn Syria into a base for global jihad aimed at Europe and the United States.

Given this depressing state of affairs, a decisive outcome for either side would be unacceptable for the United States. An Iranian-backed restoration of the Assad regime would increase Iran’s power and status across the entire Middle East, while a victory by the extremist-dominated rebels would inaugurate another wave of Al Qaeda terrorism.

There is only one outcome that the United States can possibly favor: an indefinite draw.

William Lind -THE VIEW FROM OLYMPUS 8: WHITE HOUSE PRESS RELEASE, DECEMBER 7, 2016

President Barack Obama today welcomed to the White House Mr. Ayman al Zawahiri, the leader of al Qaeda, for the formal signing of a pact of alliance between al Qaeda and the United States of America. The new alliance treaty envisions broad-scale cooperation between al Qaeda and the United States in the cause of destroying states. Following the signing of the treaty, President Obama will direct US government agencies, including the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA to work with their al Qaeda counterparts on projects of joint benefit, including generating phony intelligence to justify American military interventions, carrying out pseudo-ops to create humanitarian tragedies that can be blamed on state leaders, and generally spreading anarchy throughout the world.

The Glittering Eye –Is It To Be Isolationists vs. Militarists?

Bill Keller presents a false and vicious dichotomy. Although he’s a bit sheepish about it, he’s ultimately arguing that, if we are to be engaged with the world, it must be at the point of a gun ….

….I see barely a smidgeon of isolationism in contemporary America. There are millions of Americans living and working overseas, we import a huge proportion of our consumer goods and a lot of our food from abroad, and we have a higher proportion of immigrants presently living in the United States than at at all but a very few times in our history.

Who is he, Hideki Tojo? Is the only form of engagement with the world military engagement? That’s militarism.

Outside the Beltway (Matconis) –Are The Russians About To Outsmart Obama And Kerry On Syria? 

Chicago Boyz –Georgene Rice Interviews Lex about America 3.0, Review of America 3.0 by Arnold Kling, Daniel Hannan: Channeling America 3.0!, A Plea for America 3.0: “Can we just fast-forward to 2040? Please?”

Not the Singularity (Hynd) –Does The NSA’s General Alexander Have Too Much Power?

Campaign Reboot –What value to a poll? Syria edition

Brad DeLong – “Modern Greats”….

hbd chick –national individualism-collectivism scores 

Friend of Zenpundit Fred Leland had his LESC blog ranked # 3 out of all criminal justice related blogs. Congratulations Fred!!!!

That’s it!

[A conversation Lynn C. Rees had once with his oldest niece]

Crazy Uncle: Do you know what a good cat name would be?

Teenage Niece (impatient): What?

Crazy Uncle: Chairman Meow

Teenage Niece (bewildered): What?

Crazy Uncle: Do you know who Chairman Mau is? Mau DzeDung?

Teenage Niece (with half-eye roll): No.

Crazy Uncle: He ruled China. He killed 100 million people.

Teenage Niece (incredulous): Really? Did he get punished?

Crazy Uncle: No, he died in his bed, of old age.

Teenage Niece (still incredulous): Really? That sucks.

Crazy Uncle: Yes it does. Do they teach you, um, history or whatnot in school?

Teenage Niece (authoritatively): No. My history teachers suck.

Good news for the niece: Justice may have happened after all.

The World’s Most Dangerous Man™, Edward M. Luttwak, has revealed he was in Peiping when Mau died. Coincidence? Never: with Luttwak, paradoxically, there is no coincidence, only the Romanian Death Cuff. Watch and gape below at a man who’s killed ninjas while armed only with a paperback edition of The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press, January 1, 1979).

[ by Charles Cameron — a popular catch-phrase fumbled ]
.

**

TE Lawrence was an original. The “second senior official” either has a poor memory for quotations, or wishes he were an original, sad in either case.

Hat-tip to the Small Wars Journal editors, who noted the combo — they referenced John Nagl, who borrowed his book title from Lawrence, while I prefer to attribute the spoon to Lawrence directly, but no matter.

What comes next? Chewing Qat with a spork?