Afghanistan

Should Obama send more troops? No. Simply put. My reasons are not the standard set; though I can see the analogies between Vietnam and the current "quagmire," I can also see the differences. I also am not a fully committed pacifist even though I do believe we should try and solve problems sans force whenever possible. I do think that some groups require military force, but only as a last resort.

Here is my reasoning. On the one hand, George Bush diverted his attention nearly three years after committing to Afghanistan, yet continued to "fight" there quite ineffectively. On the other hand, the U.S. is truly at a crossroads of epic proportion, not to unlike the point that Rome was at as a Republic when Caesar and then Augustus transformed it so it could survive another half millennium.

Let's look at the first point. There are no such things as short wars. Admittedly, World War II was five years for the U.S.'s involvement, but in a hundred years, when historical time becomes compressed, WWII will look much more like the continuation of WWI. Indeed, many wars last thirty years despite the typical interregnums between actual fighting. The causes of WWII lie deeply rooted in the resolution of WWI. Vietnam, despite not being defined as a conflict, was also 15 years long or more if you consider the time we were there with soldiers dying. Thus, wars are long. But, it is also rare that one war is shelved or pushed in the periphery to fight another; a strategy Bush chose to pursue for many, many benign and nefarious reasons. The outcome of this strategy has likely lengthened the amount of time we will have to realistically spend in Afghanistan both in terms of fighting and stabilizing. Who is our enemy? It was the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but now it is becoming just Al Qaeda, with some olive branches being reached out to the Taliban. What is our strategy? More troops? Not going to work. Not only did the Russians and British fail before us, but using conventional tactics does not work in a country like Afghanistan where the neighbors, Iran, Pakistan, and the Caucuses are not exactly pro-American or willing to build a wall on their borders. This is bad. If we had remained vigilant in the early stages, a surge may be useful, but because we neglected this front for so long I don't know how it is really worth it.

You might respond by saying we owe it to the Afghani's to do this. We don't owe anyone, except the Iraqi's who did not attack us and whose infrastructure we destroyed in the process of preemption. The Afghani's live in little nucleated villages that function more like chiefdoms than city-states or provinces; chiefdom politics are much different from Americanized/Western politics...translation: better to leave these people to deal with their problems customarily than try to impose some nonsensical system on them.

The second reason should draw attention to the U.S.'s steady decline in hegemony since it lost Vietnam. Our political and economic clout have drastically ebbed, and all that is left is our military power built up during the Cold War and our cultural hegemony. People wanting to buy Levi's jeans, though, does not lend itself to leverage in politico-economic realms. We are a paper tiger, with a big dick. The parallels with Rome are thrown in sharp relief when we consider how they used their military more and more near the end of the Empire's efficacy to subjugate little territories rather than defeat challengers. Short of nuclear war, we could not defeat China without losing a lot of human lives, which means they have leverage. Thus, we fight proxy wars like Rome did to gain resources like oil that the Chinese will need. By owning them, we have economic bargaining chips that seem like good substitutes for military power. But here is the rub: that is exactly what the Chinese want. The more committed we are to foreign incursions, the more resources have to be diverted from the American people to some foreign universe, its population, and its infrastructure. Wars and geopolitical power are eroded when countries spend lots of time stretching their imperialist grasp far from home. Look at the examples: Egypt, after the First Intermediate Period, became an imperialist state stretching as far as Mesopotamia; in Mesopotamia, Sargon's Akkadian dynasty (see a prior post), Hammurabi's Babylon, the Assyrian, neo-Babylonian, and Persian empires all did the same thing.  China's dynastic upheavals offer similar examples, as does Greece under Alexander and then later under Athenian rule; Russia during the Cold War. The examples are endless actually. Why?

Stagnation in political expansionism has its costs. Political systems require material resources to sustain their goals, activities, and actors. The best way to secure this is through expansionist policies as the government can become a powerful landholder who can either "lease" the land, sell it outright, or let people use it but tax them. That is revenue. The spoils of war also help prop up the aristocracy who are given things to keep them from revolting against the ruling class. In modern US, this happens all the time. The contracts given to Halliburton, for example, are no different from a king parceling out some land to a noble or landed gentry to pacify them, increase their wealth, and buy their allegiance. Defence contractors are not the same as the aristocracy of feudal times, but they certainly exhibit similar qualities in terms of their relationship with political elite.

I digress, however. The point I am making is fighting these wars and diverting our human and material resources thousands of miles away means that schools, hospitals, and other vital social services will eventually become neglected. In economic crises, like the one we are in right now, the first things we stop funding are schools. Ironically, schools and education are one way to combat the changes in the economic landscape. But, as many founding fathers and Greek philosophers recognized, democracy has a very easy path to despotism and tyranny. When warfare becomes routine or necessary to the political elite, the consolidation of vital resources become exacerbated. Few benefit, other than the modern aristocracy. War produces security fears which are met through the restriction of rights (e.g., the Patriot Act); power increasingly becomes centralized, and soon bad things happen.

I don't think we are going to become autocratic, nor do I think we are going to collapse like Rome...but, we are headed the direction Britain took in the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century, decline. This will be hard for Americans to accept because we like cheap goods and services; we like thinking we are the best. But, a state is like all living things: it grows, blossoms, declines, and decays. The question our generation faces is: do we want to go down with the pedal to the floor or nice and steady? I for one prefer the latter to the former, and advocate what George Washington once advocated...let's avoid unnecessary foreign entanglements because they only lead us down a dark path. War is an ugly business which only profits a few people. Certainly not the pawns on the chess board in Afghanistan.