Defining Victory in Afghanistan and Elsewhere

    On the civilized chat board on which I normally hang out, two posters from opposite ends of the political spectrum really go after each other. One is a literate, committed Annapolis grad and career navy officer, the other a well-read business executive committed to the view that the interventions of the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere are doomed to futility. They agree on almost nothing. But they are in agreement that 'victory' in Afghanistan and elsewhere, in general on, the war on terror, is an impossibility. There is too much tribal rivalry to overcome, too little infrastructure, and too much history of futility. 

    This to me raises exactly the kind of linguistic issue I began this blog to address. It is obviously impossible to 'win' a war against 'terror', or a war against 'drugs' or 'crime' in the same way the South surrendered at Appomattox. 'Terror'  'drugs' (meaning drug sale or usage), and 'crime' are all concepts, or types of behavior. So let's for starters modify the meaning of 'victory' to a usage that actually has practical application to such abstractions. Let us say victory means 'the maximum positive result in practical terms'. Well and good - we at least have a working definition that can be applied to abstractions. But it is still devoid of content. What exactly is the maximum practical positive result in concrete terms?

     Philip Bobbit, a legal historian at the University of Texas, has written two enormously influential books in this decade - 'The Shield of Achilles' and 'Terror and Consent'. The second of these addresses this issue directly. The author attempted to write a book that would be academically credible as well as accessible, with the result that the book is a mite on the tomish side, and not as widely known as it should be. But the thesis is persuasive., Examining a variety of national and international conflicts over the last millennium, Bobbit postulates that organized nation states bring forth (for want of a better phrase) enemies that mirror their organization. For example, the city states of medieval Italy, whose armed forces were essentially bands of knights, were opposed by mercenaries, condottiere, organized in a similar way. The more sophisticated nation states that arose between the 17th and 20th Centuries generated opposition in the same way, with the military organizations of the rival states aping each other's military organization.

       Bobbit argues that the nation states that dominated world affairs until the end of the Cold War have been outmoded, replaced by what he calls the corporate state. The term is unfortunate, for 'corporate' has a connotation of 'business enterprise', which is not (I think) Bobbit's meaning. He uses the term to reference the extent to which the institutions of government and culture have become distributed globally, without any fixed locale, in the same manner in which a corporation does not have a physical identity. Thus, the financial institutions of global society cannot be said to be located on Wall Street, or the Bourse, or the Street, or the Rialto, or anywhere. They comprise a network which cannot even be described as 'international' (which implies a relationship of national identities), but metanational or transnational. Films and television programs are released now all over the world at the same time. Satellite capability makes any significant event a global event, no matter how localized. The corporate state exists independent of any locale or nation state.

     Per Bobbit's historical view, the corporate state will inevitably produce its own enemy, its nemesis, which will ape its primary characteristics. The adversaries of the corporate state, its deadly foes, are similarly 'corporate' and networked, without any fixed national base. The most notable of these is Al Quaeda, which has no physical location and only a vague ethnic center. Something of the same can be said of the other enemies of the corporate state, opponents of globalization and the like.

       This raises an obvious question. The historical motivation for nearly all conflicts - tribal, intranational, international, and so on - have been disputes over territory and resources. But these are not. (A witty friend of mine jokes that US involvement in the MidEast occurs because 'our oil is under their land'.  A nice turn-of-phrase, but I don't think that the United States has saved a single dollar on a single barrel of oil as a result of its involvement in Iraq and elsewhere. Christopher Hitchens recently put paid to the notion more trenchantly.) So if these conflicts are not about territory, what do they involve?

      Bobbit addresses this issue in the title of his book. He sees the great global conflict in progress at the moment as a war between governmental systems based on the consent of the governed (the model for most civilized nations on earth) and those who would undermine consent by force or terror, in the name of a religious utopia, worker's paradise, or what not. The use of the word 'consent' has a nice precision, as opposed to 'democracy', i.e., there are forms of consensual government that are not formally democratic. Note, too, that the concept embraces the most vigorous opponents of an established government, so long as their method of opposition is based on winning the consent of the governed. The enemies of consensual government are literally enemies of consent itself - seeking to undermine the foundations of consensual government itself, either by direct seizure of power or forcing the established government to respond to terror and the threat of terrorism with police measures that effectively destroy its own legitimacy. 

     (This implies a fairly cynical view of the motives of terrorists, but for better or worse, it's one I share. If there is one single characteristic that has marginalized modern liberalism, it is its inclination to rationalize and condone political violence when the stated reason therefor is perceived to be just.  Not so - murder is first of all murder, and this is one case where the end not only does not justify the means, but the means effectively corrupt whatever end there was, becoming an end in themselves.  Always and everywhere.)

     Putting all this together, it is possible at last to define 'victory' in Afghanistan in concrete terms. Victory in Afghanistan can be said to have been achieved when the conditions become such that a government of consent becomes possible. i.e., when the campaign of terror has been sufficiently marginalized that does not obstruct the processes of consensual government. 'Marginalized' means exactly that. All sorts of nations tolerate degrees of organized crime and violence - the United States has endured the existence of ethnic gangs, some of considerable size and power, for more than a century without any posing any real threat to the foundations of the nation. It was not possible to 'defeat' the Ku Klux Klan, the Cosa Nostra, the Blackstone Rangers, or the the Mexican Mafia, any more than it is possible to defeat the Taliban - not without destroying the foundations of the consensual state from the opposite direction, by stumbling into fascism. There is some residual criminality that a free society, alas, must endure if it is to remain free.  

     But what is possible is to diminish the effect of that criminality, the influence of terrorist opposition, to the extent that it doesn't signify all that much, so that the people who really matter can build an orderly and responsive society without being obstructed by those acts - a society based on the consent of the governed. It can't be eliminated, but it can be marginalized. The establishment of the conditions of a consensual government, freed from the obstructive influence of terrorist acts (since the complete elimination of such crimes is unfortunately not possible), is what constitutes victory in this milieu. Only a fool would predict whether these conditions ever will be established, or in what direction history will take the Afghani people if they are. 

     But to say that victory in Afghanistan and elsewhere according to this definition is not achievable is simply not correct. It is well within the realm of possibility, indeed, even probable. 

Comments

[Andrew]

Frank: I think you might enjoy this book

http://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-War-Terrorism-Globalization/dp/0470261951/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264386977&sr=8-1

and the blog by John Robb, its author

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/

It's a trap to romanticize any form of violence which has political ends, whether it's state endorsed, a "popular" uprising, or the actions of a small stateless band.

It's also a trap to believe that no form of political violence is justified or justifiable - whether by states or non-state actors. That's a trap Obama explicitly repudiated in his acceptance speech in Oslo.

But after that, I think it's a case by case basis. Are protestors in Iran not justified in using any form of violence? Is that because the Iranian government is consensual? Or opponents of the Chinese government - is that a consensual form of government?

So here I think we do fundamentally disagree. The modern state is defined, in large part, by its ability to be the sole legitimate agent of violence within its borders, and (in certain circumstances) legitimately project violence beyond its borders. And in many cases actions against agents of the state are simply criminal.

But is the situation in Afghanistan one where we can unambiguously label opponents of the Afghan government and the Coalition terrorists? It seems like a civil war to me, with the Taliban being another name for the Pashtuns (or at least their governing group).

They're a repugnant lot - but it's not obvious to me that any working Afghan government can be constructed without their participation.

The West's most basic interest, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and elsewhere is in denying a pan national organization like Al Qaeda the chance to build a permanent functioning infrastructure - but at the same time, it can't lose sight of a huge strategic trap. If the US and its allies are seen to be waging a war on Islamic nations, a lot of very nasty things will happen in the next twenty years or so.

The US and its allies have a hugely disproportionate ability to inflict violence on their opponents - but the hysterical response to the attempted plane bombing on Christmas Day doesn't bode well for thinking that they'll be smart about responding to their opponents' very limited ability to inflict violence on them.