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On Drones
In case you missed it or have not forked over the money to buy a copy of the New Yorker, Jane Mayer -- who is even more powerful than Nate -- has written perhaps the very best piece on the use of unmanned drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan. (A good summary can be found here.) There are all kinds of good questions this piece explores, like why Americans get so fired up over targeted killing programs (allegedly cooked up by the Vice President) which utilize special operations forces but do not get too bothered by targeted killing programs that actually exist and use remotely piloted drones. Or what happens when the Central Intelligence Agency takes over what are essentially military operations without the check and balances -- like the UCMJ -- that govern the military when they conduct such operations?
Since Dave Kilcullen and I have written a little bit about these strikes, Mayer asked me what I thought. She slightly mangled my quote, but here it is:
“Neither Kilcullen nor I is a fundamentalist—we’re not saying drones are not part of the strategy. But we are saying that right now they are part of the problem. If we use tactics that are killing people’s brothers and sons, not to mention their sisters and wives, we can work at cross-purposes with insuring that the tribal population doesn’t side with the militants. Using the Predator is a tactic, not a strategy.”
What I actually said was that while drone strikes were part of the problem, they can also be part of the solution. (Mayer thought I said "strategy" instead of solution.) I really think drone strike can be part of an effective, integrated CT and COIN strategy, but they cannot substitute for such a strategy, and I worry that the CIA is carrying out their own campaign in part because a) it's been getting kicked around so much since 9/11 that it is now overly focused on killing high-level al-Qaeda targets rather than gathering intelligence and that b) it's trying to justify and defend its budget through what it can claim is a successful program.
My worries have always centered around how the attacks are perceived on the ground, so it has been frustrating to read careless readers of our argument mistakenly assume we agree with open-source reporting out of Pakistan. To the contrary. I focus on Pakistani press reports because, in a war of perceptions, I am less concerned with how many civilians we are actually killing and more concerned with how many civilians the neutral population thinks we are killing.
There is something else about drones which bothers me. We are all slaves to culture, and I worry that a combination of a background in the light infantry, an upbringing in East Tennessee, and a classical education leaves me repulsed by the very idea of remote-controlled war. Mayer mangled another quote of mine (again, insignificantly), when I said, “As a classics major, I have a classical sense of what it means to be a warrior.” As I recall, I asked that more as a question and included a "maybe" somewhere in there. But maybe I do in fact have a cultural predisposition against drones. I know that undermines my other arguments somewhat, but I feel I should be honest with the readership about my own potential biases here.
I am not sure, on the other hand, that my bias does not have some use. One of the best parts in Pete Singer's latest book
"Yeah," Pete wisely asks, "but weren't the humans the heroes of those movies?"
Indeed.
At the very least, though, the classical warrior spirit is alive at 1301 Pennsylvania Avenue. Nate was also a classic geek, and I have been known to steal the Roman helmet Nagl inexplicably keeps in his office and wear it to staff meetings.
Update: Hahahaha. Perfect. Just perfect. Thanks, J.
That Terminator comment is a
That Terminator comment is a funny coincidence, as I just saw this: http://xkcd.com/652/
I also happened to catch Jane Mayer being interviewed on NPR yesterday: http://www-cdn.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113978637
So if you are repulsed by
So if you are repulsed by the idea of "remote control war" then how far back do you regress to get to your classical sense of how wars and its "warriors" should fight it? I mean, heck, a purist would argue to do away with pek-2s and go with simply iron sights to kill the enemy, and then the purist on steroids would say forget fire arms completely and let’s just revert to cold steel.
Your use of the term "remote control" war it seems to me is simply another literary trick on your part to continue your argument for population centric coin with the accompanying assumption that it is the anti-thesis of war by remote.
Or are you arguing that population centric counterinsurgency warfare is a modern expression of "classical" war (at least as you understand it to be from your tranining in the classics), and therefore more pure and even righteous?
gian
English and/or Urdu press
English and/or Urdu press reports? How do Pakistani press reports correlate with, say, word of mouth and how does one compare the two, or even measure such a thing as 'word of mouth'? I guess what I mean is how good a proxy are Pakistani press reports for that elusive thing known as public opinion, or opinions? Ugh, there's probably a whole literature on that, huh?
*Apologies if the above was discussed, already, in your reports or on the blog. I mean, if I knew this blog came with actual homework, well, I'd just have stopped reading by now, okay?
Do any of us know what the
Do any of us know what the Vice President is advocating on the Afghanistan/Pakistan file? No, I don't think so.
I hope we can all agree that until such time as VP Biden makes his views known publically, preferably not through the largely inept and incompetent filter of the media, we should refrain from attributing to him simplistic solutions that do not reflect his thinking on this subject.
Col Gentile, C'mon. I agree
Col Gentile,
C'mon. I agree most of the time, but how did you manage to relate this post back to the COIN debate? It was mentioned once and only in passing. The points made about the drones speak generally to not creating enemies - which is equally applicable if you are conducting COIN in A'stan, FID in Pakistan, or fighting HIC someplace else.
Peter Bergen and Katherine
Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann also provided a long analysis of the "Drone War" in a 19 Oct 09 piece for the New American Foundation: http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/revenge_drones
Andrew, Count me with COL
Andrew,
Count me with COL Gentile here, I find your
If what you mean by a "cultural bias against drones" is that you are concerned that they make war too easy in the sense that we end up using counterproductive levels of violence, turning local populations against us or losing international support due what is perceived as unwarranted, excessive violence, then sure, that is a valid potential critique. I am also with you in finding it odd that assasination via UAV is seen as OK by the public where assasination by sniper would not be; that does seem strategically inconsistent.
Your phrasing suggestions something else, though: a sense that you dislike "remote control warfare" because of what it means for _you_, the warrior. That it is not manly enough or romantic enough or fair enough or however you would phrase it. That does suggest a bias towards a style of warfare that you find satisfying, just as some technophiles are always looking for things to pound with their shiny hammers.
From a strategy standpoint, I don't want people to push operational concepts on the basis of what brings glory or what falls into proud tradition, be that learned from Tennessee or Thucydides. It's fine to take into account morality in the sense of, will the deaths and destruction we inflict be worth it. Could we accomplish the same goals with fewer innocent lives lost? But I don't get how the calculation of whether civilian deaths were moral or not depends on whether they were inflicted by mace, musket, or MQ-9.
"Careless readers???" Let's
"Careless readers???"
Let's keep the focus where it belongs - You LIED!
Regardless of what language you want to wrap it in, you are warping the truth to fit your warped philosophy. Who gives a hoot in hell what propaganda the Pakistanis believe? The important thing is are we defeating the enemy, and as long as fruits like you are out there distorting the truth - and undercutting our ability to dominate the battlefield, we will lose every damned war/operation/contingency plan we will fight.
Whose side are you on, anyways? I thought the Army swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Have you become the domestic enemy, Exum?
That post by Visitor
That post by Visitor @1:15pm... awesome on so many levels. Missing the point. Misinterpreting the statement. Irrelevant tangent. Classic stuff worthy of the comment section of a YouTube video. U rulz!!!
Is a drone really any
Is a drone really any different from, say, artillery? Except the drone guy can see what he's shooting at and the arty guy can't. Remember that video from Gulf War I where the Iraqi's surrendered to the drone acting as a spotter for a battleship? How is that any different?
@Andy, On the artillery
@Andy, On the artillery point, you might be interested in this monograph.
Col Gentile I have great
Col Gentile
I have great respect for you views and voice. But this time i fear you are becoming that which you criticize, and getting trapped in your prism.
I did not read any pushing of COIN doctrine in that post.
This is about assassination. The argument extends to the IDF use of Apache attacks.
There is an argument that if you know enough to target someone, you should be sending a helicopter in to arrest them.
There is also the argument about how detached from the killing can a 'warrior' become, before he/she is no longer a warrior.
Here's a relevant little bit
Here's a relevant little bit of inconvenient history: Pink's War. How many times has Pink's War been mentioned in the august halls of CNAS? I'm gonna guess - somewhere between zero and less.
Jane Mayer - meet Wing Commander Richard Charles Montagu Pink. Which of these people knows more about how to subdue the troublous Pathans? If you wanted to solve the problem, whose advice would you take? And what do ya think Wing Commander Pink would have done with a Predator or two?
What a demented world we live in. People say I'm crazy, but it's not true. It really is everyone else.
Pink's War? Obligatory
Pink's War?
Obligatory Reservoir Dogs clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XBZO8JcClM
Pink's War. It's really too
Pink's War. It's really too perfect. I mean, just the little Wikipedia war box is unbeatable:
Date: March and April 1925
Place: South Waziristan
Result: Tribal leaders accept terms
Strength: Three aircraft squadrons
Casualties and losses: Two personnel killed and one aircraft lost
By my mathematical calculations, Pink's War is roughly four orders of magnitude more successful than USG's present efforts in the area. Perhaps as many as five. Or maybe just as few as three. The error bars, I fear, are wide.
Naturally, I'm sure all the historical experts out there in the PC-COIN community have studied this conflict in exhaustive detail, and have a straightforward explanation of why Wing Commander Pink's approach to counterinsurgency, if used 80 years later against the basically the same people, would not be similarly effective - but in fact profoundly counterproductive. Science, boys and girls! Better foreign policy, through science!
Pink's War: "The defence of
Pink's War: "The defence of the North-West Frontier Province was an important task for British India."
In 1925.
Allegations of guilt are cause for indictment and trial. Using a Predator instead is what the word says: predatory.
Do rights exist for people in the US only through the exclusion of rights for others? If so, there is no legitimacy to the concept of 'rights'. Try running a business in that environment.
That's what we've been doing.
Margaret, I prefer peace to
Margaret,
I prefer peace to war. How about you?
Drones sell. They limit our
Drones sell. They limit our casualties and let us strike off the list the latest "#3" on the Al-Qaeda depth chart. That "sells" at home. There is also the interesting physchological studies on how it gets easier to kill with the distance from your target. From that angle its a natural progression from spear to arrow to bullet to bomb to bombing from the A/C comfort of greater Las Vegas (just think, instead of having to travel to England and risk your @$$ over Nazi Europe every week in ordered to get bombed at a local pub and chase tail like the old days, you can now skip all of that and still head to Vegas and as a bonus the hookers are legal in the surrounding counties!).
Plus I'm surprised at the token UCMJ reference, CIA folks are bound by US laws. It's not the law that is a "problem" if it even is one in the first place, it's our willingness to follow it and to take action if its violated. And if it is being violated, but nothing is being done, it wouldn't be the first time that essentially a societal "jury nullfication" is awarded to people who may be violating a law that a majority in this country, and in our 3 branches of government, don't wish to see exercised. If there is frustration of all of these career academic lawyer types (broad brush I know, not everyone fits that bill) its that no one is listening to them because deep down, we'll take the temporary hit to our morale standing if we know we will snap out of it once the work is done. If there is one thing that makes us different from the "bad guys", it's that we turn "it" off when the killings done. That's why, in part, Sgt. Nazario was hugged by jurors, some in tears, after his failed prosecution.
http://www.pe.com/localnews/riverside/stories/PE_News_Local_S_nazario29....
Killing people people not party to a conflict is horrible. Sickening. But until we invent a way to look inside someone's head and heart, in other words science someday produces the perfect lie detector (the ultimate COIN weapon), we're not always going to get the right people, or even know who they are, in a world where no one wears a uniform or does more than pay lip service to the laws of warfare.
Mencius: I prefer gardening
Mencius: I prefer gardening to sports.
I stand by Blackstone.
Blackstone was an expert on
Blackstone was an expert on the common law, not the law of nations or the law of war.
I stand by Grotius, Vattel, Henry Maine, Francis Lieber, and George B. Davis. In other words, by the standard authorities of classical international law. If you can show me where Wing Commander Pink or his general approach violated the letter or spirit of any of these authorities, I'd be pleased to hear it.
What you'll find is quite the opposite. Reprisal, including reprisal by bombardment, is a perfectly legitimate tactic under classical international law. Moreover, reciprocity holds; the laws of war do not protect those who choose not to observe them. Eg: savage Pathan hill-tribes.
The result is that civilization wins, savagery loses, and wars end. Insurgency is ineffective and basically unknown under these rules, which I suspect would put Margaret out of a job. Instead, people die, and keep dying. And she eats. She is not alone in this.
I mean, how exactly did the 20th century decide that Grotius, Vattel, Lieber, etc, were morons? Did someone watch The Princess Bride too many times? The result of our foolish, counterproductive sentimentality has been exactly as all the notable experts of previous centuries would have predicted. Again, there is something really, seriously crazy going on here.
Yes, cease your fruity
Yes, cease your fruity treason, AM. You can be a fruit or a domestic enemy, but being both is just bad form.
Erm - Britain was colonial
Erm - Britain was colonial master, and bombed the uppity wogs into submission.
Is that the course you are suggesting for the United States?
"Is a drone really any
"Is a drone really any different from, say, artillery?"
This is an excellent point. Understandably there are issues that don't just creep into this debate but stomp into the room and demand attention. Is it right to engage a hostile target with a M24, with a M2 mounted on a Humvee, a Bushmaster, 105 Arty and so on.
As a tool in the toolbox of COIN I do think that targeted killings, along with kinetic direct action on the part of dedicated SF troops, has a place. If you can accurately put rounds on target. Otherwise its just a horror show.
Surgical strikes that target know enemy can be devastating and can seriously hamper the leadership of the Taliban network, as more senior cadres are removed , and less experienced cadres take their place.
But if along with that senior leadership you kill his wife, his kids and his dogs, then you give that new leadership the incentive to get smart really quick. Along with the rest if their new found and justifiably outraged compatriots.
And to accurately target someone you need good old fashioned HUMIT, what the CIA should be doing with its time in the region.
Diablo, That or let 'em
Diablo,
That or let 'em alone. I prefer the latter, actually. But whatever is done, I prefer to see it done right.
You don't even need a pith helmet and a lisp to understand how a civilized nation can subdue and govern savages and barbarians. You can stay on our side of the Atlantic and our century, and look at the US experience in the Philippines or Haiti. You can read any pre-1945 field manual from the US military. PC-COIN basically consists of taking every known axiom about how to solve the problem properly, and reversing it. Instead of constantly demonstrating strength, for instance, it constantly demonstrates weakness. This masquerades as counterintuitive, which masquerades as smart. Indeed, one cannot defend it without being pretty damned smart.
And it's not even the willingness to bomb villages from the air, or whatever, that generates victory. Since we have way better gear than Wing Commander Pink, we can be way more subtle. All that is needed is that USG demonstrate to the Afghan people that it has chosen to rule them by force and without their consent, as a result of their actions in harboring Osama, KSM and their nasty friends. Seal the border, register and tax the population, impose indirect rule. Find some modern equivalent of Lord Cromer to run the whole thing.
Instead, we create the ultimate in passive-aggressive goverment. We whine and wheedle and curtsy before the savage tribe, pay it welfare for its misdeeds, apologize at every possible opportunity. At the same time, we hunt it with Predators. It's like a bad episode of "The Dog Whisperer," with the Pashtoons instead of the dog. Couldn't we get Cesar Millan to run Afghanistan for a while? His skin is about the right color, and he could hardly do worse.
Mencius, Well, there's
Mencius,
Well, there's probably nothing we can do to convince you that you really do sound crazy, or at least out of touch with the reality on the ground.
Your idea that 'savages' can be pummeled into submission suggests to me that you have never spoken to civilians in a war zone. I have never seen anything inflame ordinary citizens to take up arms as quickly as bombing or a forcible foreign occupation without their consent, as you suggest.
I don't know how much history of the Mehsuds you know, but let's just say that Pink's bombardment did not end their resistance against the British. Even your worship of British leaders leads me to believe, that you have have never spoken with anyone in a former colony about their experience of imperialism (and I'm saying this as someone who went to a fairly conservative grad school for war studies in the UK).
Hell, even IR studies keep concluding that 'punishment bombing' of civilian vulnerabilities never works and in fact stiffens resistance (see Pape etc.). I'd also like to hear your explanation for why things are getting worse when we have fired as many drone attacks in the past 10 months as in the three years before.
And where are the resources, much less a plan, for 'sealing the border'?! You must be talking about millions of troops, half a trillion dollars of infrastructure and a wall to rival the Great Wall. The US can't even seal it's own border with Mexico and our civilians are relatively sympathetic to the cause.
For what it's worth, I've worked in the rural areas of the Phillipines and Hati and I shipping out to Afghanistan next. I cannot see anyway in which the US occupation of the first two can be called a success or at beneficial for the indigenous people or US interests.
By the way, I have also read all of those theorists back in school so I'm sure you know that they don't all agree...but I'm not going to even get into a legal argument since none of the insurgents care about these pie in the sky theories.
I have no interest in arguing this further and people are always slow to change their minds, but I just hope that you gets some on-the-ground experience before you try to name drop your way repeating an old argument that is ignorant is every sense.
"Hell, even IR studies keep
"Hell, even IR studies keep concluding that 'punishment bombing' of civilian vulnerabilities never works and in fact stiffens resistance (see Pape etc.)."
Well, yeah, except the "studies," from the Strategic Bombing Survey to today, are by and large intellectually dishonest.
Spencer, You'll have to
Spencer,
You'll have to explain to me what Dunlap has to do with my comment.
All,
We are using drones because that is the only way we have access to the people we want to kill. What's the alternative?
"We are using drones because
"We are using drones because that is the only way we have access to the people we want to kill. What's the alternative?"
We should fly over their territory and airdrop hundreds of thousands of bootlegged copies of PowerPoint. If they use it in the same way that we do, then they will soon be paralyzed. Rather than conducting well-coordinated small unit attacks upon vulnerable outposts, they will revert to giving mindless briefings and bickering over master sheet templates, colors, transitions and builds, and other slidesmanship minutia. Rather than leading his organization, Mullah Omar will be tearing his beard out, griping that his tribal staff hasn't stuffed enough data onto one slide.
This is foolproof.
So what you're saying is
So what you're saying is that Mayer doesn't double-check her on-the-record quotes. I'm not shocked.
Andrew-- I understand your
Andrew--
I understand your point about the perception of civilian casualties among Pakistanis being more important than the reality of how many civilians have actually been killed. Obviously, shaping the attitudes of the population in these areas is a key part of the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. I don't think anyone would dispute that these strikes are widely opposed by Pakistanis, or have caused a lot of outrage and anger across the Pakistani political spectrum, as you and Kilcullen correctly noted in your NYT column.
But consider a few counter-facts: A TFT poll of Pakistanis in 2007 (i.e. before the sharp increase in drone strikes beginning in mid-2008) found that 74% opposed U.S. military action against the Taliban and AQ inside Pakistan. Just 19% had a favorable opinion of the United States. The Taliban had a 38% approval rating -- and 43% for Al-Qaeda.
In August 2009, an IRI poll of Pakistanis found that opposition to U.S. military action against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda inside Pakistan was...almost exactly the same (76%). The U.S. favorability rating among Pakistanis is also virtually the same (16%), according to a recent Pew Research survey. On the other hand, support for Pakistani-US cooperation in fighting terrorism is actually higher than it was before the intensified drone campaign began.
The real question here is whether or not drone strikes are indeed causing so much anger and outrage that they're driving significant numbers of Pakistanis to support the Taliban and Al Qaeda. There is no evidence to support that claim -- in fact, the numbers are moving in the opposite direction.
A Pew Research poll in March 2009 found that Al-Qaeda's favorability rating has dropped 18 points to 25% among Pakistanis. The Taliban's approval has dropped 11 points to 27%. Even better, young Pakistanis are even less likely than older Pakistanis to support the Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda. The IRI poll I mentioned above found that opposition to "a peace deal with extremists" increased by 32% in a single year. Another poll from June 2009 found that 81% of Pakistanis now see the Taliban and other extremist groups as a "critical threat" to their country.
These shifts are undoubtedly due to the Taliban-AQ decision to conduct more attacks and suicide bombings inside Pakistan. But despite the (understandable and prudent) worry that even the "perception" of civilian casualties from drone strikes will create a backlash among the Pakistani population and drive them into the arms of extremists, there's just no evidence that's happened.
Finally, I must add -- I read your blog regularly, and this is one of the few issues on which I disagree with you. Keep up the great work.
--Alex Mayer
The problem with Cheney's
The problem with Cheney's shadow hit squads is we have no idea where they might have been deployed, had they been deployed. Unless I am mistaken, we know drones strikes are limited to Afghanistan and FATA (and maybe occasionally Somalia?), where we pretty much understand we are at war. And in those places, anyone who doesn't think we also field Special Ops units assigned with assassination missions (by other names) -- in Afghanistan AND Pakistan -- must be out of their mind. I think Americans general understand that and see little that is worse about the ground-level operations using small arms than the drone strikes. If anything, there are likely fewer civilian casualties with Special Ops.
Rather, the reason the Cheney squads get people jittery is, again, we don't know where they might have been sent, and then also, were they going to report to him? Do we find that legit, even if Bush 'delegated' their command to the VP? Can he delegate such orders? Comparing Cheney death squads and drone warfare (CIA concerns notwithstanding -- that's a legit point) is apples and oranges.
Perhaps my post was unclear
Perhaps my post was unclear in what I was trying to get at. I take criticisms of what I write seriously especially by many folks on this blog like Schmedlap and D.
My post wasn’t so much a critique of Coin and 3-24 per say, but more of a probe at a conception of war that Andrew seemed to be getting at in his post. I have often pointed out that the advocates of Pop Cent Coin believe that they have replaced the flawed RMA approach to war (which was premised on technology removing friction) of the 90s with a truer and clearer conception of it, that sees it as a muddy boots thing, on the ground, and in this sense the antithesis of remote control war. Too I have argued that ironically the Coin advocates haven’t necessarily improved or moved beyond the RMA in a progressive sense but more simply have only replaced it with something different and in my equally as flawed.
So it was in this spirit that I pushed back on Andrew and his post.
Hope this clarifies.
gian
Schmedlap, I like it! To
Schmedlap,
I like it! To leverage the havoc that powerpoint will cause, we should drop them some 5 year-old used laptops with Windows 95 installed along with satellite phones that can only call the MS help desk.
Andy, Good suggestion,
Andy,
Good suggestion, though we should have a backup plan in case they've already thrown a Windows 7 party.
WsL, Pretty much no one
WsL,
Pretty much no one living today knows anything about "the experience of imperialism." What you are listening to is old myths and propaganda, dating to the early postcolonial era. The source of much of this propaganda was a giant intellectual anticolonialist noise machine, centered roughly around the remnants of OWI in the United States. With a significant annex, of course, in Moscow.
To say that the US occupation of the Philippines "did nothing" for that country, borders on the delusional. No. Actually, it doesn't border. It is well past the delusional. Have you ever read anything about the Philippines, circa 1900-1940, that wasn't written by postcolonial propagandists? Even at your "fairly conservative" graduate school?
This is basically your problem: your education is constructed entirely from secondary sources. If you had actually read the American authors of our own imperialist period, or the Brits, there is no way you could possibly hate on them so much as you do. You are obviously not a hater in general.
Moreover, you accept bad firsthand evidence. Of course Afghans tell Westerners such as yourself that their main reason for hating on us is the civilian casualties. This is exactly what you want to hear. Certainly, for both parties - them and you - there could be no more effective message. Thus, it is conventional. It's like saying hello, or inviting you up for tea.
As MikeF noted on this blog, when you actually get these dignitaries in private, you can sometimes get them to say things like "follow every Taliban and kill them all." Ie: be the biggest tribe. What do you think the British did in India? Wank all day, in their pith helmets? No - they kept the peace in India (and the NWFP, and even Afghanistan, whose monarchy was a more or less compliant satellite), by being the biggest tribe. They dominated it and kept in peace.
Believe it or not, before Woodrow Jesus Wilson came and made foreign policy one with Bible studies, for all recorded millennia of human history, conquest happened and conquest worked. In this pagan era, conquered people could be easily forced to submit, because they had no reason to resist, because they knew they could not succeed in resisting, because their ass would be tamed as brutally as necessary and busted into submission.
Hence the Indian Mutiny, after which rebel chiefs were blown out of cannon, which kept India at peace more or less until 1947. Hence Tiananmen, in which a mob was machine-gunned or something like that, which has kept China at peace since 1989. And hence operations on the NWFP in the late Raj - when "subduing the wogs" by indiscriminate bombing of their villages seemed to work quite well. At
So what changed? What caused the dramatic psychological change in the population of Waziristan, between 1925 and 2009? Because frankly, to me, it strikes me that these are some of the people whom the 20th century has changed the least. Perhaps you could give us the benefit of your highly-subsidized graduate degree in Pashtoonology, and tell us what.
If you want to know what the Pathan was in 1925, for instance, the world now has Google Books and you can read everything pre 1923.
Pink's War was after 1923. I bumped into it on, of all things, Wikipedia. I love your deprecation of the result. Tell me, WsL - what successes this successful have you had? How many biplanes did you lose in the process, and how many thousands of pounds has it cost?
More generally: if you are actually interested in having an opinion, which is your own opinion, on the merits of imperialism and colonialism, I recommend you at least start by reading the imperialists and colonialists. In any case they are far more personable and interesting than their bureaucratic descendants.
And I certainly would avoid coming to any judgment about any case on which I had heard from the prosecution, but not the defense. So: what was the last book you read by an imperialist or colonialist? Or, for heaven's sake, racist?
But no - you get your interpretation of the British Empire from Mike Davis, like everyone else. Heck, you probably read Mike Davis in your "fairly conservative" graduate school.
So thanks, but I'll stick with my insanity. Maybe you can make me drink some kind of Internet hemlock, like Socrates. Did you know he was a democracy-hater, too? As were Plato and Aristotle, of course. You're more of a Vizzini than you may know, WsL...
I should also answer the
I should also answer the point about borders.
The idea that the Afpak border somehow "cannot" be secured is another of these strange American delusions that WsL and his ilk are, for some reason, struggling under. It is impossible for any rational person who knows anything about history to believe this chestnut. Yet somehow, it is trotted out everywhere.
Excuse me - how many young males of working age are there in Afghanistan? How many of these people need jobs? Surely some of the liberals out there are familiar with the phrase "Works Progress Administration." A colonial administration that cannot, with exclusively native labor, funded exclusively by native taxation, seal the borders of its own colony, is a colonial administration that is incompetent and needs to be replaced. No conceivable excuse or exception to this conclusion can be accepted.
Oh, I forgot. America isn't running a colonial administration. It is making friends and influencing people, or something. Anyone involved with Pink's War would certainly recognize it as a colonial administration, though!
Just a very ineffective one. (For instance, all American colonial administrations lose massive amounts of money and always have. Just as America's outer empire is customarily known as "the Third World," this red ink is customarily known as "aid." It is best seen as a general subsidy to criminals, who can ruin the colony most effectively - as a form of vengeance, perhaps, for having dared to serve the evil reign of darkness once known as the British Empire. At least from the late colonists' perspective, there was a definitely punitive feel to decolonialization!)
Yes. I am aware that the border between Afghanistan is rugged. I cannot find the source, but in older writing I have actually seen as an argument for the *ease* of securing a border - after all, by definition all you have to secure is the passes. Certainly the French were very successful with the Morice Line, between Morocco and Algeria. This may not be the Hindu Kush, but it is not New Jersey, either. And it was 50 years ago.
Schmedlap, I'd just like to
Schmedlap,
I'd just like to add that if you can get Gandhi and Mandela into the background of that PowerPoint, that would be great. Also, if the text could maybe be adapted from the Sermon on the Mount? Or something by Jimmy Carter?
In the old days, when America wanted to get something done, she sent guns and Bibles and money. Guns and money are always in style, but what jihadi these days really has the time for the full King James Version? And apparently they all use laptops now. So a PowerPoint is just the thing for peeling off those "moderate Taliban." Although maybe you'd better get Malcolm X into that background, too - wasn't he a Muslim?
(Not even the slides will help until we get the damned civilian casualties down, of course. Thank god we don't have to do a Dresden on North Waziristan. Nazi fanatics are still blowing themselves up in shopping malls over that one. Unfortunately, since those Marines ran over that goat with their Humvee two years ago, the Pashtoon people will never forgive us. Whatever we do, we can look forward to more exploding Pashtoons in the Rockville Mall. That's world leadership for ya! If only we'd been more careful in our respect for human rights. In future, out of consideration for the deep ethnic sensitivities of the noble Pashtoon people, all vehicles must pause for at least an hour if any goats are sighted in the vicinity. The barn may have burned down - but that doesn't mean we can't still lock the horse in it.)
Ghandi? Mandela? Carter?
Ghandi? Mandela? Carter? Wtf? I could understand plucking a personality from here, but those three guys don't seem like a good fit. I've never heard of any safety achievements or breakthroughs in the field of micromanagement on their part.
Schmedlap, Perhaps you're
Schmedlap,
Perhaps you're unfamiliar with The Elders...
Alas, I checked for Wing Commander Pink on the list, but he doesn't seem to have made it. Perhaps, despite his great efforts on behalf of peace, he was simply too elderly. Meanwhile, we learn:
"The Elders are actively engaged in supporting initiatives to address the humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe and efforts to build a stable, prosperous and secure future for its people."
Indeed. And what a job they've done with that! Afghanistan can only be next...
XKCD is a gem. I believe
XKCD is a gem. I believe this one may be relevant as well, to give us some perspective.
http://www.xkcd.com/647/
Re: the Elders. Looks like
Re: the Elders. Looks like the bar scene in Star Wars.
MM, Seriously, you're
MM,
Seriously, you're beyond stupid.
Do you have any real on-the-ground experience anyplace besides the pages of old books written by old racists? Obviously those idiots had the truth in them, as opposed to self-justificatory nonsense.
I understand your need to feel superior to the filthy wogs, but generally I prefer my unalloyed racist shite from someone who has actually held a sjambok or raped a trembling native maid with their own hands, not from a dreaming wannabe on the internet.
Visitor, you are absolutely
Visitor, you are absolutely right. Please read them, rather than me.
But do you read them? I'm sure you do, which is why you've favored us with your wisdom. Although it appears to owe quite a bit to the Julius Streicher tradition in history, or perhaps too many viewings of Addio Zio Tom. It may not be quite as dangerous to hate the past as to hate the Jews (or the wogs), but it is at least as weird and creepy. I will be the first to confess that I am not entirely without hate, but I try to leave the pornography out of it.
But in case you don't, and you actually do care to grasp the basic principles of racist colonialist imperialism, I'd start with the basic historical text - Seeley. If you follow that with Cromer (vol. I, vol. II), you should develop a good rough understanding of what the late Empire was about.
As for self-justificatory nonsense, I was born in 1973 and I feel like I have absorbed a good bit of this material. It is actually much easier to recognize in the past than in the present - try watching some old FDR propaganda someday, or reading some of his speeches. You simply won't be able to swallow it. Obviously, your present susceptibility to imperialist propaganda is much lower than your susceptibility to New Deal propaganda! So I wouldn't worry at all. There is no chance that these old demons will infect you with their evil Sith ways.
What you'll find, when you read those writers of the past whose intellectual tradition is not ancestral to ours (the present universal tradition of philanthropy, which is ancestral to ours, is in Victorian letters known as "Exeter Hall"), is just that they were people like you, who had real jobs like yours. None of them were morally or philosophically perfect, and nor is anyone today. The past is a foreign country. Get used to it.
Cromer, for instance, had a job: governing Egypt. I'm not sure he raped any native maids, trembling or otherwise, with his hands or anyone else's. But he surely had native maids, and that's a start. And he'd have had to order the sjambok from the Cape, but who knows! Perhaps he did! Hey, man, whatever gets you hard.
For readers unfamiliar with
For readers unfamiliar with "Mencius Moldbug," he blogs at Unqualified Reservations.
He's also Jewish. Not that there's anything wrong with this, of course. But it does heavily inform his views.
To put it perhaps a bit crudely, but nonetheless accurately, Mencius Moldbug basically wants the international arena to be safe for Israel, and diaspora Jews safe from both potential anti-Semitic right wing movements and violence perpetrated by lower-class criminals in their host countries. As such, he advocates strong, aggressive, military measures abroad and a powerful, nigh authoritarian government domestically composed of cognitive and commercial elites that are favorable to Jews and to Israel.
Some of his major claims have been debunked - through simple fact checking with Wikipedia. See here, here, and here.
If you can get Anderson's
If you can get Anderson's assertion that Mencius is primarily "wants the international arena to be safe for Israel, and diaspora Jews safe from both potential anti-Semitic right wing movements and violence perpetrated by lower-class criminals in their host countries" from Unqualified Reservations, they are a closer reader than I. Or high.
Mencius primarily recommends letting other countries fester in their own fetid juices (without aid, or diplomatic links) but if you are going to invade, do it brutally, and then run a colonial regime, with as much brutality as needed (which is some, at the start, but not so much later on).
Also, his recommended Government is not "nigh" authoritarian. It is wholly authoritarian.
Those are his basic
Those are his basic motivations.
And if you're going to qualify what I said he recommends, then qualify it completely. It's not simply a "wholly authoritarian" government that he recommends, but a "wholly authoritarian" government composed of cognitive and commercial elites that are favorable to Jews and to Israel. He certainly doesn't recommend a "wholly authoritarian" government opposed to or against Jews and Israel.
WsL: Your idea that
WsL:
Your idea that 'savages' can be pummeled into submission suggests to me that you have never spoken to civilians in a war zone. I have never seen anything inflame ordinary citizens to take up arms as quickly as bombing or a forcible foreign occupation without their consent, as you suggest... Hell, even IR studies keep concluding that 'punishment bombing' of civilian vulnerabilities never works and in fact stiffens resistance (see Pape etc.). I'd also like to hear your explanation for why things are getting worse when we have fired as many drone attacks in the past 10 months as in the three years before.
There is a difference between a fly-by bombing (of a rural area) and a foreign occupation. In a bombing, the planes keep on flying away from the village and the targets rebuild. In a foreign occupation - which is what Moldbug is talking about - the planes (and troops) have a base near the village and can keep up the killing until the remaining villagers get the hint.
And where are the resources, much less a plan, for 'sealing the border'?! You must be talking about millions of troops, half a trillion dollars of infrastructure and a wall to rival the Great Wall. The US can't even seal it's own border with Mexico and our civilians are relatively sympathetic to the cause.
Note you said "civilians". To seal a border of that length you need a government, to pay the army or at least to co-ordinate the border communities to co-operate. And this US government is corrupt and refuses to seal that border. In Moldbug's system, the State is not beholden to interest groups made up of subversive ACORN types. The Moldbug State is a profit-making enterprise. Anybody who can contribute stays in; those who plan to come in just to grab some emergency-room care for free, is shut out. Nice try at changing the subject. Pity it failed.
For what it's worth, I've worked in the rural areas of the Phillipines and Hati and I shipping out to Afghanistan next. I cannot see anyway in which the US occupation of the first two can be called a success or at beneficial for the indigenous people or US interests.
Suffice to say of Haiti, that the US occupation cannot have done any worse with the material at hand.
But the Philippines were absolutely better off as of 1940 than they were when the Spaniards left them in 1900. We could have left them alone and seen how they fared, but if we had then they'd have just got annexed by the Japanese that much sooner. Is that your ideal solution?
You are not very good at this.
I'm with Zanon - I have no
I'm with Zanon - I have no idea where in particular Anderson is getting his accusations of Moldbugian Zionism. It's possible he's right, of course, but I've archive-binged UR twice and a half since discovering it and I can't recall any pro- or antiSemitic sentiment.
And if your evidence is merely the absence of the converse, I hasten to point out that by the same logic he also recommends a wholly authoritarian government favorable to China, Zimbabwe, and individually wrapped bubblegum.
wow, anderson is a moron.
wow, anderson is a moron. Nothing in Mencius's blog indicates he is pro-zionist (I always got the indication that he was anything but suspicious of political religions a'la Voegelin). Also, the blog links that Anderson linked to are HILARIOUS. They don't even support his assertion. Two of them have nothing to do with Jews, and one of them is a quote taken out of context. And lmao@some of his major claims being debunked by those linked pieces. One of the blog posts is a post against a commentator, NOT mencius, the other is the Jewish out of context quote, and another is historical nitpicking.
I don't think anderson even knows what 'debunks' means.
but I've archive-binged UR
but I've archive-binged UR twice and a half since discovering it and I can't recall any pro- or antiSemitic sentiment.
If you can't recall any pro or anti-Semitic sentiments, then you have to archive binge it again.
He has a lot of very lengthy essays. Many of which of course are on completely unrelated topics, such as Austrian economics. So it's easy to miss.
And if your evidence is merely the absence of the converse
It's not.
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