Edward Luttwak
The Byzantine art of war and diplomacy would prove useful in today’s Afghanistan
Even by the shortest reckoning, the Byzantine empire survived for eight centuries (from the fourth to the twelfth)—longer than any other in history. Although the Byzantines were supremely tenacious in combat, their strategy—invented in response to the unprecedented threat of Attila’s Huns in the 5th century—relied on diplomacy, evolving into a body of rules and techniques that is still relevant today.
Unlike the Romans, the Byzantines wrote official guidebooks on statecraft, foreign relations and espionage: writings I find especially fascinating, as I once helped compose the main field manual of the US army. These ancient techniques centred on a single, paradoxical principle: do everything possible to raise, equip and train the best possible army and navy; then do everything possible to use them as little as possible.
With Afghanistan, the west faces a simple strategic calculus: too costly to stay in, too risky to leave. A Byzantine response would be, first to withdraw the west’s scarce, expensive troops, and arm local proxies instead. This was the standard remedy for turbulent, worthless lands where no taxes could be collected, but which were to be denied to enemies: an improvement over the Romans’ fondness for battles of attrition and annihilation.
In Afghanistan, a banal case of divide and rule is impossible. There is no unitary nation to divide. This is well suited to a Byzantine strategy, which would aim not to rule Afghanistan, but to stop the Taliban from doing so. Little persuasion would be needed to co-opt allies. The Shia Hazara distrust the Taliban, who view them as heretics deserving death, while the country’s Tajiks and Uzbeks, who can be as extreme in religion as the Taliban, would not want to be ruled by them either.
The Byzantines would use diplomacy to deal with Afghanistan’s diverse neighbours. They once even persuaded a rival empire to split the cost of guarding strategic border passes, so both could keep invaders out. Today Uzbekistan, which is just across the river from Afghanistan, and its patron Russia, which is just beyond, have every reason to keep the Taliban at bay, given their internal struggles against armed Islamists. Accordingly, the Byzantines would demand from Russia and Uzbekistan the weapons and ammunition that were needed to arm the Tajiks, Hazara and Uzbeks in Afghanistan.
Most Pakistanis, too, have had their fill of Islamists—during the last election, in 2008, in the supposedly most Islamic northwest, the major Islamist party won just 3 per cent of the vote. Pakistan is more liberal than we think: one of its most popular television talk shows has major political guests, despite being hosted by a transvestite (with a not unpleasant singing voice). But when it comes to meddling in Afghanistan, the ideologically Islamic Pakistani officer caste is firmly in charge, ignoring the preferences of the country’s voters. So Pakistan will continue to do everything in its power to sabotage any possible Byzantine solutions and strengthen the Taliban. The Taliban’s weapons all come through Pakistani territory—Shia Iran only supplies the Shia-killing Taliban every now and then, when the urge to embarrass the US prevails over the much stronger long-term interest in containing the ultra-Sunni Taliban.
The Byzantines would employ a standard technique to neutralise the inevitable Pakistani counter-move. In their day the arrival of a new class of enemy—mounted archers, for instance, or new empires attacking their eastern flank—prompted long-range diplomatic expeditions, deep into their foes’ backyard, to find other powers that might be induced to come and take them on. In one case, an envoy perilously travelled 3,000 miles into what is now China, and persuaded a previously unknown monarch to send forces to attack their rival empire of Persia.
Today, distant journeys would not be needed to find our ally, India, which already provides economic, political and intelligence support to the Afghans. India would furiously protest the remedy of leaving Afghanistan to the locals. But if America goes Byzantine, and withdraws, India will have no choice but to increase its own efforts to resist the Taliban. US-Indian relations in the aftermath? Some passing unpleasantness, no doubt, with aggrieved complaints heard politely and cheerfully ignored. But the solid force of common interests—and, of course, Beijing’s curious revival of the major territorial dispute over the new Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh—would force the Indian hand.
An abandoned Afghanistan, even with a low equilibrium of violence, would not be a pretty spectacle. Then again, it is far from a being one now, in spite of a very costly intervention. Strategy, Byzantine or otherwise, is not a sentimental trade.
Prospect
Karzai must negotiate a complex system of patronage
Alex de Waal’s account of the tough realities of Afghan politics (December) should be welcomed. Yes, the government of Afghanistan is corrupt. So whoever is governing the country—whether President Karzai or anyone else—has no choice but to rule through a diverse and disparate coalition. Out of necessity, this coalition uses public funds to finance and hold together a complex system of patronage. A look at 18th-century British politics provides some clues as to how this works—though Afghanistan’s problems are far more challenging than the Britain of Walpole and George I. What was surprising about the last Afghan election was not the vote-rigging itself, but the shock expressed by observers and commentators. What did they expect?
Perhaps instead of railing about corruption, commentators should explore how we can help the Afghan government do better. There may be lessons here from Pitt the Younger, who used the corrupt political system he disliked to pursue the foreign and domestic policies he regarded as essential. He knew that if he simply railed against (or fought) a chronically corrupt system, it would have rejected him and his policies. Nevertheless, his time in office did lay some of the foundations for the more transparent and “cleaner” political system that developed in subsequent decades.
Of course, we should not simply accept or turn a blind eye to corruption. But we do need to be more sophisticated in our response to it.
Phil Vernon
Via the Prospect website
Renegade
Obama’s mixed heritage finds a parallel in Spock
We should have guessed at the 2008 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, when Barack Obama spotted Leonard Nimoy and gave the double-finger Vulcan sign to the man who played Spock in the original Star Trek. Yes, Obama is a Trekkie. This endears him to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, King Abdullah of Jordan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who were all delighted to find a fellow fan. And it gives him some common ground with Al Gore, whose Harvard roommates said he spent more time watching the show than studying. (Colin Powell is another avid fan.)
Just as the world divides into Beatles and Stones fans, Trekkies are split into fans of cerebral Spock and those who prefer Captain Kirk (whose character was dreamed up in the 1960s as an echo of JFK). Even without considering his prominent ears, no prizes for guessing which way Obama leans—and what is more, the president is often compared to Spock.
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Prospect
Burchill on Diana
11th November 2009
There are not many magazines that contain intelligent articles about things that matter. There are lots of magazines providing lengthy coverage of things like the antics of minor royals and their aristocratic relatives, or what one celebrity author thinks about another. Julie Burchill’s piece on Diana (November) seems to belong in that category: Burchill doesn’t much like Charles Spencer, but sees the late Princess of Wales as a “bright, searching cityscape of progress and compassion.” What’s the evidence for this? Is it possible that this “mercurial, volatile body of light” was in fact a well-meaning, psychologically damaged airhead of no long-term significance to this country or its politics? And if this is the case, what place does she have in Britain’s intelligent conversation?
Arthur Snell
London SW8
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Tom Streithorst
The beginning of wisdom: the illusion of control?
So there I was, in the graveyard at dusk, the little girl screaming. I couldn’t deny it, it was all my fault. Umm? Maybe I should start again.
December’s issue of Prospect features a perceptive article by Alex de Waal on the west’s failures in Afghanistan. De Waal suggests that western officials, comfortable with academic concepts like “nation building,” “civil society” and “rule of law” have a hard time understanding the nitty gritty of politics in places like Afghanistan. I think he is right. We in the west are so much richer—often so much better educated than the Afghans we meet—that it sometimes blinds us to our ignorance about their lives and country.
Back in the very early days of the “war on terror,” back when the Taliban still ruled Kabul, back when it was still all good fun, I was based in a compound deep in rural Afghanistan, near the Northern Alliance foreign ministry in Takhar province. We westerners, well trained as to the proper disposal of garbage, would always neatly put our trash in the little pails we had brought with us from Tajikistan.
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Alex De Waal
Afghanistan: “a political souk where buyers and sellers haggle over the going rate for renting allegiances”
When Nato concedes a draw in Afghanistan, it will be because of its failure to understand the country’s politics. But a deeper failure will lurk in the background. In the past decade the west has launched a huge experiment to build capable states in the world’s most difficult countries. Troops, technical advisers and aid budgets are the tools of choice. The experiment is said to have worked in East Timor, Kosovo and Sierra Leone; now Afghanistan, Congo and Sudan are top of the target list. All are failed or fragile states where patronage is paramount and where the political arena is a marketplace, not a debating chamber.
The problem is that Nato and the UN are terribly bad at patronage politics. Their operations are run from green-zone ghettoes and their representatives are risk averse, obsessed with procedures and rarely interacting with their hosts. No one in Afghanistan gets promoted for bending the rules to fit the reality of patron-client relations and the exchange of favours.
How did we get here? According to the conventional story, countries like Afghanistan are in trouble because they can’t sustain order, manage a budget, or deliver services. So we provide funds to kick-start development, charities to provide services, experts to run departments, and troops to enforce the law. A helpful cocoon emerges in which the state grows stronger. And when this state looks enough like the Czech Republic, we hand over the keys.
In 2005, the UN set up a peacebuilding commission to promote such technocratic state-building, which is especially fashionable in western aid departments. The state-builders normally show up after the peace agreements have been signed, give themselves four to six years to get results, and hold multi-party elections or a referendum on self-determination as a graduation ceremony. At the start it looks feasible and western governments, aware of their treasuries and fickle publics, rarely admit that the process might be much slower.
Yet even in tiny countries such hopes are fatally optimistic. Take East Timor, heralded as one of the UN’s successes. Its 1m people received $565m in support from 2002-05, backed up by Australian troops. But the country was soon back in crisis; in 2008 there was a coup attempt. The model is more unsustainable for larger countries: it would take tens of billions of dollars to similarly support Congo’s 66m people.
Look at statebuilding from another point of view: that of an embattled ruler. To him, all those dollars and foreign troops are a huge boon. The money can buy off some opponents, while foreign soldiers fight the rest. Strong, autonomous government departments, however, are a genuine threat. A chief of staff might launch a sudden coup, or a finance minister may put rival warlords on his payroll. Secret ballots are a problem too: it’s hard to pay off local powerbrokers under the eyes of election monitors. The ruler might speak the language of the rule of law. But the real game is buying loyalty. A well-managed, inclusive patronage system is often the only way of running such countries.
Afghan president Hamid Karzai is a case in point. A more talented politician might have been able to strike better deals with local powerbrokers, so that posts and payoffs were bargained for in backrooms, not with Kalashnikovs and roadside bombs. But skilful management cannot resolve Karzai’s main dilemma: any bargain he strikes is good only so long as his US backers remain in place. Both Karzai and his opponents know that the surge of 40,000 extra troops proposed by US General McChrystal is unsustainable, and that any agreements dependent on battlefield advances will be short-lived at best. Underneath the old model remains: a political souk where buyers and sellers haggle over the going rate for renting allegiances.
Even worse, Nato has crippled Karzai’s ability to bargain properly. Foreign firepower and funds give him the strongest hand in the souk, but western demands to stamp out corruption and defeat the Taliban stop him playing his best cards. And peace established by foreign troops, village by village, will quickly break down once the troops are gone—meanwhile, their very presence sparks disputes.
So the ruler has a fine line to tread. He must be strong enough to be indispensable to his foreign backers, but not so strong that they withdraw. Congo’s Joseph Kabila has played this hand masterfully. Following his disputed election in 2006, he has contrived to get the UN to increase its peacekeeping contingent and hunt down his adversaries. Best of all, the international criminal court has put his most formidable rival in the dock for war crimes. But should the troops withdraw, Congolese provincial leaders who have been underpaid for their loyalty will demand more—at the point of a gun.
Karzai’s best asset is that he knows how his country works, with loyalties transacted on the basis of kinship, faith and cash. The Taliban showed that a government can be run cheaply on the first two alone. The US is handicapped because it has only the third. In the months after 9/11, the Americans dollarised Afghanistan’s patronage system, flying in planeloads of shrink-wrapped $100 bills to pay off warlords, while putting on a fireworks display for the media to pretend that military might, not bribery, defeated the Taliban. It worked. But this hardheaded approach was then abandoned in favour of the illusion that, freed from the aberrant Taliban, Afghanistan would begin a path towards western-style democracy.
Today, it would be more cost-effective to ditch the extra troops and revert to funding patronage. This would mean different priorities, like taking control of the drugs market to deny the Taliban its best source of funds. A new patronage system could eventually be made fairer and more inclusive, perhaps allowing institutions to grow around it slowly. But this means thinking like an Afghan politician, not an international peacebuilder. If the west cannot follow this path, it will join the other superpowers humbled in the Hindu Kush. The war in Afghanistan will become more about salvaging Nato than about building a central Asian Denmark. And should Nato withdraw, others—perhaps China—will set the more modest goal of political stability, and pay hard cash to get it.
Tom Nuttall
EU: there is increasing scepticism about foreign interventions
With Gordon Brown and, reportedly, Barack Obama both agreeing to up their respective countries’ troop count in Afghanistan, Afghan watchers have understandably spent the past week focusing on the military component of the international effort (plus, of course, the nefarious activities of the Italians).
Yet, as with most large-scale interventions these days, Afghanistan also enjoys a significant civilian presence—police, rule of law experts, reconstruction teams and the like. And while the instinct in America is always to turn to the Pentagon first, we Europeans, with our far more subtle understanding of the complex nature of modern security challenges, are much better at deploying this so-called “civilian power” effectively—right?
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Tom Streithorst
Johnson: what can Obama learn from Vietnam?
A popular new president, committed to ambitious domestic reform. A war halfway around the globe, inherited from his predecessor. Generals demanding more troops, predicting defeat if they are denied. The year, 1965, the president, Lyndon Johnson, the war, Vietnam.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Lyndon Johnson in 1965, like Obama today, was dubious about the prospects for victory in his far away war. Nor was he convinced of its geopolitical significance. What persuaded him to send troops—the decision that ultimately destroyed his presidency—was the fear that if he didn’t, his opponents would paint him as militarily weak—as the president who lost Vietnam.
During the campaign, in order to maintain his militaristic bona fides, Barack Obama liked to compare the war in Afghanistan, the “good war,” with the “bad war,” the war in Iraq. He made the point, correctly, that by shifting troops in 2002-2003 for the invasion of Iraq, America took its eye off the ball in Afghanistan.
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Jonathan Power
Osama bin Laden: too little was done to track him down
Six days after the attack on the World Trade Centre, President George W. Bush declared that the capture of Osama bin Laden was his prime objective. “I want justice,” he said. “There’s an old poster out west that I recall that said ‘wanted dead or alive’”. He also said that the purpose of going to war was to “smoke him out.”
The US and Britain then unleashed their bombs over Afghanistan, killing far more innocent Afghans than the number of people killed on 9/11. It did no good at all, and certainly didn’t touch bin Laden and his team who were safely hidden in caves in the impenetrable mountains of Pakistan. Not long after Bush turned his attention to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Less and less was spoken of the need to hunt down bin Laden. None of this made sense. Afghanistan is now in a mess. The US and its allies are in as deep as the previous Soviet invaders were, with the Taliban as apt at keeping them on the defensive and wearing them down by a war of attrition as the Mujahedeen were 25 years ago.
Today the Western powers say their aim is to change the nature of Afghanistan society—ending Islamic militancy, liberating women via educating, building clinics and roads. But are we there to refashion a conservative society? That, surely, is not our business.
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Anthony King
Writing in this month’s Prospect, Stephen Grey details the political and military mistakes that have been made in Helmand. Perhaps most importantly, he identifies the role of the institutional culture of Britain’s armed forces: “cracking on”—the unshakeable determination of Britain’s troops. Grey is right that the ethos of “cracking on” is the army’s greatest quality; effective armies require fortitude and morale in order to endure the losses that they will inevitably suffer. Yet, as he notes, it may be the army’s greatest weakness too.
Having worked with the British armed forces for the last five years, watching them on operations in Kabul and Basra, it has become clear to me that the culture of “cracking on” may not mean merely that British troops from the Somme to Sangin have dutifully enacted orders which they know to be poor but, more seriously, it affects operational command itself. As Grey notes, British commanders have blithely conducted missions in Helmand despite a woeful lack of intelligence about the theatre and knowingly inadequate military resources for any realistic chance of success.
During their initial training at Sandhurst, army officers are taught to retain the initiative: when they are confronted by the immediate presence of an enemy, it is better to do the wrong thing decisively than to do nothing at all. Passivity almost always leads to defeat, while determined, concerted action— even if initially implausible—can often unhinge opponents. On recurrent exercises primarily based on conventional warfare, the centrality of activity, of tempo and offensive action—of cracking on—is repeatedly emphasised to trainee officers. At the tactical level, this prioritisiation of action and initiative is surely correct, imbuing a robust work ethic in Britain’s armed forces which is appreciated and valued by their allies, like the US. From the Balkans to Afghanistan, multinational commanders have looked to British troops to carry out tasks that other nations have been reluctant to perform.
More surprising, however, is that the same ethos of action is evident at staff college where officers are trained for operational command. Although the concept behind Britain’s Joint Service Command and Staff College (created in 1997) was innovative, the institution was imbued with traditional British military culture. It was and remains a testament to “cracking on.” Giving students little time for thought and independent reading and research, the college seems to replicate a conventional military exercise in which the speed and quantity of output is prioritised over quality—and potentially incorrect action over cautious contemplation. The result is that Britain’s operational commanders feel the need to act and impose themselves on any situation.
More worrying still, British commanders often have a narrow concept of the ideal form of military action. Despite well-worn claims to expertise in counter-insurgency, the British army actually regards conventional military combat as the ideal—and indeed ultimate—test of their professionalism. Like Clausewitz’s military genius, British officers today want to test themselves under “the most murderous fire.” This encourages the premature and excessive use of violence despite wider the political situation. In June 2008, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith judged the Taliban insurgency to have been defeated (at least temporarily) as a result of a series of decapitation missions by special forces he had commanded. But by the end of the tour in October, he took a rather different line, arguing that this was a campaign which could not be won by the very military methods which he had advocated only months earlier. British commanders are prone to confusing local tactical superiority with operational success.
Even now there are inadequate numbers of troops in Helmand. However, rather than tailor the campaign to their resources, commanders have consistently “cracked on”; seeking to dominate the whole of Helmand, a hostile province the size of Wales, with just a few thousand troops, and dispersing their forces across the province into small, isolated platoon and operating bases. Even in the Sangin Valley, where there are several significant positions, the British bases cannot mutually support each other; they are too far apart, while Musa Qaleh is some twenty miles away to the north. As British commanders in Sangin have themselves noted, troops in these locations “sit in a bubble,” and this inevitably means they are engaging in numerous firefights.
Institutional factors within the military establishment seem to have further encouraged this preference for “cracking on.” Never easy, tensions between the services have become increasingly strained over the last decade as a result of declining defence budgets and, as they approach the future defence review in 2010, these frictions have reached a crisis point. Each service is desperately seeking to protect itself from cuts; furious and bitter arguments have been reported, with each service trying to undercut the other. And intense tactical activity in Helmand has become a potent tool in this competition: it is very difficult to cut regiments that have fought hard and suffered numerous casualties in Helmand. Budgetary pressures, then, have actually precipitated a preference for high-intensity war-fighting in Helmand—a pathological institutional reaction to chronic under-funding, ministerial mismanagement and poor governmental guidance.
A new Afghan strategy is essential—and the announcements from US General McChrystal and Gordon Brown at the end of August recognise this. However, their new strategy in Helmand also requires a reformation of Britain’s armed forces themselves. The success of General Petraeus in Iraq rested finally on a common recognition by the US Army and Marine Corps that the way in which they trained, planned and conducted military operations required profound revision. In short, operational success demands institutional reform at home. While valuable at the tactical level, the culture of “cracking on” needs to be expunged from operational command. The armed forces, the ministry of defence and government need to develop more mature criteria on which to assess the performance of commanders—judging them by their political contribution to the campaign, not by the number of air assault operations they have conducted.
There is some evidence that the British armed forces may be capable of this change. In previous campaigns in Malaya and Northern Ireland, the British recognised, after false starts, that the key to success in counter-insurgency campaigns was the slow suppression of insurgency through intelligence, negotiation, the presence of adequate security forces and cross-governmental coordination. The British now need to relearn these lessons very quickly. The alternative is that their commanders in Helmand will continue to disperse their forces in futile and blunt demonstrations—ensuring that they crack on to defeat not only in Helmand but at home, in the arena of public support, as well.
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