Apologies for the lack of posts. I have been busy doing research in Moscow for my book on Russian conservatism. Today I conducted a couple of interviews, including one with the man standing next to me below. I’ll post the interviews on this site once they have been transcribed and translated.
I am off to Moscow on Saturday. While there I will deliver a paper at the 2017 Moscow Telos Conference, details of which you can see here and in the poster below. Back to Ottawa on Tuesday 5 September.
So, now we know what Donald Trump intends to do about Afghanistan. He intends to reinforce failure, sending additional troops to that country (believed to amount to 1,000 soldiers and 3,000 military contractors, although Trump didn’t specify) in an effort to defeat the Taleban. Quite how this miniscule increase in military power is meant to achieve that objective isn’t at all clear, especially given that the United States was unable to achieve it when it had 10 times as many troops in Afghanistan. With Steve Bannon out of the White House, we are led to believe that national security policy is now in the hands of the ‘grown-ups’, serious military men like H.R. McMaster and James Mattis, who understand strategy. But reading Trump’s speech on the subject it’s hard to see any sign of strategy. It is, quite frankly, a confusing mess.
On the one hand, Trump declared that he intends to ‘win’ the war in Afghanistan. ‘We will always win’, he said. But how will the US win? By avoiding all that touchy-feely nation building stuff, allowing more permissive rules of engagement, and permitting the US military to kill more bad guys, Trump seemed to say. ‘We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists,’ he declared, adding that, ‘we will no longer use American might to construct democracies in faraway lands … Those days are now over.’ But how many more ‘terrorists’ is another 4,000 people going to manage to kill, and what’s to say that more of them won’t just pop up in their place? Trump doesn’t have an answer. Indeed, he contradicted himself by saying that, ‘Military power alone will not bring peace to Afghanistan or stop the terrorist threat arising in that country. But strategically applied force aims to create the conditions for a political process to achieve a lasting peace’.
Ah! So the aim isn’t after all to ‘win’, but to ‘create the conditions for a political process.’ But what is this process? Trump didn’t tell us, no doubt because he hasn’t got a clue what it might be. All he could say was:
Someday, after an effective military effort, perhaps it will be possible to have a political settlement that includes elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan, but nobody knows if or when that will ever happen.
So, the strategy is to use military power to create the conditions for a political settlement with the Taleban, even though it has so far utterly failed to achieve that, and even though ‘nobody knows if or when that will ever happen.’ And this is what constitutes ‘grown-up’ thinking? At the end of the day, Trump’s announcement amounts merely to a statement that withdrawing will bring untold disaster, and therefore we have to persist, because, well, you know, it will be bad if we don’t. There is nothing in this announcement which suggests how Trump or his advisors imagine that this war will end. They are as clueless as Obama and Bush before them, and so are just carrying on doing the same thing over and over.
Why do they do this? The answer is that the financial costs of the war are dispersed over a vast number of people, so that nobody actually notices them, while the human costs are concentrated in a small segment of the population – the military – which the rest of the people can safely ignore (and at the current tempo of operations, the number of Americans dying in Afghanistan is quite low). Politically speaking, continuing the war is relatively cost-free. But should America withdraw, and something then goes wrong, Trump and those around him will be held to blame. It is better therefore to cover their backsides and keep things bubbling along as they are until the problem can be passed onto somebody else. This is a solution in terms of domestic politics, but it’s not a solution in terms of the actual problem.
By coincidence, today I got more news about Afghanistan, in the form of the latest missive from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). This relates to a review of ‘USAID-funded initiatives to implement an electronic payment system for the collection of customs duties in Afghanistan.’ Like most Western-backed initiatives in Afghanistan, this one (managed by the company Chemonics) hasn’t gone according to plan. According to SIGAR, ‘Chemonics and USAID significantly revised the revenue generation targets downward for the first three quarters of program year four because the program failed to achieve any of the revenue generation targets established for year three.’ Beyond that, says SIGAR:
As of December 2016, there was little evidence to show that the project would come anywhere close to achieving the 75 percent target, however, USAID and Chemonics have not altered project targets to account for the reality of the situation, and instead continue to invest in an endeavor that appears to have no chance of achieving its intended outcome. [my underlining]
That pretty much sums it up.
Who’s to blame for the war in Ukraine? The great majority of Western politicians and security experts have no doubt. It’s Russia. The war in Donbass is not a civil war, but ‘Russian aggression’. If enough pressure can just be exerted on Moscow to get it to change its behaviour, the violence would stop, Donbass would rejoin Ukraine, and the country could march happily towards its inevitable future as a prosperous, free, and democratic member of the community of European nations.
A minority of commentators has a different point of view. One of them is Dutch journalist Chris Kaspar de Ploeg. In his new book Ukraine in the Crossfire, de Ploeg does not seek to whitewash either Russia or deposed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich, and admits that Russia has provided significant support to the Donbass rebels. Nevertheless, he points the finger of blame for Ukraine’s problems quite firmly at the United States of America. ‘The war in Ukraine serves to keep the EU [European Union] in line with the wider US agenda,’ he argues.
Remember how, back in 2001, George W. Bush abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, previously one of the cornerstones of the international security system? It was one of the first American steps to annoy the then relatively new Russian president, Vladimir Putin, helping launch US-Russian relations on their long downward trajectory. The Americans claimed that it was worth the price, however, because they foresaw a danger from ‘rogue states’ armed with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, and by reneging on the ABM Treaty the US could develop a means of defending itself. And thus was born the National Missile Defense boondoggle.
Sixteen years later and, if we are to believe the CIA and the press, the predictions have come true, and North Korea has finally developed a miniaturized nuclear bomb which can fit inside a ballistic missile, and has also developed missiles capable of hitting the continental USA. Donald Trump is threatening ‘fire and fury’ the likes of which the world has never seen. Something must be done, he shreaks. The United States faces a terrible danger, we are told.
But why? Aren’t the Americans safe by now behind their missile shield? It hasn’t been cheap, and surely given how much has been spent, it must be able to shoot down those North Korean nukes? After all, we are told:
According to Missile Defense Agency (MDA) estimates, Congress has appropriated roughly $190 billion for the agency’s programs between fiscal years 1985 and 2017. That total does not include spending by the military services on programs such as the Patriot system or the many additional tens of billions of dollars spent since work on anti-missile systems first began in the 1950s.
So, why are the Americans running around like headless chickens and threatening blue murder? There is only one answer – they don’t believe that their beloved missile defence system actually works. And they’re right. National missile defence’s latest manifestation is the so-called Ground-Based Mid-Course Defense System. This alone has cost $40 billion. But according to a report issued last year, it is ‘simply unable to protect the public’ – in other words, it’s a dud.
In a world of rational policy making, somebody would ask why such vast sums of money had been wasted on a project which to date has failed utterly to produce what it promised, and which has also incurred broader political costs, such as those associated with the abrogation of the ABM Treaty. In such a world, policy makers would decide that it was long past time to put an end to this fiasco and stop funding immediately. That, of course, is most unlikely to happen. The progress made by the North Koreans will almost certainly instead be used to argue that missile defence has never been more critical, and so to demand even more money to throw even deeper into the hole.
If this were the only such example of massive waste, one could perhaps forgive it (if one was a particularly generous soul). But, of course, it isn’t. In other posts I have, for instance, highlighted the $100 billion plus which the USA has spent on economic aid to Afghanistan, which the American government’s own auditor admits hasn’t achieved any positive results he can identify. And then, there’s the trillion or so dollars the US has spent on its military campaign in Afghanistan, similarly without success. And, I’m sure, it would be pretty easy to find other, equally outrageous examples.
I’m going to say it straight. The military industrial complex is a system of scandalous profligacy and inefficiency, the primary effect of which is not to make the USA (or other countries with similar MICs) any safer but rather to redistribute wealth out of the pockets of the general taxpayer and into the pockets of select constituencies (military personnel, defence contractors, and the like). It also largely beyond democratic control. The foundation of a liberal democratic system is accountability. But the MIC is not accountable. The large and more wasteful its failures, the more it is able to claim that it needs more money: smash up the Middle East and then the resulting disorder enables one to claim that the world is dangerous and one needs more funding; spend $190 billion failing to produce a workable missile defence system, and the fact that you don’t have a workable system justifies even more money in order to try to create one. And so on. In the world of military affairs, nothing is as rewarding as failure.
Will anybody in a position of power now start asking what’s happened to the $190 billion which was meant to protect the USA against North Korean missiles? Don’t bet on it.
Dinner conversation at the ancestral pile in the People’s Republic of Monmouthshire:
Why do kids have to waste their time learning Welsh when they could be doing something far more useful? It’s getting silly. All the signs in Welsh and the villages suddenly getting Welsh names. Shirenewton’s always been Shirenewton. Suddenly it’s Drenewydd Gelli-farch. What the ‘farch’ is that? You can’t even pronounce it. Besides, has anyone ever called it that? Yes, but you know there are a few people who’ve gone native. Diane’s learning Welsh, for God’s sake. Why? It’s not like she knows anybody she could speak it to. If she tried speaking to the bank teller in Barclays in Welsh, she’d just get a blank stare. But she’s not the only one, Elizabeth the other day said something like ‘Oh John’s gone over to England’. Like it’s somewhere foreign! Time to stop this stupid nonsense. It’s not like Monmouthshire’s Welsh anyway. It was part of England from Henry VIII’s Act of Union in 1536. And then the Labour government just one day decided to give it to Wales as a gift. Just like Khrushchev! 1969 wasn’t it? Or was it 1970? I think it was the Tories, actually. Keith Joseph, surely, when he reorganized the counties? Nobody imagined it actually meant anything, that there’d be devolution and it would end up in a different country. You know that Donetsk was founded by a Welshman? A miner wasn’t he? No, a steel man, but you can’t have steel unless you have coal as well as iron ore. There wasn’t anyone living in Donetsk till Hughes turned up, and then the Russians arrived to work in the mines and steel works. Just like in the valleys here – they’re all English really. Came in the nineteenth century. If Wales ever secedes from England, we’ll just have to secede from Wales. I’ve applied for an Irish passport, by the way. It will be really useful after Brexit.
I’ve spent the last week in Florence, thus the lack of posts. I read in the BBC that Europe is experiencing its greatest heatwave in a decade, with temperatures in Italy 10 degrees above normal. I can believe it. This is what it feels like:
I managed to scan the calendar picture for August before I headed off on my travels. So here it is – a poster in praise of physical exercise.
IRRUSSIANALITY 