Unsurprisingly, the debates regarding America’s options in Afghanistan have been framed around the Vietnam debacle. While TSIBR is a major fan of learning from the past, TSIBR has also learned from difficult experience that one should never confuse learning from the past, with living in the present. In other words, humans like to fight the last battle rather than the current one.
That being said, there are certainly many commonalities on the ground between America’s Vietnam and Afghan experiences, as one would expect since both are guerilla style wars; such commonalities have received widespread coverage in the mainstream press. Regarding such commonalities, TSIBR would like to point out the obvious: since Vietnam there have been 40 years during which all American military doctrine was aimed at developing counter-guerilla-insurgency techniques and technologies (i.e. drones). To think that America is not better at conducting guerilla counter-insurgency today than in 1965 would be tantamount to saying that 1960s mainframes were as good as our portable laptops today.
More importantly perhaps, is the scant coverage lent to all the many strategic ‘Grand Game’ differences between the Vietnam and Afghanistan situations. Comprehending these type variations is crucial to understanding the stakes at play for Americans in this episode. Historical consensus now agrees that the US blundered into Vietnam as an incorrect proxy for a global ideological war on communism; rather quickly it became clear that neither the US, Russia, nor China had any hegemonic-type strategic or material interests in Vietnam being communist or otherwise. Thus Vietnam morphed into a strange war over ideological symbolism, it was never a war of material need, and barely a war about strategic threat. Given the hubris with which the US emerged from WWII, it is not particularly surprising that the US imagined beforehand that it would have the wherewithal to fight a third-world ideological battle with first-world material blood and treasure. But it didn’t; not that it couldn’t, more that it wouldn’t, for long.
Some 40 years later we come to Afghanistan, and I ask you kind reader, do we still revel in American hubris today? Hardly; America is on its heels, and its enemies smell blood:
http://thesystemisblinkingred.blogspot.com/2009/04/americas-enemies-smell-blood-and-so.html
Notice that the Viet Cong never attacked domestic America, or planned to, or even threatened to? What would they have to gain? At every level then the key factor that differentiates the war in Afghanistan from the war in Vietnam is America’s rapidly declining Hegemony. In Vietnam the question the world posed was: is the US so much stronger than the rest of the world that it can waste monumental amounts of blood and treasure on an ideological war without suffering any negative material consequences? The answer clearly was no. Today the question the world is posing is: has the US declined so far that it can no longer afford to adequately protect itself? And if the world increasingly decides the answer to that question is yes, global chaos will swell.
Longtime readers know that the key stories TSIBR follows all generally revolve around the global hotspots of political and economic chaos, and how happenings there interact with American decline here. Few if any global hotspots have received more TSIBR coverage than the Af/Pak region, particularly the terror events that make it clear that al Qaeda is using Pakistan as a launching pad to destabilize relations between nuclear armed India and Pakistan, in an attempt to stress key Chinese-American dynamics. The fact is that India and America have numerous deep and important bilateral alliances, many of which revolve around a scenario where India and Pakistan come to blows over Kashmir. On the other side, Pakistan and China too have numerous deep and important bilateral alliances (along with historic enmity for India), many revolving around a scenario where India and Pakistan come to blows over Kashmir.
Hence it is not surprising that al Qaeda in Pakistan has allied with the TTP, which in turn has strong connections to the Kashmiri Freedom Terrorist Groups Lashkar and Jaish. Al Qaeda is attempting to sew the seeds of chaos throughout their target nations (in this case Pakistan and Afghanistan), and the best way to do that is to force large powers with complex alliances to cross borders they’re not supposed to. The ensuing chaos foments an environment more conducive to enacting Caliphate type strategies (al Qaeda’s reason for existence remains their far-fetched attempt to create an Islamic Caliphate stretching from Afghanistan through Saudi Arabia). Moreover, the al Qaeda associated Lashkar not only launched the devastating Mumbai attacks, but also has numerous unknown and largely clandestine ties to the Pakistani ISI (intelligence services). Meanwhile, the ISI is quite aware that Pakistan, in the long-run, is far better off living in a world where China is Hegemon, and the US has declined (hopefully taking India with it). Hence, nuclear-armed Pakistan will never truly be on America’s side in any materially important political-economic issues over the next century or so, although they will hedge their bets by taking money from, and paying lip service to, the US; until they don’t that is.
Therefore it becomes clear that the true threat in the AF/Pak region comes, not from al Qaeda/Taiban per say, but from the potential reactions of India and the Pakistani government itself to increased terror originating in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is the potential for significantly increased terror throughout Af/Pak that drives America’s continued presence. Its like this: if the US does withdraw, and the terror does increase, India and Pakistan would be more, shall we say, ‘free’ to deal with their issue. The consequences for the region, America/Chinese relations, and American hegemony more generally, would be grave.
The fact that the Afghan war coincides with the greatest financial crisis since the US won the mantle of hegemony should not be lost on Americans. What has been lost on Americans, what remains lost to the average American, is how much America gains from its position as global Hegemon. The Hegemon governs the global economy by managing the global reserve currency. That fact has allowed the US to pay off its global debts, for the last 40 years, with printed up dollars, thereby boosting American standards of living far beyond what they would could or should be otherwise.
Thus, a key support to the US economy today is the world’s belief in the US as the ultimate guarantor of global safety and stability; this is the trade-off for getting to be the global reserve currency custodian (nothing is free afterall). The US ascending to lead position was an example of how economic power gets translated into political power. When nations withdraw from battles that have key material and strategic consequences, well, that is how economic weakness gets translated into political decline. History shows once begun, hegemonic decline can become self-sustaining; especially, and perhaps counterintuitively, if hegemonic abdication is consistently opted for. Hegemonic abdication creates an ‘order’ vacuum, chaos ensues as the world searches and conflicts over future stabilizing mechanisms, and that chaos tends to quicken already existing trends, i.e. hegemonic decline.
Abdicating responsibility for the mess in Afghanistan would signal to the world that America is opting to abdicate its hegemony. The immediate effect on the dollar would likely be extreme as the final death knell for its reserve currency status is sounded. Going further, abdication in Afghanistan now would inestimably weaken America’s bargaining power as nations sit down to construct a more balanced global financial system going forward. The main consequence: with rapidly declining economic clout, and now also rapidly declining military clout, America will be left a rapidly DE-developing nation in a rapidly DEVELOPING world; a world it helped create, but now no longer prospers in… This is how Hegemons decline folks. Nation after nation says the right words, and the Hegemon wants to believe them. But each nation then takes actions that in the end serve their self-interest and leave the Hegemon a hollow shell of itself. That is the global dynamic at play for the last 500 years or so. America is going to have to demonstrate a willingness to boldly activate its remaining strengths if it wishes for a different outcome, or suffer the consequences.
Getting America through the next 20 years and having it remain a place most Americans would want to live is not going to be easy. America is going through a systemically forced hegemonic decline the likes of which the world has rarely seen, and never seen in the presence of WMD. History teaches again and again that when nations face such impasses, the ones that get through it well, do so by reaching outward, not turning inward. The decades during which Hegemons have shrunk from their systemic duties have been the worst decades in known human experience, WWI and the 1930s come to mind. The decades during which Hegemons have risen to the occasion, and taken a key role in shaping the next world order, were difficult, but were followed by multiple decades of global economic growth theretofore unseen, as during WWII and the postwar era.
What kind of declining Hegemon will Americans choose to make America today? An abdicator, or a lead reorganizer? As you seek the answer to that question, keep in mind that withdrawal is always the easier case to make, because peace is always preferable to war. But easy solutions elude humanity at difficult times. So I ask again, what sort of Hegemon do you wish America to be? The consequences for future and present day America could not be anymore stark.
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