So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth. Baha’u'llah
In Afghanistan, the end is nigh, whether we speak of the official Dutch withdrawal or the greater Damoclesian exit, due for the rest between now and Karzai’s suggestion of 2014. What does the end mean, not so much for Afghanistan, but for those who intervened?
The End Starts at the Beginning
The liberal French newspaper Le Monde declared on 12 September 2001, “We are all Americans now.” Well, the American Americans swiftly went to Afghanistan, while it took some time for their European doppelgangers to join them there. Once they were all together, together as part of the Atlantic Alliance, Baha’u'llah’s light did not, alas, shine ’round about.
One observer noted that there were technical flaws in the structure of the Western mission that created serious problems:
In Afghanistan today, want of moral singleness, simplicity, and intensity of purpose harp of military failure. This is attributable to an abrupt departure from a long-standing and distinctly American practice of insisting on unity of command. The United States is the only country where military doctrine recognizes the principle of “unity of command,” and has successfully applied it in multiple alliances and coalitions since 1918. It was the guiding principle during World War II that convinced Allied powers to invest “supreme command” upon singular operational level commanders in distinct geographic areas. Colonel Ian Hope. [http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/pub889.pdf]
Hope believes that the problem is one of military command, but actually it goes much deeper than that. There is no unity of command, because there is no unity of purpose. America and its Allies do not agree on what should be done in Afghanistan; moreover, they do not agree on what Afghanistan represents. In this sense–and as it should be–military form follows political vision. It is not that organigrammes are constructed incorrectly. Rather, there is no unity of military command because there is no political unity. Allies are serving alongside each other in Afghanistan, but they are not fighting as one. The symptoms are staggered exits and different risk appetites (reflected most tellingly in the various caveats on troop deployments and employment, and restrictions on the use of force). The disease, though, is much more serious.
The allies may not agree on the problems, but much more importantly they no longer agree on the solution. Oswald Spengler, that much-maligned malcontent, describes the predicament thus:
Western mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion. Everyone demands something of the rest. We say “thou shalt” in the conviction that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders is unshakable. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (emphasis in the original)
And there’s the rub. Not everyone in the West believes in such unshake-able-ness anymore and therefore the demands go largely unheeded.
Christopher Coker points out an important aspect of Spengler’s illusion: Those demands are made reflexively. It is the West who demands, of itself, and the West who fails to respond:
The members of any political community have a right to make claims and entertain expectations of each other. And they do so not in relation to outsiders, but themselves. Membership is not only a matter of rights and obligations, but involves identifying with a community, seeing it as one’s own, accepting responsibility for its interests and well-being. Furthermore, such communities do not exist merely in the present: they have a future in which their current members have a vital stake…For those and other reasons, a military alliance requires a common sense of belonging, a shared collective identity and degree of mutual attachment. Christopher Coker, Rebooting the West : The US, Europe and the Future of the Western Alliance
If we are merely rising up to meet a common foe, we are not doing so as a community, or an enduring alliance, but simply as a coalition of the willing, a temporary, transient grouping. This suited Rumsfeld and others, but the price of unilateralism may have been to overlook the corrosion of community and the transition to contingency. For if we are acting in relation to outsiders, rather than ourselves (in Coker’s formulation) we do so, each of us, on our own terms. And if we act according to our own (similar but not the same) imperatives, how can we expect unity of command? At best we are on parallel paths to different objectives, not falling into line, one behind the other, towards a single objective.
Together…to the End
Whether or not, during the Cold War, America would have actually traded Peoria for Dusseldorf, there is certainly no equivalent to Marseilles or Rotterdam today in the U.S. Is there any wonder, then, that Hope cannot find ‘moral singleness’? And is it true that such a lacuna inevitably leads to ‘military failure’?
We had better hope not, because if the supposedly existential threat posed by the epiphenomenon that is ‘global terror’ cannot bring the West together, what can? Climate change? Financial reform?
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Is this really much different from the dynamics of most coalitions in the context of war-fighting? If one drills down beyond the commonly understood reasons (defeat Nazi and Japanese imperialism, stop communist aggression, restore Kuwait etc.) for the “allied” efforts in the 2 world wars, Korea, the first Gulf War etc. etc., one finds a complex of motivations, purposes, goals, interests and the like of the individual states comprising each coalition. Thus it seems that there can be gradations and levels of “unity of purpose” that can be achieved in spite of these individual differences but still sufficient to accomplish the more obvious task at hand that caused the coalition to coalesce in the first place or if extant to act in the the particular circumstance.
Thus might it be that it is not the “zero sum game” suggested by Spengler et al. but rather an very individual thing in terms of each “war” having its own dynamics in terms of coalition “unity of purpose.” These are in turn influenced by myriad other factors such as the state of the global and individual economies of the participants or changes in the domestic political landscape of one or more coalition members as we have seen in the last several years with respect to the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
I am not sure if Afghanistan is the best barometer for the health or decline of the West in a Spenglerian sense. You note that terrorism is “supposedly existential” in its threat, I think the emphasis is clearly on the supposedly. Obviously if the US makes participation in the Afghan war a metric by which it evaluates the loyalty of its allies and its interest in supporting the rest of the “West” in Europe in particular, countries will go along with it. But I do not think most Europeans really believe that, even if the war on terror is an existential threat, that Afghanistan is the source of the danger anymore.
It’s fun to note that in later years Spengler made environmental-technological challenges the existential threat to Western civilization… So perhaps climate change is the right answer after all…
If it is global warm…erm, I mean “climate change,” that is the global existential threat around which nations will all rally, I think those proponents of it will need to do a better job of getting their collective “story” straight than they have done thus far. Of course, much like some of the other “existential” threats, this one is also riddled with propaganda, dissembling and gross exaggeration as well as so dramatically reflected in the “scientific” emails of our colleagues at East Anglia and beyond.
Cinci,
But that is, of course, the difference…or at least it is supposed to be. The West is meant to be bigger than the problems of the day. The ‘special relationship’ that exists between like minded nations is meant to be more profound amongst the West than might be the case on an issue by issue basis. NATO is founded on the bedrock of liberal democracy, whereas WTO is merely a grouping of mutual advantage. Cultural inter-subjectivity is the key, don’t ya know.
FDR and Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter nearly 4 months before Pearl Harbour and it has a decided ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’ ring about it [http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp]. No such charter bound Uncle Joe to the other Allies. That marriage was one of convenience, not destiny. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is predicated on the bonds of a profound kinship.
As Karl Deutsch went on to define it, a security community had eight characteristics that made it stand apart: the mutual compatibility of main values, a distinctive way of life, capabilities and processes of cross-cutting communication, high geographic and social mobility, multiplicity and balance of transactions, a significant frequency of some interchange in group roles, a broadening of the political elite, high political and administrative capabilities. Hence, NATO is in, OSCE is out. Where does ISAF stand? Can the Dutch withdrawal and the German caveats be interpreted within this framework?
The idea of the West is founded on pilings so deep as to transcend mere ‘transactionalism’ or ‘instrumentalism’; Deutsch again figured that, beyond mere common interests, security communities needed to have “mutual sympathy and trust”.
The West is an inheritance of the Greeks and later the European Renaissance and Enlightenment. People of the West do not cooperate at the level of states, but rather are destined to look at the world in the same way, with the same appreciation of ‘the good life’. Hence, Victor Davis Hanson can speak about a Western way of war.
The question is whether or not that cohesion still exists today. Whether or not it ever existed is another question, but an important one. Of course, to some extent, the West is a myth. And myths are strange things. They have an animating power that exceeds any rational explanation. I recommend David Gress’s ‘From Plato to NATO’ for a look at the Grand Narrative of the West, particularly its contemporary American form.
Interesting comments. Again, we are somewhat at the mercy of the inherent limitations for this form of discourse such as space, the etiquette of not hijacking a thread, anonymity of some of the posters, and in my case at least trying to compose a comment on my I-phone while walking my many dogs on leashes.
In any event, I did not intend to rule out the existence of various “special relationships” that may co-exist within an international security arrangement with the individual interests and motivations of the constituent members (or of sub-groups within the larger structure). I also can agree that in terms of the “West,” much of this can be attributed to a more or less common cultural heritage flowing from our classical roots. Of course, as you point out, there is also considerable debate about just what the “West” is (if one agrees with the premise at all) on every level from the abstract and ideological to the material and commercial. I like Jürgen Habermas’ “The Divided West” and Kupchan’s
“The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign Policy After the Cold War” as to this aspect and perhaps its ultimate end.
*sigh* looks like Afghanistan will be the graveyard of yet another foreign army.
EDIT: Brilliant, I’ve just been taken for a ride by a spam-bot. Guess I’ll learn to think before I type… They’re getting so topical these days!
I think if we look at things in a Spenglerian view of time (that is to say, the Red Army aside), Afghanistan is rather more conquerable than you’re letting on. The Achaemenids, Selucids, Maruyans, Greco-Bactrians, Indo-Scythians, Parthians/Indo-Parthians, Sassanids, Saffarids, the Mongols, Timur… Or the British circa the Second Anglo-Afghan War….
In other words, the failure of the Western effort in Afghanistan says a lot more about the West and its current level of political-military cohesion and shared vision than it does about Afghanistan. Historical cliches about “unconquerable Afghanistan” aside, it seems there have been some fundamental problems of strategic vision and perceptions of interest that would be dogging us in some other conflict or political crisis somewhere else if not now in Afghanistan.
You have also sharpened my less than clear point that the dynamics of the ISAF (past, present and future) internal to the coalition itself and to a degree those of the broader NATO (in terms of individual national interests–and perhaps even those within a given nation in terms of its domestic politics–and “special relationships” or tensions among some of the the members) are central to any understanding of the “chances” of “success” in the current Afghanistan effort, much less any real effort to account for them in terms of the way the “war” is conducted..
Im not so sure the West is being broken on the rocks of Afghanistan but I do think the illusion of the mostly existential threat of terror and the sympathy/support for the US in the post 911 era have run aground there.
Western culture and values have always had a fractious nature internally (the reformation, nationalism vs feudalism, democracy vrs fascism and more recently the emerging struggle of economics vrs the environment) as well as conflicting with other cultures and values (the crusades, colonialism, free trade etc) yet the attributes which bind the West have not changed as much as the nations and institutions themselves have changed over time.
My only real addition to this discussion is that if the West is in decline as a physical entity it is because we are losing the values which helped to shape the West in the first place (democracy, freedom of rights and religion, the concept of the individual etc).
The decision to invade Afghanistan is an indication of the highly coercive effort to move away from those very values by following the US on its spurious crusade far more than the decision by the unwilling partners to pull out of what is obviously a military and moral quagmire.
In fact the decision to pull out may show that the West is not as dead as it seems as the rejection of a US centric world view may in fact be a reaffirmation of Western values and ideas as oppose to our current state of being bullied by a rouge superpower into doing its bidding.
I would say that the only existential threat that Islamic terrorism poses to the West is in the oppressive over-reaction. We can be reasonably sure that AQ didn’t expect the West to collapse with 9/11, but that it would be an effective provocation that would create a profitable and beneficial reaction. Nearly 9 years later, the West has killed untold hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians in our really well-thought out and even better-executed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recruited many hundreds or thousands of fanatics to AQ’s cause. Not to mention the bonfire of civil liberties.
Who’s winning? Who faces an existential threat: AQ, or the liberal West?
I suppose the answer lies somewhere in your reference to the “fractious nature internally” of the “West” but (that is no doubt merely a function of my being an American that I guess carries with it some sort of inherent desire to create and then become consumed by “military and moral quagmire[s]“) I am still confused by your post.
You say on the one hand that “… if the West is in decline as a physical entity it is because we are losing the values which helped to shape the West in the first place (democracy, freedom of rights and religion, the concept of the individual etc)…”. Then you say that the US is, among other things, a coercive bully (I assume you mean to its allies), rouge (sic) state (I assume you mean to its enemies) etc.
I suppose it would help my admittedly enfeebled and brain incapable of much nuance etc. if you explain why the US has acted this way if different from such things as “democracy, freedom of rights and religion, the concept of the individual etc.?” I readily acknowledge that the respective views of these concepts, as you even concede, will vary among nations given their differing social, political and historical perspectives, such that we can debate whether the US got it “wrong” in terms of how “it” (and we need to keep in mind these things are not unanimously agreed upon even within a nation) interpreted these concepts and principles.
Your post, however, especially given the IMHO rather strident language you used, suggests there are other reasons for the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and even perhaps on a personal level for your apparent rancor. Of course I have heard some of these elsewhere that you may raise–such as the US quest (of course not at all shared by any of our allies) for oil and other natural resources–etc. but I still have not seen much actual proof of them.
I assumed the “rouge superpower” was a reference to future President Palin.
We can but hope. ;-)
Really interesting post. Division of the western world is to be seen seen on the spot, in Afghanistan itself: caveats of the countries, symbolic participation just to have the flag on the pole, well accepted by the NATO and the US to get a supposed legitimacy, etc.
Furthermore the various conferences of donors could never reach the main goal for such a challenge: unity of action and coordination. Everybody is spending, NGO are making a lot of money, other ones get their members killed as their western idealism make them forget that Afghanistan is at war.
In accordance with clausewitzian principles, I fully support the idea that, if there is a lack of military unity, it is only the symptom of a lack of political leadership.