Afghanistan versus ???

I thought I was done with Afghanistan for a while, but I keep being drawn back to the subject.  Afghanistan is evolving roughly along the lines I outlined in my recent post (see:  Sigma 5: Afghanistan - A Geopolitical Perspective).  So I see no need to "revise and extend" those remarks.  But I want to continue to provide perspective on the situation.

It has been widely noted that the U.S. effort at nation building in Afghanistan has been a complete, utter, and abject failure.  The conclusion commentators almost without fail leap to is that "nation building is impossible".  But is it?  I want to take a look at a couple of cases from history.  I want to start with Japan, specifically post World War II Japan.

There are a lot of parallels that can be drawn.  As with Afghanistan, Japan has a culture that is drastically different from what passes for culture in the U.S.  It has a different religion, Shinto, which is completely separate from our Judeo-Christian religious tradition.  The Islamic tradition that dominates Afghanistan is actually culturally much closer to our Judeo-Christian tradition than is the case with Shinto.

Japan speaks a different language, Japanese.  Again, there is no connection between Japanese and English (or any other European language).  The Afghans speak several languages.  Some are at least distantly related to European languages.  Some are not.  Japan is a "monoglot" society.  Both the U.S. and Afghanistan are "polyglot" societies.  So, for these reasons an American led effort to nation build in Japan was doomed to failure, right?

Yet America succeeded in Japan while failing in Afghanistan.  Why?  Let's start with what I think are most important attributes of a successful government:  honesty and competence.  The Japan of 1945 was governed honestly and competently.  And Japan had been governed honestly and competently for hundreds of years by that time.  There is lots to object to when it comes to the direction and policies of various Japanese governments across the centuries.  But Japanese leaders were not corrupt hacks.

It is hard to find a period in Afghan history where the country has been governed honestly and competently.  Governance in Afghanistan has always been riddled with factionalism.  And the leaders of the various factions seem to have valued power over pretty much everything else.

There was often little or no effort expended on improving the general welfare.  Instead, most effort was dedicated to to getting into power, staying in power and, if there was anything left over, to increasing the power of whichever factional leader we choose to focus on.

Now, if a Bismarck had arisen in Afghanistan, things might have taken a different path.  Bismarck was power hungry.  But he had a goal, to unite the factions of what became Germany into a single coherent whole.  And he was competent enough to succeed.

It is not that hard to win a battle here or there.  And the fruits of victory on the battlefield often include the control of additional territory.  But, to do what Bismarck did, he have to succeed in integrating that additional territory into the territory he already controlled.  And that integration has to be successful enough and complete enough so that the recently acquired territory didn't just split back away the first time an opportunity presented itself to do so.

Bismarck's genius was not in acquiring territory.  It was in keeping the territory he acquired.  The Bismarck consolidation was a one way street.  There was no back sliding.  In Afghanistan, this or that warlord has been able to win this or that battle.  That has allowed him to expand the amount of territory he controls.  But often control of that additional territory turns out to be fleeting.  No warlord has ever been been able to truly unite Afghanistan the way Bismarck was able to unite Germany.

Japan was united many centuries ago.  There has been no serious effort to break Japan up for so long that the idea is now unimaginable.  With Afghanistan, creating and maintaining a sufficient degree of national unity was and continues to be a problem demanding attention and effort.  For U.S. forces occupying Japan, it was not something they had to worry about.

Factionalism in Afghanistan was just a fact of life in 2002.  Nothing has changed since.  We see it playing out right now.   The Taliban is in nominal control of the entire country.  But there are powerful regions and groups all over the place who seem to have no interest in in remaining subservient to the Taliban for long.

There is another giant difference between 1945 Japan and 2002 Afghanistan.  In 1945 Japan had been engaged into a "turn to the west" for most of a century.  In 1853 U.S. Commodore Perry told the Japanese in no uncertain terms that they needed to open up to the West.  And he demonstrated military might sufficient to force compliance.  At the time Japan was a society that had deliberately closed itself off from outside influence.  Why?

Japan has operated within the sphere of influence of China for well over a thousand years.  China has been a big dog on the world stage for roughly 3,000 years.  That is more than ten times as long as the U.S.  A neighboring country like Japan must choose between only two options:  Accede to China's wishes or resist them.  If you wish to have a distinct cultural identity you must resist.  Japan decided that it wanted its own cultural identity, so it resisted.

Japan had the same benefit the U.S. shared in its efforts to put distance between itself and Europe, a large body of water.  The body of water that separated Japan from China was much narrower than the Atlantic Ocean.  But back in the day nautical technology wasn't as good as it is today, so for a long time it sufficed.

By 1853 Japan had been able for centuries to put significant distance, both politically, culturally, and economically, between itself and China.  But that distance came at a cost.  The cost could be paid in one of several ways.  The method of payment the Japanese had settled on at that time was to strictly enforce a policy of isolation from the outside world.

The policy had its initial impetus as a method of fending off China.  But by the early 1800's Japan's strategy of strict isolationism had expanded to cover everybody, including the U.S.  But when Perry showed up with a fleet of modern naval vessels, Japan realized that it no longer possessed the military might necessary to make isolation stick.

Once Japan's defenses had been breached, there were a number of paths it could have chosen.  The one it chose was that of engagement with the western world.  It embarked on a long term strategy of westernizing its military and its civilian economy.  The balance tilted from rabid "not invented here"-ism to a wild embrace of all things western.

This was particularly true of their military.  In less than fifty years their military went from being unable to deal with the relatively small force Perry had shown up with, to being every bit as capable as many western powers.

They proved this by decisively winning the Russo-Japanese War in 1904/5.  By 1940 they proved to be at least on a par with the British Navy, and at worst, only slightly inferior to the U.S. Navy.  They lost World War II, but it was a close run thing.

So, when the U.S. and the allied powers occupied Japan in late 1945 the Japanese had already westernized considerably.  Further westernization of the country involved pushing on a door that was already open.

Afghanistan, on the other hand, has never wavered from its position of strong resistance to outside, particularly western, influences.  That is an important difference.  Another one is that we took nation building seriously in 1945 and resourced the project accordingly.

The U.S. flooded Japan with both military and civilian resources.  We intruded deeply into the guts of the country.  Japan had been bombed heavily.  We had literally nuked two of their cities.  But we had also burned many cities to the ground the old fashioned way, by dropping massive amounts of incendiaries on them.

The conventional bombing of Tokyo killed far more Japanese than the combined total resulting from the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The percentage of the population of Japan that died in Japan as a result of World War II was far higher than the equivalent percentage in Afghanistan.  The physical destruction was also far greater.

Interestingly enough, unlike with Afghanistan the U.S. made some key accommodations to Japanese culture.  We let them keep their Emperor.  We reduced him from a person with significant political power to a figurehead.  But he retained his traditional place in Japanese society.

And, while we dealt harshly with various Japanese political and military leaders, we left most of the political, economic, and cultural leadership in place.  We just adjusted their priorities and changed their marching orders.

A big reason that this policy choice was adopted for Japan is now known only to history buffs.  The Cold War started pretty much as soon as the War ended in '45.  It quickly became obvious that weakening Japan would weaken the western alliance.  It was much better to get Japan back on its feet as quickly and as completely as possible.  (The same logic also applied to Germany, at this point just "West" Germany, as the Russians controlled "East" Germany at the time.)

So the Japanese economy was quickly put back together.  And the old guard was left in control in spite of the fact that they had been rabid imperialists who had wholeheartedly supported the War against the U.S. and other western powers.  Necessity makes for strange bedfellows.

There was little or no leadership cadre or business establishment to fall back on in Afghanistan.  And, to the extent that such people existed, we made no effort to connect up with them.  Afghanistan has always been an economic basket case.  It struggles to feed its own population in the best of times.  The only business that Afghanistan has been able to keep going for any length of time has been the growing, processing, and exporting of opioids.

Afghanistan has vast mineral wealth, at least according to western experts.  But it has never been politically stable enough and well governed enough to take advantage of this.  And the bar for "enough" is really low.  Large stable diamond industries, oil industries, and mining industries, to name a few, have thrived for decades in some of the most badly run countries in the world.  Yet Afghanistan has never been able to duplicate that feat. 

So, the U.S. was facing a monumental task in Afghanistan in 2002.  So, what did it do?  It immediately took its eye off the ball.  Osama bin-Laden could have been caught/killed within the first few months of the War if only the U.S. had deployed enough soldiers to successfully bottle up Tora-Bora.  But they didn't.  So, he escaped to Pakistan.

Instead of immediately flooding the country with military and civilian people tasked with running a Japan-1945-style operation, in those critical early years we never staffed the military up to a level high enough to be capable of gaining effective control of the country.  In fact, we started drawing military force levels down before we even got them fully built up to the extremely modest initial levels that had been targeted.

BTW, the early successful part of the War, was not run by the military.  By the time the military was able to get its act together in country, a CIA operation had already won the shooting phase of the War.

The civilian side of the operation was even less robust than the "too small by half" military side.  Instead of inserting a large number of civilians into what there was of a functioning civilian government, economy, and society, we never even tried to staff up a robust civilian operation.

As soon as the shooting died down the Bush Administration pivoted to focusing on the war they really cared about, the one they were about to start in Iraq.  Afghanistan should have been resourced at a much higher level than the Japan effort was resourced at, because the task was much more difficult.  But it was always a skeleton staff sized operation in those early critical years.

That's on the Bush Administration.  They ran the show for the first six years.  They screwed it up for the entire time they were in charge.  The argument is often made that subsequent Administrations (Obama, Trump, Biden) should have fixed things.  But there was never the political will necessary to devote the resources that would have been necessary to have a chance of turning things around.

So, with the exception of the Biden Administration, they all did the expedient thing.  They threw lots but not enough money at the problem.  They spent almost all of that money on the military (or on bribes, again mostly of a military nature, to Pakistan).

No effort was ever made to staff up and resource a robust civilian operation.  What "civilian" money was spent, was poured into the massively corrupt Afghan government.  No effort was ever made to do anything about that corruption.  President Biden finally put an end to the insanity.

Next I want to turn to Vietnam.  Much has been made of the parallels between how the Vietnam War ended and how the Afghan War ended.  Many of the parallels are apt.  But the subject has been well dealt with elsewhere.  I want to focus on the aftermath.

First of all, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saigon, as Ho Chi Minh City was then called, there was a tremendous amount of hand wringing.  "The U.S. will never recover from this crippling blow to our prestige."  "No one will ever trust the U.S. again when it come to a promise we make."  But it all ended up just being hand wringing.  Neither prediction turned out to be true.

As I have observed elsewhere, countries hold to agreements as long as it is in their national interest to do so.  If there is a compelling national interest in breaking an agreement, it gets broken.  The U.S. tries to pretend that it is special and these kinds of rules don't apply to it.  But they do.

U.S. prestige recovered.  The U.S. has since made many agreements and kept to most of them.  And we had enough prestige and were considered a reliable enough partner to get involved in Afghanistan roughly twenty-five years after all the pious pronouncements were so solemnly made.  Although that's interesting, what I want to focus on is the relationship Vietnam has since had with the rest of the world, and particularly with the U.S.

Vietnam is another of those countries that has had to exist in the shadow of China for more than a thousand years.  Vietnam did not have the advantage Japan had of a substantial body of water between it and China.  Vietnam has a land border with China.  So, for Vietnam, the problem of creating and maintaining any kind of political, cultural, or economic distance from China was much harder for them to do than it was for Japan.

And in 1975 it was the height of the Cold War.  It was us against them.  And the "them" included China and Russia.  That made North Vietnam, which was run at the time by a "communist dictator", the very same Ho Chi Minh, part of the "them" camp.  So, not surprisingly, the Russians and he Chines both supported the "communist" north against the "capitalist" south (our side).  And in 1975 the north unambiguously and definitively prevailed over the south.

So, in the post-1975 era the "bad guys" are firmly in control of the entire country.  Not surprisingly. we wanted nothing to do with Vietnam at that point.  And it should have been all sweetness and light between the members of the "them" coalition, right?

Well, "should have been" and "is" often differ greatly.  And so, not that long after the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam the Chinese invaded.  I don't remember what set the conflict off.  What I do remember is that the Vietnamese quickly and easily sent the Chinese packing.  Apparently, if you are good enough to beat the U.S., you are good enough to beat the Chinese.

But wait.  There's more.  Ten years later we get to the middle of the '80s and Russia is falling apart.  The whole "Soviet Empire" is falling apart.  And that leaves Vietnam hung out to dry.  So, who do they turn to?  The U.S.!

This time around it's strictly business.  Vietnam wants to make and sell stuff to the U.S. as a way to get their economy going.  We say "Okay".  And since that time the U.S and Vietnam have had a very cordial relationship.

It doesn't hurt that Vietnam is still concerned about encroachment, cultural or otherwise, by China.  They recognize us as the natural counterbalance to Chinese influence.  Their national interest required them to distance themselves from their old comrades in arms and cozy up to the enemy.  So, they did.

Afghanistan could go down a similar path.  After a certain amount of turmoil the U.S. - Afghan relationship could settle down to a strictly commercial one that becomes in the national interest of both sides.  That could work.  Is this a likely outcome?  I wouldn't go that far.

One of the things Vietnam inherited from China is a mercantile sensibility.  Culturally, China has been supporting business, especially small business, for its entire history.  There is a large, old, well established mercantile segment in the Vietnamese cultural identity.  Doing business with the U.S. is just doing business.

Afghanistan does not have that same long history of mercantilism baked into its cultural identity in the way it is in China and Vietnam.  And that mercantilist way of thinking goes against the grain of Taliban ideology.

Mercantilism also went against the grain of the "communist" ideology that governed both China and Vietnam.  But, the communist era is recent history while the mercantilist era spans most of the long history of each country.  Afghanistan does not have the luxury of being able to sell a policy shift toward mercantilism as a "return to the old ways".

So we find yet another example of something that will be much harder to pull off in Afghanistan than it was elsewhere and else-when.  On the other hand, things now move faster than they used to.  The Afghan economy is already collapsing.  Theoretically Pakistan, Russia, and China could swoop in to the rescue.  If they did it would be like Vietnam in the immediate post-1975 period.  Russia propped their economy up for several years.  Then they stopped.

But so far no one has swooped in to save the Afghan economy.  The current situation is bad for the population.  It is about to get worse, a lot worse.  How will the Taliban react?  How will Pakistan, Russia, and China react?  We don't know.

We do know that the U.S. (and likely its allies) will be slow to move back in.  And the cost to the Taliban of U.S. assistance will be high.  Unacceptably high?  That remains to be seen.  Watch this space.