Escaping Winter

The time has finally come to go on leave.  The goal here is to obviate about four weeks of what it hopefully my last winter in Afghanistan.  It's not that good a plan because I'm going to the bleaker environs of the UK, but at least they understand the concept of central heating there.

Getting out of Afghanistan in winter is always especially stressful (as it getting back into the country, but who cares if their return from leave is delayed?).  In my case there will be two hurdles to contend with.  The first involves crossing the 3500m pass of Salang and the second is the flight to Dubai.  The weather is a great deal shittier and colder in Kabul than here...while we get 10-15C on many days, Kabul has considerable trouble peaking above freezing (mainly because we are at 300m while Kabul is at 2000).  This means the weather on the Kabul side is often cloudy and snowy when it's just fine here in Mazar.  That said, the authorities do a stellar job of keeping Salang open throughout all but the worst blizzards.

The departure from Kabul by plane is also traditionally stressful.  It might be better now as the airport seems to have gotten better navigational facilities (planes can land at night now).  The problem is planes landing in low visibility it seems--they don't need much to take off, just lift in the direction of the flight path and then pop above the cloud cover.  So as long as the plane is already on the ground your chances are improved, as opposed to a plane coming from Delhi which might have to turn back before it can land.  For this reason it's good to go with the local airlines, who will take off no matter what.  Once those first 5 minutes are over and you're skybourne, it's smooth-sailing to Dubai and you relax and appreciate the well manicured Iranian countryside below you (lucky bastards with their fancy freeways and roadside foodcourts).  It's also a good idea to have a few extra hundred dollars on you so you can buy a ticket on another (potentially less scupulous and safety-conscious) airline.

With all luck my next post will be from the UK, where I will be feverishly socialising and networking my way into the new year.  Or else it could be a drunk poste from L'Atmosphere in Kabul!

The Limits of Force: Why the coercion constraint matters

News junkies out there will notice the trend I am talking about, that conventional militaries have been less successful at solving problems lately. There is actually a very good and succint explanation for why this phenomenon exists and how it operates. Since I don't hear this discussed much I'm laying it out here, with a proper shout-out to my undergrad poli-sci professor, Victor Magagna, who explained this idea (and others) so well.

The coercion constraint is the concept that cost of coercion increases geometrically for the coercer with each additional increment of force used.  In other words, it becomes increasingly costly to make someone do something for you.  You have to expend more effort, provide more incentives, and so forth.  The end result is a lot like one of the things Sartre said, "we always have choices."  For the sake of simplicity imagine you want a specific person to eat an apple and assume that they would rather not.  You can bargain with them, you can provide incentives and inducements, but you actually cannot force them to do so.  If they absolutely refused you can threaten them with death, but if they still refuse and you carry out that threat, the apple is not eaten. On the other hand you can force-feed them the apple but then they still didn't do it, you fed it to them. If the point had been for the apple to be eaten, then it would have been significantly less costly for you to do it yourself. Now consumption of an apple is a minor issue and could probably be accomplished with basic incentives, but the point is that the only way to get there is a bargain with the other agent. The use of force is really a bargaining mechanism, whereby you increase the cost to someone else of not doing the thing you want them too.

The coercion constraint matters as a blunt point of reality, but it also carries important implications for conflict in the 21st century. Coercive threats mattered a lot more in pre-modern times because the ideologies that supported them were much stronger. The constable showing up with goons to take a percentage of your grain always sucked, but it was underlined by a whole range of assumptions (usually believed by the elite themselves too) such as the state's legitimacy being divine and hence the right of the nobility to take their share. Nowadays people find such justifications absurd. It's not that they believe less in God, it's rather that God has been recast in their image. Modernity required that sovereignty be popular for the state to function, and the axial view (and axial deity) came into to line with that. Now God supports popular sovereignty (read the preamble to the American constitution for an example of this formulation.

The result of the trend to popular sovereignty raised the costs of coercion dramatically. States couldn't make unjustified wars with obfuscation or treachery, but more importantly, short of killing everyone who disagreed with them (genocide), wars could no longer change people's minds. Consequently violence these days no longer has much truck with things like conquering territory, but it is rather and attempt (however unjustified or ineffective) to make other people agree. This is why Israel's operation in Gaza is doomed, there is no way it's going to make the people of Gaza agree with their aims. It is has also been at the heart of Western strategic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Militants in Afghanistan cannot be coerced to stop their insurgency and regular people cannot be coerced into not supporting them, they have to be convinced. So who has been successful in convincing? The two most successful military organisations of recent years are actually parastatal organisations with armed wings--yep, love 'em or hate 'em they are Hamas and Hizbullah. Along with their aid-related activities, their enemies have played a large role in convincing people to support them, by attacking them. Part of the Taliban's ongoing weakness has been its failure to provide real public goods.

The lesson of the increasing cost of coercion is that we can only accomplish our objectives when our strategies are within the bounds of reality. Coercion is no long a realistic means to produce desired outcomes and genocide (and other forms of collective punishment) are generally unacceptable. Organisations like the Taliban and Israel are engaged in a war against reality (wars against abstract nouns are bad, but that's another rant) and it truly is sad to watch bystanders get killed and hurt for such causes.

The Israeli Political Elite Sputters

Yet again, it seems, Israeli candidates are making the rounds and promising the impossible, the toppling of the Hamas-run statelet in Gaza.  It's a really novel idea and only been tried before in 1982, 2000-02, and twice in 2006.  Given that this is mostly the same cast of characters seen over previous years, one has to wonder if they know they are full of shit and have just taken to smiling as the ship goes down.

In other news about Israel's slow collapse, I'm starting to wonder if the state could evacuate all the settlers if it wanted to.  Remember evacuation of all settlers is a minimum requirement for a two-state solution, which I've long argued is impractical and outside the realm of possibility.  During the eviction of settlers from one house in Hebron, the BBC noted that several soldiers were required to remove each settler and whatever the exact number, that's a lot of manpower.  There are 400,000+ settlers now living on the wrong side of the green line.  Let's say that half would go willingly, that still leaves 200,000 people who would need to be forcibly evicted.  The Israeli state might not have the ability, coercively or politically to do so.  (See my next post about the coercion constraint)  In fact the Israel situation with its settlers (more broadly, its religio-nationalist extremists) shares striking parallels with Pakistan's situation along its northwestern frontier, with the main difference being that in Israeli radicals form a larger share proportionally of the population.  In both cases the state's identity is deeply interwined with a less extreme version of the ideology's radical manifestation.  See how much easier it is to base your state on fulfilling its duties to its citizens rather than an ideology!

Chickens and Modernity

The root of the conflict in Afghanistan stems from the clash of agrarian and modern lifeways.  To be more precise, agrarian societies that have come into the modern world (and all have) redefine customs in a way that distorts them because their original context is now missing.  In parts of the world that were not in the vanguard of modernity (where modernity has been less jarring because it has been felt to be an indigenous process) and hence have the short end of the global political stick (everywhere that the West colonised basically), defence of these pre-modern moral and social systems becomes defensive if not also violent (anti-modernity is often misread, by supporters and opponents alike, as anti-Westernism).

The classic example is fornication.  In agrarian societies sex outside the rules was dangerous and threatened the societies with collapse.  In agrarian Europe, for example, power and authority were bound up in heredity which in turn was a foil for legitimacy, all backed by the divine authority of an axial god (popular legitimacy did not exist because mass society did not exist and was not technically feasible).  Like everything else in agrarian society, this was fudgeable; new dynasties took control, but when they did so the assumption was that the losing party lost the favour of god and the underlying basis of the system was not felt to be challenged.  In the modern context that entire web of assumptions disappeared as societies adapted to new technical and material possibilities.  The significance was that when a society that had developed more aspects of modernity encountered one with its roots still firmly in the agrarian age, the moderns they seemed permissive and immoral.  Because the more agrarian society is also modernising and forming its own mass society and national identity, it latches onto the most salient differences between it and the moderns to define itself.  These differences are not those that existed from one agrarian culture to another or even from one modern one to another but rather they encapsulated diachronic change as synchronic juxtaposition.  "What people did" in agragrian societies came to be redefined as a cultural artefact and emblem of distinction, and, unlike in the past, intended to be followed to the absolute fullest.  Coming back to my example, restrictions of fornication were a common area in which later-modernising societies have come to define themselves as different.  The results are harmful to the society in question because it is embracing activities which are at odds with the modern social relationship which is emergency.  Invariably people start forming modern kinds of relationships (dating, love marriage) while the social elite is backing the reactionary morals (in this case a modern more which is based on a reinterpretation of a perceived agrarian norm).  Not only are the new elite-back morals contradictory and harmful to individuals in the society, they're harm is increased but they are, with the resources of modern society, being implemented much more thoroughly than they ever could have been in agrarian society.  This process is exemplified by the Taliban regime and the numerous abuses that occurred as they tried to pound a square peg into a round hole.

Modernity has altered ethics and morality in human life without altering the human, and one of my goals is finding away that explains these underlying shifts to people in an intelligible way.  A lot of moderns reject ethics and morality because for them they are tied to the old way of doing things, whereas I think that these things are not only still important but in fact more important.  What we have to do is realise that we are developing a new morality for our new world.

One concept I've long entertained is a collection of fables, echoing what Aesop and Gilgamesh when societies had to explain to each other how things would be done in the new agrarian world in which they then lived.  Events do not occur in clean narratives, but consicousness seems to string them together as such.  And let's face it, some people are just not entertained by social philosophy.

The linked story (from the Chicago public radio show This American Life) could be one example of such a fable.  It is a very vivid illustration of how pre-modern social ways cannot hold their own in a modern world (spoiler alert).  The story involves a youth in Balochistan and his father, who's a pretty high on the social ladder.  The father wants to break an old friend out of jail, so he plans to stage a raid on the prison.  To ensure his friend isn't his with any stray bullets, he buys a tawiz which is meant to protect him against such things.  To make sure the tawiz works, they buy a chicken and try shooting at it.  The father and his friends touch the chicken no matter how many times they try.  The youth, in the meantime is insisting that these are a new kind of gun has to be held and aimed a different way, which makes him the subject of ridicule.  After the old guys finally give up the kid takes a shot and, aiming properly, gets the chicken the first time.  It later emerges that over US$1k was spent on the tawiz.  The story demonstrates (and the reporter himself goes on to comment) how this event reflects the power shifts brought on by the modern revolution and also on how emasculating it must feel to be on the wrong end of the transformation.

Scott's Northeastern Tour

This month I finally got around to one of my original goals when starting this job...getting out to see more of the countryside.  I embarked on a trip that took me to Kunduz, Takhar, and Badakhshan provinces.  I met a lot of people and it turned out to be great workwise and gave me a greater sense of the country I'm working in.

Kunduz has good German food at the Lapis Lazuli guesthouse, Taloqan has a small core of really cool people, and the folks from AKF showed me a good time in Fayzabad.  I didn't end up taking so many pictures because frankly the landscape looked just like a less dramatic version of California.  The coolest part of the drive was the road between Taloqan and Rustaq (specifically after Puli Begam).  The "road" is pictured...we actually we riding along the riverbed for a while and the bits which look kinda like pavement are really the water.  That's another point, so many days of unpaved roads leave you exhausted.

Another thing that amazed me is how--and I know this sounds odd--homogenous the country is. With the exception of being able to get fish near the Amu, I'm disappointed that all you find is qabili pulaw, monochromatic lamb kabab, and week vegetable khoreshes.  More stunning is that they all taste the same everywhere.  I'm starting to get the feeling that the synthesis of the Afghan identity has been remarkably successful and that the problem rather lies in society's difficult relationship with modernity.  All sorts of pre-modern praxes have individually been nationalised and modernised but are in the present context incompatible and often hypocritical.  One example being hour the 'science of honour' has been perfected amongst women (more and better ways have been found to keep their honour beyond reproach) which complete ignores the fact that it's way too expensive to cordon off one half of society into limited and pre-ordained roles.

The construction of the road between Kesham and Fayzabad is also something really amazing.  It involves some pretty impressive terraforming and it's rare that you see a road of this size being built where there is no pre-existing alignment.  I got the sense that the engineers were just having fun in some instances by trying to make the job more difficult.  Sometime rather than build the road into the more amenable gradually sloping opposite bank of the river, they were blasting away 1500m sheer rockfaces to make way for it.

Pakistan's Existence

Reading the transcript of the first debate between the presidential candidates did not reveal much new and inspiring insofar as their opinions were concerned, but it was illuminating in that it helped me put together an idea I've long been mulling; what precisely is wrong with US foreign policy?  My answer:  Lack of a coherent and reflexive approach to sovreignty.  Sovreignty is central to the equation because the US is itself a state of the 1648-style Westphalian kind.  This problem is becoming most evident with the failure to address the Pakistan Question and the resultant denial of rights to millions of people.

There are two different ways for the state system to fail us.  There is either a lack of state control over a particular area or the state exercises its control improperly.  (my definition for the state is a geographically delimited public goods monopoly.  The state may be an individual in the legal sense, but it is not a human being.  There is no "right" for it to exist, rather it has duties; contractual obligations to provide rights (public goods) to all of its inhabitants)  The lacks of control are well know and admitted--the Chad/Sudan border, the Place Formerly Known as Somalia, most of Congo.  The other side of the continuum in state failure is too packed to even begin to list and some states are worse than others in this regard.

My proposition is that there are three such holes in the state system that pose particular threats.  I think of them as my own personal axis of evil.  These states are Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.  All three fail on the level of failing to provide rights to large numbers of people living under their control, but most interesting is that these states' failures also create black holes in the state system.  All three states' claims to legitimacy rest on mutually contradictory tenets that serve to weaken the order around them.

For the sake of brevity, I'm just addressing Pakistan for the moment.  Pakistan is the one thing that keeps Afghanistan from becoming a success, or for that matter just surviving.  All of Afghanistan other neighbour's can be bargained with and play within some basic parameters.  This goes for India, China, the Central Asian states, and Iran (the US's failure to deal rationally with Iran goes back to the corrupting influence of Israel policy, which is subject for another rant).  Pakistan on the other hand cannot not be dealt with within the framework of the state system because the Pakistani state has already failed.

The curious part of Pakistan's failure, and the one that I think leads policymakers astray in constructing a coherent approach to it, is that it has failed on both of the levels I have mentioned about.  The very success of the political elite in building a strong state has overlooked such a states necessary foundation and consequently produced holes in the state system on Pakistan's fringes.  Whereas Saudi Arabia has had sufficient resources to subsidise its legitimacy by doing things like supporting illiterate business men who would never be able to succeed anywhere else without fully embracing modernity or funding missionary activity abroad, Pakistan has had to pursue a much more austere programme to hold the state together.  That 'programme' has been the military, which plays such an immense role in Pakistan's political culture that it has practically become the state.

The growth of the military state in Pakistan has fanned the flames of defensiveness already rife within the state.  States founded on ideologies other than liberalism (providing public goods to all citizens) are always problematic, whatever they may be, but states with multiple ideologies are even more fractious.  Pakistan's elite struggles visibly with whether it is a state for South Asian Muslims, an Islamic state, or a curator of the Mughal legacy.  The quick creation of the state glossed over the fact that there are as many differences between South Asian Muslims as their are between many Muslims and Hindus, hence the pan-Indian Muslim identity of many Muhajirin from places like UP class with different Muslim identities in Balochistan and NWFP.  Adding to the irony was that secular, plurast India became a more Muslim state from the point of view of traditional sharia (this is worth another rant too) and also the fact that much of the Muslim elite did move to Pakistan during partition effectively lopping off the head of Muslim (Mughlai) high culture for the Muslim masses or could not or did not want to make the move in 1947. (For more on partition, Yasmine Khan's The Great Partition is an excellent place to start.)  The muddled rump that was detached from India to become Pakistan was then given one further ideological complex--a defensive posture against the universalist India.

The most important of all of the above has the creation of mass hypocracy amongst large sections of the Pakistani elite, the ones that morally conscious individuals need to do business with.  Hence many Pakistani who know well that there's nothing wrong with intoxication, fornication, and modernity still support causes that would make their own lives hell if they ever came to power.  This psychological phenomenon is not unique of course...in the US it's easy to witness Christians giving money to a cause that seeks among its objectives to deny rights to homosexuals, even though they themselves would not directly support a move.  In Pakistan however, these tendencies have become more extreme and more unsustainable.  At the policy level Pakistan has more and more sought to encourage unattainable policy objectives in the interest of holding together the coalition of elites who still buy into the existence of the state of Pakistan.

After every major attack, some observant commentator notes that 'the Pakistani elites will now have to get really serious about the threats facing them'.  This is not true because it ignores the fact that getting serious would mean questioning the existence of the state all together.  The attacks on the ISI headquarters, the Wah Cantonment, and the Marriott Hotel (narrowly missing the entire government) have not been enough to exercise support for the groups that carry them out.  To give a few examples of untenable foreign policies which Pakistan will continue; continuing support for militancy in Kashmir when the only solution to the dispute is political, supporting any movement that might set up a Pakistan-friendly regime in Afghanistan despite that Afghans would never support it and that the idea of strategic depth for Pakistan has been discounted, and sending in the military to suppress upprisings in Balochistan and the FATA when these situations could be addressed by simply giving the people there the rights of ordinary citizens.

The war in Afghanistan needs to be fought on Pakistani soil, and the reality is that there is no conceivable way the Pakistani government can be a partner in this.  The current attack across the Durrand Line are useless because they don't seem to be part of a more complete and well thought out strategy, but they are not wrong.  In the near future it needs to be understood that to the degree to which Pakistan is a sovereign state, it doesn't have effective controls over the areas where coalition forces are attacking.  The Pakistani state will not allow access to such forces, or even if they did say so, they would then support proxies to fight them.  As for "the Pakistani street", many people will indeed be infuriorated by an assault within the state's borders, but those same people also need to understand that support for that state is no longer a viable options.  Every Pakistani is in fact now faced with the decision between supporting the Pakistani state, whatever they may construe that to mean, and supporting their own humanity, their rights as individual human beings.  The militants born out of decades of Pakistani policy are now fighting a war not for political objectives but rather a war against reality.  I never thought that I would see causes much stupider than the US war on an abstract now such as terrorism, but sure enough some people managed to come up with one.

In the long term, policy makers need to sit down and start planning the future of the region after Pakistan is gone.  This could be anything from a deeply rooted regime change in Islamabad, to dividing the state into a number of smaller ones to reincorporating it back into India (though I'm sure India would be more than happy to not take responsibility for an area that has become such a basket case).  Gradually a consenus is emerging that borders can be withdrawn with a proper amount of process.  The long process that led to Kossovo's independence should how long, delicate, and arduous this can be, but the state system needs this basic amount of flexibility (that borders can be withdrawn without the consent of all parties involved) in order preserve its survival (and it does have many concrete advantages).  This process can be done the wrong way to, as Russia's hamfisted incursion into Georgia and subsequent recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia shows, but that should not distract us from the issue.  Some states, like Somalia, should be declared dead (for what to do afterwards on that check out When States Fail by Rotberg), and others--the other two in my access of evil, Saudi Arabia and Israel--need to be left to collapse on their own terms to a large degree and I think that any intervention itself might produce greater problems than the states are already producing.  But Pakistan's existence is no longer tenable either for Pakistanis or non-Pakistanis and should be the subject of immediate international intervention to figure out the next step.  Again, states don't have rights to exist, people do.  That means individuals in Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, the US, etc.  The longer that the international community waits to address the unsustainability of Pakistan's existence, the uglier the outcome will be.

Shostoshuye Maghzi

This has to be one of my favourite words which I've learn recently.

shustoshuyi maghzi (شستشوی مغزی), or brainwashing

Yep, it's a calque.