Outside in » Geostrategy

2014 Lessons (#1)

admin — Sat, 27 Dec 2014 09:16:04 +0000

The world war is Bitcoin versus Dugin. Everything else is just messing around (or, perhaps, tactics).

Quote note (#127)

admin — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 06:20:20 +0000

No idea how I missed this extraordinary gem the first time around:

Last fall I met up with an old friend in the security consulting business. We met for breakfast at an upscale hotel in the DC area. As he was having a second cup of coffee he leaned forward and said, “I’m going to say something crazy, but I can be frank with you.” He paused and added, “what we need is a new East India company.”

“Go on,” I said, mildly surprised. And he continued in a lowered tone, but not without looking first to the left and right.

He went on to say that one of the problems in the US response to terror has been in the conduct of stabilization operations — the critical task of building up a country after the kinetic battles have been largely won. These operations have been costly, prolonged and have largely failed. Billions of dollars spent on traditional aid approaches in Iraq and Afghanistan; and in countries changed by the ‘Arab Spring’ have yielded but little result. Often they have ended in abject disaster.

Part of the reason for the failure, he explained, was that ‘nation building’ is not a good approach in countries which are not nations, but tribes. The nation state is a modern, largely Western concept, the ideal to which many post-colonial countries are supposed to conform. But in reality the world is still very much a collection of tribes. We can’t admit this, however, and continue to act as if Afghanistan were a Pashtun equivalent of Belgium and laws meant the same thing there as in Brussels.

Yet in some cases the tribal structure has been transformed by the imposition of a “Pax” — a peace imposed by an imperium, the best known of which were the Pax Romana, Pax Britannica and the Pax Americana. Our methods for imposing the Pax were to use either of two idiotic methods. Either by using US Armed Forces for nation-building or employing United Nations and similar agencies for a similar purpose. Nobody in his right mind would do this, but since those were the only two choices on the menu, they were givens.

However things were not always thus. A few hundred years ago the British Empire recognized that the best way to deal with tribal societies was not by imposing the nation-state structure on them but to take them as they were and to impose the Pax via the far more flexible structure of enterprise. This was possible through structures such as the British East India Company — a private company whose freedom of action far surpassed that of any modern bureaucrat. The officers of the Company actually became part of the social fabric of places India and acted to improve certain outcomes without direct reference to a ‘nation-state’ as such, limited only by British foreign policy and their ability to convince the inhabitants with whom they worked.

So what we needed was a new version of the old Company because that had a far bigger chance of working at stabilization than the methods to which we were currently wedded. I realized why he had looked both ways. His idea was so likely to work, so politically incorrect, so outre that one feared that the people in the neighboring tables might at any time spring up and denounce us for a thought crime.

The key, he went on to say in sotto voce, was to allow such a Company to profit from stabilization. To align the incentives of the stabilization agent with the success of the country. The only people who could make Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan a success were those who were willing to make those countries rich. The incentives of aid agencies, he said, were exactly the opposite; to keep the country poor so that the parade of victims would remain unabated and hence the fund-raising from the West would continue.

Now he’s really done it, I thought to myself. He wants to make the world better by using private enterprise. Even I looked from side to side.

“It all makes perfect sense,” I told him. “But you realize,” I added, “that this idea is so politically incorrect that we would do well to avoid being burned at the stake.” He snorted and asked for the bill. And so it lay. That conversation lay dormant in my mind for months until I came across an article today in Time Magazine. “A General Writes the First After-Action Report on the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: Why We Lost”. …

Located via an internal citation, within a post of comparable brilliance.

The Islamic Vortex (Note-3)

admin — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 14:36:26 +0000

Asabiyyah is an Arabic word for a reason. Unlike many of my allies on the extreme right, I see no point at all in other cultures attempting to emulate it. The idea of a contemporary Western asabiyyah is roughly as probable as the emergence of Arabic libertarian capitalism. In any case, ISIS has it now, which means they have to keep fighting, and will probably keep winning. Asabiyyah is useless for anything but war, and it dissolves into dust with peace. The only glories Islam will ever know going forward will be found on the battlefield, and it is fully aware of the fact.

Baghdad will almost certainly have fallen by the end of the year, or early next. The Caliphate will then be reborn, in an incarnation far more ferocious than the last. Its existence will coincide with a war, extending far beyond Mesopotamia and the Levant, at least through the Middle East, into the Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, across the Maghreb, and deep into Africa. If the Turks are not terrified about what is coming, they have no understanding of the situation. This is what the global momentum behind militant ‘Islamism’ across recent decades has been about. Realistically, it’s unstoppable.

Eventually, it will bleed out, and then Islam will have done the last thing of which it is capable. No less than tens of millions will be dead.

Other, industrially-competent and technologically-sophisticated civilizations have no cause for existential panic, although mega-terrorist attacks could hurt them. Any efforts they make to pacify the Caliphate-war will be futile, at best. It is a piece of fate now. The future will have to be built around it.

Patrick Poole writes (at the link above, repeated here):

The US Embassy in Baghdad is the largest embassy on the planet. And after Obama sent 350 more U.S. military personnel to guard the U.S. Embassy last month, there are now more than 1,100 US service members in Baghdad protecting the embassy and the airport. That doesn’t include embassy personnel, American aid workers, and reporters also in Baghdad. ISIS doesn’t have to capture the airport to prevent flights from taking off there (remember Hamas rockets from Gaza prompting the temporary closure of Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport this past summer). If flights can’t get out of Baghdad, how will the State Department and Pentagon evacuate U.S. personnel? An image like the last helicopter out of Saigon would be of considerable propaganda value to ISIS and other jihadist groups. Former CNN reporter Peter Arnett, who witnessed the fall of Saigon in April 1975, raised this possibility back in June. It’s not like the U.S. has prestige to spare internationally, and the fall of Baghdad will mark the beginning of the end of American influence in the Middle East, much like the case in Southe[a]st Asia in 1975.

When the United States pulled back from anti-communist COIN in 1973, Marxism-Leninism was left to consume itself in its own insanity. This is the situation that was reached in relation to Islam by the election of the Obama administration in 2008. Even were it desirable, it is sheer delusion to imagine that the West — i.e. America — has the moral energy (or asabiyyah) to pursue any other course. The consummation of Jihad is going to happen. The more rapidly the catastrophe develops, the sooner it will be done.

ADDED: “However many of them are killed, the ones who survive will keep pushing on into Kobani and on toward the Baghdad airport feeling as alive as if they had just plunged into the river of history itself. And they will keep telling themselves that this river flows with the blood of the non-believers.”

ADDED: The War Nerd has a very different prognosis.

ADDED: So how is ISIS doing?

Quote notes (#93)

admin — Mon, 30 Jun 2014 18:00:11 +0000

A convincing big-picture overview from SoBL:

The Russians and Chinese have slowly been building the infrastructure for a non-dollar system as well as amassing gold. The tough thing is selling this system to others. Couching it in terms immediately for an end to the Ukrainian problem, which anyone in the know started the moment the Ukrainians wanted to sign one deal with the Russians, allows it to frame the Russians and unaligned nations as victims of US foreign policy aggression. This is a pretty easy sell to a world that has seen the US move from missionaries a century ago to airborne robots that bomb supposed targets today. It can also be an easy sell to big players in the dollar recycling system like the Saudis.

Unreported by big US media as Secretary of State John Kerry flew around the Middle East being rebuffed and insulted, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov visited the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to discuss the Middle East. The Saudis asked Bandar to step down recently, and this rapprochement between Russia and the Saudis feels light years away from Bandar’s threats to Putin last summer. To be a fly on the wall for Lavrov’s visit. This is after al-Faisal visited Sochi on June 3rd to meet with Lavrov and Putin. The Saudis spoke of a need to maintain the territorial integrity of Syria and the integrity of Iraq as a peoples. The Saudis could be more concerned with their regime stability now and do not trust the US. They are not a homogenous nation and witnessed what the US did with the Arab Spring. The Russians (and Chinese) might be able to offer the type of security the regime wants. Keep in mind the Saudis sent billions to the Egyptian military junta and the Russians are making friendly with them while the US still chastises the military leaders for being harsh with the Muslim Brotherhood.